Nearly two decades after the Cold War, what type of security order is emerging in the Asia-Pacific remains unclear. Hegemony, power balancing, the politics of concert, and community building have all been designated as possible models for a future regional order, but all of these approaches contain risks for misperception and conflict escalation. Uncertainties are further intensified by the nature of emerging, broader security tests now confronting the region. These “non-traditional” or “transnational” challenges originate largely from “non-state-centric” sources and permeate national boundaries in unprecedented fashion. Climate change, international crime, maritime threats, energy shortages, and various issues of civil society and human security emanating from problems of governance all vie for attention of Asia-Pacific policymakers in an increasingly complex world.

What remains constant, however, is the human tendency to seek ways of organizing collectively to overcome the major security challenges of the day. The bipolarity that was shaped by superpower competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and dominated “strategic Asia” for the second half of the previous century is clearly transforming into new geometries that are not yet clearly understood. In the absence of a more certain and transparent world, actors who have either previously formed habits of interacting with each other in a regional context, or who share a common heritage of language, political culture, and geopolitical affinity, often find it easier to communicate and cooperate with each other than to negotiate hard bargains with potential adversaries. ASEAN-Australian relations exemplify the first pattern; Australian-Indian relations potentially reflect the second. The ASEAN-Indian relationship appears to have largely remained outside such orbits to date. Yet both Southeast Asian and Indian analysts have noted that a greater “security convergence” is now materializing within that dyad as well. Visible strategic consensus now clearly exists, for example, in the areas of counter-terrorism, maritime security, and democratization.

An obvious question flowing from such developments is to what extent these three actors might constructively pursue an implicit form of trilateralism in their security interactions. “Trilateralism” is applied to mean that the three actors under review in this particular volume would forge a series of arrangements or even policy-specific regimes, underwritten by a commonality of interests, derived from increasingly shared democratic values, economic concerns, and geopolitical relativities.