China’s escalating grey-zone tactics—including water-cannon attacks and maritime militia operations against Philippine vessels—threaten freedom of navigation, regional stability and the rules-based order in the South China Sea, raising concerns for non-claimants Singapore and Indonesia over their own sea lanes and Indonesia’s Natuna EEZ. 

As capable maritime ASEAN states, Singapore and Indonesia should deepen strategic coordination by providing the Philippines with diplomatic and legal support, joint real-time maritime domain awareness, capacity-building assistance, and a robust collective defence of UNCLOS and the 2016 arbitral ruling. 

Strengthened Singapore–Indonesia partnership, including economic and technological collaboration, can enhance ASEAN’s crisis-management and deterrence capacity without military alignment or over-reliance on external powers, helping prevent the normalisation of coercion and preserve the maritime rules-based order.

In recent years, China has dramatically escalated its coercive behaviour in the South China Sea, sparking deep concern in Southeast Asia. Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) has employed water cannons in physical attacks on Philippine vessels at Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal recently. The CCG’s actions pose grave threats to the safety of the sea and other countries’ freedom of navigation. Recently, China’s behaviour has generated fresh concerns among countries in Southeast Asia and threatens to undermine the rules-based order in the region. The recent development is that, as a winner of the arbitration in 2016, the Philippines is under growing pressure from China. In order to defend international law, to prevent any single country from engaging in unilateral actions that could threaten the stability of the region and to support the Philippines in its defence against any Chinese aggression without using force, Singapore and Indonesia, two maritime-capable countries in ASEAN, need to strengthen their strategic coordination.

However, China’s recent behaviour in the South China Sea has been increasingly assertive and has become increasingly structured and serious. All of the recent incidents, involving China’s use........

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