The monumental statecraft of PM and ASEAN on its 58th anniversary

Conceived in Bangkok to keep the Cold War’s rival blocs from turning Southeast Asia into a proxy battlefield, ASEAN has since matured into a ten-member bloc—soon to be eleven with Timor-Leste—that is still capable of surprising the world.

This past week was one such surprise. From August 4 to 7, 2025, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim demonstrated what deft, quiescent statecraft can achieve.

Under his chairmanship of ASEAN, Cambodia and Thailand agreed to a fragile but critical ceasefire along their contested border, where over 300,000 people—160,000 Cambodians and 140,000 Thais—have been displaced.

The significance lies not just in the cessation of hostilities, but in the way it was brokered. Anwar did not stride into the room to dictate terms.

Instead, Malaysia’s Ministry of Defence provided the facilities for Cambodia’s and Thailand’s General Border Committees (GBC) to work through the operational details themselves.

The disputants owned both the problem and the solution, in line with ASEAN’s long-held principle of conflict resolution that respects sovereignty while creating the conditions for progress.

The interim peace is anchored by a commitment from all ASEAN member states to send their defence attachés to form a monitoring team, holding the line until a more formal peacekeeping arrangement can be assembled.

The GBC will reconvene for an extraordinary meeting two weeks from August 7, followed by a ministerial-level session in September.

The timeline recognises that violations may occur—no border dispute of such depth and history will be friction-free—but it binds both parties to the general agreement signed on July 28 in Kuala Lumpur.

This success is even more striking given ASEAN’s diversity. Within its membership are democracies, constitutional monarchies, and single-party states.

Yet through the good offices of Anwar and like-minded leaders, the bloc has applied the right kind of peer pressure to remain sufficiently united ahead of the year-end ASEAN Summit and East Asia Summit in October 2025. For a grouping often caricatured as too loose and too cautious, this unity is an asset worth noting.

Equally important is how ASEAN has kept the major powers in their place.

The United States and China—both Comprehensive Strategic Partners of ASEAN—were present in the ceasefire process only as observers embedded within ASEAN’s structure. They did not dictate terms, deploy forces, or wield economic pressure.

Instead, they adapted to a distinctly Southeast Asian form of conflict management, one that privileges quiescent facilitation over noisy intervention and bends even the largest powers into respectful stillness.

This is what ASEAN centrality means in practice. It is not about forcing Washington and Beijing to agree on everything, but about setting the rules of engagement so that their activities in Southeast Asia align with the region’s collective priorities. The Cambodian Thai ceasefire now stands as a living example of that principle.

While the border talks captured headlines, ASEAN has also been working quietly on another front—trade.

Several member states have negotiated tariff reductions with the United States, bringing the average down to 19 percent. More crucially, semiconductors and integrated circuits—cornerstones of the region’s export economies—are exempt from US tariffs.

In an era when global supply chains are being reshaped by strategic competition, these exemptions are not technical footnotes; they are economic safeguards.

The juxtaposition is telling. On one track, ASEAN is de-escalating one of its longest-running territorial disputes, dating back to the French–Siam Treaty of 1907, six decades before the bloc was founded.

On another, it is navigating high-stakes trade negotiations to protect its technological competitiveness. This is ASEAN operating simultaneously in the realms of security and economics, without allowing one agenda to compromise the other.

Sceptics have long accused ASEAN of being slow, reactive, and overly bound to consensus.

Yet consensus is not the enemy of action when it is underpinned by strategic intent. In this instance, ASEAN’s consensual approach allowed Cambodia and Thailand to commit to their own peace, while a region-wide monitoring framework ensures that it is not left to goodwill alone.

By keeping the United States and China in observer mode, ASEAN has reinforced that regional security will not be outsourced. And by clinching tariff concessions, the bloc has strengthened its economic resilience.

These are not headline-grabbing triumphs of the kind that military alliances trumpet. They are the incremental, enduring gains that have allowed ASEAN to survive nearly six decades of geopolitical turbulence.

The Cambodian Thai ceasefire will be tested; the tariff exemptions could be revisited if US domestic politics shift. Yet the ability to secure both in the same political season speaks to a level of diplomatic agility that many larger, more centralised organisations would envy.

As ASEAN approaches the October 2025 summits, the stakes are clear.

The ceasefire must hold at least long enough to ensure that regional leaders meet without the pall of renewed hostilities between two member states.

The tariff gains must be consolidated into a narrative of resilience that ASEAN can present to its partners in the East Asian Summit, where the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and others will be watching closely.

In its 58th year, ASEAN is not perfect. It remains a work in progress, its institutional architecture still evolving, its capacity for enforcement limited.

But the events of August 4–7 show that it can still deliver outcomes that matter—peace, however tentative, in a volatile border zone, and economic safeguards in an era of trade wars and technology bans.

On its anniversary, ASEAN’s value is not best measured by the number of meetings it hosts or the density of its communiqués.

It is measured by whether it can keep its own house in order, set terms for great-power engagement, and protect the livelihoods of its people.

By that measure, the Cambodian Thai ceasefire and the recent tariff deals are not just wins—they are proof that ASEAN’s brand of statecraft, patient and persistent, still bends the great powers to the region’s will.

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Emeritus Professor Dr Datuk Osman Bakar is Al-Ghazali Chair of Epistemology and Civilizational Studies Rector at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM)