Strategically, Southeast Asia sits at the intersection of the wider world and Australia’s local neighbourhood; what happens there matters to Australia. But the broader Asian security environment is in flux, and an era of strategic quiescence in Southeast Asia may be drawing to a close. Security trends there are increasingly being shaped by a set of global and broader Asian concerns as well as local ones. In consequence, traditional patterns of strategic influence and cooperation are shifting in Southeast Asia.

In this paper, Professor Carl Thayer from the Australian Defence Force Academy unpacks four patterns of strategic influence in the region, assessing the interactions between them and what they mean for Australian strategic interests. Those patterns increasingly overlay in new and complex ways, ways that might undermine the stable, consultative Southeast Asia with which we have become so familiar.