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Asean military rank Including country: Vietnam, laos, phillipines, malaysia, mianmar, indonesia, brunei, cambodia, thailand, singapore 2016 While Southeast Asia considers closer military integration, China continues its encroachment on the sovereignty of the region. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has the potential to become a fully integrated mutual defense alliance which stands to ward off aggressive acts from an increasingly southward expanding PRC. This process of military and security integration has already begun in the form of the ASEAN Chiefs of Defense Forces Informal Meetings and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meetings. These meetings provide a forum for the nations to discuss their pressing security issues in a collaborative setting. External threats provide the perfect environment for internal cooperation and this region collectively faces a unilateral threat from an aggressive China. Why would the states favor military integration? Military cooperation in the form of a collective security organization would allow the region to assert their territorial claims to the South China Sea in lieu of China’s. This goal itself poses fundamental problems to the very idea of cooperation by ASEAN members. China only represents one of the countless territorial claimants over the South China Sea. Most claimants are ASEAN members and would represent competing interests within the alliance. These competing interests do pose challenges to the prospect of cooperation but are possible to overcome through analyzing the ranking of each states preferable outcomes. The South China Sea currently entertains claims or partial claims from Indonesia, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Singapore. Of these states only one, China, is a great power capable of truly global power projection. Every other state with competing claims actually lacks the military capacity to dispute any of China’s claims. This single truism means that the only hope for keeping China out of the region will require balancing and collaboration by the smaller powers. Now certainly not all claims and disputes over borders are with China, meaning that some states in the region have no direct quarrel with the PRC, but that does not mean their interests are not threatened by Chinese presence in the region. Since the days of the Srivijaya (ancient kingdom based on Sumatra) and the Spice Islands, Southeast Asia has been a pillar of international trade, whether consensual or otherwise. This international trade finally stands to benefit the population of the region in place of the frequently exploitative system that has been forced upon the region for centuries. Though this trade system is threatened if the People’s Republic of China continues to force its presence into strategic waterways. Would ASEAN military cooperation be sufficient to deter further Chinese encroachment? According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Military Expenditure Database, the total military expenditures of ASEAN in 2013 equal around $38 billion USD. This is miniscule compared to China’s 2013 expenditures of $188 billion USD but represents a unified threat that could be substantial in deterring China from aggressive action. (SIPRI) Currently the cost of China taking aggressive or hostile postures towards individual countries with which it has disputes is effectively zero. No single nation in the region even poses a threat of military resistance due to the imbalance of power. But a unified front with shared military resources of approximately a fifth of China’s expenditures would pose a serious threat to uncontested Chinese hegemony in the region. Unilaterally attacking such an alliance would surely make China a pariah in the international system. Military cooperation between ASEAN states would not be for the purpose of fighting China, but would serve to negotiate from a position of strength and not the current climate of weakness.