Endurance Without Recovery
As Russia’s full-scale invasion enters its fifth year, Ukraine has demonstrated extraordinary resilience. It has denied Moscow a decisive military victory, maintained social cohesion under sustained bombardment, and secured enduring support from Europe and North America.
Such a display of national endurance is strategically significant and historic.
However, endurance should not be mistaken for recovery. The war risks perpetuating a protracted stalemate, with front lines hardening but no durable settlement in sight. Western military and financial assistance continues, though increasingly shaped by domestic political calculations in Europe and the United States. Support must now be continually negotiated rather than assumed.
For Southeast Asian countries, Ukraine’s experience should not only be treated as a distant European crisis that could affect them. It offers a real-time illustration of what happens when a middle power confronts a revisionist giant.
The war has also exposed a broader question that extends beyond Eastern Europe. What allows a middle power to retain agency when the international system becomes structurally unstable?
We argue that Ukraine’s experience offers a wider lesson about the evolving conditions of middle power strategy. Survival has depended not only on military resistance or external assistance but on domestic institutional resilience, political responsiveness and the ability to translate internal cohesion into external credibility.
In a global environment shaped simultaneously by tightening Russia-China alignment and a more transactional United States, middle powers must cultivate credibility at home in order to retain room for action abroad.
Living Beside Giants
This piece uses the term “middle power” in a structural sense. Middle powers possess regional influence and diplomatic agency yet lack the capacity to unilaterally shape global order.
Stable rules, credible institutions, and constraints on great power behaviour play a vital role for their security and prosperity. Ukraine fits this description, and so do several Southeast Asian countries (including Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore) albeit with differing capabilities as well as strategic cultures.
However, the comparison between Ukraine and Southeast Asia must be handled with care. The structural conditions of Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia are clearly distinct. Russia has used overt military force to redraw borders, while China’s approach in Southeast Asia has thus far relied more on calibrated maritime pressure, economic leverage and grey-zone tactics.
Therefore, the relevance of Ukraine for Southeast Asia does not lie in assuming identical behaviour—rather, it lies in understanding how structural proximity to a powerful neighbour shapes strategic risk.
The argument here is not that the threats are identical, but that the strategic environment of heightened great-power volatility reduces the margin for error for middle powers.
Russia’s perception that Ukraine’s NATO trajectory crossed a strategic threshold partly influenced its decision to invade. Middle powers operate in environments where great power threat perceptions can shift rapidly and decisively. For Southeast Asian countries, the critical question is not whether China will behave exactly as Russia has, but how Beijing interprets certain alignments, security partnerships or regional developments.
Strategic foresight requires continuous assessment of those perceptions. Middle powers must defend autonomy while avoiding unnecessary escalation. That balancing act becomes more difficult as the international environment grows more unstable.
Hedging, Credibility and ASEAN’s Dilemma
Hedging has long been Southeast Asia’s preferred grand strategy, considered as the “most logical option” out there. By engaging multiple powers and avoiding rigid alignment, Southeast Asian states have sought to preserve flexibility and room for manoeuvre. This approach has delivered relative stability for decades.
However, manoeuvring room becomes less valuable when it is not accompanied by credibility. In periods of heightened uncertainty, other actors increasingly seek reliability rather than mediation. Flexibility without institutional depth risks appearing indecisive rather than strategic.
This observation raises uncomfortable questions for ASEAN. The narrative of neutrality has supported cohesion, yet neutrality alone does not shield middle powers from pressure. Convening dialogues and issuing balanced statements may delay confrontation, but they do not replace coordinated policy positions or collective capability.
If ASEAN centrality becomes procedural rather than substantive, its influence will erode precisely when external pressures intensify.
Therefore, it should be put forward that hedging in today’s environment must evolve. It cannot rest solely on ambiguity. It must be supported by institutional credibility, legal capacity and clearer collective commitments to regional norms.
The DragonBear and a Harder Strategic Triangle
The broader geopolitical environment heightens these pressures. The growing Russia-China alignment has been dubbed the “DragonBear”, a formulation that captures the complementary strengths of China’s economic scale and Russia’s military assertiveness. This alignment does not require a formal alliance to be consequential.
Its significance lies in practical effects. Sanctions are less effective when alternative economic channels exist. Diplomatic resistance to Western norms is intensifying when Moscow and Beijing align positions in multilateral forums. Strategic pressure can be exerted across military, economic and informational domains simultaneously.
For Southeast Asia, this means that pressure may be layered and multidimensional rather than sequential. At the same time, the United States, while indispensable to regional balance, has exhibited increasingly transactional tendencies.
Shifts in alliance rhetoric, debates over burden-sharing and domestic political volatility complicate long-term expectations of American commitments. Ukraine’s negotiations with Washington over ceasefire proposals and territorial concessions demonstrate that even close partners ultimately act in accordance with their own strategic calculus.
Under President Donald Trump, economic statecraft became explicitly transactional. Trade policy and security commitments were frequently intertwined, with tariffs deployed both as economic tools and instruments of political leverage.
Trade agreement is less a conventional economic arrangement than a demonstration of asymmetrical bargaining power. For middle powers, this signalled a clear message: flexibility without structural credibility leaves them vulnerable to coercion.
Middle powers, therefore, face a more demanding strategic triangle. The DragonBear reduces Western leverage and reinforces revisionist coordination, while uncertainty surrounding American behaviour increases the risks of overdependence. In such an environment, hedging becomes more delicate and more exposed.
Grassroots Resilience and Democratic Cohesion Under Fire
And yet, the lesson of Ukraine’s endurance cannot be explained solely by geopolitics. Institutional and societal resilience have been decisive. While it is true that liberal democracies can generate resilience, it is equally important to note that institutional responsiveness and political legitimacy, however constituted, strengthen external credibility.
European humanitarian support and labour market integration for refugees have mitigated social collapse despite several challenges. Dense networks of CSOs, volunteer groups and religious institutions have acted as first responders, sustaining communities and coordinating assistance across the country.
Equally important is the character of Ukraine’s democratic life during war. Ukraine remains politically pluralistic. Controversies involving figures close to the presidential office, including former chief of staff Andriy Yermak, generated public debate regarding executive power and transparency. Proposed changes affecting anti-corruption oversight prompted mass demonstrations.
As citizens protested in wartime conditions, the government responded with investigations, personnel changes and policy adjustments. This responsiveness strengthened legitimacy rather than undermining it.
There are real strains, including war fatigue and the centralising effects of martial law. And yet, political competition continues within a shared commitment to national survival.
Cohesion in Ukraine has therefore been negotiated and layered. Disagreement may exist, but it is managed within an overarching strategic consensus. This cohesion did not substitute for material support; it amplified it.
For Southeast Asia, this dimension is crucial. If confronted with sustained coercion, would regional societies maintain comparable cohesion? Diversity is a strength, yet it can become a vulnerability if institutional trust erodes. Emergency powers in less consolidated democracies may entrench authority rather than preserve accountability.
Grassroots resilience must be cultivated before a crisis emerges. Civil society requires some protected spaces, crisis coordination mechanisms must be institutionalised, while public trust cannot be improvised under pressure.
Policy Implications for Southeast Asia
Ukraine’s experience forces a reconsideration of what middle power strategy means under systemic strain. Survival has depended not only on external support or military capacity, but on domestic cohesion, institutional responsiveness and the capacity to remain politically plural while strategically united.
For Southeast Asian middle powers, the lesson is uncomfortable but clear. Hedging has long been understood as the preservation of manoeuvring space between great powers. Yet manoeuvring space without institutional depth becomes increasingly fragile when great powers behave unpredictably. In such an environment, neutrality alone does not shield the middle powers; it merely postpones pressure.
If the emerging order is shaped simultaneously by Russia-China alignment and a more transactional United States, middle powers will be judged less by their rhetoric of balance and more by their capacity for reliability.
Domestic governance, anti-corruption safeguards and political legitimacy are not peripheral to foreign policy. They are its foundation. As the adage states, “foreign policy begins at home; it is a continuation of domestic politics.”
The strategic question for ASEAN and its member states is therefore not whether to hedge but how to hedge credibly. Without institutional resilience at home and coherence in regional mechanisms, middle powers risk becoming objects of leverage by the great powers rather than their own agents of strategy.
