I have spent the better part of the past three years or so learning about the political economy of the South China Sea, most notably the role of external actors in that part of the world, especially the US.
Two things sit with me as I write this brief essay. One is a reminder of the day, 50 years ago today, when the Vietnamese defeated the Americans and took their destiny into their own hands. The other is how Vietnam has emerged as one of the economic success stories of East and Southeast Asia.
Vietnam has become an economic powerhouse without the intervention and support for antidemocratic authoritarianism that birthed South Korea’s development achievements.
The interested reader may benefit from studying the role of the US military government established in Seoul after World War 2, how that segued into the US military offshore procurement (OSP) programme, how the US sustained interventions and activities of the chaebol and military industrial complex, and how it all contributed to “economic dynamism” or the East Asian “miracles” — while conveniently ignoring openly dictatorial governments, various forms of military-authoritarian rule, and coups.
The relevance here is the failed coup and attempt at imposing military rule on the country around the time of my last visit. While that’s for another discussion, the point is that the Vietnamese victory on April 30 1975 set the country on a path of economic expansion.
The point I wish to make now is that the US is back in the region (not that it ever left), and cajoling its staunchest allies like Singapore and most notably the Philippines against China in the South China Sea. To be clear, China has designs on the South China Sea — also a discussion for another time — but the littoral states of Southeast Asia go about improving the lives of their citizens while constantly looking over their shoulders for Washington’s next move.
There are, of course, areas of desperation, violence and displacement in countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean). I spent some time teaching Karen refugees, and found that the most notable aggressors in Myanmar are Buddhist nationalists. There is little surprise that somewhere at the Buddhist nationalist table sits Aung San Suu Kyi, much feted in the West and of whom the influential Foreign Policy journal asked: “Why isn’t Burma’s democracy icon speaking up for minorities — and against her country’s nationalistic, racist, xenophobic, and occasionally violent Buddhist majority?”
We can only guess at that, or speculate. What does seem plausible is that for as long as the Buddhist majority has the backing of Washington there will probably be no response. The real wild card in Southeast Asia — with particular reference to South China Sea tensions — is the Philippines. Taking a leaf from US President Donald Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico, one of the oligarchs who has snuggled up to Trump, Sundar Pichai, apparently instructed his company, Google, to rename part of the South China Sea. It is now the West Philippine Sea — a finger in the eye of Beijing.
Digging a little deeper we find that the US has increased its military presence in the Philippines and now runs nine installations and bases on the archipelago, adding to the estimated 313 military base sites in East Asia, according to David Vine of the American University.
For all the actual or perceived threats the littoral states on the South China Sea face, the one reliable fact has been US military interventions in the region since the end of World War 2. The lessons of defeat in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon), have all but been forgotten.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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