Improving the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific

Author: I Gusti Bagus Dharma Agastia, President University

Three years after its formulation and wide acceptance, progress on fulfilling the objectives set out by the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) remains slow. The AOIP lacks the teeth to deal with the increasing great power rivalry that has come to characterise the Indo-Pacific, so it simply continues to be an aspirational document.

Flexibility and inclusivity are the AOIP’s greatest strengths, but neither make the AOIP operational. The AOIP was formulated to ‘guide cooperation’ and ‘promote an enabling environment for peace, stability, and prosperity’ while ‘upholding the rules-based regional architecture’ — but it does not specify how to achieve this.

Answering the how is left to ASEAN, its member states and external partners. But coordination remains a fundamental hurdle to overcome. Without proper operationalisation, the AOIP risks becoming another redundant contribution to the trove of other fruitless ASEAN documents.

The AOIP was widely accepted by major powers, so it was expected to be a bridge between Russia and other countries. But international developments help to explain why there has been a lack of progress on the AOIP. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has driven a wedge between regional actors and exacerbated great power polarisation in the Indo-Pacific.

Meanwhile, the military takeover of Myanmar continues to test ASEAN and casts doubt on the potency of its conflict resolution mechanisms. The COVID-19 pandemic hampered the region’s ability to implement collective plans as member states shifted to containing the pandemic.

The AOIP aspires to enhance ASEAN-led mechanisms including forums such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asia Summit. Yet the AOIP lacks a clear way to strengthen and link existing platforms, relying instead on its members’ efforts to link sub-regional arrangements with ASEAN.

For example, Thailand’s chairmanship of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation — an international organisation that facilitates economic cooperation between Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand — is expected to pave the way for ASEAN to pursue a deeper connectivity agenda with South Asia.

More importantly, the AOIP fails to provide ways to address the underlying problems faced by its core mechanisms, some of which have been affected by great power rivalry. The East Asia Summit continues to face an erosion of its functionality due to the emergence of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) and the failure to graduate from its ‘talk shop’ nature.

In the realm of maritime security — a key area of the AOIP — the document does little to pave the way for further maritime cooperation. Such issues are left to member states to deal with, often in collaboration with extra-regional powers. Japan, for example, continues to cooperate with ASEAN to support countermeasures against illegal fishing and marine plastic debris, while also providing technical and operational training.

A natural development of the perceived deficiency of core ASEAN mechanisms is an increasing preference for intra- (or extra) regional security groupings and economic-related ‘minilaterals’. Although the proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is still in its infancy, several ASEAN members — notably Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand — have expressed their intention to join despite the framework’s questionable benefits.

It seems the AOIP is yet to make significant progress beyond norm-setting, so further steps must be taken to operationalise it. An operational document supplementing the original AOIP needs to be drafted by ASEAN members to address this issue.

This document would elaborate on the operational milestones that the AOIP seeks to achieve, akin to the ASEAN Community Blueprint. At the very least, this would provide a common picture of the objectives and processes that the AOIP intends to achieve — rather than being a collection of normative statements.

Improving organisational coordination would be necessary to achieve the goals set out in this operational document. Utilising existing leader-orientated venues, such as the ASEAN Foreign Minister meetings, would be way to achieve this while staying true to the AOIP’s intention of not creating new institutions and ASEAN’s preference for informal diplomacy. These meetings could coordinate member state policies and take stock of current developments, helping to jointly map out areas where policies could be better implemented.

These steps would require a significant amount of effort on the behalf of ASEAN member states and their Dialogue Partners — but they are necessary to enhance the AOIP’s relevance in a region increasingly affected by great power rivalry.

Assistant Professor I Gusti Bagus Dharma Agastia is Adjunct Lecturer at the International Relations Study Program, President University, Indonesia.

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