Malaysia's 2025 ASEAN chairmanship will be pivotal in navigating intensifying U.S.-China competition and intra-ASEAN divisions, balancing regional security issues while mitigating risks from U.S. trade restrictions, potential Chinese economic coercion, and supply chain realignments that threaten ASEAN's cohesion and strategic autonomy. Malaysia's term as rotating chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, began on Jan. 1 in a year marked by intensifying geopolitical competition and economic uncertainty. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's government has signaled that its ASEAN chairmanship will prioritize reinforcing the bloc's centrality doctrine -- the principle that ASEAN should emerge as its own geopolitical pole in the evolving multipolar world and that it, rather than external powers, should lead regional decisionmaking and maintain unity in addressing geopolitical challenges, advance regional economic resilience and manage external pressures on the bloc's neutrality. Major agenda items include drafting the ASEAN Community Vision 2045, addressing escalating South China Sea...
