ASEAN's hedging — Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines under China-US pressure

ASEAN's consensus-based decision norm means the bloc rarely takes binding collective foreign-policy positions. What it does, structurally, is provide cover and coordination space for ten different national hedging strategies. The 2022-2025 period has subjected these strategies to substantial stress, and the contrasts across the bloc are now sharper than they were five years ago.

Vietnam has moved closer to the US without abandoning its long-standing relationship with China. The September 2023 Biden-Trong Comprehensive Strategic Partnership upgrade was an unprecedented Vietnamese alignment given the country's One-Party state. Vietnamese manufacturing has captured significant supply-chain redirection from China — Foxconn, Samsung, and Apple-supplier capacity has expanded substantially in Bac Ninh and surrounding provinces. Simultaneously, Vietnamese-Chinese trade reached $172B in 2024, growing faster than Vietnamese-US trade. The Vietnamese position is the classical hedge: substantive but limited US security engagement, deep economic engagement with China.

Indonesia under Prabowo Subianto has tilted more cautiously toward Beijing than under Jokowi, but the tilt is real. The IKN Nusantara capital relocation is partly Chinese-financed; the EV-supply-chain nickel partnerships (most prominently the Morowali Industrial Park) are Chinese-led. Indonesia's joint declaration with China in November 2024, in which Jakarta accepted Chinese-supplied language on South China Sea overlapping maritime claims, was a notable departure from Indonesia's traditional position. The Indonesian foreign ministry walked back some of that language within weeks, but the direction of drift is clear.

The Philippines under Marcos Jr. has moved sharply toward the US. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement expansion to nine sites (including four facing Taiwan and the South China Sea) is the most significant US-Philippines military integration since the 1991 expulsion of US forces from Subic Bay and Clark. The 2023-2024 escalation of Chinese coast-guard interactions at Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal has pushed Manila into more visible US security alignment. Whether the next Philippine administration sustains this posture is uncertain; the structural drivers (Chinese maritime pressure, Philippine fishing-fleet interests) are durable.

Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar each have distinct hedging postures that this article cannot adequately summarise. The bloc-level observation is that ASEAN's structural form — consensus norm, sovereignty-respect principle, ten different bilateral relationships with each major power — has absorbed substantial US-China pressure without fragmenting. Whether it continues to absorb the pressure as competition intensifies is the open strategic question for Southeast Asia.

­The hedging posture is structurally rather than ideologically rooted. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a consensus-based regional grouping of ten member states — Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam — that operates under the explicit norm that no bloc-level decision can be taken without unanimous member-state agreement. The norm is what produces the perceived weakness on China-related issues; it is also what allows the grouping to survive across geopolitical cycles that would tear apart a more committed coalition.

Vietnam's posture is the most demanding to maintain. The country shares a land border with China, has overlapping South China Sea claims (the Paracel Islands and parts of the Spratly Islands), and runs a one-party communist political system that is ideologically adjacent to but operationally autonomous from Beijing. The 2023 upgrade of US-Vietnam relations to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership status — bringing the US to the same diplomatic tier Hanoi assigns to China and Russia — was a calibrated signal that Vietnam values the US relationship without treating it as an alliance commitment. Vietnamese trade with both China and the United States exceeds $100 billion per year; the structural dependence runs both ways, and Hanoi's strategic doctrine of the 'four no's' (no alliances, no foreign bases, no taking sides in great-power conflicts, no force) is the ideological frame for managing it.

Indonesia's posture is the second-most-watched case. As the world's fourth-largest country by population and the largest in Southeast Asia, Indonesia anchors ASEAN's center of gravity. Evan Laksmana at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, now at the National University of Singapore, has tracked the Jokowi-era and post-2024 Prabowo administration evolution of the hedging doctrine. The doctrine prioritises what Indonesia calls a free-and-active foreign policy, which in operation means simultaneous engagement with US-led frameworks (the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), China-led ones (Belt and Road Initiative investment), and middle-power groupings (IORA, the G20 chair Indonesia held in 2022). The Natuna Islands incidents, where Chinese coast-guard and fishing-fleet incursions repeatedly tested Indonesian sovereignty, are the practical limit case for how much Beijing can press without moving Jakarta toward a harder posture.

The Philippines is the variable in the ASEAN equation. The Duterte administration (2016-2022) had moved Manila toward a softer China posture and away from the US alliance; the Marcos Jr. administration (2022-present) reversed that vector decisively. The 2023 expansion of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, granting US forces access to four additional Philippine bases, plus the increased operational tempo of US-Philippines combined maritime patrols in the Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal areas, has made Manila the most clearly aligned ASEAN member in current US strategic posture. The corresponding pressure from Beijing — water-cannon incidents, anchor-line cuts, blockades of Philippine resupply missions — has not moved Marcos toward softening; if anything, the public salience of the incidents has reinforced the political coalition for the alignment.

The aggregate ASEAN-level posture is best read not as a unified doctrine but as the average of ten member-state doctrines that are individually calibrated to each capital's specific exposure to China and to the United States. The consensus norm produces the perception of weakness; the underlying structural reality is that the region is one of the few places in the global system where neither great power has succeeded in pushing any major state into an aligned posture, and where the hedging logic — keep both relationships, refuse irreversible commitments to either — remains the politically dominant strategic frame.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.