The Southeast Asian Crucible

As President-elect Joe Biden and his incoming administration begin to fashion a strategy to manage the intensifying competition between the United States and China, they need to pay close attention to Southeast Asia. The contest with China is now playing out all over the world and across all functional domains—diplomacy, commerce, security, influence operations, ideology, values, education, science and technology, and more. The competition in these realms in Southeast Asia represents a microcosm and a harbinger of how it might develop elsewhere in the world. The outcome there will at the very least affect the rest of the vast