To forecast even the short-term future of a region as diverse and as subject to external influences as Southeast Asia is rash. But to fail to be aware of emerging trends and likely developments in the region is scarcely less foolhardy. Equally important is attentiveness to the interaction of developments at the national and regional levels in Southeast Asia. That interaction will determine the future of the region.

In the realm of regional politics and security, no trend or development looms as large to observers looking ahead towards 2011 and 2012 as the progress of the “great game” set in motion by the increasing power and assertiveness of the People's Republic of China (PRC). This game spans all of eastern Asia. It has implications for the Indian Ocean. But it is in Southeast Asia that the PRC's growing ambitions and increasing military capabilities have begun to have the greatest consequences. States both within and outside the region have adopted a range of postures in reaction to those ambitions and capabilities. The result has been a climate of deep uncertainty about the extant regional security order.

On one level, the PRC's ever more intense interest in the region challenges the viability of ASEAN's longstanding vision of Southeast Asian security. Beijing's expansive understanding of its national interests seems difficult to reconcile with that vision, which has consistently downplayed such assertiveness in the interest of the gradual construction of a regional community.

On another level, the policies of a range of other external actors have also long shaped the regional political and security environments. American, Japanese, Australian, and, increasingly, Indian and South Korean approaches to Southeast Asia bear as much examination as do Chinese undertakings.

Nowhere have challenges to ASEAN's approach to regional security proved more apparent than in the South China Sea. While ASEAN and the PRC agreed on a Declaration of Conduct in the South China Sea in 2002, the failure in the intervening years both to implement the terms of that declaration and to arrive at a more formal and effective Code of Conduct may symbolize the obsolescence of the Association's approach to regional security.