This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 26, 2025 - June 1, 2025

The most urgent matter for us today regarding Asean is the contemporary relevance of its Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN), declared over half a century ago in 1973. This year also happens to be the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and 70 years since the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Africa-Asia summit in Bandung, Indonesia.

Despite these anniversaries, the world seems to have lost its commitment to creating the conditions for enduring peace. Despite much misleading rhetoric, there is little commitment in many parts of the Global North to freedom and neutrality. The world was deemed unipolar after the end of the first Cold War but, for many, it has been seen as multipolar since.

More of the Global South has chosen to remain non-aligned, that is, not aligning with any particular global power. Meanwhile, many claim they are committed to peace but do nothing about it. As for peacemaking, the major powers have increasingly marginalised the United Nations. Few pay attention to the UN, especially the US and its European Nato allies.

The number of military interventions since the end of the Cold War is greater than during the Cold War. But realistically, Asean cannot really lead in terms of international peacemaking. It does not have enough coherence and capacity to do that. But it can be a voice of reason for peace, freedom and neutrality, and, importantly, in the current period, for development and cooperation.

Asean has to make an essential choice regarding international economic cooperation. The world economy is stagnating, due to the West, with little resistance. This is why Asean+3 (Japan, South Korea and China) is especially relevant now. We already have a regional economic arrangement for it, namely the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

The week before US President Donald Trump announced his tariffs on April 2, the governments of Japan, China, and South Korea met to prepare for them. This was a meeting of the “plus three” without Asean.

What happened? The plus three rarely met without Asean due to subregional tensions during the Cold War and the unipolar world. The glue that brought the “plus three” together was Asean.

Today, Asean risks becoming increasingly irrelevant, partly because it has been reluctant to make more progress since the Chiang Mai Agreement, a quarter of a century ago. The main progress has been moving from a series of bilateral swap arrangements to a multilateral one.

Asean has not done very much since Chiang Mai as the limits of the Asean Free Trade Area are painfully clear. Worse, key leaders cannot imagine regional economic cooperation beyond another free trade agreement. Some leaders have called for an Asian monetary fund, but there has been little momentum.

Trump’s “shock and awe” tariffs and Mar-a-Lago proposal are a long overdue wake-up call that “business as usual” is over, and Washington intends to remake the world. Will East Asia rise to the challenge and go beyond defensive actions to offer an alternative for the economies and people of the region, if not beyond as well?

Jomo Kwame Sundaram is currently senior adviser at Khazanah Research Institute. A former economics professor, he was United Nations assistant secretary-general for economic development. He is a recipient of the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

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