On 2 February 2022, United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III met with Philippine Senior Undersecretary and Officer in Charge of the Department of National Defense Carlito Galvez in Manila to supposedly ‘reaffirm the unwavering alliance between the United States and the Philippines.’
Mr. Austin said that the US commitment to the Philippines is “ironclad, and that the Mutual Defense Treaty extends to Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft anywhere in the South China Sea.”
We have yet to see the truth to this commitment but what is clear is that the Philippines has already agreed to expand its allowed four new Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) locations. But to date, the Philippines has not yet seen more concrete action by Washington on worsening tensions between Manila and Beijing in disputed waters in the South China Sea.
Worse, other players in the international community are dipping its toes into regional concerns, such as the continuing foray of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into Indo-Pacific issues.
As recent as 25 January 2023, NATO launched an initiative named ”Futures in the Indo-Pacific”. This endeavor has been developed through the NATO Science for Peace and Security (SPS) Programme, and will consist of a series of discussions amongst experts from Belgium, Australia, France and Japan, for the next two years.
While this is mainly an education initiative, this can nonetheless be taken as a sign of the strategic interest of NATO in influencing activities in the Indo-Pacific, and more particularly, in Southeast Asia.
In fact, in April 2022, Foreign Ministers of several Indo-Pacific countries such as Japan, Australia, Republic of Korea and New Zealand participated in the NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting, which followed the first-ever NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting with the partners from the Indo-Pacific in December 2020, where they discussed the shift in the global balance of power and the rise of China.
More concerningly, NATO Secretary-General Jens von Stoltenberg recently visited Japan and South Korea seek more military assistance to Ukraine, and closer cooperation between NATO and not only these two countries in particular, but also countries that are viewed as more closely aligned with the US and Europe.
Whether the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will open itself up to NATO influence is yet to be seen, but should already be raised at the earliest opportunity by regional actors.
To be clear, 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.
It 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.
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.
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.