Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo closed this week’s series of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summits and meetings by calling on world leaders to step back from the brink of confrontation.
Speaking at the close of the 18th East Asia Summit (EAS), attended by ASEAN leaders and key foreign counterparts, including US Vice President Kamala Harris, Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Foreign Minister Russia, Sergei Lavrov, Jokowi said that in an era of rising tension, cooperation and multilateralism risked being replaced by “the rule of the strong.”
“We all have the responsibility not to create new conflicts, new tensions, new wars, and at the same time we also have the responsibility to reduce tensions,” Jokowi said. according to Reuters. And he added: “The world will be destroyed if conflicts and tensions in one place are transferred to another.”
The EAS closed a week of ASEAN-led summits and meetings in Jakarta, which have taken place against an increasingly dark regional backdrop, overshadowed by the deadly civil conflict in Myanmar, recent flare-ups in the disputed South China Sea and the intensification of the war between China and China. American competition. Later, at the summit’s closing ceremony, Jokowi handed over the ceremonial gavel of the presidency to Laos, which will preside over the organization in 2024.
During his speech at the EAS, Jokowi expressed his region’s caution in the face of growing tensions between great powers, which compete for influence in Southeast Asia. But ASEAN is struggling to respond to some of the most pressing regional challenges, threatening to undermine its prized position of “centrality” – its ability to serve as a forum for great power interaction and dialogue.
The first of these, a perennial issue on the ASEAN agenda, is the increasingly tense situation in the South China Sea. In recent months there have been a series of dangerous incidents in which Chinese Coast Guard vessels have aggressively confronted and interfered with Filipino and Vietnamese ships in disputed waters, in a context of constant Chinese invasions in the exclusive economic zones of these nations.
Despite Jokowi’s warnings about “rule of the strong,” this week’s summit statements, despite efforts of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.., did not advance substantially compared to previous years. The E.A.S. President’s statement issued after the close of yesterday’s meeting “reaffirmed the need to enhance mutual trust, exercise self-control in the conduct of activities that would increase tension, complicate or intensify disputes, and affect peace and stability.” It also “emphasized the importance of non-militarization and self-control in the conduct of all activities by the plaintiffs and all other states.” He corresponding statement issued after the 43rd ASEAN Summit on Tuesday referred to member states’ concerns over “land recaptures, activities (and) serious incidents in the area, including actions that put the safety of all people at risk,” but otherwise recapitulated much of the same language.
Both statements affirmed ASEAN’s commitment to negotiating with China the long-awaited Code of Conduct (COC) in the South China Sea. The COC has been under negotiation since 2002 and while ASEAN has committed to finalizing a deal by 2026, it is widely seen outside the region as a way for China to buy time while it slowly encroaches into the waters of rival claimants.
The other obvious trouble spot is Myanmar, where national conflict has raged since shortly after the February 2021 military coup. While Myanmar does not directly endanger regional peace, ASEAN’s inability to impose even a minimum standard of behavior in one of its new member states has undermined its reputation outside the region. In comments to CNBC, former Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said that burma “It was not only a litmus test for ASEAN, but, in my opinion, it is an existential threat to ASEAN.”
To be fair, ASEAN leaders this week issued a statement that adopted stronger language on the conflict, for the first time denouncing the military specifically for the violence it has unleashed since 2021. He also agreed to continue excluding the military junta from high-level ASEAN meetings and announced that Myanmar would be stripped of its presidency in 2026, which will now be taken over by the Philippines, the second time Myanmar has been forced to do so, to spare the organization the embarrassment of having an international pariah state host its summits. Even if it is admitted that there are strict limits to what ASEAN can do to coerce the generals in Naypyidaw, these represent a difference of type rather than substance.
Both challenges perhaps point to something more fundamental: the fact that consensus-based diplomacy and the ASEAN process have failed to keep pace with regional and global developments.
It is difficult to improve on the verdict delivered by Euan Graham of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in an article yesterday: “The weakening of ASEAN’s diplomatic fortunes is an inevitable consequence of the group’s growing struggle to maintain internal coherence,” he wrote, “which has undermined its role as an institutional center for the region’s multilateral security architecture and has raised fundamental questions about the organization’s capacity. live up to its founding purpose.”
It is perhaps not surprising that the golden age of ASEAN expansion and consolidation, in which the notion of “ASEAN centrality” gained wide acceptance and its summits became key events in the regional diplomatic calendar, was the ironic interregnum between the end of the Cold War and the return of China as a great power. The question now is not only whether the bloc can remake itself for a new era of confrontation as it was founded in the maelstrom of the Cold War, but where the energy for such renewal might come from.
It’s up to you, Laos.
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