As the United States and China redefine their relationship, Asia’s middle powers will be left to navigate this uncertain security future. There is no reason, however, why they should be passive players in this process: they have the potential to influence the evolution of relations between the two giants.[19] But if they are to do this, it is clear that they will need to move beyond their existing approaches to regional security and work much more closely with each other.

The idea of middle power diplomacy – typically involving the building of coalitions in multilateral forums – has considerable lineage, especially in Australia and Canada.[20] More recently it has, to varying degrees, been identified as relevant to many countries in Indo-Pacific Asia. [21] It makes sense to understand Australia, South Korea and the more militarily and diplomatically capable Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore – as middle powers. Even Japan [22] and India [23] can plausibly be defined as middle powers for the time being, given their internal challenges and the limits of their capacity to shape the strategic environment unilaterally.

Working together, Asia’s middle powers could affect the regional balance of power. They have their own kind of strength in numbers, if only they can coordinate their capacities better. For instance, as of 2013, four of the region’s middle powers, Japan, India, Indonesia and Australia, had a combined population of 1.64 billion, a combined GDP of US$ 9.13 trillion, and combined defence expenditure of US$ 127.80 billion. By contrast, the US has a population of 316.5 million, a GDP of US$ 16.78 trillion and defence spending of US$ 640.21 billion. For its part, China's population was 1.36 billion, its economy US$ 9.18 trillion and its defence budget US$ 188.46 billion respectively. [24]

At the moment, Asia’s middle powers pursue three main types of broad security strategy. Some have made the alliance with the United States the cornerstone of their approach. Others have put their faith in multilateral or regional approaches; others in various forms of non-alignment. The utility of each of these approaches is likely to be tested by the evolving security future of Asia.

Reliance on the United States

China’s rising power is testing American alliances. Thanks to the rapid advances in its military capabilities, Beijing is probing the durability of American strategic primacy in the Western Pacific. Although the United States is a bigger military power in global terms, and its technological edge will likely endure for many years, Beijing has begun to alter the regional military balance. If Chinese force modernisation continues apace it will eventually tilt the US-China bilateral military balance in the Western Pacific in Beijing’s favour. This will undermine the credibility of US alliances and more broadly raise doubts about Washington’s ability to forestall Chinese pre-eminence in Asia.

China’s neighbours see a US policy establishment divided on the question of coping with Beijing’s rise. Despite Washington’s assurances, many Asian nations worry about the constancy of American purpose in Asia. For example, the Obama Administration has moved from seeking a degree of accommodation with China to announcing a high-profile pivot to Asia and then a seeming de-emphasis of the rebalance strategy – all in the past six years. Asians also worry about the combination of America’s continuing preoccupation with the Middle East, the breakdown of post-Cold War understandings with Russia, hints of renewed isolationism and an increasingly dysfunctional domestic polity in Washington. All of this will make the United States a less predictable variable in the Asian power calculus. This in turn means that Asia will not only have to hedge against China’s rise but also against prospects of America’s relative decline and inattention.

Against this backdrop, both the United States and its allies are looking to diversify their security partnerships. For decades the United States had relied on formal bilateral alliances and special relationships in Asia. Now Washington is broadening the base in multiple ways. Even as it strengthens traditional alliances (Australia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Thailand) and long-standing partnerships (Singapore), Washington is seeking to deepen defence relationships with India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Washington is also encouraging its allies to work with each other.

The past few years have brought a rapid expansion of bilateral security cooperation agreements across Asia. US allies and partners are expanding their own bilateral defence ties with each other as well as third parties.[25] Consider, for example, Japan’s growing defence engagement with Australia, India and the ASEAN nations, involving high-level dialogue, information sharing, capacity building and defence exports. Tokyo’s security partnership with Canberra now appears poised for a significant expansion following prime ministerial visits in both directions in May and July 2014. Some observers suggest Japan is seeking a quasi-alliance commitment from Australia, while Canberra appears interested in the option of acquiring Japan’s advanced submarine technology. [26]

Since the middle of the last decade, when Japan announced the launch of a strategic partnership with India, security cooperation between the two has grown to cover a range of activities including regular military exercises and combined ‘2+2’ talks among senior foreign and defence ministry officials. The two sides are also exploring industrial collaboration, beginning with transfer and production in India of a Japanese amphibious aircraft. While progress will necessarily be slow, thanks to cautious bureaucracies in both capitals, there appears to be a rare alignment of political stars with the return of Shinzo Abe as Japan’s prime minister and the 2014 election of Narendra Modi with a strong mandate. In the last few years, Japan has also devoted special attention to developing defence and security cooperation with Southeast Asian countries, notably Vietnam and the Philippines. Japan has also stepped up its activism in the various ASEAN forums.

Another US ally, South Korea, has traditionally focused on its alliance with the United States and the security threats from the North, yet it too has made defence cooperation a major priority for its engagement with other countries in Asia. Although Seoul’s current relations with Tokyo are strained, it has expanded its defence diplomacy with Australia, India and some Southeast Asian countries, notably Indonesia, and is seeking to combine this with defence technology links.

In much of this cross-cutting alliance diplomacy, Australia has been a quiet leader, beginning with its 2007 bilateral security declaration with Japan, and a similar subsequent statement with India in 2009. Australia has also worked to deepen practical security cooperation and dialogue with Southeast Asian partners, including Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and, despite recent ructions over espionage and illegal immigration, its close neighbour Indonesia. Australia has become a venue of choice for multilateral defence exercises, such as the first naval drills of the 18-country institution known as the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus, conducted in October 2013. Canberra’s defence policy documents highlight such engagement as a way to influence the regional security environment and manage risks of conflict. [27]

No US ally sees its new regional partnerships as a substitute for an alliance with America but rather as a useful complement. In fact, America’s own quest to build new defence partnerships in the region has made it easier for allies to do the same. This widening of the network of defence cooperation has also included trilateral arrangements. Notable among these are the Australia-US-Japan trilateral security dialogue – which has translated into military exercises and the building of interoperability – and a more modest India-Japan-US trilateral dialogue, as well as the frequent involvement of Japanese warships in India-US ‘Malabar’ exercises.

Multilateral and regional approaches

Those regional middle powers that have placed their faith in multilateral or regional mechanisms to provide for their security are also being forced to look beyond such approaches by the strategic changes underway in Asia. Indonesia’s experience with ASEAN is a case in point. It has long been a point of faith for ASEAN to mitigate great power tensions in Asia by drawing all powers into a cooperative security mechanism under its aegis. The reality is that the very construction of regional institutions has fallen prey to conflicts between regional powers. The 2005 formation of the East Asia Summit centred on ASEAN, underlines this. China first pushed for an EAS based on the ASEAN+3 process that excluded India, Australia and the United States. Most of ASEAN preferred to ensure that those countries, plus Russia, were present in the EAS to broaden the playing field and dilute Chinese influence. Thus, since then, Beijing’s emphasis has been on limiting the scope of the EAS and refusing to let it touch China’s pursuit of its interests, trying to block it from discussing the South China Sea.

Neither the older institutions like the ASEAN Regional Forum (foreign ministers level) nor the newer ones like the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus (which brings together the defence ministers of the EAS member states) are likely to be effective in coping with the historic redistribution of power in Asia. Their focus on soft security issues only underlines an inability to address real problems. Beijing has also shown the ability to use proxies such as Cambodia to break ASEAN unity on issues involving disputes between its member states and China.[28] There have been suggestions from Beijing of a “new Asian security concept” that somehow downplays the current regional institutions and seeks an end to US alliances in the region. Speaking at a hitherto little-known forum called the Conference on Confidence Building and Interaction (CICA), Chinese president Xi Jinping declared that Beijing would build it up as the main multilateral security body for the region. [29] The implication was that China would marginalise the EAS and other ASEAN-centric institutions, even though CICA does not include Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others, as full members.

Non-alignment

The changing regional scenario is also encouraging Asia’s non-aligned countries to discard their traditional military isolationism and expand security cooperation with their fellow Asian countries and the United States. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union were distant powers. It was relatively easy to stake out a neutral or non-aligned position between them. Dealing with US-China rivalry poses more difficult challenges for the large non-aligned countries in the region such as India and Indonesia. That China is an Asian power gives Beijing the advantage of emphasising inherited regional traditions of Asian solidarity and opposition to Western dominance, appealing to sections of some Asian political elites. Yet this card has its limits. The slogan ‘Asia for Asians’ has less appeal now that many of China’s neighbours see a threat to their interests emanating from China rather than from former colonial powers. Those countries facing territorial claims from China – Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam and India – have no difficulty seeing through Beijing’s recent rhetoric about a new framework for Asian security.

The governments of Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam have become increasingly explicit in warning about the risks they see in Chinese power. In most other regional countries however, especially those with traditions of non-alignment, there remains a reluctance to be forthright about such questions, amid significant domestic opposition to any arrangement that would look like an alliance with Washington to balance Beijing. That said, expanding defence cooperation with America short of a formal alliance has become an important objective of states such as India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore.

These countries are conscious, however, that they cannot rely on the United States alone to guarantee their security. Expanding defence cooperation with other regional powers has, therefore, become a major feature of regional security politics. India, which limited its defence engagement with even closest partners such as the Soviet Union in the Cold War, has significantly expanded defence partnerships with a range of countries over the last decade and more. [30] The rise of China and its growing military profile in the Subcontinent and the Indian Ocean have intensified India’s quest to consolidate its traditional security partnerships in the region as well as build new ones. If India’s new defence diplomacy has little resemblance to the past politics of non-alignment, the situation is similar with other countries like Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar, which are all discarding postcolonial military isolationism.