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span class="inline inline-left">Strategic balance: Vice President Boediono (right) talks to The Jakarta Post’s president director Jusuf Wanandi (left) prior to a seminar on “The Strategic Balance in Asia: Cooperation and Competition” at the Darmawangsa Hotel in South Jakarta on Tuesday, while Singapore-based Konrad- Adenauer-Stiftung’s Asian media program director Paul Linnarz looks on. The seminar was organized Tuesday by The Jakarta Post and the Asia News Network (ANN). JP/NurhayatiPitted between major powers competing for a bigger clout in Asia, Indonesia and other ASEAN countries are poised for skillful maneuvering to ensure no one power becomes too dominant in the region.

To attain such a reality, Indonesia, the current chair of ASEAN, proposed the maintenance of so called dynamic equilibrium where countries could engage with one another in a mutually beneficial and peaceful way.

Delivering a keynote speech at a seminar Tuesday on the changing balance of power in Asia, Vice President Boediono said the proposed doctrine emphasized a win-win solution and the absence of one or a few dominant actors.

“Indonesia and ASEAN believe that it is not in the region’s best interests for any one power to become too dominant,” he said.

Boediono said that with the Cold War well behind and the imperatives of globalization now confronting all countries, many former enemies had developed increasingly close cooperation in many fields. However, he said, mutual suspicions continued to characterize relations among key powers in Asia.

“At the same time, the multifaceted, multidimensional and yet interlinked and constantly evolving nature of the security challenges in the wider East Asia region defy national solutions.”

Indonesia, he said, was firmly committed to ensuring ASEAN would be in a position to play the kind of regional role it aspired to, first by enhancing its capacity and credibility to act together, and second by “skillfully managing its relations” with major neighboring powers.

Rizal Sukma, the current executive director at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the changing balance of power in East Asia was going to be a complex one with more than two main actors.

“I don’t believe the US and China are going to make up the two poles and they will try to balance each other. So I don’t believe predictions that the US and China will be in competition,” he said at a discussion in Tuesday’s seminar.

Rizal said there were a number of factors to consider in order to predict the balance of power in the region five years or 10 years down the road. The first is that China will want a greater role and it will want greater recognition as its power increases. Second, the US will have a problem treating China as an equal. Third, India, being an independent state, will defy the choice of whether it should jump on the bandwagon with the US against China or vice versa.

Lesser powers such as South Korea and Australia, Rizal said, would not sit by and watch how major powers played off in the future.

“So, within that very complex regional structure, especially because of the changes within smaller powers and major powers, we need to look beyond the strategy of balancing on the one hand or jumping on the bandwagon on the other hand,” he said.

Indonesia’s director general for ASEAN, Djauhari Oratmangun, said the group dealt with security challenges by allowing its regional architecture to be conducive to a wider scope of participation in forums such as ASEAN+1, ASEAN+3, the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit.

“[The priority] for us during [our chairing of] ASEAN is to take a look at the regional architecture, in particular with the membership of the US and Russia in the East Asia Summit, in pursuit of dynamic equilibrium.” Djauhari said.

The EAS is a forum for leaders of 16 countries in the East Asia region and was proposed at its initiation as an ASEAN-led development. The next summit will be held in October in Jakarta with the participation of the US and Russia.

Yassine Majdi contributed to this story