Advertisement
Opinion | Southeast Asia must factor Big Tech firms into its US-China calculus
- Southeast Asian states must recognise that it is not only countries but also large companies which shift the power balance on the global stage
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
At the recently concluded Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) meetings in Laos, the region’s foreign ministers met their counterparts from 17 other Asia-Pacific states to discuss a range of strategic challenges. It was clear as they did so that Southeast Asia remains a Rorschach test – a projective experiment of what is possible for different, sometimes fiercely competing interests.
Advertisement
For larger Asia-Pacific countries, Southeast Asia offers a toehold to project influence. Russia’s suggestion to China that the two cooperate to “counter interference by forces from outside” Southeast Asia and positively contribute to the region was matched by the United States’ reassurance that Asean lies at the heart of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
In courting Southeast Asian states at these regional meetings, larger powers have also become better at refining their message. They now take care to centre Asean in speech while advancing their own objectives in substance.
For Asean’s own member states, this annual meeting of top diplomats provides external validation of the grouping and recalls the region’s historical role as an entrepot for commodities as well as ideas and dialogue. In Southeast Asia, power and persuasion have been traded as long as goods and services have been.
However, the preference among Asean and its member states for separating complex international politics from economic engagement leaves Southeast Asia with three blind spots: the expanding interpretation of national security considerations overlapping with business concerns, the role of large technology firms in this conflation and the risk of inadvertent geopolitical alignment through tech dependency.
Advertisement