President Barack Obama, left, greeted Hun Sen, the prime minister of Cambodia, before regional meetings in Phnom Penh. 
Vincent Thian/Associated PressPresident Barack Obama, left, greeted Hun Sen, the prime minister of Cambodia, before regional meetings in Phnom Penh.
 
HONG KONG — Southeast Asian leaders have failed — again — to make any headway on resolving the dangerous territorial disputes over various islands in the South China Sea.
At their regional summit meeting this week, they could not even agree to set up a crisis hotline. Even bitter enemies like North and South Korea have a cross-border hot line — three, in fact.
The meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, adjourned amid infighting and acrimony on Tuesday with Cambodia, the host nation, appearing to derail efforts at establishing a maritime code of conduct.
A binding code of conduct has been on the Asean agenda for more than a decade, and the group has blown its 2012 deadline. Riven by factionalism, the group seems to have no clear way forward, despite increasing tensions over several implacable territorial disputes.
The Spratly island group, the Paracel islands and a tiny atoll near the Philippines known as the Scarborough Shoal are claimed by various Asean countries, claims that overlap those of China, which said in June that the islands are “indisputably” Chinese territory.

Although not one of Asean’s 10 members, China counts Cambodia as a key ally and holds tremendous leverage in the region through its economic might, diplomatic clout and an increasingly muscular military.
China has long opposed what is known as an “internationalized” approach to drafting a code of conduct for the South China Sea — that is, any approach that would include the United States. And while Asean dithers on drafting its own overarching code, Beijing prefers to hold bilateral negotiations on its island disputes with each individual claimant.
Asean has never been very efficient at making policy, nor has it been very good at policing its own members, in part because of the so-called “Asean Way,” which prohibits members from interfering in each other’s domestic affairs. Myanmar, for example, after joining Asean in 1997, existed as a thuggish military regime with barely a word of reproach from its fellow members.
The group also requires a unanimous vote on any major decisions. A single dissenter among the group can block an otherwise-unanimous decision — effectively creating a hung jury. Landlocked Laos, therefore, will have just as much say over a maritime code as Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia or the Philippines.
Cambodia and its authoritarian prime minister, Hun Sen, are now solidly within Beijing’s political orbit, perhaps cajoled by more than half a billion dollars in Chinese loans, grants and gifts over the past three months. At recent Asean gatherings, Cambodia has appeared to act as a kind of Chinese proxy.
Chinese investment in Cambodia last year approached $2 billion, according to a report by Reuters — twice the combined total invested by fellow Asean countries and 10 times more than the United States.
Security analysts and regional leaders say that nasty maritime standoffs over the contested islands — due in part to a more assertive and far-reaching China — have made a code of conduct more necessary than ever.
A brushing incident at sea, for example, even an inadvertent collision, has the potential to rapidly escalate: One nation’s “bumping” is another’s “ramming.” As one Asean diplomat put it, such situations can get “a little tricky.”
Even so, the various claimants still have no collective way of communicating when such incidents occur. There’s no hotline, for example, to defuse tensions over a conflict at sea, such as the Vietnam-China skirmish over the Spratlys in 1988 in which 70 Vietnamese sailors were killed. And earlier this year a China-Philippines standoff at Scarborough Shoal dramatically raised regional tensions.
At the Asean meeting in Phnom Penh this week, Indonesia proposed the installation of a regional hot line as a practical, real-world safeguard while a formal Asean code of conduct is hashed out.
Marty Natelegawa, the Indonesian foreign minister, said that “in the future, should there be any incident of the type that we had, the ministers should be able to quickly pick up the phone and establish communication.”
Without a hot line, he said, “the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation is bigger.”
Mr. Natelegawa said he got the general sense from other Asean members that the hot line could be “something important.”
But no action was taken.
That’s the Asean Way.