‘Is it good or is it bad?’: minilateralism and its effects on the Indo-Pacific security architecture

Amid the rapid proliferation of minilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, this article probes its impact on the regional security architecture. Using an analytical framework designed to determine the relationship between new and incumbent institutions and applying it to major minilateral mechanisms previously categorized into four distinct groups, it finds that the rise of minilateralism has had no uniformly complementary or competing effect on the pre-existing institutions of the Indo-Pacific security architecture. Nevertheless, the analysis also demonstrates that, collectively, minilateral cooperation has tended to make the regional security architecture less balanced and more polarized. This is mainly because the majority of the newly established minilaterals tend to reinforce characteristics inherent in the pre-existing bilateral US hub-and-spokes layer of the regional security architecture, which is built on collective security, deterrence, and non-inclusiveness. Meanwhile, the pre-existing multilateral layer of the architecture, centered primarily on ASEAN and focused on cooperative security and pan-regional inclusion, is being challenged in multiple ways by a range of very different minilateral platforms. Taken together, minilateralism constitutes a significant addition to the regional security architecture, but—at least in its currently predominant forms—it does not offer a convincing solution to the varied pressing security problems in the Indo-Pacific.