Along with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), SEATO is one of the Cold War alliances the United States and its allies created in order to contain the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, particularly that of People’s Republic of China (PRC), which supported communist movements in the region. Formed in 1954, the alliance parties were France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and the United States. While NATO persists, SEATO bit the dust in 1977.
As China is being perceived as a threat again, the resurrection of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) has been proffered and predicted since the 90s. In a 1995 New York Times op-ed Thomas L. Friedman recommended to “dust off the SEATO Charter” if American foreign policy fails to shape a more “benign China.” Two decades later, Josh Gelernter advocated in the National Review the revival of SEATO. Recently, in InterAksyon, Cesar Polvorosa Jr., has also argued that one of the possible consequences of China’s rise is SEATO’s comeback. Dreams of SEATO’s re-emergence might just be wishful thinking. Certainly, there is a difference between wishful thinking and wishing for something. The latter requires the dreamer to come down to earth and learn from SEATO’s experience.
SEATO’s Rise and Fall
Under American initiative, SEATO was formed upon the signing of the Manila Pact in September 1954. SEATO’s secretariat was based in Bangkok, and its operations were primarily bankrolled by US largesse. In 1954, Walter Lippmann hailed the treaty as marking a “new venture” in collective security. The Manila Pact, Lippmann said, “opens up the possibility of legalised and licensed [international] intervention in [the] internal affairs” of its alliance members and in the Protocol States which included Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam.
However, unlike NATO, SEATO did not view an attack to one of them as an attack against all of them. SEATO merely considered these attacks as a “common danger.” The treaty did not impose any obligation to the parties to come to the aid of the attacked alliance member. And the measures to be taken must be unanimously agreed by and must conform to the “constitutional processes” of alliance members.
Throughout the years, SEATO was increasingly viewed more as America’s foreign policy tool than as an institution embodying the collective aspirations of its members. US Senator George S. McGovern rebuked SEATO as a mere “paper treaty” providing nothing but “legal rationalization” for American presidents “to intervene in Southern Asia.” Affirming this is a recently declassified document from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Meanwhile, the 1961 Laos Crisis demonstrated the weak grounding of the alliance members’ collective desire. With American support, Thailand proposed that SEATO intervened in Laos. The UK and France strongly opposed it.
Plagued by disagreements, lacklustre support from some its members, and ambiguous treaty provisions, SEATO dissolved in June 1977. No one grieved its death. The New York Times called its demise a “tearless end.” SEATO was one of those things that, to borrow Oscar Wilde’s words, brings happiness “whenever they go.” Its end was heartily welcomed by several non-member Southeast Asian countries - Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia.
So what killed SEATO?
According to realism, the raison d’être of alliances is the existence of a State that each alliance member individually finds threatening. When that State no longer poses a threat to most of the members of the alliance, the alliance ceases to exist. Thus, what proved to be fatal to SEATO was that the threat that spurred the alliance to form — China — ceased to be perceived as threatening.
From the start not all SEATO members viewed China as a threat in the same extents as the US did. Pakistan viewed India more of a threat. As early as January 1950, Pakistan already recognised the legitimacy of the PRC, and established full diplomatic relations with the following year. Despite the shadow of the Cold War, the UK maintained a trading relationship with the PRC. In fact, “British companies were among the first to trade with communist China.” Meanwhile, France had not enough interests in the region that China could jeopardise; also the French had been trading with China since 1958.
The precipitating moment that dramatically diminished the threat posed by China was the 1961 Sino-Soviet split. This opened an opportunity for the US and its allies to normalise their relations with China. After a series of secret talks, in 1972, President Nixon visited China. This visit produced the Shanghai Communiqué, marking the end of hostility between the two nations. Meanwhile, the newly elected governments of Australia and New Zealand in 1972 sought closer economic ties with the PRC. And in 1975, both the Philippines and Thailand established diplomatic relations with China. In the same year, they issued a joint communiqué, calling for the phasing out of SEATO. Thus, when the raison d’être of SEATO ceased to be threatening, the alliance dissolved. But it wasn’t just the absence of threat that triggered SEATO’s dissolution.
From the perspective of constructivism, the absence of external threat is not enough to dissolve an alliance. Alliances dissolve because its members have not reached the depth of identification sufficient to form a collective self. The reason why alliance members stay together is that their sense of self is entangled with the collective identity of their alliance. Without the fusion of selves among its members, members will find it easy to leave an alliance when the strategic situation changes. An alliance disbands when sufficient members no longer find it necessary for their own survival. Thus, what killed SEATO was the absence of collective identity among its members.
To begin with, only the Philippines and Thailand were from South-East Asia. The alliance members came from different cultures. Because of this, alliance members find it difficult to identify themselves with each other because they are too different. Their divergent views often lead to paralysis.
Since the alliance was based on a vague collective identity, the members found it difficult to identify their common interests. As the Pentagon Papers revealed, “anti-communism was no unifying force.” There was no sufficient fusion of selves in SEATO. Since the treaty did not oblige members to come to the aid of alliance members who were under attacked, SEATO was not able to encourage the formation of a community-feeling among its members that would allow them to recognise that an attack on one of them was an attack to all of them. SEATO’s treaty let members assess how a threat affected them individually rather than how it imperilled their existence as a community. The absence of a “We” made it difficult for SEATO’s members to withstand the myriad differences of its members on various issues. Without a “We” to hold on to, SEATO members found it easy to leave and see their alliance vanish into history without even shedding a tear. The alliance members divorced without even getting married.
Thus, to those who are dreaming of a NATO-like alliance in the Pacific in order to contain China’s ascendance, SEATO’s dissolution imparts an important lesson. It is one thing to say that China’s rise is a threat, that it is a threat in the same degree to all possible alliance members is another; and that the possible alliance members will be able to identify each other deep enough to form a collective identity, which in turn would be the bedrock of their security community, is quite another still.
SEATO’s Rise and FallSEATO’s Rise and FallSEATO’s Rise and Fall
