Cscap Regional Security Outlook 2021
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CSCAP REGIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK 2021 REGIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK 2021 COUNCIL FOR SECURITY COOPERATION EDITOR IN THE ASIA PACIFIC Ron Huisken Adjunct Associate Professor, Established in 1993, the Council for Security Cooperation Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, in the Asia Pacifi c (CSCAP) is the premier Track Two Australian National University organisation in the Asia Pacifi c region and counterpart to the Track One processes dealing with security issues, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT namely, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the East Kathryn Brett Asia Summit (EAS) and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Plus Forum. It provides an informal mechanism for Australian National University scholars, offi cials and others in their private capacities to discuss political and security issues and challenges facing the region. It provides policy recommendations to EDITORIAL PANEL various intergovernmental bodies, convenes regional and Anthony Milner international meetings and establishes linkages with CSCAP Australia institutions and organisations in other parts of the world to exchange information, insights and experiences in the Ric Smith area of regional political-security cooperation. CSCAP Australia Philips Vermonte CSCAP Indonesia Jusuf Wanandi CSCAP Indoensia Front cover image Source: Illustration of a SARS-CoV-2 virion. LETTER FROM THE Credit: Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins / CDC. CO-EDITORS On behalf of CSCAP, we are pleased to Back cover image present the CSCAP Regional Security Source: Jan Huisken Outlook (CRSO) 2021. Inaugurated in 2007, the CRSO volume is now in its fi fteenth year. The CRSO brings expert analysis to bear on critical security issues facing the region and points to policy-relevant alternatives for Track One (offi cial) and Track Two (non-offi cial) to advance CSCAP thanks the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacifi c multilateral regional security Affairs, The Australian National University, for their cooperation. support for this publication The views in the CRSO 2021 do not represent those of any Member Designed and printed by CanPrint Communications, committee or other institution and are Canberra, Australia. the responsibility of the individual authors and the Editor. Charts and images in the CRSO 2021 do not ISBN: 978-0-642-60708-9 necessarily refl ect the views of the chapter authors. Copyright © 2020 by CSCAP Ron Huisken and Kathryn Brett. www.cscap.org 3 REGIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK 2021 CONTENTS Regional Security Outlook 4 Introduction: Sliding Toward a Less Orderly World – Ron Huisken 9 United States: Persistent Security Concerns in an Election Year – Jeffrey W. Hornung 13 Sino-US Strategic Competition: Impact on the Security Situation in the Asia- Pacifi c Region – Teng Jianqun 17 Japan: Strengthening Order and Stability in a Free and Open Indo-Pacifi c – Ryo Sahashi 20 India: Competition over the Character of Order in the Indo-Pacifi c Intensifi es – Vijay Gokhale 23 Optimistic and Pessimistic Scenarios: A Russian Perception of an Insecure and Uncertain Post-Pandemic Future – Alexei D. Voskressenski 26 Europe’s Approach Towards Asia: diversifi cation in times of COVID-19 – Alice Ekman 29 ROK: Korean Peninsula Security Outlook 2021 – Beomchul Shin 32 Australia: The Art of Strategic Balance – Andrew O’Neil 36 Indonesia’s Regional Security Outlook 2021: Indonesia as a Responsible Maritime Power – Gilang Kembara 39 Thailand During the Pandemic: Building resilience in an increasingly polarised world – Kasira Cheeppensook 42 Malaysia’s Regional Security Outlook: Continuity amid Disruption – Thomas Daniel 46 Singapore’s Concerns: Comprehensive Security Rebooted – Simon Tay and Jessica Wau 49 Vietnam: The Indo-Pacifi c Regional Architecture: the Quad, Inclusivity and ASEAN Centrality – Le Trung Kien 52 New Zealand: A Re-elected Government with Less Appetite for Geopolitics – Robert Ayson 55 Myanmar: At a Crossroads: Myanmar’s Evolving Security Challenges – Aung Zin Phyo Thein 59 Sino-American Competition in Cambodia: A 2020 Retrospective – Pou Sothirak 63 Special Supplement AUSCSCAP/ASIALINK The Virus and Regional Order – Initial Assessments 3 CSCAP REGIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK 2021 Sliding Toward a Less Orderly World Ron Huisken established trends and developments, that is, that we would face the same future that we could (more dimly) discern in 2019, but that this future would arrive more quickly and, to that extent, be rather more inevitable. In broad terms, it would appear that the fi rst alternative was more widely endorsed in the earlier stages of the pandemic with the weight of opinion swinging to the latter from around mid-2020. This transition is broadly supported when comparing the commentary CSCAP commissioned in the April-May 2020 timeframe (reprinted below from p5) with the April 14, 2020. Special ASEAN Summit on COVID-19. Credit: ASEAN Vietnam Chairmanship 2020. articles that follow which were prepared in the October-November 2020 period. Clearly, however, these The COVID-19 novel coronavirus Separation and lockdown became are differences of degree, even of is a gritty and primitive specimen, the global norm. The pandemic semantics. Whichever assessment the so primitive that scientists dispute gradually reduced the distracting reader prefers, the world will feel and whether it qualifi es as a form of life. cacophony of the international system work differently when COVID-19 is But it is wickedly contagious and to a whisper, leaving all states behind us. possessed of fi endishly advanced unusually exposed. This inadvertent In one decisively important sense, stealth capabilities. In a matter additional transparency appears to however namely, its impact of weeks it had erased ‘normality’ have intensifi ed the infl ammatory on the character of the US- across most of our planet, effortlessly effect the advent of the virus had on a China relationship – the notion riding the tentacles of globalisation number of international relationships. that the pandemic has been a to every corner of the world, paying The scale of the economic penalty paid transformational watershed seems no greater heed to geopolitical divides to weather the pandemic has been indisputable. COVID-19 struck a than to religious, racial or political immense – essentially immeasurable world in which signifi cant changes boundaries. The fi rst infections – as are the social, political and other in the relative strategic weight of appear to have occurred in central changes tangled up with this huge the world’s major states was well China in late November 2019 and scar on humanity’s timeline. advanced, both motivating and just 10 weeks later the number of In thinking about the longer-term allowing behaviour that challenged states yet to report any infections was ramifi cations of the pandemic, the prevailing international order, smaller than the number who had. perhaps the most widely used inevitably, the very order that had By mid-2020, when barely a handful gambit was to posit two fundamental supported and encouraged these of the 197 members of the United alternatives. Firstly, that the changes. By the time COVID-19 took Nations could claim to be COVID free, pandemic would prove to be a true hold the condition of the international the virus had become the undisputed watershed in which everything was system could fairly be described as gold standard for a global pandemic. rendered more fl uid and there was turbulent and increasingly brittle, In the absence of a vaccine, the genuine scope to make fundamentally an outcome clearly anticipated in the logical countermeasure was to stifl e different choices about the future of assessments offered in successive the virus by keeping people apart the human enterprise. The alternative editions of this publication over the and enduring whatever economic view was that the pandemic would see years 2014-20 (See Box). consequences fl owed from doing so. the strengthening or accentuation of 4 5 CSCAP REGIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK 2021 CSCAP Regional Security Assessments 2014-20 “One does not have the sense that of a broader sensation that the “What recent events have thrown East Asia today is characterised by constellation of circumstances that into sharper relief is whether the expectations of peaceful change that produced decades of comparative extant rules-based order … is are either alarmingly weaker or order and stability … is now badly capable of sustaining a level playing encouragingly stronger than was the eroded… The Asia Pacifi c now has fi eld between states that hold starkly case in the early 1990s. In short, we no more important business than different views on the question of are not winning.” [Outlook 2014] to address what will or should governance.” [Outlook 2019] be the shape of (the) new order “Despite being clearly anticipated “The abrupt reconfi guration of and determine how to get there and exhaustively studied for some US policy objectives [in 2017-18] peacefully.” [Outlook 2017] twenty-fi ve years, the management effectively drew a line under the of the Asia Pacifi c’s strategic “That we are witnessing the end of posture of engagement of China that transformation is currently headed an era … seems beyond dispute… A had endured since 1972.” toward outcomes at the worst case major change in the distribution of “More than a year of negotiations end of the spectrum” hard power is well underway but for have been inconclusive…neither [Outlook 2015] the indefi nite future this ‘new order’ confi rming nor precluding seems destined to have a collective “The US appears to have become whether the stark differences