Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief, which features my reporting from the ASEAN leaders’ summit in the Philippines.
The highlights this week: From Cebu, ASEAN searches for fuel crisis solutions, opens the door a crack to Myanmar’s junta, and promises progress on the South China Sea. Plus, in Malaysia, pig farming gets political.
ASEAN Struggles With Fuel Crisis Response
At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders’ summit in Cebu, Philippines, over the weekend, one topic dominated the agenda: the fuel crisis. But while some constructive plans are being proposed, a coordinated response from the grouping looks doubtful.
Economic circumstances dictated that this would be an austerity summit. The planned five days were cut down to three. And more than 600 preparatory meetings were moved from in-person events to online to save costs.
In his opening statement, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the summit’s host, initially struck an oddly whimsical tone. Marcos noted that the summit was being held a nondenominational chapel and said he hoped that a “spirit of romance” would permeate the talks.
He quickly grew more serious: “The recent crisis is a stark reminder of how vulnerable our economies remain to sudden shifts in the international order and, consequently, the global economy.” The region should work together to mitigate this, he said.
But what can ASEAN actually do about these issues? As Marcos noted in a press conference, most of the fuel supply agreements in the region that have followed the crisis have taken place on a bilateral basis.
The most immediate ASEAN-level measure is the push to ratify the ASEAN Petroleum Security Agreement (APSA). But whether this will actually help seems unclear. The agreement, first introduced in 1986, imagines that when one country faces an energy crisis, other ASEAN members will supply it with fuel. And it envisions the creation of a stockpile to be drawn on during emergencies.
All good ideas. But the current situation is that every single ASEAN country is already experiencing a fuel crisis simultaneously.
Coordination is also going to be tricky. Marcos said there was a strong consensus within ASEAN to get the APSA set up ASAP. But he also admitted that key questions—such as who will pay how much, where the stockpile will be located, and how it would be divvied up when crisis hits—still need to be hammered out.
We also don’t have a timeline for the agreement’s implementation. Marcos assured the press that it would be soon. When a journalist pressed for specifics, though, he got quite waspish and said, “If you have a suggestion to make it faster, please tell us.”
In the longer term, there was talk of implementing the ASEAN power grid, an effort to connect up the different national power grids of the region.
As renewables continue to roll out across Southeast Asia, the initiative would provide flexibility; lower prices; and lead to win-wins, such as poor-but-hydropower rich Laos selling energy to rich-but-power-hungry Singapore.
Also, don’t be deceived by the name. Political and technical challenges mean that progress is almost certainly going to be piecemeal rather than entailing a grand integration of the region. It’s worth bearing in mind that Indonesia doesn’t even have a fully interconnected national grid yet.
Outside of energy, there was talk of trying to increase ASEAN’s economic resilience by amending the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement and integrating regional economies more deeply.
Despite the bloc being almost completely tariff-free internally, though, intra-ASEAN trade accounts for a little under 25 percent of the bloc’s total trade. That’s about where it was two decades ago.
Pushing this figure up would mean taking on the thicket of national regulatory barriers that still stymie trade. This would, however, also mean taking on entrenched interests such as major domestic conglomerates.
What We’re Watching
Myanmar junta’s defrosting. ASEAN’s foreign ministers will hold a virtual meeting with their counterpart in Myanmar’s junta, ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn told Reuters on May 7.
Since the 2021 coup, ASEAN has had a policy of freezing Myanmar out. Officials representing the military regime in Naypyidaw are allowed to attend ASEAN conferences, but top-level leadership is not.
An online meeting does not breach this boundary, but it does represent a shift in approach.
“There was, I think, a tacit agreement that we need to do more,” said Marcos, speaking about Myanmar at a press conference at the ASEAN summit. “We need to find other ways to move the process forward.”
Why is this happening now?
The first reason is fatigue. For five years, ASEAN has insisted that normalization for Myanmar hinges on the junta making progress on the five-point consensus, an ASEAN-endorsed peace plan. But the junta has simply refused to engage on this. Marcos said that the process had become “moribund.”
Second, Thailand is lobbying hard for normalization. It shares a long border with Myanmar and has concluded that if it wants to effectively manage cross-border issues (scam centers, pollution, refugees), it needs to work with the nominal central government.
Third, China’s increasing influence in Myanmar has left some worrying that it will become a “vassal state.”
Fourth, the sham elections and transfer of imprisoned former leader Aung San Suu Kyi to house arrest provides a fig leaf—data points that suggest the government is taking positive steps and should be rewarded.
Peace talks stay stalled. Trilateral talks between Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul—with Marcos playing host—took place on the sidelines of the Cebu conference.
This was the first time that the leaders of the two sides have met since they signed a cease-fire agreement in Kuala Lumpur in October.
After that, the two countries saw a fresh round of fighting in December, when Thailand advanced into Cambodia and held territory along the border. Meetings by the various border committees supposed to turn the cease-fire into a peace deal have been in abeyance since October.
Despite the meeting, there was little sign of a breakthrough. No new measures were announced other than extending the tenure of the ASEAN observer team, which will act as a neutral arbiter of the cease-fire until July.
After the conference, Hun Manet said that Thailand and Cambodia had agreed that border committee talks would resume. That would be an important step. But when I asked about this at a Thai press conference, officials hedged and said that trust needed to be built first.
Meanwhile, new areas of dispute have opened up. On May 5, Thailand tore up a 2001 memorandum of understanding with Cambodia governing their maritime border. Cambodia is now planning to address the issue via the compulsory conciliation mechanism of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
South China Sea Progress. Momentum is building for a South China Sea code of conduct between ASEAN and China, ASEAN chief Kao Kim Hourn told Reuters on May 7. The bloc, he said, aims to complete it this year.
“I think there is real progress in negotiations,” he added. “We are able to reach more consensus on key issues.”
If this is true, it’s big a step. The idea of a code was first agreed to in 2002, but it has made little progress since then. Meanwhile, China has continued with its gray-zone tactics in the region.
The unanswered question for now is how comprehensive this code might be. Analysts seem to vary in their assessments, ranging from skepticism to thinking that a minimal agreement—one which helps smooth out day-to-day misunderstandings without stopping the continued militarized jostling—might be achievable.
Two related developments should be noted here.
First, ASEAN has agreed to set up a maritime center to monitor developments in the South China Sea. The Philippines is angling to be the host country.
Second, Marcos raised eyebrows when at a press conference he told a reporter that deeper economic cooperation between ASEAN and China would depend on progress of the code of conduct. Up until now, ASEAN has quite carefully kept these two areas separate.
Photo of the Week
Joshua Van of Myanmar punches Tatsuro Taira of Japan in the UFC flyweight championship fight during the UFC 328 event in Newark, New Jersey, United States, on May 9.Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Born in Myanmar’s Chin state, Joshua Van’s family fled the war to Malaysia and then the United States, where he settled in Houston at age 12. Now he is the first Southeast Asian fighter to win an Ultimate Fighting Championship belt in the flyweight category. Van, who has criticized the junta, has said that he fights partly to let him carry Myanmar’s flag into the ring around the world.
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Number of the Week
2.8 percent. The Philippines’ growth in the first quarter of 2026. The energy crisis is hitting the fuel import-dependent Philippines hard. This figure is much lower than the 3.5 percent predicted by economists surveyed by Reuters.
Part of the story is slowing household consumption—which makes up 70 percent of GDP. So as fuel prices rise, expect things to get even worse.
Even before the latest crisis, the Philippines was struggling. In 2025, its economy grew 4.4 percent, the slowest rate in five years, as the country was battered by a corruption scandal and a series of natural disasters.
What We’re Reading
A hundred years, $2.5 trillion, and 9 million residents. Vietnam plans to reshape Hanoi on a truly epic scale, Yuji Nitta and Mai Nguyen write in Nikkei Asia.
A rare-earths deal with the U.S. Defense Department has sparked controversy in Malaysia, Siau Lim Chong writes in the Diplomat.
Why is Myanmar’s military junta all a flutter about the discovery of a huge ruby? Maung Kavi digs into modern propaganda and mystical beliefs in the Irrawaddy.
In Focus: Malaysia’s Pig Farming Fight
Malaysia has found itself embroiled in a porcine political controversy with a royal push to ban pig farming in the state of Selangor.
Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah of Selangor has declared that he wants no more pig farming in the state.
The sultan’s demand, first floated in February and reaffirmed last week, has been explained in terms of the pollution caused by the farms. But the religious and racial element—pork is eaten and farmed by Chinese Malaysians but not by Muslim Malays—is inescapable.
On May 9, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim tried to cautiously endorse a milder proposition. He declared that he shared the sultan’s concerns but then seemed to signal a softer line: strict regulations and making sure that the farms were far from residential areas, rather than imposing an outright ban. Chinese residents don’t like living near pig farms either, he declared.
Anwar is between a rock and a hard place here. Royal backing is important for his grip on power. In Malaysia’s system, nine sultans do not rule directly but act as powerful constitutional monarchs within their own states and take turns as the head of state of Malaysia.
The sultans are also respected among the Malay population, especially as protectors of Islam. And while most Malays vote for the opposition, the chunk that back Anwar are key to his coalition. Since coming to power, he has worked hard to show his Malay bona fides on issues of race and religion.
However, one of the largest parties in his coalition is the overwhelmingly Chinese-backed Democratic Action Party, whose base increasingly grumbles that it has failed to protect its interests.
Figures in the Democratic Action Party are pushing back against the proposed ban. Some say that the farmers should take it up in court, arguing that it would violate their constitutional rights.
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