As Cambodia is wrapping up her chairmanship of ASEAN by the end of the year, it is an opportune time to give critical assessments of the ASEAN chair’s role amid all these challenges while taking on this year’s theme, “ASEAN A.C.T.: Addressing Challenges Together” to forge the bloc’s centrality in moving ASEAN’s vision forward while strengthening the existing ASEAN mechanisms.
As the current ASEAN chair, Cambodia has worked relentlessly to preserve and strengthen ASEAN Centrality, both at home and abroad. One of the most important undertaken by the chair has been to encourage all conflicting parties in the Myanmar crisis to implement the Five-point Consensus. There has been some progress, especially on the action plans related to humanitarian assistance and dialogues among stakeholders.
During the upcoming 40th and 41st ASEAN Summits and Related Summits ASEAN, Cambodia is expected to demonstrate her ability to effectively rally ASEAN’s assets and resilience to navigate the unsettling geopolitical created by: the Myanmar crisis to implement the Five-point Consensus; discuss the strategic issues of the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea, particularly how ASEAN and China are working on Code of Conduct (COC) to find a guideway for party-involved in the South China Sea dispute; deliberate on the US-China rivalry which is known to be the most visible implication for ASEAN to reckon in order to avoid the bifurcated pressure; and other related non-security challenges; assess the ASEAN Community Building and Cambodia’s efforts to realize the ASEAN Community Vision 2025.
