Can the ASEAN Way Survive 2026? |
As 2025 draws to a close, Southeast Asia finds itself in unfamiliar territory. On the surface, it has been a good year: the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur admitted Timor-Leste as the bloc’s 11th member. The summit also drew presidents and prime ministers from across the Indo-Pacific and again proved ASEAN’s value as a stage for great power diplomacy. Its leaders understand they are operating in a sharper, more multipolar environment, and have used that convening power to maximize their own agency – bringing more partners to the table, signaling that the region will not simply be pushed into someone else’s camp, and raising the underrepresented voices of Southeast Asia on the international stage.
Yet a closer look reveals a more troubling picture. In Myanmar, a civil war grinds on with no political resolution in sight. Border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia have escalated into sustained armed confrontation; a U.S.-brokered ceasefire lasted less than 50 days. The South China Sea is more contested, not less. New waves of U.S. tariffs and economic security measures are reshaping trade with all major Southeast Asian economies. And floods across Thailand, Malaysia, and Sumatra, alongside other extreme weather events, have reminded the region that climate risk is no longer distant but immediate and extreme, and that Southeast Asia remains underprepared.
All this is unfolding just as ASEAN has set out its long-range aspirations in the ASEAN Community Vision 2045, promising a “resilient, innovative, dynamic, and people-centered” outlook by mid-century. The coming year will be the first real stress test of whether the ASEAN Way – consensus, non-interference, quiet diplomacy – is fit for purpose in a harsher environment.
2026 matters not only because of overlapping crises, but more because of timing. The Philippines will take over the ASEAN chairmanship, bringing a frontline South China Sea claimant into the role of agenda setter. The Cambodia-Thailand conflict will either stabilize or become a dangerous new normal. Myanmar’s war will either pull ASEAN toward a more explicit conflict management role or entrench the bloc’s powerlessness. And the region’s response to U.S. tariffs, Chinese overcapacity, and more frequent climate disasters will either reinforce ASEAN centrality or lay bare its limitations.
Yet what is really at stake in 2026 is whether ASEAN still matters in three connected ways. First, to its own members: does it still bind their choices in any meaningful sense, or are national strategies drifting so far apart that ASEAN........