The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional organization comprising ten countries in Southeast Asia which aims to promote political, economic, military and sociocultural cooperation among its members and other countries.
The ASEAN has expanded meaningful dialogue with other countries such as China, Japan and South Korea. Currently, it has pursued relations with India, Australia and New Zealand.
But in the main, ASEAN is primarily an organization for regional economic cooperation, which has resulted in the ASEAN Free Trade Area with the idea of creating a single unified market, the ASEAN Economic Community.
In fact, ASEAN was able to sign free trade agreements with Australia, New Zealand and China.
This is why there is much skepticism in ASEAN by attempts by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to establish relations with the ASEAN and its member states.
NATO, in contrast to the ASEAN, is mainly an intergovernmental military alliance between thirty North American and European nations, established for mutual defense in response to an attack by external parties.
In truth, NATO was established primarily as a military counterbalance then, to the Soviet Union, and today, to the Russian Federation.
Outside of NATO, the military alliance has established relations with the European Union under the Berlin Plus agreement, in which the EU was given the possibility of using NATO assets in case it wanted to act independently in an international crisis
It had also established the Mediterranean Dialogue to coordinate relations with Israel and North African states. It has also entered into a security arrangement with Qatar in 2018.
Towards the Pacific, it has trained its sights towards the need to ‘address the rise of China,’and sought greater cooperation with Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.
By and large, what is clear is that NATO has been breaching its mandate beyond the territories of its members. In the guise of bilateral security cooperation, it is actively engaging in expanding the scope of its powers outside of Europe.
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What needs to be stated is that by entering into security arrangements outside of its original mandate, NATO is raising regional tensions risks on issues it has no business in the first place.
By entering into a security cooperation with Colombia, it has raised regional tensions with Venezuela. By entering a similar agreement with Qatar, the geopolitical tensions with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will continue to linger.
As such, ASEAN member states should be on high alert on attempts by NATO to establish relations with ASEAN.
By allowing NATO to establish relations with ASEAN, regional tensions relating to the South China Sea will definitely reach a fever pitch.
This is an initiative that certainly Beijing, as an existing ASEAN partner, will object to, and vigorously oppose at all diplomatic levels.
More important, these objections by Beijing will have real economic impact on member economies reliant on impactful economic relations with the Chinese economy.
Worse, if ASEAN enters into a security arrangement with NATO, it will be complicit in endangering entire peoples if a military incident arises in the South China Sea.
All it takes is a miscalculated maritime incident along international waters for military confrontation with Beijing to reach unmanageable levels.
With the insistence of the United States on its own strategy of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea with the clear objective of involving more international players, a military incident in these waters is a question of when, not a question of if.
There is quibbling with this: NATO in the ASEAN is military interference in the region, nothing else.