One Strategy, Two Regions: What ASEAN's Experience Can Teach Pacific Islands About China's Escalating Tactics
- Jul 1
- 6 min read
China's expanding military presence in the Southwest Pacific (SWP) is attracting growing attention. From opaque security agreements, expanding policing cooperation, test-firing weapons, and increasingly ambitious Chinese naval deployments, Beijing is demonstrating an ability to project influence far beyond Southeast Asia and their neighbors.
For ASEAN policymakers, these developments should feel familiar. For Pacific Islands, they offer a glimpse into the threats that Southeast Asian Governments have spent decades managing.
While the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea (SCS) are fundamentally different strategic environments, both are grappling with the consequences of China's expanding regional influence. In Southeast Asia, that process has manifested through competing maritime claims, artificial islands, and persistent security tensions. The SWP, is characterized by widening security agreements, intensifying naval activity, and an overt Chinese security presence. While the circumstances differ, the same core question about influence, sovereignty, and strategic autonomy now carry the same weight, and risk of erosion.
The SWP provides a rare opportunity to examine how strategic competition develops before it reaches the intensity seen in the SCS. For ASEAN and Pacific Islands, the challenge is ensuring that engagement with major powers strengthens national development and security without eroding sovereignty.
SCS: From Territorial disputes to Strategic Crossroads
The SCS is one of the world's most strategically important regions. Approximately one-third of global maritime trade passes through its waters, alongside significant fisheries and potential energy resources (ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Statement on the Maintenance and Promotion of Stability in the Maritime Sphere in Southeast Asia, 2024).
In addition to economic value, the SCS offers China maritime security, and access to the wider Pacific Ocean. Control over key maritime approaches has therefore become an increasingly important component of Beijing's regional strategy. However, disputes involve several states whose overlapping territorial and maritime claim continue to shape regional security dynamics (ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Statement on the Maintenance and Promotion of Stability in the Maritime Sphere in Southeast Asia, 2024).
Several key developments gradually transformed the dispute into one of Asia's most consequential geopolitical flashpoints (see Figure 1):
The significance of the 2016 ruling extends beyond the Philippines. China is itself a signatory to UNCLOS, the international framework governing maritime rights and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ). By finding that China's Nine-Dash Line claims lacked legal basis under UNCLOS, the tribunal highlighted the necessary role international law plays in peacefully resolving maritime aggression (The South China Sea Arbitration Award: A Chinese Perspective, 2016).
China's subsequent dismissal of the court's ruling, however, demonstrates how this once relied upon legal mechanism is being eroded.
Today, coast guard confrontations, large-scale military deployments, and contesting sovereignty claims remain defining features of the SCS (ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Statement on the South China Sea, 2024).
SWP: A New Strategic Frontier
Unlike the SCS, the SWP has historically centered less on territorial disputes and more on influence (Pacific Security Outlook 2023-2024, 2024).
Several developments have transformed the SWP from a largely overlooked strategic region into a central theater of geopolitical competition (see Figure 2):
Beyond these events Chinese survey and research vessels have operated more frequently throughout the SWP. While officially conducting scientific and maritime research, analysts identify that oceanographic and seabed data possesses a strategic dual-purpose value, including supporting future naval operations and deep-sea mapping to ensure control of key shipping lanes in times of conflict (China is Mapping the Ocean Floor as it Prepares for Submarine Warfare with the U.S., 2026).
The significance of these developments extends beyond China's growing presence. The SWP is emerging as an important region of competition between China, the United States, and it's regional allies. As geopolitical attention and security engagement intensify, Pacific Islands are becoming increasingly important actors in the wider Indo-Pacific landscape. However, the challenge is not simply managing relations with China but navigating growing interest from multiple major powers while preserving sovereignty (Pacific Security Outlook 2023-2024, 2024).
Economic Opportunity And Strategic Risk
Economic relationships can have strategic implications. While trade and investment generate significant benefits, they can also create channels through which political and security disagreements spill into the economic domain.
China is ASEAN's largest trading partner and an important source of investment, and tourism. These relationships have generated substantial economic benefit, and dependence, across the region. Deep economic ties will not prevent tensions and, in some cases have provided additional sources of leverage during strategic disagreements (Overview of ASEAN-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, 2024).
The Philippines provides one clear example. Following the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff and subsequent arbitration proceedings, Beijing imposed sustained periods of economic pressure on Manila, including unofficial restrictions on banana and tuna exports that reduced Philippine agricultural exports to China by approximately 30%. At the same time, maritime pressure campaigns intensified around contested features (Economic Impact of the South China Sea Dispute in China-Philippines Relations from 2012 to 2016, 2023).
Similarly, despite China being Vietnam's largest trading partner, with bilateral trade exceeding USD$150 Billion in 2023, disputes over maritime rights and offshore energy exploration have persisted for decades. Chinese coast guard and maritime vessels have repeatedly challenged Vietnamese activates in contested waters, including during the 2014 China-Vietnam oil rig crisis, and through survey vessel operations within Vietnam's EEZ in 2019 and 2024 (Sitting in Silence or Standing in Protests: Endogenous Dynamics Behind Vietnam Foreign Policy And The 2014 Oil Rig Crisis, 2024).
Together, these examples highlight two important realities. Economic relationships can create leverage during periods of strategic disagreement, while deep economic integration alone is no guarantee of political or security alignment.
This sentiment is reflected in the 2025 State of Southeast Asia Survey, which found 60% of ASEAN's members distrust China. Notably, 47.6% of those expressing distrust cited China's growing economic and military power as a direct threat to their national interests and sovereignty (see Figure 3):
China's growing role in infrastructure development, finance, and security partnerships offers tangible economic and governance benefits. Yet, Southeast Asia's experience demonstrates that economic engagement and strategic competition are not mutually exclusive. Governments may find themselves deepening economic cooperation with Beijing while simultaneously weathering broader security and geopolitical issues.
As China's presence expands across the SWP, decisions relating to trade, and investment may shape not only economic outcomes, but also independence of Pacific Islands. While engagement can deliver benefits, the cost of over reliance will be a reduced ability to diversify partnerships, adapt to changing circumstances, and pursue independent strategic decisions.
The Role of Regional Institutions
ASEAN's consensus-based framework is frequently criticized for moving slowly. Nevertheless, institutions such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and East Asia Summit (EAS) provide mechanisms for consultation, confidence-building, and collective diplomacy (ASEAN Regional Forum Work Plan 2024-2025, 2024).
These institutions do not eliminate political and security conflict. But they do provide member states with additional leverage by allowing them to engage external powers collectively rather than individually.
The Pacific Island Forum (PIF) serves a similar role for Pacific Islands. However, it generally operates with fewer resources and possesses less influence over regional security outcomes than ASEAN's institutional architecture. Yet, the PIF has proven effective in coordinating SWP positions on issues such as climate change, regional development priorities and the Blue Pacific agenda (Pacific Security Outlook 2023-2024, 2024).
Both organizations share a common vulnerability. Consensus-based institutions derive their strength from collective unity, but that unity can become a strategic target in itself: external powers can target individual members to weaken the whole (Pacific Security Outlook 2023-2024, 2024).
The lesson for Pacific Islands is straightforward: small states have greater influence when they act together. ASEAN's experience demonstrates that regional institutions cannot eliminate strategic competition, but they can help prevent states from dealing with external powers on a bilateral basis. For the PIF, regional cohesion is not just diplomacy, it's a strategic tool for preserving autonomy against external coercion.
What Pacific Islands Can Learn From ASEAN's Experience
The comparison between the SCS and the SWP highlights a broader reality confronting countries across the Indo-Pacific.
Strategic competition rarely emerges through a single crisis. More often, it develops gradually through trade, infrastructure investment, security partnerships, and military engagement. The SCS demonstrates what strategic competition can become when influence, military presence and competing interests accumulate over decades. The SWP offers a rare opportunity to detect this process, before disputes become deep-rooted.
ASEAN's experience suggests three broader lessons for Pacific Islands:
Spot strategic competition early. Many of the developments that shaped today's SCS disputes initially appeared as incremental incursions in sovereign territory.
Understand the strategic implications of economic engagement. Trade, investment, and development cooperation can generate significant benefit while also creating new strategic considerations. Economic integration does not eliminate geopolitical competition, and governments may find themselves managing both simultaneously.
Strengthen regional cooperation and diversify partnerships. ASEAN's experience demonstrates that smaller states are often better positioned to preserve autonomy when they engage major powers collectively and avoid excessive dependence on any single partner. Strong regional institutions and diversified relationships provide greater flexibility when navigating strategic competitions.
For Pacific Islands, ASEAN's experience ultimately offers a reminder that sovereignty is rarely lost suddenly. More often, it is gradually constrained as influence, dependencies, and security relationships accumulate over time. The challenge for leaders of Pacific Islands is recognizing these dynamics early enough to retain the ability to shape them.
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