On 3 June in New York, the UN General Assembly faces a choice: will the institution charged with enforcing international rules include a voice that’s prepared to call out their breaches?

The General Assembly will choose between Kyrgyzstan and the Philippines in filling the non-permanent Security Council seat allocated to an Asia-Pacific country. The election is for 2027 and 2028. Kyrgyzstan’s candidacy has merits, but the General Assembly should choose the Philippines.

This time, the issues in the election rise above the usual matters of peacekeeping records and regional rotation. Asia-Pacific countries (now more commonly referred to as the Indo-Pacific) are not merely defending the rules-based order; they are arguing for it to be reinforced and enforced. This was clear at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore on 29 to 31 May.

At the dialogue, the Philippines made the point most plainly. Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro urged the region to ‘call a spade a spade’ and pointed to the 2016 arbitral ruling that exposed Beijing’s nine-dash line as fiction. Manila is the rare claimant to have tested coercion against law and won, a high qualification for membership on the council, the body whose role is maintaining peace and security according to international rules. That record is why the non-permanent seat matters beyond the Philippines’ own interests.

A non-permanent member cannot veto, but it shapes the Security Council’s agenda, holds the presidency at least once during its term and influences which crises are named and which are managed into silence. Choosing the Philippines is a choice for upholding global rules, maintaining a free but law-based maritime domain and countering coercive activities not as mere bilateral irritants but as collective responsibilities. The UN itself would be demonstrating that when its charter is violated it can act to enforce its rules, not merely recite them.

A live test of that distinction is Taiwan: if Washington proceeds with arms sales this year, the rules-based order, though tested, holds; if it does not, the region will read it as confirmation that a Sino-led order has arrived and not even the US feels powerful enough to prevent it. But, even then, reassurance built on one transaction is brittle. It needs to be distributed across many smaller demonstrations that rules still bind – and many of those are multilateral, not bilateral.

One successful candidacy won’t fix the issues with the UN or international institutions overnight. The problems are so deeply rooted that fixing surface level symptoms is insufficient. But the fight to hold onto international rules cannot be done by individual nations alone. Multilateral institutions need to embrace reform to regenerate global confidence in them.

This is precisely where Manila’s Security Council candidacy converts from national ambition into regional resilience. The Philippines has campaigned on maritime security, the peaceful settlement of disputes and the primacy of the UN Charter and international law – an agenda that reads less like a wish list than a description of the pressures under which the Indo-Pacific now lives. A vote for the Philippines is low-cost and immediately available when the larger Taiwan signal may yet falter.

This is not to dismiss Kyrgyzstan. It has run a credible campaign for representation as a small, landlocked state. Both candidates bring legitimate claims.

But only one outcome reinforces the principle the Indo-Pacific region spent the weekend defending at Shangri-La: that competition, however permanent, must remain bounded by law. A landlocked state’s voice is valuable in this regard. A maritime democracy that has litigated against the largest grey-zone campaign in the Indo-Pacific – a globally critical region where intense economic competition meets escalating geopolitical friction – is, right now, strategically scarcer.

For Australia, the logic compounds. Our own defence strategy holds that states which fail to invest in credible capability become more exposed to coercion and more constrained in their sovereignty.

The same is true of institutions. An order is only as enforceable as its members’ willingness to enforce it, and the Security Council’s credibility erodes each time coercion goes unnamed.

A successful Philippines candidacy would strengthen the UN itself as it seeks to stem the tide of those arguing the rules-based order is already ruptured. A failed one would confirm their case. It would signal that a small state that invokes law against coercion cannot count on the institutions meant to uphold that law. To apply Teodoro’s transparency standard: the candid reading would be that some governments will have withheld their votes not on the merits but from fear of Chinese coercion.

Manila’s case rests on the proposition that small, middle and regional powers are not spectators to great-power competition, but participants entitled to shape its rules. That is the same proposition on which Australia bases its own statecraft. Supporting the Philippines’ candidacy therefore would not be generosity; it would be consistency. When the vote is called, members should cast their votes for the Philippines, say so publicly before the ballot rather than after, and frame the choice in the region’s own terms – as endorsement of enforcement.