Beyond Pax Americana, Southeast Asia Confronts the Wolf World

Postwar international stability rested on predictable maritime access and the calculated deterrence of Pax Americana. For decades, regional diplomacy operated on the assumption that external security guarantees would outlast localized political turbulence. That structural premise has collapsed. When strategic analysts describe a transformation toward systemic confrontation, they observe an unravelling that regional planners already feel across commercial corridors and territorial waters. The shift is not merely rhetorical. Unilateral tariff measures and direct military strikes against Iran demonstrate that hegemonic restraint has given way to raw geopolitical assertion.

In Manila, discussion surrounding the book Geopolitical Conflict in the Wolf World by Marc Saxer, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Head of Regional Project Indo-Pacific, outlines this systemic rupture. Speaking with Rappler's Bea Cupin, Saxer posited the end of Pax Americana, documenting a landscape governed by naked power rivalry rather than collective treaties. The analysis crystallized as the United States under Donald Trump enacted unilateral trade measures labeled liberation day tariffs, followed by an attack on Iran launched by the US and Israel. Those actions, with consequences reverberating across the world nearly nine months later, confirm that major powers now bypass multilateral consensus whenever national objectives dictate immediate force.

The Limits of Institutional Neutrality

For ASEAN, the return of unmediated balance-of-power competition strikes at the foundation of regional hedging. Diplomatic tradition across member states has long treated external rivalries as pressures to be mediated through summitry, consensus statements, and balanced engagement. Recent discussions among defense ministers, where the Philippines spotlighted both the South China Sea and an increasingly fragmenting world, indicate that administrative non-alignment offers thin protection against coercive realpolitik. Dominant powers no longer view regional forums as neutral arbiters; they treat them as strategic terrain to be partitioned.

Defense planners must consequently address what capability, rather than what statement, has actually changed. Historical alliances constructed during decades of Western preeminence cannot be assumed to function automatically when domestic political imperatives in Washington lean toward mercantilism. Forthcoming multilateral meetings, including the gathering in Cebu where defense officials face direct scrutiny regarding the role of the United States in the Indo-Pacific, arrive amid acute awareness that external patrons prioritize unilateral advantage over collective reassurance. When external powers apply economic coercion and unilateral force abroad, secondary states cannot rely on verbal assurances of collective defense.

The Cost of Strategic Exposure

There is, to be sure, a coherent counterargument: regional economies have weathered major power friction before, successfully balancing competing commercial dependencies without forfeiting sovereign autonomy. Proponents of this view maintain that external friction creates tactical leverage, permitting middle powers to extract infrastructure commitments and security assistance from competing suitors simultaneously. Such calculations assume that great power rivalry remains disciplined and predictable, allowing secondary capitals to manage risk along established margins.

Unilateral commercial measures and kinetic strikes demonstrate that hegemonic restraint has given way to raw geopolitical assertion.

That assumption underestimates the operational instability of the current transition. Competing powers involved in acute conflict demand exclusive alignment rather than ambiguous coexistence. Economic corridors structured on frictionless commerce face immediate disruption when tariff barriers and retaliatory measures become standard tools of statecraft. Secondary states that defer domestic defense consolidation while awaiting external mediation find themselves structurally exposed.

Southeast Asian capitals confront an unforgiving operational environment. Lacking the collective naval displacement or unified industrial capacity to dictate maritime outcomes, regional states must reconcile their enduring reliance on external security architecture with the reality of an aggressive, fragmented global order. The structural dilemma facing regional capitals is not whether to acknowledge the demise of traditional hegemony, but whether their sovereign capabilities can withstand the friction of a contest in which rules no longer constrain the strong.