Confidence‐building measures at sea: The challenges ahead in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia faces a range of challenges in adopting maritime confidence‐ and trust‐building measures in the very promising atmosphere of political endorsement that exists after the ASEAN Regional Forum, with possible changes to the strategic balance caused by maritime rearmament within the region. This paper briefly analyses the roles or activities of maritime forces in the region on the basis of their sensitivity to scrutiny: the hard or contentious kinds of activities, usually warlike, that navies will only practise together in an environment of considerable trust, and the soft, usually non‐warlike activities, that they could undertake cooperatively with fewer security concerns. From this list of shared roles two lists of possible CBMs are derived, the easy (or likely‐to‐succeed) and the hard (or less‐likely), based on the level of sensitivity of the activities to be undertaken cooperatively.