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View all search resultsHow ASEAN was reduced to a mere coworking space
ASEAN has fallen far from its original purpose, as has Indonesia from its role as the organization's natural leader, but all is not yet lost, so long as its current leaders can buck up and transform the grouping into a truly regional community.
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Roundup ready: A woman walks on Oct. 23, 2025 past a promotional display for ASEAN Malaysia 2025 in front of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which is hosting the regional grouping’s 47th annual summit from Oct. 26 to 28. (AFP/Mohd. Rasfan)
W
hen United States President Donald Trump takes all the credit for resolving the conflict between Thailand and Cambodia and treats ASEAN like an organizing committee, with current chair Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim as project officer, the regional grouping has turned into a mere platform or a coworking space and no longer determines the substance or sets the agenda.
As Southeast Asian leaders gather on Sunday at the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, the symbolic occasion could provide additional confirmation of whether the bloc still matters or not. Unfortunately, it is not all rhetoric from Trump. Without his pressure, and support from China, neither Thailand nor Cambodia would have come to the negotiating table in the first place.
As it is now, ASEAN couldn’t handle an internal conflict in its own backyard, let alone discipline its members. To be fair, though, the 10-member grouping acknowledged the “determining role” of external partners, stating that the Thai-Cambodian peace talks were “co-organized by the US and China”.
The grouping was never designed to be a strong institution. Born out of Cold War fears in 1967, it was formed as a forum for cooperation to prevent open conflicts among Southeast Asian countries, not to enforce collective will or discipline.
Its DNA is consensus: a principle that, while celebrated as the “ASEAN way”, has in practice become a convenient excuse for paralysis. Consensus is now the veto of the weak, the shield of the complicit, the weapon of the powerful.
The result is a regional institution that functions more like a coworking space, where each member rents a desk, brings their own agenda and shares only air-conditioning and coffee breaks. The façade of unity hides a hollow core.
Nothing has exposed ASEAN’s impotence more than the Myanmar crisis. The military junta’s 2021 coup of Myanmar’s democratically elected government was the moment to prove ASEAN’s relevance, and it failed spectacularly. The so-called Five-Point Consensus, brokered under Indonesia’s chairmanship, was dead even before it was signed. The junta ignored every commitment, escalated violence and executed political prisoners while ASEAN members quietly went back to the drawing table.
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