ON MAY 27, Kuala Lumpur played host to the inaugural ASEAN-GCC-China Economic Summit — a glossy exercise in diplomacy, anchored in bold declarations and vague promises. In theory, it represents a pivot: away from reliance on an unpredictable United States and towards a multipolar architecture centred on economic pragmatism. But in practice, it may be less a pivot and more of a pirouette — elegant, circular, and ultimately stationary.
Prime minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, the summit’s architect and regional statesman of rising stature, is betting that trilateralism — anchored in cooperation with China and the Gulf Cooperation Council — can serve as both lifeboat and compass for ASEAN’s economic future. His rhetoric is compelling. His premise is sound. His timing is strategic.
And yet, one can’t help but ask: Is ASEAN overplaying its hand? To understand this summit, one must first grasp what it’s reacting against. Free trade, once gospel in Washington, is now sacrificial fodder on the altar of populism. The US under Trump 2.0 has announced sweeping tariffs — dubbed ‘Liberation Day’ duties — targeting Chinese goods and casting a wide net over Southeast Asian exports, some reaching as high as 49 per cent. The message: the rules of engagement are gone. Allies are optional. Winners write the terms.
This geopolitical turbulence has prompted ASEAN to look elsewhere. Anwar, always the realist, has positioned the bloc not merely as a regional body but as a voice of the Global South, demanding relevance in a world where legacy alliances have lost their lustre. The trilateral summit was, above all, an assertion of agency.
But agency without architecture is often a mirage. The idea of economic alignment among ASEAN, China, and the GCC isn’t absurd. It’s attractive. ASEAN’s trade with China hit $700 billion last year; GCC’s business may be smaller, but it’s rising steadily, buoyed by energy flows and investment in financial services and logistics. Chinese FDI into ASEAN reached $17.7 billion, and GCC investments have climbed by nearly 50 per cent since 2018.
In theory, the three regions offer complementary strengths. ASEAN provides labour and markets, China provides scale and manufacturing depth, and the GCC brings capital and energy. Put them together and you get a formidable bloc of over two billion people and $23.7 trillion in combined GDP.
But economic logic does not equal political cohesion. The GCC, while presenting itself as a unified bloc, is anything but. From the Qatar blockade of 2017 to diverging policies on Gaza and Iran, intra-GCC tensions are more common than cooperation. Saudi Arabia’s techno-economic push diverges wildly from Qatar’s gas-led diplomacy and the UAE’s capital-driven, cosmopolitan vision.
China, for its part, doesn’t do multilateralism for the sake of it. Premier Li Qiang’s summit speech echoed support for the WTO and ‘removal of trade barriers’, but Beijing made no firm commitments. That’s not an oversight — it’s a strategy. China prefers bilateralism. Trilateralism may be a useful stage for its ambitions, but never the main act.
ASEAN, meanwhile, is institutionally allergic to urgency. It took a decade to agree on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Its economic integration goals remain aspirational, with wide regulatory disparities and little enforcement. Its response to the Myanmar crisis — an open wound in the body politic — has been half-hearted at best, feckless at worst.
A trilateral alliance sounds impressive until you realise it has no treaty basis, no dispute mechanism, and no enforcement mechanism. It’s cooperation on paper, not in practice.
None of this is to diminish the diplomatic significance of the Kuala Lumpur summit. Symbolism matters in global affairs, and ASEAN has scored a win by asserting its presence beyond the narrow confines of East Asian regionalism. The summit underscores a truth often ignored in Washington: the Global South is no longer content to be a geopolitical afterthought.
Yet symbolism must eventually yield to substance. The danger here is strategic overreach — mistaking optics for outcomes and press releases for policy. ASEAN risks becoming a prisoner of its own narrative: a bloc that speaks the language of integration while remaining tethered to the constraints of sovereignty and consensus politics.
This is particularly perilous when dealing with partners as complex and calculating as China and the GCC. Both operate from highly centralised, often personalised systems of decision-making. Neither has a great record of sticking to multilateral commitments when national interest dictates otherwise.
If this summit is ASEAN’s way of hedging against the US, it is understandable — but not without cost. Anwar’s open letter to Trump inviting an ASEAN-US summit shows that the bloc hasn’t closed the door on Washington. But it’s a door increasingly viewed with suspicion.
Trump’s second coming — if polls are to be believed — threatens a reversion to the worst instincts of transactional diplomacy. Biden’s tenure, while rhetorically multilateral, has lacked clarity and focus on Southeast Asia. Either way, ASEAN feels orphaned — forced to navigate a dangerous world without a dependable patron.
Still, Washington is not out of the game. Several ASEAN members — Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines — remain strategically and economically tethered to the US. Some are actively deepening military and trade ties. These countries are unlikely to subordinate their national interests to ASEAN consensus if push comes to shove.
This is where the summit’s most ambitious claim — that trilateralism can serve as a new economic pole — begins to falter. ASEAN cannot speak with one voice because it does not think with one mind.
To his credit, Anwar Ibrahim has injected urgency into a normally sluggish institution. He has articulated a vision of ASEAN as a proactive player in global trade, rather than a passive recipient of global shocks. That’s no small achievement.
But the test of leadership is not whether you can summon applause—it’s whether you can deliver architecture. Trilateralism is not a substitute for structural reform within ASEAN. If the bloc wants to become the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2045, as some forecasts suggest, it will need less pageantry and more policy.
The summit was not a mistake. But if ASEAN wants this to be more than a one-off event, it must do the hard work of creating binding frameworks, harmonising standards, and enforcing rules. It must choose between integration and inertia.
The risk isn’t that ASEAN is dreaming too big. It’s that it may wake up to find the world has moved on — leaving behind a region rich in rhetoric but poor in resolve.
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ÌýMA Hossain is a political and defence analyst based in Bangladesh.
