THE Philippines took over Asean’s rotating chairmanship in January, and it didn’t take long to see what kind of year this would be. Myanmar’s civil war was still grinding on, still testing whatever credibility the bloc had left.
The South China Sea kept generating friction. Thailand and Cambodia were squabbling again over their shared border. Global trade was getting harder to predict. Then the Middle East blew up-fighting between the US and Iran rattled energy markets and put shipping through the Strait of Hormuz at risk.
Manila had planned a chairmanship built around a tidy slogan, ‘Navigating Our Future, Together,’ and three pillars: ‘Peace and Security Anchors,’ ‘Prosperity Corridors’ and ‘People Empowerment.’
The idea was to blend Asean’s old staples-dialogue, consensus, stability-with newer priorities like AI, digital transformation, supply chains, disaster response and social protection.
What the Philippines actually got was a live test of whether that framework could survive multiple crises at once.
And Asean’s members don’t even agree on what a good chairmanship looks like, let alone how to pull one off.
Myanmar still splits the room
Five years after the coup, Myanmar remains the crisis Asean can’t resolve and can’t ignore. The bloc’s response-the Five-Point Consensus, adopted in 2021-called for an end to the violence, inclusive dialogue, humanitarian access and a special envoy to shepherd the process.
None of that has really happened. The fighting continues. So does the humanitarian emergency.
Manila has stuck with the Five-Point Consensus as Asean’s official line.
At the July foreign ministers’ meetings in Manila, it pushed for ways to actually track progress against the plan, including a proposal for a multi-year special envoy who could stay on the job long enough to build relationships instead of starting over every rotation.
That’s the official position. Underneath it, the bloc is split.
Thailand wants what it calls ‘calibrated re-engagement’-talking to the junta directly, on the theory that access beats isolation.
Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow put it bluntly: ‘In the end, we have to engage, we have to have dialogue, and we are not abandoning our position.’
It’s not hard to see why Bangkok feels this way. Thailand shares a long, porous border with Myanmar, and it’s the one absorbing the refugees, the trafficking networks, the armed groups drifting across the line, the black-market economies that thrive in a vacuum.
Isolation is an easy position to hold from Jakarta or Manila. It’s harder when the fallout is landing in your own border provinces.
By May, Sihasak was floating something more concrete: inviting Myanmar’s foreign minister to sit down with senior Asean diplomats.
Not everyone agrees that ‘action’ means talking to the junta on its own terms. Singapore has argued that engagement without preconditions just hands the generals legitimacy they haven’t earned-and that any real re-engagement needs to be tied to results that can actually be measured: violence stopping, humanitarian access expanding, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners being released.
The Philippines has tried to thread the needle-keep a line of communication open, but insist that Myanmar’s full return to the table still depends on results.
The July meeting with Myanmar’s top diplomat suggests the bloc’s old exclusion policy is starting to crack. What’s not clear is how far Asean actually wants that crack to go.
The risk is obvious: if Thailand keeps building its own bilateral relationship with the junta. At the same time, the rest of the bloc waits for conditions to be met, Asean ends up running two Myanmar policies instead of one.
The South China Sea problem
A similar bind is playing out over the South China Sea. The Philippines wants to get the long-stalled Code of Conduct talks between Asean and China moving again, and clearly, any deal has to be grounded in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Here’s the complication: the Philippines isn’t a neutral chair on this one.
It’s a claimant state with its own maritime disputes with Beijing, which gives it every reason to push hard for a rules-based outcome-and makes it awkward to ask other Asean members, some with far less at stake and far deeper economic ties to China, to fall in line behind Manila’s priorities.
Most analysts don’t expect a binding, finalized Code of Conduct this year. The gaps are too fundamental-over how much territory the code should cover, whether it should carry real legal weight, and how it relates to Unclos in the first place.
What’s realistic is smaller than that: confidence-building measures, better communication at sea, mechanisms for managing incidents before they escalate.
Manila can steer the agenda and shape the language on the table. It can’t manufacture an agreement where the underlying interests-Asean’s and China’s, and Asean members’- don’t line up.
A war thousands of miles away
If anyone doubted how exposed Southeast Asia is to conflicts it has nothing to do with, the Middle East settled it.
Fighting between the US and Iran rattled global energy markets and put the Strait of Hormuz-the route a huge share of Asia’s oil and LNG passes through-at real risk. Asean’s economic ministers warned the conflict could knock down regional growth and put energy security in jeopardy.
The Philippines felt this one more than most. It imports the bulk of its energy and a large share of its food. Fuel prices ripple straight into transport and electricity bills; pricier fertilizer ripples into food costs, and eventually into every household budget.
At the 48th Asean Summit in Cebu in May, leaders started discussing things that would have sounded abstract a year earlier-a regional framework for sharing fuel supplies, a standby arrangement for food security.
The subtext was clear: nobody wanted to find out the hard way what happens to fertilizer markets and food production if the disruption dragged on.
Suddenly ‘Prosperity Corridors,’ one of the Philippines’ three chairmanship pillars, meant something bigger than cutting trade barriers between Asean members. It meant figuring out whether the bloc could keep energy, food and basic goods moving at all if a shock hit from outside the region.
The July foreign ministers’ meetings in Manila leaned into this.
Asean called for hostilities to stop immediately and for ‘safe, unimpeded and continuous transit passage’ through Hormuz to be restored-language that captures both what Asean believes in and what it can actually do about it.
The bloc can issue statements, coordinate economically, and appeal to international law. What it can’t do is make the US, Iran or anyone else listen, or guarantee that a chokepoint thousands of kilometers away reopens.
It didn’t take long for people to connect this back to the South China Sea. Freedom of navigation is freedom of navigation, whether the water in question is the Persian Gulf or waters closer to home-and Asean members wanted to defend that principle without turning the bloc into a proxy battleground for Washington, Beijing and Tehran.
Quietly, Asean tried to become less of a talk shop
Buried under the headlines about Myanmar and the Middle East was arguably the most consequential outcome from the Manila meetings: the adoption of the ARF Manila Plan of Action 2026-2036.
The Asean Regional Forum brings together Asean states and their security partners from across the Asia-Pacific, and for years it’s had a reputation-fair or not-as a place where people talk rather than act.
This new 10-year plan aims to change that. It reaffirms the ARF as ‘a central pillar in the evolving regional security architecture,’ committing everyone at the table to dialogue, confidence-building, preventive diplomacy, respect for international law, and, notably, ‘specific, actionable and measurable’ steps rather than just more statements.
Vietnamese Foreign Minister Le Hoai Trung, speaking at the 33rd ARF ministerial meeting in Manila, framed it as a shift from ‘reactive dialogue’ toward ‘proactive risk management’-building the forum’s ability to spot trouble before it turns into a crisis.
Indonesia’s Sugiono made a similar case, pushing for the ARF to get ahead of tensions before they hardened into conflict, while staying anchored to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia.
None of this touches the ARF’s founding logic-it’s still consensus-driven, still voluntary.
What’s changing is the plumbing underneath: more information-sharing, more capacity-building, early-warning mechanisms, structures for crisis prevention that exist before anyone needs them rather than being improvised in the middle of one.
The plan’s cooperation areas read like a list of everything currently keeping Asean foreign ministries up at night-disaster relief, counter-terrorism, transnational crime, maritime security, non-proliferation, cybersecurity, defense cooperation, peacekeeping. Some of the specifics map directly onto this year’s headaches.
On the maritime side, participants committed to backing Unclos, freedom of navigation and overflight, maritime domain awareness, search and rescue capacity, action against piracy, trafficking and illegal fishing, and protection for underwater infrastructure.
On cybersecurity, the plan leans on confidence-building and information-sharing to cut the risk of a digital miscalculation spiraling into something worse, naming AI-related threats, online scams, cybercrime and attacks on critical infrastructure as specific concerns.
It also stretches the definition of ‘security’ further than Asean traditionally has-folding disaster response, humanitarian assistance, environmental resilience, digital crime and maritime safety together as connected problems rather than separate portfolios.
The plan pushes civilian and military officials to train together on disaster relief and calls for closer coordination with the Asean Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance.
Lazaro described the pace of emerging threats as ‘unprecedented,’ arguing the region needed more innovative, collaborative responses-and that the Manila Plan was meant to give the ARF an actual roadmap for the next decade rather than another set of aspirations.
Nobody is pretending this is a revolution. The ARF isn’t giving up consensus or voluntary participation, and the plan is non-binding-no government has to sign onto anything that cuts against its own interests. That keeps the forum inclusive, but it also means the plan’s ambitions could easily outrun what governments are actually willing to do.
Even so, it says something about what Asean and its partners think the region needs right now. Between Myanmar, the South China Sea, cyber threats, natural disasters, cross-border crime and rising tension among bigger powers, just talking to each other clearly isn’t cutting it anymore.
What chairing Asean actually gets you
Manila has leaned into its role as host this year, turning itself into the region’s meeting point.
The 59th Asean Foreign Ministers’ Meeting and the cluster of related meetings around it brought Southeast Asian foreign ministers and their external partners together in July, working through Myanmar, maritime security, economic integration, regional connectivity and the Middle East in the same stretch of days.
The gathering produced a Joint Communiqué and moved cooperation with Asean’s dialogue partners forward.
But it’s worth being honest about what a chairmanship actually is. It’s not a command. The chair convenes the meetings, manages the negotiating table, drafts the communiqué language, and hunts for phrasing that governments with wildly different interests can all live with. That’s a real influence-just not the kind that produces breakthroughs on its own.
One assessment of the July meetings put it plainly: plenty of procedural movement, but no collective response that actually changed anything about the Iran-US conflict, the South China Sea, or Myanmar’s war.
So, what does success even look like here?
Realistically, nobody is going to look back at 2026 and say that’s the year the Philippines solved Asean.
That’s not how this works. What Manila can actually claim credit for is something less dramatic: keeping three or four crises from tearing the bloc’s agenda apart at the same time.
That means holding the line with Myanmar without legitimizing the junta for free, pushing maritime rules without turning Asean into an anti-China bloc in everyone else’s eyes, and building economic resilience while a war on the other side of the world messes with everyone’s fuel and food prices. None of that is glamorous. All of it is necessary.
It also means proving Asean is still worth something even when it can’t fix the thing that’s actually on fire. The Philippines doesn’t get to steer this organization wherever it wants-it’s negotiating with a dozen governments that all want different things, in a year when very little is under anyone’s control.
What the chairmanship does leave behind is the ARF’s new 10-year plan-a genuine attempt to turn Asean’s habit of talking into something closer to actual crisis prevention.
Given everything else going on this year-Myanmar’s war, the South China Sea, cyber threats, natural disasters, crime that crosses borders, bigger powers jostling for position-dialogue by itself was never going to cut it.
If anything gets remembered from this chairmanship, it probably won’t be a single dramatic win. It’ll be a region slightly better equipped to catch the next crisis before it turns into a war.