Multitrack diplomatic approaches to border and territorial disputes in Southeast Asia and soft balancing

[Extract] Conducting security dialogues through multilateral frameworks in Southeast Asia has been a rather recent development. During the Cold War, the Asian security environment was poised with ideological divisions dominated by
the Soviet Union and the United States, lingering deep-seated historical animosities among states and great differences in economic development. There was not adequate confidence and trust to engage in any major multinational
regional cooperation in the security arena. On the other hand, the strategic environments of post-Cold-War Southeast and East Asia have been in a situation when various proposals for a more structured and inclusive institutional security architecture were designed to encourage an increased confidence among states and the overall readiness to conduct multilateral consultations. These processes have been in particular driven by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which faced a dilemma of how to position itself in the region in the early 1990s. The pressing concerns were the uncertainty of us presence and Washington’s future commitment to the region, in addition to apprehension over a rising China. At that time, ASEAN was not fully accommodating to us requests with regard to basing rights (as in the case of the Philippines not renewing the us lease at Subic Bay in 1991), and it was not fully engaging China within its frameworks (Acharya 2014; Emmers 2003; Simon 1996).