Astute ASEAN delivers surprise gift to Australia

Australia’s relationship with the 10-nation Southeast Asian bloc has been elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

Scott Morrison with Asian leaders at the East Asia Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2019. Picture: AAP

Australia went into the ASEAN three-day summit-fest this week expecting to take some heat over the AUKUS security pact and its other extra-curricular regional activity – the Quad.

Instead, Scott Morrison came out with a prize: the elevation of Australia’s relationship with the 10-nation Southeast Asian bloc to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

What that actually means is still anybody’s guess.

Diplomatically, however, it is a win for Australia, and tacit acknowledgment from ASEAN that – for all its talk of centrality – it cannot ignore new regional groupings with a greater capacity to manage pressing issues like the US-China power competition.

Indonesia and Malaysia may rail against Australia’s plan to acquire nuclear-powered subs through AUKUS as a potential proliferation trigger – and Indonesian President Joko Widodo again warned of that potential on Wednesday during the first annual ASEAN-Australia summit (previously held every two years) – but Jakarta’s earlier proposal for ASEAN foreign ministers to issue a statement on Australia’s trilateral security pact with the UK and US went nowhere.

It also went unmentioned in the ASEAN chairman’s statement after the leaders’ summits on Tuesday.

AUKUS – as the Prime Minister assured his ASEAN partners on Wednesday – ultimately re­inforced Australian, American and British support for ASEAN-led regional architecture, and added to the “network of partnerships that support regional stability and security”.

“Australia wants to be seen as an important actor in the region and a partner of choice. This (CSP) shows it is seriously received in the region,” says Huong Le Thu, senior Southeast Asia analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“It’s important for ASEAN also, which has had this crisis of confidence. For Australia to pursue closer relations means ASEAN still matters.

“It’s still a body countries need to strike closer relations with.”

Australia has some patching up to do with some neighbours, who saw its surprise AUKUS announcement as evidence of Canberra’s lack of trust in its regional partners.

Still, says Aaron Connelly, a senior research fellow at the Singapore-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, no ASEAN dialogue partner works harder on diplomacy than Australia.

Why does ASEAN matter to Australia? The bloc has more than earned its reputation for dithering on the biggest issues facing its region, whether it be China’s pugnacious pursuit of its discredited territorial claims across the South China Sea or the ongoing crisis in Myanmar since the February 1 military coup ended the country’s democratic experiment.

This week’s ASEAN meetings were – for once – not overshadowed by China-US rivalry but by an unprecedented standoff with the Myanmar military regime, which boycotted the summit.

In a rare act of decisiveness, ASEAN member states excluded junta leader Min Aung Hlaing for his refusal to co-operate with a five-point plan to resolve the ­crisis. They invited him to send a non-political representative. He refused.

The two sides are at an impasse, with Cambodian strongman Hun Sen – the ASEAN chair from November – hinting a de facto Myanmar suspension could continue if the junta does not start co-operating to end the crisis.

With ASEAN set to host an online summit of 50 Asian and European countries within weeks, the prospect of European leaders skipping the meeting to avoid the optics of sharing a screen with Min Aung Hlaing is probably more than the bloc can take right now.

As Asia Society Australia director Richard Maude noted this month, ASEAN’s anxiety over its “centrality” to economic, political and security co-operation and dialogue in the Indo-Pacific is only heightening as US-China competition intensifies.

Mr Morrison’s Wednesday address to the summit may have repeated platitudes ASEAN has been hearing from Canberra for years – that Australia benefits from a strong, secure Southeast Asian bloc – but it happens to be true.

“If ASEAN didn’t exist, the ­region would probably be much more dominated by China,” Connelly said.

“The stronger ASEAN is, the harder it is for great powers like China to act upon the region with consequences not only for Southeast Asia but Australia as well.”

While it lacks teeth, however, it makes sense for Australia to continue to hedge its bets.