Blue Security: A Maritime Affairs Series - Issue 3

Introduction

Sailors have an expression, “fair winds and following seas,” to describe the favourable conditions which they desire when setting out to sea.

Much like these seafarers, Southeast Asian maritime nations seek stable and peaceful waters for their security and prosperity. The South China Sea has long vexed regional policymakers and security strategists due to both the number and complexity of overlapping maritime territorial claims among regional actors, including Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. In the past two decades, China’s increasingly expansionist tendencies and willingness to use force to coerce or intimidate smaller claimants has reinforced growing threat perceptions vis-à-vis Beijing and fuelled hedging strategies. In February 2023, a Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessel targeted Filipino counterparts with a military-grade laser in the Spratly Islands.1 The following month, a CCG vessel caused a dangerous encounter with Vietnamese patrol boats during a patrol of Vietnamese oil and gas fields around Vanguard Bank. Around this time, a CCG vessel was also seen operating in close proximity to Malaysia’s Kasawari gas project near Luconia Shoals, prompting the Malaysian Navy to dispatch a Keris-class littoral ship to the area.2 As a result of Chinese intimidation, Southeast Asian states have begun to prioritise maritime security as a central component of national defence and security strategies.

While power asymmetry between regional states and China makes a concerted pushback against Chinese coercion unpalatable, arguably no state has mounted a consistent or coherent response to deal with this security challenge. Rather, Southeast Asian countries have adopted an array of hedging tactics to deepen engagement with China while bolstering their own domestic defence capabilities and simultaneously expanding security cooperation with a variety of external partners, including Australia, Japan, and Korea. Hedging refers to insurance-seeking behaviour meant to signal ambiguity in a state’s alignment while cultivating fall-back options to preserve maximum autonomy.3 Few existing studies of hedging have considered the central role that maritime security plays in regional countries’ foreign policies. This paper therefore clarifies the maritime security strategies of three Southeast Asian claimant states (Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam) to assess how such strategies map onto or deviate from existing notions of hedging. In each of the case studies below, maritime security strategy is reflective of a state’s broader hedging strategy and mirrors the same fundamental tensions: power asymmetry, geographic proximity to a security threat, lack of political consensus, and profound strategic uncertainty, namely fears of abandonment or entrapment in a great power conflict. Seen in this light, maritime security strategy is a manifestation of states’ deeply ingrained preferences for ambiguity and unwillingness to choose sides in brewing superpower competition. The paper concludes with a brief summary assessing the parallels between the three case studies and what they tell us about hedging and maritime security strategy.