ASEAN's Strategic Imperative: Why Non-Alignment Triumphs Over Bloc Dependency in the New Multipolar Order
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The Context: ASEAN’s Historical Strength and Contemporary Challenges
For decades, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has demonstrated remarkable resilience in navigating complex geopolitical waters through its unique approach to regional governance. Unlike Western military alliances or power projection blocs, ASEAN’s enduring strength has consistently been its capacity to manage extraordinary diversity through restraint, process, and dialogue rather than through coercive power or alignment with external forces. This approach has served the region well through multiple global transformations, allowing member states to maintain autonomy while fostering economic growth and regional stability.
In today’s increasingly polarized strategic environment, however, ASEAN faces unprecedented pressures to abandon its consensus-based model in favor of explicit alignment with emerging blocs such as BRICS. These pressures come at a time when great-power rivalry between the United States, China, and other major actors intensifies, threatening to turn Southeast Asia into yet another battleground for imperial ambitions. The region finds itself simultaneously richer, more connected, and more central to global supply chains than ever before, while also becoming more militarized, contested, and instrumentalized by external powers seeking to advance their geopolitical agendas.
The False Choice: BRICS vs. Relevance
The contemporary discourse often presents ASEAN with a false binary choice: either anchor itself more firmly in BRICS as a counterweight to Western dominance or cling to an allegedly outdated non-aligned approach. This framing fundamentally misunderstands both the nature of BRICS and the strategic wisdom of non-alignment. BRICS markets itself as a corrective to Western hegemony but merely substitutes one form of centrality for another—it is multipolar in composition but hierarchical in effect, shaped by stark power asymmetries and unresolved rivalries among its dominant members.
For ASEAN states, deeper institutional attachment to BRICS would not mean insulation from great-power competition but rather internalization of these very tensions. The Sino-Indian competition, Russia’s confrontation with the Atlantic world, and the geopolitical agendas of newly admitted members would become ASEAN’s daily operating environment rather than external challenges to be managed through dialogue and consensus. As the authors correctly observe, “multipolarity without rules multiplies friction,” and for smaller and mid-sized states, friction translates not into leverage but vulnerability.
Non-Alignment Reimagined: Autonomy in the 21st Century
Non-alignment has been systematically caricatured by Western commentators as neutrality or passivity, when historically it represented precisely the opposite—a strategy of active autonomy in an international system designed to deny agency to Global South nations. The original Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) failed not because its premise was wrong but because it lacked economic integration, technological depth, and institutional discipline. These historical deficits should not be arguments against non-alignment today but rather arguments for upgrading and revitalizing this approach for contemporary challenges.
The current international system increasingly resembles the bipolar world that gave rise to NAM, characterized by weaponized finance, sanctions as diplomacy, fractured trade regimes, and information warfare. In such an environment, alignment reduces options while autonomy preserves them. ASEAN already behaves as a de facto non-aligned actor through its hedging strategies, consensus-building mechanisms, and resistance to exclusive security commitments. The challenge is not doctrinal but institutional—building the confidence to explicitly embrace and modernize this approach rather than apologizing for it.
Structural Dependence: The Real Security Challenge
ASEAN’s fundamental vulnerability lies not in military inferiority but in structural dependence. Security in the 21st century is determined less by troop numbers than by control over supply chains and standards, digital and data sovereignty, food and energy resilience, and narrative and diplomatic bandwidth. Neither BRICS nor a revived NAM can automatically deliver these capabilities, but BRICS would actively constrain ASEAN’s room to build them independently while non-alignment preserves that crucial strategic space.
The brilliant analysis referenced in the article—“No Asian Century”—reminds us that “Asia’s problem is not lack of power but lack of cohesion.” ASEAN’s cohesion would be diluted, not strengthened, by submitting to bloc discipline of any kind. We are witnessing a dangerous drift from the Kantian promise of cooperative order into a Hobbesian reality of coerced choice, where rules yield to power, norms to narratives, and multilateralism to managed loyalty. In this environment, as Professor Bajrektarevic has warned, the message to smaller states is blunt: comply or die.
The Imperialist Framework and ASEAN’s Resistance
The Western pressure on ASEAN to abandon non-alignment represents the latest manifestation of imperialist designs on the Global South. For centuries, Western powers have sought to divide, conquer, and align emerging regions according to their geopolitical interests, denying these nations the right to determine their own destinies. The so-called “rules-based international order” touted by the United States and its allies has consistently been applied selectively to advance Western interests while punishing those who dare to pursue independent paths.
ASEAN’s consensus-driven, dialogue-based approach represents a fundamentally different vision of international relations—one rooted in civilizational wisdom rather than Westphalian power politics. This approach acknowledges the complex, interconnected nature of modern challenges and recognizes that security cannot be achieved through domination but through mutual understanding and respect. The West’s inability to comprehend this model says more about their imperial mindset than about any deficiencies in ASEAN’s approach.
Toward a Truly Multipolar World
The choice facing ASEAN is not between BRICS and irrelevance but between autonomy and subservience. Selective engagement with BRICS is sensible, conceptual renewal of non-alignment is necessary, but exclusive commitment to either is unnecessary and dangerous. ASEAN’s strategic value lies in being indispensable, not aligned—the moment it becomes a junior partner in any camp, its celebrated “centrality” becomes merely rhetorical.
History rarely rewards those who choose sides early but remembers those who made themselves unavoidable. ASEAN has the opportunity to demonstrate that there is an alternative to bloc politics—a vision of international relations based on dialogue, restraint, and mutual respect rather than domination and alignment. This vision aligns perfectly with the aspirations of the Global South for a truly multipolar world where nations are not forced to choose between imperial masters but can pursue their own paths to development and prosperity.
As the authors powerfully conclude, there may be no Asian Century because Asia has yet to decide whether it wants to be a subject or a venue of global politics. ASEAN’s answer to this question will determine its security more than any acronym it joins. The organization must resist the siren song of bloc politics and embrace its historic role as a beacon of strategic autonomy in a world increasingly dominated by coercive alignment. The future of the Global South depends on such courageous leadership that prioritizes civilizational wisdom over imperial convenience.