Southeast Asia’s volatile security environment is increasingly not a problem that can be handled by a single country or a single entity. Disputes over maritime claims; rivalry by external great powers; cyber-attacks originating from all parts of the globe; climate change, which crosses borders; domestic instability in several countries in the region, including in several ASEAN member states all these require cooperation and collective action and response if they are not to overwhelm the capacities of individual countries in the region and undermine the credibility of ASEAN as a whole.
The security of the seas remains the most volatile of issues in the region. The South China Sea, for example, continues to pose challenges to the unilateral actions of all claimant states. While the 2016 arbitration decision of the Philippines established a legal benchmark, this did not in any way resolve the contest for control of the islands and reefs of the SCS between China and the other eleven countries. Piracy, human trafficking, smuggling, and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in the Sulu–Celebes Seas, and across the archipelago as a whole, are but a few of the many issues that are taking place in the region’s many Maritime Zones that require a collective sense of awareness and cooperation of all nations within the region’s various forums for addressing these issues. In recent years, for example, there have been trilateral patrols conducted among nations that share a border, which have provided some positive results on a number of tactical levels.
An incident in early 2026 at Sabina Shoal in the South China Sea highlighted once again the regional weaknesses when it comes to dealing with a sudden escalation of a maritime incident. Chinese coast guard vessels blocked a Philippine resupply mission to a temporarily anchored Philippine warship in the area, which was stopped and boarded by Chinese marines. The incident, which had developed from a legal dispute over the area where a Philippine research vessel had been conducting marine scientific research in early 2026, was rapidly escalated by Chinese actions into a coercive confrontation that was stopped only when the Philippine government declared a naval standoff and asked for support from its regional partners. Although the standoff was eventually resolved without any shots being fired, the incident also revealed once again that the rights of individual states in the region to access and use parts of the global commons are no longer sufficient to ward off structural pressures from other states. What is needed instead is a unified regional front that is able to deter such actions by a single state in the first place. However, due to the internal divisions within ASEAN, such a coordinated response was not possible, and the Philippines was left to its own devices in dealing with the Chinese.
Friction at the sea is a manifestation of deeper-seated constraints within Southeast Asia’s security architecture. Maritime security in Southeast Asia is often hampered by the country’s adherence to the principles of ASEAN, in particular, its practice of consensus among its member-states, and of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. In the case of the regional forum for security cooperation among ASEAN and other countries in Asia—namely, the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus (ADMM Plus)—while the forum does provide a useful platform for member-states to engage in dialogue on security issues of mutual concern and hold joint military exercises from time to time, the forum’s very broad membership is a constraint that prevents member-states from taking more decisive action on security issues that affect them. In this sense, regional mechanisms for security cooperation in Southeast Asia are not as effective as they could be, and there is a need for more innovation, such as the Information Fusion Centre (IFC) that Indonesia and Singapore established in 2007 to share intelligence on terrorism and other security threats, and to respond more quickly to crises that affect both countries. The challenge is to translate these innovations into mechanisms that are already embedded in the architecture of security cooperation in Southeast Asia.
The need for cooperation is even more pronounced in the face of new security challenges and threats. Cyber warfare can target at will the computer networks of any country or business. The threat to Southeast Asia is particularly high, and one country is not enough to face such a complex challenge. It would require shared protocols and, more importantly, the automation of information exchange and real-time response by each country. A similar threat is posed by climate change, which impacts all countries but does not respect any international border. The impact on food production, migration, and critical infrastructure would be severe and cannot be addressed individually.
Cross-border security challenges related to domestic crises, in the region and beyond, continue to affect the security of neighbouring countries. Extremist networks such as ISIS and Daesh have long taken advantage of regional connectivity to operate across borders. Recently, the ongoing conflict in Myanmar following the 2021 military coup has created large numbers of refugees, flowing into neighbouring countries, and created vast new border zones susceptible to human trafficking, illicit finance and cyber-scam operations that other countries in the region are ill-equipped to deal with, again revealing the limits of traditional diplomacy in the face of ASEAN’s institutional inertia.
The region’s economic development and energy security are also under threat. Should the Malacca Strait ever be closed for even a short period, it is likely to bring huge economic losses to Southeast Asia and the world at large. Several measures have been taken at the bilateral level, such as a plan to connect the two countries’ power grids and a plan to develop a gas pipeline between them. However, as noted, the region as a whole is very weak in terms of supply-chain resilience.
Southeast Asia’s future, therefore, will be one of greater institutionalisation. ASEAN needs to provide a greater platform for the already existing ASEAN Maritime Forum and to formalise the already existing good practices of bilateral intelligence sharing. Joint training, joint maritime patrols, and joint radar/satellite data sharing should be operationalised. These need to be supported by confidence-building measures in other less sensitive areas with a view to fostering trust that can be gradually developed.
Southeast Asia needs stronger security cooperation to preserve its autonomy in a complex and challenging world. With the kind of threats facing individual countries today, no one country can manage them alone. It is for this reason that ASEAN needs to institutionalise its ad hoc arrangements, absorb minilateral arrangements that are functioning well and build enough operational trust to convert its collective vulnerability into collective strength. The regional body has enough lessons from the South China Sea disputes, the Sabina Shoal standoff, the ongoing chaos in Myanmar and the various digital threats to know that fragmented responses would only lead to more instability and chaos in the region.
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Simon Hutagalung
Simon Hutagalung is a retired Indonesian Foreign Ministry diplomat and received his Master’s degree in Political Science and Comparative Politics from the City University of New York. He writes opinion pieces for Europeantimes and all opinions expressed in his article are his own.
