ABSTRACT
Rivalry between great and regional powers over the South China Sea (SCS) has negatively affected East Asia’s multilateral architecture (EAMA). By way of the concepts of institutional, adversarial, and associational balancing, this chapter looks at the evolution of balance of power dynamics between China and the United States. For the first two decades of post-Cold War East Asia, interstate balancing within the EAMA was predominantly “associational” in quality, where China, the US, and other powers balanced each other in ways that threatened neither the centrality of ASEAN in East Asian multilateralism and the grand compact that rendered that possible, nor the fundamental integrity of the EAMA. That began to change as institutional balancing assumed “adversarial” characteristics with China’s growing assertiveness in the SCS and its apparent attempts to divide ASEAN against the backdrop of the US rebalance to Asia. Whether this potentially harmful shift can be arrested and reversed – and the prospective role of ASEAN to that effect – will be of key importance to the future stability and security of the East Asian region.
