Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
DEFENSE Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. is correct in dismissing the idea of establishing a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-like alliance in Southeast Asia.
Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has made the suggestion to create an "Asian NATO," and while he made no reference to China, it is clear that the intention is to create a shield to counter Beijing's expansionist ambitions in the region.
The United States, one of Japan's staunchest security partners in Asia, is cool to the idea, and for good reason: it already has set up a ring of military alliances with countries in the Asia-Pacific, including the Philippines.
Teodoro said a bloc patterned after NATO would not fly because of Southeast Asia's "dichotomies and divergence in country interests."
The Philippines already has a mutual defense treaty with the US, while other Southeast Asian countries have similar partnerships with China, he explained.
The concept of a Southeast Asian NATO was actually tried out in the 1950s, when the Seato, or Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, was established.
Its name, however, is misleading, since only two Southeast Asian countries — the Philippines and Thailand — joined the alliance. The other members were mostly Western superpowers led by the US and United Kingdom, which were locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union in Europe.
Seato was born with much fanfare after the Manila Pact was signed on Sept. 8, 1954. Its creation was in line with the Truman Doctrine, a defensive strategy to counter what the US saw as the spreading communist influence in the region.
Other Southeast Asian states like Indonesia, Burma (now Myanmar) and Malaysia, stayed out of the new alliance mainly because they did not feel the communist threat at the time.
Seato was flawed from the start. Unlike NATO, it did not have a standing force, and had no clear response protocol if a member state were to come under communist attack.
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By some ironic twist of fate, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — the states that emerged after the breakup of French Indochina — were prevented from joining Seato by the Geneva Agreements. That allowed China and the Soviet Union to step into the power vacuum, the very scenario that Seato had wanted to thwart.
Only when the domino theory of communist domination became popular did Seato take the new states under its wing, but it was already too late.
For most of its existence, the alliance was a paper tiger, arising only to conduct annual joint military exercises and civic work. It never intervened militarily in regional conflicts. Seato was never directly involved in the Vietnam War because two of its members, the UK and France, did not allow it.
The alliance was dissolved in 1977 with little to show. By that time, American influence in the region was already on the wane.
In an article on The Diplomat website last August, political analysts Tommy Chai and Ang Cheng Guan said the reluctance by Seato's principals "to come to a consensus on the nature of [the] communist threat led to a diluted and unrealistic goal of meeting the common danger of communist 'aggression by means of armed attack' — an aggression that never materialized."
They counseled "aspiring members of an Asian multilateral alliance" to be prepared "for the overexpectations of their members, especially in the face of China's gray-zone operations, lest they be criticized for being just a talk shop."
It is a counsel worth considering. But instead of entertaining another military alliance, Teodoro said a more effective approach is to involve a truly regional bloc like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in dealing with China.
"Getting some principles or some reactions regarding the expansive activities and admittedly illegal activities of China in the South China Sea is a very good first step, and that's what we should be working on," he said.
Because the Philippines has experienced repeated Chinese incursions into its territorial waters, it should take the lead in prodding Asean to toughen up its stance in confronting China.
Asean, for example, could be more resolute in pressing China into agreeing to speed up negotiations for the long-pending code of conduct on the South China Sea.