In recent months, the acute anxiety about widening geopolitical tensions has become palpable, be it over the Russo-Ukrainian war, US-China economic decoupling, Taiwan as a flashpoint, or maritime incursions in the East and South China seas.

Singapore leaders have sounded the alarm about potentially irreconcilable differences between Washington and Beijing, warned about the catastrophic consequences of a great power war in Asia, and highlighted the untenable costs of reducing free trade out of fear of decoupling.

How can South-east Asia best respond to this rapidly changing international order?

What is this new order?

The first task is to diagnose correctly the nature of this new international order.

From the point of view of great powers and their allies, the main concern is whether we are moving from a unipolar to a bipolar or multipolar system.

In other words, how many great powers are there going to be jostling for control of the world?

There are rival theories about whether stability is best ensured by single, double, or multiple power combinations.

From South-east Asian vantage points, this debate about polarity often seems esoteric.

South-east Asia is historically a crossroads, located in the land and sea routes between India and China, between the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Today, the South-east Asia crossroads already feature many powers – super, great, offshore, regional, rising, aspiring – operating with stakes and interests.

With rapidly growing economies reliant on overseas markets and investors, this region also constantly navigates a range of other powerful international actors, including international financial institutions, multinational corporations, and standard-setting agencies.

In other words, South-east Asia does not operate in a uni- (or even bi-) polar order. Instead, its international order reflects the traditional architectural style of tropical houses, resting on multiple stilts of different sizes and functions.

At a recent conference on South-east Asian geopolitics I convened in Canberra, Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan responded to my analogy by adding that these unequal and asymmetrical stilts also rest on uneven and shifting ground.

This captured the more complex perceptions endemic at crossroads locations like South-east Asia.

By contrast, simplified assumptions about uni- or bi-polarity would be akin to living in a house built on a single pillar or on two pillars only.

Implications for South-east Asia’s strategic choices

Because they understand the international order to be asymmetrical, uneven and multi-pillared, South-east Asian countries’ strategic perceptions take on one particular characteristic.

As this order is one in which there are many actors, factors and vectors, regional policymakers face much wider choice-sets and potential for policy combinations and trade-offs than many might assume.

There is usually no need to reduce political, economic or security choices to simple binary options (choose either A or B; if you choose B, you cannot have A and vice versa).

South-east Asian states avoid invidious choices – such as choosing to ally with only one great power – fundamentally because they do not see themselves as playing a game that exclusively revolves around two great powers.

They are playing multiple, overlapping games to manage economic interests, security threats and political imperatives at the local, regional and global levels; in some of these, China and/or the United States is important, but not in all.

Of course, South-east Asia is not immune to escalating great power rivalries and the more tense and uncertain international environment.

The pressures to choose one side – whether in a potential war or technological decoupling – are efforts to reduce South-east Asia’s multidimensional international order to two-dimensional form.

At the South-east Asia Regional Geopolitical Update conference in May, scholars and practitioners analysed the effects of these pressures.

One conclusion was that South-east Asia’s strong preference for geopolitical “hedging” (placing multiple bets) will need updating to meet more stringent feasibility requirements.

In terms of hard security choices, obviously it will be difficult to dodge allegiances if sustained hostilities break out over Taiwan. But more immediate will be tough choices forced by supply chain and technology decoupling.

South-east Asian companies and countries will have to choose sides and bear rising costs on multiple fronts, ranging from food production to vaccine supplies to military technology. 

Regional economies urgently need to find new ways to play positive-sum games in a geopolitical environment that exerts binary pressures.

For example, even in non-alliance issues such as platforms for the latest-generation mobile network technology or infrastructure building, South-east Asian countries’ openness to different providers or investors can be construed as taking sides in the US-China contest.

How can the region creatively construct policy choices that retain options and diversity, while managing the risk of offending one great power or the other?

For South-east Asia’s fast-developing economies, these – rather than military alignment – are the most pressing problem because they affect bread-and-butter issues, and have an impact on popular and business support for governments.

Moreover, existing problems are exacerbated under and alongside these new pressures.

South-east Asia has long adopted practices of “comprehensive security” that go beyond military aspects to include economic, human and environmental aspects of security.

Under the current pressures, these security problems increase in number and speed of occurrence. For example, external threats logroll more with domestic political tensions, and systemic climate change increasingly intersects with local degradation to generate socio-economic-environmental “perfect storms”.

Therefore, when considering what “guardrails” are required for conflicts and tensions in South-east Asia, we must go beyond debating how to foster dialogue or confidence between the US and China, important as that is.

As Dr Rizal Sukma of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies has argued, the South China Sea territorial disputes among some South-east Asian countries and China create a particular flashpoint that could escalate if wrapped into the great power contest.

Moreover, intramural conflicts within Asean have escalated over disagreements over human rights and legitimate governance in Myanmar and Thailand, for example.

This combination of challenges requires urgent management. They call for new political guardrails within South-east Asia itself.

At the same time, South-east Asia does have a successful and growing record of mechanisms for cooperation and for mediating conflicts. This is especially true in functional areas such as transnational crime, maritime piracy, and aspects of economic and financial regulation.

Asean has a wide range of cooperative initiatives in these areas, with varying effectiveness but also potential for positive spillover effects.

Indonesia and Malaysia conduct coordinated sea and air patrols over the Malacca Strait with Singapore and Thailand, and over the Sulu-Celebes Sea with the Philippines. There is a notable landscape of regional guardrails for some key regional security threats.

As our crossroads region wrestles with the unfolding new international order, the essential struggle is with the guardrails of the mind. South-east Asian leaders must continue to find ways to resist pressures – external and internal – to simplify and to force their interests into neat zero-sum boxes.

More vital than that, this region must find new ways to create options and invent mechanisms for preserving dualities.

Alongside the old “unity in diversity” slogan, we would do well to demonstrate stability despite tension, cooperation amid conflict, choices even with decoupling.

• Evelyn Goh is the Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies at the Australian National University, where she is also the director of the South-east Asia Institute.