DECEMBER 29 — As Asean moves beyond 2025 into a far more demanding regional and global environment, one reality stands out with increasing clarity: the association’s ability to remain relevant, credible, and effective will depend heavily on how its top six Comprehensive Strategic Partners (CSPs) choose to behave.

These partners—Australia, China, India, Japan, United States, and South Korea—are not merely symbolic partners.

They are the actors with the economic scale, technological depth, diplomatic reach, and security capabilities that can either lift Asean higher or hollow it out from within. CSP status, therefore, cannot be treated as a diplomatic ornament. It carries expectations of responsibility.

Asean has done its part by keeping its doors open, sustaining dialogue across rival camps, and providing inclusive platforms even during periods of intense geopolitical strain.

The next phase requires its most capable partners to match Asean’s patience with purpose.

At the core of this relationship lies Asean centrality. Centrality is not preserved by communiqués but by conduct.

For the top six CSPs, this means consistently privileging Asean-led mechanisms—the East Asia Summit, Asean Plus processes, and the Asean Regional Forum—as first-order venues for regional problem-solving.

When major powers bypass Asean during crises or default to exclusive minilateral arrangements, they weaken the very architecture that has underwritten decades of relative stability in Southeast Asia.

Paradoxically, in doing so, they also undermine their own long-term interests. Economically, the responsibility of these six partners is even more pronounced.

Asean today is no longer a peripheral manufacturing hub; it is a central node in global supply chains, digital commerce, and energy transition. Japan and South Korea remain indispensable to industrial upgrading and technology diffusion.

China and the United States shape capital flows, market access, and global standards. India and Australia expand Asean’s strategic depth in services, energy security, education, and connectivity.

What Asean requires is not competing initiatives pulling in different directions, but a degree of coordination that aligns with Asean’s own blueprints—on digital integration, sustainable infrastructure, and cross-border energy interconnection. In an era of geoeconomic fragmentation, Asean needs its CSPs to treat openness and resilience as shared public goods, not leverage in zero-sum bargaining.

Security cooperation must also remain anchored in Asean’s comparative advantage: prevention rather than projection. Asean has never sought to become a military bloc. Its success lies in confidence-building, de-escalation, and inclusion.

The top six CSPs can add enormous value by strengthening maritime domain awareness, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, peacekeeping capacity, and counter-scam cooperation—areas that reduce risks without forcing Southeast Asia into binary alignments.

Security assistance that sharpens rivalry will fracture Asean; security cooperation that lowers miscalculation will preserve it. Equally important is investment in Asean’s institutional capacity.

Too often, partners focus on bilateral projects while neglecting the quiet work of institution-building.

A better-resourced national Secretariat on Asean, in each member state, is necessary if Asean is to manage climate shocks, cyber threats, health emergencies, and geopolitical spillovers simultaneously.

Institutional resilience is the unseen multiplier of regional order.

It reduces transaction costs, enhances predictability, and benefits every external actor that trades, invests, or operates in Southeast Asia. The people-centred dimension of Asean’s agenda must also be taken seriously.

Climate adaptation, disaster resilience, skills upgrading, ethical digital governance, and public health preparedness are no longer peripheral concerns. They are core to social stability.

CSPs that help Asean protect livelihoods and dignity will earn trust that outlasts electoral cycles and shifting strategic fashions. Soft power, in this sense, is built not through rhetoric but through reliability.

Yet even as Asean looks outward, it must also look inward.

Asean today has expanded its political and moral footprint with the inclusion of Timor-Leste, a small but symbolically significant state whose hard-won sovereignty and democratic aspirations reaffirm Asean’s commitment to inclusivity.

Horizontal enlargement, however, brings new responsibilities. Asean must climb the vertical chain of a true doer as a like-minded country.

Stamping out corruption and scam operations are now a must for Asean to be respected at the highest reaches of state craft; as is ensuring the six Comprehensive Strategic Partners do not become entangled in any conflict spirals among themselves. Malaysia has done well on anti-corruption but must go further and deeper.

A larger and resilient Asean must be more honest about internal weaknesses that threaten its credibility.

At the same time, it must take the Indonesian concept of “resilience” or Mandiri seriously.

In this regard, Myanmar stands out as Asean’s most serious unresolved problem.

The military junta’s attempt to stage an election is not a pathway back to legitimacy but a false façade designed to provide a patina of democracy.

Elections conducted amid civil war, mass displacement, the banning of major political forces, and the absence of nationwide control cannot confer consent.

The reality is stark: the junta does not govern more than half of Myanmar’s territory, yet it seeks international recognition through procedural mimicry. Asean must recognize this for what it is—an effort to normalize the abnormal.

For Asean to go higher in 2026 and beyond, its CSPs must understand that supporting Asean also means backing its principled stance on Myanmar.

Silence or premature normalization will only entrench instability and undermine Asean’s claim to be a rules-respecting community. At the same time, Asean itself must avoid mistaking unity for denial.

Managing Myanmar requires firmness, patience, and sustained international coordination—especially with its most powerful partners.

Ultimately, Asean does not ask its top six Comprehensive Strategic Partners to abandon national interests.

It asks them to pursue those interests through Asean rather than around it. History shows that Southeast Asia resists dominance but rewards respect.

If Australia, China, India, Japan, the United States, and South Korea act with restraint, coordination, and commitment to Asean-led solutions, the region will remain the anchor of stability in a contested Indo-Pacific.

Asean has kept the doors open—even as it grows larger and more complex.

Going higher now is a shared responsibility. The burden must be carried not only by Asean itself, but by those partners who benefit most from its endurance.

* Phar Kim Beng, PhD is the Professor of Asean Studies at International Islamic University of Malaysia and Director of Institute of International and Asean Studies (IINTAS).

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.