Bilahari Kausikan discusses geopolitics and Southeast Asia in George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture
After 37 years in the Singaporean foreign service, Bilahari Kausikan, now the Chairman of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore, has a message for the world’s major powers and pundits: seeing Southeast Asia in the binaries of global rivalries does not make for good policy.
On September 30 in Henry R. Luce Hall, Kausikan delivered the annual George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture in International Studies sponsored by the MacMillan Center. In his lecture, titled “How to Think about Southeast Asia,” he challenged the notion that Southeast Asia’s fate is determined by global rivalries. (view lecture)
“The U.S. has generally viewed Southeast Asia through the lens of competition,” he said. “Cold War imperatives have been replaced by those of U.S.-China relations.”
But that is not the way Southeast Asian policy-makers view the geopolitics of their region. “We see no reason why we can only be one thing or another,” Kausikan said. Because Southeast Asia has “always been a region where the interests of several major powers have intersected and sometimes collided,” those powers often assume that their own foreign policy shapes the foreign policy of Southeast Asian countries. But that assumption vastly underestimates the role of domestic policy.
“What happens on land in Southeast Asia is as much an important part of the regional architecture as what happens on the sea,” Kausikan said.
He discussed the power of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to keep the peace among its diverse member countries, many of which are divided along racial, linguistic, and religious lines.
“ASEAN’s fundamental and enduring purpose is to ensure at least a modicum of order and civility in relations among its members,” he said. “But we are not happy brothers.” The organization’s goal is consensus-building, and it has proved “strong enough to be useful but not strong enough to be an impediment.” He added, “Accepting the harsh reality of asymmetrical power and working within it is the key reason why ASEAN has survived.”
In defense of the organization, he said, “ASEAN is certainly not a perfect organization…but far too much criticism of ASEAN amounts to criticizing a cow for being an imperfect horse.”
Kausikan criticized Western media coverage of international relations involving Southeast Asia. Foreign policy governed by binationalism and implemented by coercion “was not invented by Mr. Trump,” Kausikan noted. He described “Western media biases” that can lead to unthinking criticism of the Trump administration—even though, according to Kausikan, “Obama and Trump are perhaps more alike than either would like to admit” on the issue of Southeast Asia.
Kausikan expects the outcome of the competition between the U.S. and China to be “messy and indeterminate”: it will certainly be harder to pick a winner than it was at the end of the Cold War. But whatever happens, he said, the U.S. will not disappear from the region. He added, “The adjustments are relative, not absolute.” For now, he does not see any signs of a U.S. retreat from Southeast Asia. But that doesn’t mean that the U.S. or China has control.
“It is a historical fact that no major power has ever been able to capture Southeast Asia in its entirety,” he said. “Southeast Asia is now returning to a more historically normal state.”
Written by Lily Moore-Eissenberg, Yale College Class of 2020.