Asia’s maritime domain is increasingly teeming with danger. Yet there has not been any code of conduct for decades. Therein lay the increased risks.
From the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea, and from the East China Sea down to the Philippine archipelago, the region is becoming a theatre where military exercises, arms sales, and strategic signalling collide with alarming regularity.
This is all happening without a proper sense of how each side must not misunderstand the intention of the other. Yet with each demonstration of strength, animosity deepens, not amity and benign comity.
What is most worrying is not a single incident, but the cumulative effect of moves and counter-moves that keep aggravating one another, narrowing diplomatic space and increasing the risk of miscalculation: a serious security dilemma, invariably, an arms race.
The latest flashpoint is the Taiwan Strait. China has launched extensive military drills around Taiwan, branding them a “stern warning” against separatist forces and what it calls “external interference”.
These exercises, codenamed Justice Mission 2025, involve combat-readiness operations, port-blockade simulations, live-fire drills, and coordinated air-sea strikes across multiple zones around the island.
According to Beijing, the manoeuvres are necessary to defend sovereignty and national unity.
The trigger
From China’s perspective, the timing of the drills is not accidental.
They follow the announcement by the Donald Trump administration of a US$11.1 billion (RM44.9 billion) arms sale to Taiwan earlier this month.
In Beijing’s strategic logic, arms transfers to Taipei are not merely defensive transactions but political acts that embolden pro-independence sentiment and invite external powers into what China considers a domestic matter.
Hence, military exercises become both deterrence and demonstration — messages aimed simultaneously at Taipei and Washington.
Defensive move
Taiwan, for its part, sees the situation very differently.
Officials in Taipei argue that the drills confirm the Chinese Communist Party’s nature as an aggressor and underscore the existential threat Taiwan faces daily.
The island’s defence ministry has highlighted the scale of the operations: dozens of aircraft and drones operating in and around the Taiwan Strait, naval manoeuvres simulating blockades, and the disruption of civilian air traffic affecting more than 100,000 international travelers.
From its vantage point, arms purchases are not provocations but necessities for survival.
This is precisely how flashpoints are sustained. One side’s “defensive necessity” becomes the other side’s “provocation”, and the cycle tightens.
Arms sales trigger exercises; exercises justify further arms acquisitions; each move hardens domestic political positions and reduces room for compromise. Over time, what begins as signalling morphs into structural instability.
Danger on the high seas
In this regard, the Taiwan Strait is hardly the only flashpoint. Across Asia’s seas, military exercises have become more frequent, larger in scale, and more politically charged.
In the South China Sea, freedom of navigation operations, coast guard confrontations, and naval drills by multiple claimants and external powers overlap in dangerously congested waters.
In the East China Sea, air and maritime encounters between China and Japan remain fraught with historical baggage and strategic distrust.
Even the Bay of Bengal and the waters around the Korean Peninsula are witnessing intensified naval activity.
What links these flashpoints is a shared pattern: military exercises and arms sales are no longer exceptional events but routine instruments of policy.
A quandary
Exercises are meant to enhance readiness and deterrence, yet when conducted in disputed or sensitive areas, they also raise perception of threats.
Arms sales are framed as stabilising measures, yet they often encourage adversaries to respond in kind.
The result is a regional security dilemma at sea. China’s drills around Taiwan illustrate this dilemma starkly.
Beijing insists that it has sovereignty over the island, pointing to the unresolved legacy of the Chinese civil war after 1949. Taiwan has been self-governed since then, developing its own political system, economy, and identity.
The ambiguity that once kept the peace — often summarised as “strategic ambiguity” — is eroding.
As China’s military capabilities expand and US support for Taiwan becomes more visible, the middle ground narrows.
The involvement of external powers further complicates matters.
The US views arms sales to Taiwan as part of its longstanding commitments under domestic law, while also signalling resolve to allies across the Indo-Pacific. China interprets the same actions as containment.
Fears of upsetting commerce
Regional states watch nervously, aware that a conflict in the Taiwan Strait would disrupt trade routes, supply chains, and energy flows across Asia and beyond.
Maritime flashpoints are especially dangerous because incidents at sea can escalate quickly.
Naval and air encounters leave little margin for error. A misread manoeuvre, a collision, or an accidental exchange of fire could trigger a crisis before diplomats have time to intervene.
The heavy use of exercises as signalling tools increases the density of military assets in confined spaces, multiplying the chances of such accidents.
The way forward
Asia’s tragedy is that economic interdependence has not translated into strategic restraint.
The seas that once connected the region through trade now risk becoming lines of confrontation.
Military planners may believe that exercises enhance stability through deterrence, but deterrence without trust is brittle. It relies on perfect rationality and flawless execution — conditions rarely met in the real world.
What is needed is not the abandonment of military preparedness, but a recalibration. Confidence-building measures, clearer communication channels, advance notification of large-scale exercises, and renewed commitments to crisis management mechanisms are essential.
Arms sales and drills should be embedded within broader diplomatic frameworks rather than deployed as standalone signals.
Asia has too many flashpoints at sea because it has normalised a cycle of aggravation.
Until regional actors and external powers alike recognise the cumulative danger of this pattern, the waters around Taiwan — and across Asia — will remain perilously close to boiling over.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.