Indonesia was the region's fixer. Two Singapore analysts ask what that is still worth.

When Southeast Asia has a quarrel to settle, the job has often fallen to Indonesia. Melinda Martinus and Fannesa Adisty Laksmita of Singapore's ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute set out that record in Fulcrum. In the late 1980s, foreign minister Mochtar Kusumaatmadja got Cambodia's warring factions and outside powers into the same room, in the talks that became the Jakarta Informal Meeting and fed into the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements. In 2012, after ASEAN foreign ministers failed to agree on a joint statement about the South China Sea, Marty Natalegawa visited several capitals inside 36 hours and came back with the group's Six-Point Principles.

The authors' argument is that ASEAN is good at getting people to talk and weak at making anything hold. In 2011 Indonesia brokered talks on the Thailand and Cambodia border, and both sides accepted ASEAN observers in principle. The mission then died over its "terms of reference", the written rules of what a mission may do and where it may go, with Thailand attaching conditions about Cambodian troops pulling back. Myanmar is the harder case. Six chairs, Indonesia among them, have each appointed a special envoy since the 2021 coup, and outside assessments call the mechanism more symbolic than real. When Cambodia and Thailand fought again in 2025, ASEAN had no economic or political lever to pull, and China's envoy Deng Xijun did the shuttling instead, because Beijing has money and ties on both sides.

In the institute's own 2026 survey of the region, 34.7 per cent of respondents named ASEAN's slow response as an obstacle. The repairs the authors want are dull ones: a Secretariat that keeps the files and the lessons when the chairmanship changes hands each year, clear steps for quiet diplomacy before a dispute goes public, and follow-through written in from the start, with agreed terms of reference, timelines and reporting.

Why it matters

ASEAN is the room where Indonesia's cross-border problems land, and this month that means the smoke its neighbours are breathing. If the region agrees on something there without dates or reporting attached, this reading says it will go the way of the 2011 observer mission. So when foreign ministers meet next month, the boring details are the story: they decide whether a promise turns into crews, money and deadlines.