ASEAN Summit highlights persisting challenges facing the bloc

WRITTEN BY MEGHAN MURPHY AND BRYANNA ENTWISTLE

29 October 2024

This month has seen Laos experience a flurry of diplomatic activity in the form of overlapping Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summits. These included the ASEAN Summit between Southeast Asian member countries; meetings with ASEAN dialogue partners like the United States and China; and the East Asia Summit (EAS) between 18 participating countries. Both the ASEAN and EAS consensus statements on key policy issues, released by the 2024 host Laos, demanded an immediate halt to fighting in Myanmar, expressed concern over tensions in the South China Sea, and voiced worries over the war in Gaza.

ASEAN's need for unanimous agreement on issue statements and decision-making makes progress on regional issues challenging due to its diverse and often competing member interests. This has incited scepticism about the utility of annual meetings and limited the impact of their consensus statements. As a result, much of the summit's importance is tied to the seniority of attending leaders, reflecting which powers prioritise Southeast Asia.

Concerns about regional commitment

This year, US President Joe Biden skipped the summits for the second year in a row with Secretary of State Antony Blinken taking his place instead, prompting a flurry of commentators to conclude that the American president is snubbing the region. Biden’s absence this year, especially in the context of American entanglements with war in the Levant, indicates that the Obama-era goal of reducing American commitments in the Middle East and ‘pivoting’ strategic attention to Asia continues to elude the United States. However, as CSIS’s Gregory Poling argued, the reality is that American presidents facing a flurry of summits across the world cannot always make every one. Other regional powers regularly skip the summits as well: China has divided responsibilities so that Premier Li Qiang, and not party head Xi Jinping, always attends ASEAN and EAS Summits.

One attendee of note was Indian Prime Minister Nardendra Modi, who assured the bloc that tapping into ASEAN markets is a core part of India’s Act East Policy — his plan for India to play a greater role in the region’s security and counter Chinese influence. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was also in Vientiane, during which he oversaw the adoption of a joint statement to establish an ASEAN-ROK Comprehensive Strategic Agreement.

As for the Southeast Asian attendance, notable no-shows included Indonesia’s outgoing President Jokowi Widodo and Vietnam’s General Secretary Tô Lâm, who was instead on a bilateral visit in Paris. The Jakarta Post’s editorial board condemned Jokowi’s absence, calling it “bad foreign policy” and warning that the absence “undermines Indonesia’s claim that ASEAN is the cornerstone of its foreign policy”. Additionally, Myanmar sent a delegate in the form of the permanent secretary at the Foreign Ministry, Aung Kyaw Moe. Although Myanmar has been restricted to only sending “non-political” representatives, the meetings in Vientiane were the first time the junta agreed to send a delegate since they seized power in a 2021 coup.

Unable to stop a deadly civil war within its member states, halt transnational crime that crosses its borders, deliver solutions on maritime rights, or mitigate superpower relations, the bloc feels to many as an increasingly irrelevant mechanism in which to conduct foreign affairs.

While Biden’s absence has commanded the most scrutiny, Lam and Jokowi’s decisions to not attend the ASEAN meetings are more destabilising to the bloc. Skipping the group’s most important meeting sets the precedent that it is permissible for leaders to eschew the biannual meeting, risking diminishing the summits’ significance. Meanwhile, by sending their heads of state, Korea, Japan, and India sent a strong message about their commitment to ASEAN.

Geopolitical hotspots are the focus of ASEAN deliberations

Many of the topics discussed at the ASEAN meetings in Vientiane mirrored those of the past years, namely the civil war in Myanmar and the situation in the South China Sea, indicating ASEAN’s failure to make progress on its most intractable dilemmas. However, a new addition to this year’s summit was the conflict in Gaza, joining the war in Ukraine as a troubling regional conflict threatening to further entrap the global community.

Since April 2021, ASEAN has regularly parroted their 5 Point Consensus (5PC) addressing the situation in Myanmar, which includes an immediate cessation of violence. This year’s consensus statement, again reaffirming the 5PC, “denounced the continued acts of violence” in Myanmar against civilians and urged both the junta and opposition groups to “take concrete action to immediately halt indiscriminate violence”.

However, the overarching theme of Laos’ chairmanship year is that Vientiane has been even less successful than past ASEAN chairs in implementing the 5PC and ending the war. As Jason Tower concluded for the US Institute of Peace, the political will to “push the military to end violence” has declined under Laos’ leadership without any innovative solutions to end the conflict or even a new language to address Myanmar originating during the past year. Instead, Thailand took the lead during last week’s meetings by announcing it will host “an Extended Informal Consultation” in Myanmar in December. Nevertheless, the truth remains that a regional organisation built on the principles of non-intervention is unequipped to end a domestic civil war when the leaders of Myanmar have no interest in ceasing the violence or implementing the 5PC. As the ASEAN summits took place in Vientiane, the junta launched an airstrike campaign that killed 15 civilians in Rakhine state.

At the ASEAN-China Summit, Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. urged Southeast Asian leaders and China to speed up negotiations on the Code of Conduct for the South China Sea — a diplomatic agreement that has eluded ASEAN since 2001. Despite an uptick in clashes between the Philippines and China in contested parts of the South China Sea, this year’s meeting resulted in little progress. In his remarks, President Marcos lamented that “the overall situation in the South China Sea remains tense and unchanged”, noting that the Philippines continues to experience “harassment and intimidation”. Marcos was the only ASEAN leader to vocally call on China to speed up the negotiations, reflecting the bloc’s cautious approach to addressing territorial disputes without upsetting China. Chinese incursions into Philippine waters were not referenced in the chairman’s statement published after the meeting.

On his end, Chinese Premier Li Qiang blamed “external forces” for stoking tensions between the rival claimants and threatening regional peace — a pointed comment directed at the United States. Meanwhile, US officials alleged that a proposed statement drafted by Southeast Asian countries during the Summit was blocked by Russia and China because of how it referred to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). While Beijing is a signatory of UNCLOS, it has actively disputed the way the agreement has been applied, adding to the number of factors that make it unlikely for a formal Code of Conduct to be signed any time soon.

The conflict in the Middle East — which has been a point of great concern for Muslim-majority ASEAN members Indonesia and Malaysia — was also a central issue during the EAS. Previously, some ASEAN leaders had been outwardly critical of the United States’ support of Israel’s offensives in Gaza, but in Vientiane, leaders were more cautious of their criticism of the United States, neglecting to reference US support of Israel in any of the consensus statements. Instead, bloc members expressed “grave concern” for the humanitarian situation in Gaza and called on “all relevant parties” to accept the ceasefire proposal outlined in UN Security Council Resolution 2735, which has already been ratified by the United States. 23 ASEAN nationals remain held hostage in Gaza; the EAS resolution called for their immediate and unconditional release.

The muted language about the South China Sea and the Middle East conflict is a testament to ASEAN’s careful balancing between the US and China. Meanwhile, the principles of non-intervention and consensus-based decision-making still hinder progress on de-escalating Myanmar’s civil war and other internal issues.

ASEAN’s strength remains in question

The lingering question for ASEAN as an institution remains the same asked at every summit: does ASEAN matter in the scope of so much global chaos? Unable to stop a deadly civil war within its member states, halt transnational crime that crosses its borders, deliver solutions on maritime rights, or mitigate superpower relations, the bloc feels to many as an increasingly irrelevant mechanism in which to conduct foreign affairs.

The answer to the question of ASEAN’s relevance can only be answered by dissecting the original aims of the bloc — a venture that reveals mixed results. On one hand, the crisis in Myanmar indicates that ASEAN has failed to fulfil its guiding principle of “promoting regional peace and stability”. However, it remains true that the yearly summit dialogue between ASEAN and its partner states does support “the economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region” in offering these states and their partners avenues to collaborate. And, despite the internal turmoil in Myanmar, ASEAN has still adhered to its founding intent: diplomatically binding states to each other to prevent interstate conflict.

Looking ahead to the 46th ASEAN summit in Malaysia, attendance by ASEAN heads of state will be an indicator of the organisation’s importance in the eyes of its members. As leadership shifts to Kuala Lumpur, the same questions about ASEAN’s relevance and ability to draw world leaders will be asked of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. However, Malaysia’s takeover brings new hope to ASEAN: with more political and economic power than Laos, Malaysia has a larger capacity to impact the region. Moreover, Ibrahim’s outspokenness on controversial international issues indicates he is far more likely to take hard stances than Laos’ more deferential treatment of regional crises — especially those where China is involved. In the coming year, Malaysia has the opportunity to build up ASEAN and showcase Southeast Asia’s strategic relevance.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biographies

Bryanna Entwistle is a press and program officer at Asia Society Policy Institute. She manages press relations, supports editorial work for ASPI staff across the globe, and researches US-China relations and Southeast Asia. Prior to Asia Society, Bryanna worked at Schwarzman Scholars and The Asia Foundation. She received her BA from Dartmouth College with honors in History and minors in Government and Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages.

Meghan Murphy is a Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) in New York, where she researches Southeast Asia and geopolitical competition between the US and China in the Indo-Pacific region. Prior to joining ASPI, Meghan worked at several think tanks (Center for Strategic and International Studies, the East-West Center, and Brookings) and in the US government (State Department and Congress) on foreign policy issues. Meghan received her MA in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University as a part of the Schwarzman Scholars scholarship and her BA in International Relations from Brown University. Image credit: David MacSweeney.