During this year’s chairmanship of ASEAN, Singapore is expected to continue the association’s work in developing measures to help mitigate tensions in the South China Sea. In recent years, ASEAN and China have agreed to establish communication hotlines between their respective foreign ministries as well as to implement the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES). CUES is intended to reduce incidents between the navies (and eventually the coast guards) of littoral states.
A framework for a Code of Conduct (COC) was agreed upon in May 2017 — an incredible 25 years since the need for a COC was first acknowledged. The implementation of its predecessor (the 2002 Declaration of Conduct) continues to be discussed.
In February 2018, China agreed to start negotiating details of the COC with ASEAN. To date, there is no clarity on whether the outcome document will be ‘legally binding’ as originally envisioned. This lack of clarity is due to the difficulty of establishing verification and enforcement mechanisms among parties with such highly asymmetric power capabilities.
One obvious shortcoming of any COC is that it is limited to China and ASEAN as the negotiating parties. The South China Sea issue has evolved from the original question in the 1990s of managing territorial and maritime disputes between ASEAN states and China into a broader geostrategic contest between China and the United States, with ASEAN caught in the middle. China has little incentive to allow its behaviour to be constrained by agreements to which the United States, or any other major power that operates in the South China Sea, is not similarly obliged to adhere.
China’s current willingness to commit to COC negotiations with ASEAN is likely motivated by a desire to undercut further involvement by the United States. Under US President Donald Trump, the United States has increased and upgraded its freedom of navigation operations in the disputed areas. The indications that Taiwan — with the independence-inclined Democratic Progressive Party in control — may re-emerge as a flashpoint in US–Chinese relations enhances the strategic value of the surrounding seas.
ASEAN is not oblivious to these new challenges. A number of constructive proposals remain on its multilateral cooperation agenda. CUES was expanded last year to include all members of the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus (ADMM+), a forum that consists of ASEAN countries’ defence ministers and their counterparts from Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia and the United States. The ADMM+ has since 2013 actively conducted multilateral maritime exercises that largely focus on non-traditional security challenges, such as terrorism. In preparation for the ADMM+ meeting in October 2018, Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen has actively endorsed expanding the CUES agreement to include the prevention of military incidents in the air.