The Chinese Ministry of Defense’s announcement of a “joint support and training center” at an airport in Ban Keun, Laos, on Sept. 29 drew attention to the People’s Liberation Army’s growing footprint in Southeast Asia. Although China does not call it a “base” and said it’s “not targeted at any third party,” it is China’s first publicly acknowledged overseas military facility centered on airpower. Ban Keun joins Djibouti and Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base as nodes in a burgeoning network of overseas Chinese security infrastructure.
Concern is understandable. While smaller than China’s base in Djibouti, satellite imagery reveals eight light attack aircraft and support vehicles on a 2,000-meter runway that is currently under construction. Although insufficient to support long-range bombers, the facility likely benefits China’s logistics and intelligence capabilities, diversifies Southeast Asian base access beyond Cambodia, and ties Laos into its arms sales network. The joint center could eventually enhance the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s power projection across mainland Southeast Asia, potentially affecting U.S. forces operating in the eastern Indian Ocean. For Vietnam, this development deepens its sense of siege.
The reflex among many policymakers in Washington after each rumored or announced Chinese military facility overseas is to interpret it through the lens of U.S.-Chinese competition. In Cambodia’s case with Ream, Washington imposed sanctions as punishment. Yet, this reflex misunderstands the nuanced interests driving regional partners to work with China — and how to counter it.
While the aviation facility in Laos demonstrates Beijing’s growing security presence in Southeast Asia, alignment is driven by diverse threat perceptions, notably regime security and intra-ASEAN concerns, rather than U.S.-China Cold War dynamics. Regional governments continue to hedge, leaving an opening for the United States to compete effectively with Beijing.
China’s Growing Security Presence in Southeast Asia
Compared to U.S. regional security engagement, China’s presence is less extensive but growing. China continues to militarize South China Sea land features. In mainland Southeast Asia, the Laos airfield joins the Ream Naval Base in Cambodia, which opened in 2025 — officially under Cambodian control — and houses a rotating naval deployment. Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand stand out for the depth of military-to-military relationships with Beijing, while Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have recently established 2+2 dialogues with China, involving foreign and defense ministers from both countries. Arms sales are also a growth area for Beijing. Indonesia expects the delivery of J-10 fighter jets, while Beijing surpassed the United States as Bangkok’s primary supplier.
However, China’s strongest comparative advantage over the United States is its regime security provision. The Global Security Initiative, one of four foreign policy cooperation frameworks promoted by Beijing, promises internal security assistance to its authoritarian partners, boosting state capacity while advancing its preferred governance norms. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar’s junta, and Vietnam have all formally signed on. Although Bangkok remains outside the framework, internal security and police cooperation (particularly targeting scam centers in Myanmar) mirror the Thai military’s warm relations with the People’s Liberation Army.
Given the Chinese Communist Party’s holistic security conception equating party rule with national security, internal security arrangements often bleed over into external military cooperation. Notably, Beijing upgraded its 2+2 security dialogues with Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to 3+3 in 2026 by including the internal security ministries. For each of these regimes, China’s internal security provision is critical, as Beijing can export its substantial know-how in high-tech surveillance and paramilitary policing. In Vietnam’s case, the internal security cooperation addresses some of the paradox in its approach to China: despite threatening Vietnam’s South China Sea claims, China likely won’t overthrow the Communist Party of Vietnam, but a revolution could.
Deepened Security Ties Do Not Equal Alignment
Viewed through the lens of U.S.-Chinese competition, one could assume that China’s growing security presence in Southeast Asia comes at Washington’s expense. The United States is distracted and underinvested in Southeast Asia, and China’s deepening security ties augment its unassailable economic predominance. Singaporean think tank ISEAS’ annual survey of ASEAN elites found in 2026 that a majority would side with Beijing if forced to make a choice in alignment.
Yet, the geopolitical landscape in Southeast Asia remains in flux, and alignments are multifaceted and ultimately transitory due to the region’s complex web of threat perceptions, including vis-à-vis China. Indeed, ISEAS’ 2025 survey found that a majority would side with the United States — perhaps due to renewed South China Sea tensions. In 2024, China led at 50.5 percent after a U.S. lead in prior years, likely as a result of U.S. support for Israel. Rather than representing durable shifts in regional alignment, the survey instead reflects in-the-moment reactions to specific events. Indeed, diving into other areas of the survey, such as which geopolitical events rank as top concerns for ASEAN governments, one finds little consensus on the perceived threats that drive alignment.
The region’s diverse and shifting threat perceptions, not great-power competition, do more to explain the incentives to forge closer security ties to China. Despite the bloc’s self-proclaimed role in reducing state-to-state conflict since the Cold War, some ASEAN states fear each other more than China or the United States, while also seeing Beijing as a friend in some respects (internal security) and a foe in others (maritime disputes). Southeast Asian governments do not evaluate China and the United States solely through the lens of great-power competition. Instead, their behavior reflects shifting calculations of external threat, internal regime security, and intraregional rivalries.
Landlocked Laos, as a fellow communist government, seems a natural partner for China, as it does not see Beijing as a direct security threat. Air force training and support boost Laos’ own capabilities, while ensuring Chinese economic assistance, despite the clear risks of dependence. If it can position itself as China’s preferred client, then it stands to benefit.
Although often derided in Washington as a “Chinese puppet state,” Cambodia’s regional security environment is more dangerous than Laos’. In addition to regime security considerations, part of the strategic calculus driving outreach to Beijing is to hedge against the potential security threats from its neighbors, Vietnam and Thailand. In 2025, disputes over land along their border sparked a short but sharp armed conflict between Cambodia and Thailand, which ended in a fragile ceasefire. Still-simmering Thai-Cambodian tensions underscore the risk of renewed war, incentivizing Phnom Penh to hope that security ties to China can offset relative weakness vis-à-vis its historic rivals or, at the very least, keep Beijing engaged as a friendly mediator.
This impulse — along with distrust of complete dependence upon Beijing — has spurred Phnom Penh to renew ties with the United States under the Trump administration, which is less concerned about human rights than past U.S. presidencies. After a 10-year hiatus, Washington and Phnom Penh plan to relaunch joint military exercises in 2027. Cambodia welcomed a U.S. Navy visit to Ream Naval Base earlier this year, presenting the base as under its control, not China’s. Simultaneously, Cambodia continues to pursue security ties with other powers, notably Japan.
Despite Thai elites seeing China as the preferred partner, Thailand is in a similarly complex position. That Chinese weapons in Cambodian hands ended up deployed on the battlefield became a sore point. In some cases, China’s behavior has generated concerns about its political influence. During a 2025 joint crackdown on scam centers, a senior Chinese official personally oversaw the repatriation of Chinese detainees from Myanmar through Thailand, prompting debate about the extent of China’s involvement in sensitive security and law enforcement matters on Thai territory along the Myanmar border. The official later apologized for the “misunderstanding” of China’s rapid actions that generated the perception it does not respect Thai sovereignty. Importantly, Thailand has not jettisoned its defense ties with the United States, even if the alliance is weaker than in past decades. U.S.-Thai military exercise Cobra Gold remains the largest in Southeast Asia, and the two sides have expressed the intent to sign a new joint vision statement by the end of 2026.
Vietnam, meanwhile, demonstrates that analysis predicated on external security alone misses a key element: regime security. Vietnam, as Laos’ closest partner, will not rest easy with the announcement of a People’s Liberation Army Air Force presence to its west. Hemmed in by China’s island-building in the South China Sea and Beijing’s close ties to Cambodia, Hanoi is deeply concerned, having fought a war with its northern neighbor in 1979 and clashed at sea since. That security anxiety drives the U.S.-Vietnam rapprochement of recent decades and keeps Vietnam close to Russia.
Yet, in a reminder that few relationships within ASEAN are one-dimensional, Vietnamese-Lao bilateral ties have seemingly suffered little or no damage over the air force facility, while Hanoi’s Communist Party-to-Party relations with Beijing have deepened in recent years. Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is fundamentally pragmatic in his hedging. In the external security realm, where China presents a challenge, this manifests as outreach to the United States. But, from the perspective of regime security, where Washington’s occasional focus on human rights and democracy can constitute a threat of its own, Vietnam sees benefits to close cooperation with China on internal security. Like Cambodia, Vietnam in 2026 elevated its 2+2 dialogue with China to a 3+3 format including internal security.
How the United States Can Position Itself as a Trusted Security Partner Again
The United States and China are in competition in Southeast Asia, but that has not resulted in the rigid bloc alignments associated with a Cold War. Instead, the multilayered and shifting security relationships and threat perceptions between states like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam point to a mixed landscape where no one great power predominates. Instead, ASEAN capitals actively diversify relationships with Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Russia, and South Korea as alternatives to China and the United States. The takeaway for Washington’s policymakers from the People’s Liberation Army’s expansion into Laos should therefore be to double down on regional engagement, not reject Vientiane and other close partners of Beijing.
However, Washington faces two policy challenges in Southeast Asia: democracy and human rights promotion alienate governments in the region, and its great power competition lens washes out distinctions in threat perceptions across states.
China’s regime security advantage is harder to address given the importance of values to U.S. foreign policy. The Biden administration’s framing of “democracies versus autocracies” alienated many in Southeast Asia. President Trump’s relative deemphasis of values has since facilitated renewal with Cambodia and Thailand, but it has also gradually engaged the Myanmar junta with no obvious benefit for U.S. national interests given Naypyidaw’s untrustworthiness and incapacity to deliver.
Going forward, it is difficult to see Washington abandoning its values, and not all regimes are worth engaging. Competing with China’s surveillance package is not realistic for a democracy, and an independent civil society, seen as “color revolution,” accounts for the threat perception in governments like Hanoi. There are also governments, notably the Myanmar junta, where the scale of violence and repression is too large for engagement to be justified, especially while a still potent resistance movement more amenable to U.S. national and values interests contests regime consolidation. Even if it can alleviate some aspects of threat — like deemphasizing “democracies versus autocracies” rhetoric — Washington must accept that it cannot compete pound for pound with China on regime security.
Yet, its values can bring benefits too, notably transparency and trust. The corollary is that regional democracies like the Philippines distrust China, as do the populations and elites in many of its close partners. For example, ISEAS found that 90.6 percent of Thai respondents expressed concern about China’s influence. The United States can still beat China in external security and do more to understand regional threat perceptions, including internal ones.
To better manage threat perception, Washington should tailor its policies to each state’s interests while remaining grounded in a careful strategic assessment of what it aims to achieve compared to the risks of alienation. For instance, sanctions on Cambodia elevated regime security anxieties and incentivized outreach to China but did little to support Cambodian opposition on the ground or change Phnom Penh. The Trump administration’s easing of sanctions is instead likely to pull Cambodia back toward a more balanced position than ineffective targeted sanctions. Understanding the external security environment can be an additional force multiplier. Given Phnom Penh’s fear of Vietnam and Thailand, Washington should position itself as a more trustworthy and responsive mediator than the Trump administration, and China did during the Thai-Cambodia border war of 2025, which was more symbolism than substantive peacemaking.
For Laos, its biggest challenge remains low state capacity and economic development, particularly its immense debt burden with Beijing. There, traditional development assistance at expanded levels could win goodwill and chip away at China’s dominance. Although it lacks external security threats, Vientiane would value capacity-building and training, particularly law enforcement, to better tackle the criminal syndicates on its territory. The goal here is not alignment with the United States but simply to provide security options beyond China’s offerings.
With Bangkok, its military-monarchy elites see Beijing as the preferred partner for economic growth and stability, and the alliance is unlikely to return to the closeness of prior decades. Yet, Washington should continue to foster defense ties, while accelerating alternative avenues of cooperation, notably countering transnational crime. Growing concerns have emerged in Thai society about the impact of Myanmar’s scam centers and pollution, and the Chinese crackdown that caused debate over Thai sovereignty in 2025 is a reminder of China’s occasional heavy-handedness. Critically, the United States has recently committed resources to regional law enforcement cooperation with Thailand. Expanding these offerings and emphasizing the trust and accountability only a fellow democracy can provide presents an alternative to China’s internal security provisions.
Finally, with Vietnam, the U.S. relationship continues to deepen, but challenges, like trade policy, still exist. There is also little the United States can do to compete with China on internal security given Vietnam’s party-to-party ties. More fundamentally, uncertainty remains about U.S. commitment to the Indo-Pacific, along with some distrust due to Washington’s discomfort with Vietnam’s purchase of Russian weapons.
But, given Vietnam’s exposed external security position, the United States has an opportunity to do more to reassure Hanoi. Vietnam’s two most important external security providers, the United States and Russia, are both distracted and mutually opposed, causing some consternation. Moscow’s Ukraine quagmire undermines it in Southeast Asia’s arms market, while its growing ties to China cast doubt on its reliability in a South China Sea clash. As such, accelerating the pace of U.S. arms sale approvals should be the priority, while Washington should understand Hanoi’s acute security threat and refrain from threatening to punish it over its Moscow ties. In the South China Sea, although Vietnam adopts a quieter strategy than the Philippines, U.S. demonstrations of resolve in supporting Manila go a long way — and show the limits of Moscow’s backing. These actions could eventually position Washington as the more trusted partner.
On the whole, Southeast Asian states may distrust the United States, but no government in the region wants Washington gone. While realistic assumptions are necessary about how far hedging states can move away from China and toward the United States, Washington needs to devote more resources and institutional attention to Southeast Asia’s complex security and threat landscape. A broad brush risks abdicating the initiative to China, but a tailored approach can better counterbalance Beijing.
Lucas Myers is the assistant director of the China and U.S. Program at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a nonresident visiting scholar with the George Washington University’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies.
Image: Tyg728 via Wikimedia Commons