SOUTHEAST ASIA AT THE CROSSROADS OF POWER RIVALRY: A VIETNAMESE PERSPECTIVE Dang Cam Tu* Growing contestation among big powers, particularly between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, is dominating contemporary international politics. Nowhere else is it reflected more evidently than in the Indo-Pacific region. Located at a geostrategic crossroads linking the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia has, therefore, become a site for direct big power competition with multiple impacts. Common regional responses have so far been a mixture of hedging, engaging, and institutional balancing by measures of bilateral ties and multilateral mechanisms initiated and led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The article argues that, while power rivalry creates more fragmentation within the region and lessens appetite for multilateralism, ASEAN retains its relevance for small and medium-sized countries in Southeast Asia to mitigate the negative consequences of power politics. Being an ASEAN member, Vietnam has attached greater significance and emphasis to ASEAN in its effort to delicately balance relations with competing big powers. SOUTHEAST ASIA AS A FOCAL POINT OF POWER RIVALRY The Indo-Pacific has become the main theatre for power rivalry. It is because the world’s economic and geopolitical centre of gravity is presumably shifting eastwards to the region which is home to the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies. Major economic, political, security, and strategic interests of the great powers are consolidated here. More importantly, it is also the immediate geostrategic environment wherein China seeks to defend and expand its interest and influence in its ambition to become a global * The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the institution she works for.
power. Since the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, China has been pursuing increasingly assertive policies in the region within the framework of its peripheral diplomacy, striving towards its proclaimed aim to establish a community of common destiny under its influence. Meanwhile, the United States—a perceived resident of the Indo-Pacific and an incumbent global superpower—finds its primacy in the establishment and management of the world order being challenged and, therefore, publicly declares China its rival. The ultranationalist foreign policy tendencies of both the United States and China, the introduction of the former’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIPS) and the latter’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the mutual distrust, the trade war, and the COVID-19 are creating an environment for a chain of actions and reactions through which tensions between the two giants are accumulating and their strategic rivalry is intensifying. In addition to this, for the first time in history, Asia is witnessing three regional powers, namely, China, Japan, and India, rising concurrently and vying boldly to exert their influence. At the same time, medium and small countries in the region, including Australia, New Zealand, and ASEAN members, have shown greater activism in their foreign relations. As the relations among regional countries are largely revolving around the dynamic of competition between the United States and China, the regional strategic landscape has become increasingly competitive, and the modes of power alignment more fluid. Lying at the centre of the Indo-Pacific and at a crossroads of FOIP and BRI, Southeast Asia appears more salient in the big power rivalry. Being a community with an aggregate population of 630 million people, the fifth-largest economy in the world with a gross domestic product of ASEAN PERSPECTIVES
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