The Two Southeast Asias

Susannah Patton

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Policymakers and scholars in the West talk about Southeast Asia as a coherent region, but it has always been divided. The region’s 700 million people speak hundreds of languages and follow different religions, and its 11 countries vary in political system, size, geography, and level of economic development. Throughout the Cold War, Southeast Asia was divided between the five original founding members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that were aligned with the United States—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand—and the three countries of Indochina—Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—that aligned with China or the Soviet Union.

After the Cold War ended, ASEAN expanded to include Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, as well as the tiny sultanate of Brunei, increasing the salience of Southeast Asia as a geopolitical entity. Yet despite ASEAN’s achievements in fostering cooperation between its members, a cohesive Southeast Asia remains more myth than reality.

The reality is of two regions, not one. According to the Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia Influence Index, which maps the sway of foreign partners across the region, two distinct networks persist among countries in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam form a continental group that leans toward China. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore make up a maritime group in which the countries are well connected to one another, work with a wider array of governments from outside the region, and hedge between the United States and China. The Philippines is an outlier. It lacks close friends among other ASEAN countries and relies on non-Asian partners, particularly the United States, more than any of its neighbors.

The gap between these two networks of Southeast Asian countries is set to grow in the decades ahead, leading to a de facto Chinese sphere of influence in continental Southeast Asia. To prevent Beijing from encroaching even further, the United States should deepen ties with the countries that straddle Southeast Asia’s two subregions: Thailand and Vietnam.