ASEAN

The onus is on Southeast Asian countries to seize the initiative and collectively assert their role in shaping a regional order in a state of flux.

Other countries can support Timor-Leste in the bureaucratic development needed to attend and contribute meaningfully to ASEAN’s numerous annual meetings.

India has long used its navy to build ties with maritime nations in the Indo-Pacific, but this exercise steps up collaboration by tying up with ASEAN as a group.

The GSI seems to be China’s new blueprint for security cooperation, but its impact in Southeast Asia will be marginal at best.

For 11 years, ASEAN member states have advanced a number of rationales for delaying the admission of the region's youngest nation.

"Absent a major crisis, policy toward Southeast Asia tends to be a corollary of policies toward those major powers, most notably China."

While political crises dominate the bloc's attention, Indonesia can use its chairmanship to advance and recalibrate ASEAN's economic integration agenda.

The Southeast Asian regional bloc has ample experience in dealing with more powerful outside states – if only it can manage to draw on it.

Indonesia is setting up an office of an ASEAN special envoy on Myanmar in Jakarta to spearhead how the bloc deals with the crisis.

The country takes up the bloc's rotating chairmanship at a time when its centrality and efficacy are being called into question.

Historic summit not helped by ASEAN disunity and its peculiarities.