US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's demand at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore for Asian allies and partners to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence sounded alarm bells across Southeast Asia and beyond. His brow-beating call to arms will likely lead to a regional defence build-up not seen in decades. It bodes ill for regional security in Southeast Asia and does not seem to add up for America's own debt and defence concerns.
Under the 11-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the regional neighbourhood south of China and east of India has succeeded in securing peace and security for the past six decades as the anchor of broader Asia by design and by default. No other organisation can convene Indo-Pacific countries, large and small, the way Asean has done through its annual meetings, such as the East Asia Summit. Notwithstanding its shortcomings and internal divisions, Asean has had to be in the driver's seat of security promotion and maintenance because no other entity is as widely trusted to fulfil this function. Asean's role as the buffer, bridge and broker in keeping the bigger powers connected and away from confrontation and conflict is Southeast Asia's name of the geostrategic game in the Indo-Pacific.
Southeast Asia's approach to peace and security has been to prioritise and promote words over weapons and dialogues over muscles. It has been about "jaw-jaw" over "war-war", a Churchillian quip often repeated in Asean contexts. Mr Hegseth, in fact, chastised this approach at the Singapore gathering. As he put it, "We don't need more conferences. We need more combat power … less Shangri-La, more ships, more subs." As he likens himself as the "Secretary of War", who oversees a gargantuan war-fighting government department, Mr Hegseth's call for a defence build-up risks spiralling into an arms race in Southeast Asia, a region with historical enmities and overlapping territorial claims.
As Southeast Asia's regional defence spending averages less than 2%, the 3.5% benchmark would require Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand to more than double their current annual defence expenditures. Others, such as Singapore and Vietnam, face smaller but still considerable gaps. Myanmar is the only Asean member state already above the target at 4.2%. Its arsenal of artillery and airstrikes has been aimed exclusively at its own people, who have fought a fierce civil war against Myanmar's military, which staged a coup in February 2021 and has whitewashed it with a bogus election earlier this year. In a region where militaries of some member countries have played a dominant role in politics, higher defence budgets will play into the hands of the top brass at the expense of civil society organisations and democratisation.
Since the 1980s, Southeast Asia has focused on trade and investment to become a manufacturing powerhouse, resulting in phenomenal economic development and contributing to global economic expansion. Mr Hegseth's demand would require the reallocation of resources from critical sectors, such as health and education, to boost arms acquisitions and defence industrial bases at a time when Southeast Asia's export-led growth models face headwinds from the Trump tariffs and US protectionism against the backdrop of an adverse world economy and energy shock from the conflagration of the Iran war and wider conflict in the Middle East.
The pressure and pain points on economic growth could result in domestic political instability in Southeast Asian countries. The rich would become richer, the poor poorer still, with fewer safety nets and welfare cushions. Domestic instability could spill over into regional risks as incumbent governments may resort to nationalism against neighbours to divert attention or may face internal dissent and protests as economic conditions worsen. The shakeup in the regional neighbourhood from lower growth and higher spending on defence and less on physical and human infrastructure amid an unprecedented arms build-up would undermine and further weaken regional unity and cohesion. In such dire straits, Southeast Asian countries would be pushed further into China's geostrategic orbit.
All of this does not mean Southeast Asia should be "freeloading", as the US defence secretary referenced, on Washington as an offshore security balancer vis-à-vis China. Yet Southeast Asian countries deploy diplomacy and defence in a moving mix to address their threat perceptions. They have engaged and included China, for example, in a clutch of regional bodies, including the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership for trade liberalisation and the Asean Defence Ministers' Meeting-Plus, apart from the EAS. The latter two also include the US. Economic and defence diplomacy and cooperation are part and parcel of how Southeast Asia spends on defence.
Much of the "free-loading", in fact, was to America's benefit because it helped maintain domestic political stability and enabled Washington to reign supreme in the rules-based international system. In their own constellations of power and prestige, the great powers usually allow some free-riding because they need the smaller states to play along. The 3.5% is probably not a strict benchmark and is likely to be considered with other conditions, such as defence spending increases and military-military cooperation with the US joint force. To be sure, free-loading is inherent in any system dominated by a great power.
And Secretary Hegseth's numbers do not seem to add up. If the US wants partners and allies to increase defence spending to carry their load, then the US should want a "burden-sharing" dividend whereby its defence budget can be reduced. But instead, the US Department of War wants to increase its budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in the coming fiscal year. The whopping 50% hike would put US military expenditures above the next nine largest militaries combined, or more than 40 per cent of all military spending worldwide. Such a military boost would exacerbate the US's ballooning $39 trillion debt.
It would also raise the question about the nature and identity of the threat and enemy. As its most recent National Security Strategy and National Defence Strategy laid out, Washington under Trump II aspires to dominate the Western Hemisphere, although the Iran war has proved costly and distracting to its core aims. If Asian partners and allies are to spend a lot more on defence while the US does the same, to what end will these expenditures end up, especially when President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have recently reinforced guardrails in US-China relations? Who would be the enemy and target of this call to arms? This is why Mr Hegseth's proposition should be considered ominous and dangerous.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, PhD, is professor at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Political Science and a senior fellow at its Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok.
