Our guest today is Dr. Pushpanathan Sundram, who previously served as a former ASEAN deputy secretary general and has over thirty years of experience working across regional issues. We will start talking about ASEAN's newly-released vision out to 2045 and evolving initiatives out to the next round of regional summitry later this year. Be sure to tune in as we go through a range of other subjects, including geopolitical flashpoint management in Southeast Asia as well as geoeconomic priorities amid developments like tariff wars, BRICS enlargement and ASEAN-GCC-China summitry.

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INSIDER’S PERSPECTIVE ON NEW ASEAN VISION 2045

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast Nathan, and I wanted to start, if we could, on ASEAN's new vision 2045, which was publicly released in late May alongside events tied to the summit. As you well know, this is something that's been in the works for a few years already even though it's just been publicly released. As somebody who has been working with ASEAN from the inside, including as deputy secretary general, you've seen the trajectory of this organization up to date. How would you grade or assess this new Vision 2045 that was released within ASEAN's broader trajectory?

Dr. Pushpanathan Sundram: Thank you, Prashanth, for the invitation to this podcast. I'm pleased to talk about something that's very close to me, ASEAN. The ASEAN Vision 2045, I would say, is an ambitious plan for twenty years, but it's backed by structure. I was involved in drafting the first ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint. We have put in a lot of things there, but we realized that ASEAN will need time to actually implement. So this time, they are really looking at it in a more in-depth perspective in terms of looking at the vision plus the structures needed. In fact, for the economic community itself, they have five-year plans, strategic plans. They've come out with strategic plans for all the communities under this Vision 2045. So the political security community, economic community, social cultural community, and the master plan on the connectivity aspect of it. So we look at the AEC and connectivity strategic plan as they call it now. They don't call it a blueprint strategic plan anymore. They are five years. The others are ten years.

So each of the plans have a number of goals and measures. I counted around total all the four strategic plans will have about five hundred measures or so. So it's quite a detailed plan. The thing is if you look at an ASEAN plan itself, what is important to realize is that sometimes it's aspirational. Sometimes it's very broad. But I think what it needs is the depth. So even if you look at the various plans, right, the 2025 plan, the secretary general actually mentioned that the political security blueprint has now achieved 99.6 percent, economic blueprint around 97 percent, and then the sociocultural about 99 percent, and the master plan on ASEAN connectivity 83.9 percent. These figures look very good actually. But if you really look at it, I would say, yes, they may have implemented it from the broad sense of all the measures. But when you really go into the depth of it, that is where the problem is. Because if you don't really tackle the depth, then you will not see much change. So I think that's where the crux of the matter is when you look at the blueprints.

“The thing is if you look at an ASEAN plan itself, what is important to realize is that sometimes it's aspirational. Sometimes it's very broad. But I think what it needs is the depth.”

Now let me just give you some examples. For example, ASEAN has done very well on the tariff side, reducing tariffs. So, 99 percent of all tariffs are now down. But if you look at the non-tariff barriers, it continues to be a challenge, I mean, especially, say, in the agricultural sector, there are still high tariffs. Now on the political side, the crisis response to Myanmar or the Rohingya crisis was slow and constrained by consensus. And then the human rights declaration remains nonbinding, and there is, I would say, lack of effective enforcement mechanisms. So if you really look at the 2045 plan, it’s very good, but the weakness will be in the enforcement and timely action. So this is an area that I hope ASEAN will look at when they develop the structure to implement this twenty years plan.

EVOLVING APPROACH TO REGIONAL STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS

ASEAN Wonk: Right. This is the first ASEAN twenty-year vision – the previous vision was ten years. But as you said, they have these strategic plans on different timelines, so they can be updated from time to time. How does this relate to the fast-changing world that we are facing in right now? It does seem like there's an attempt to balance responsiveness with the broader vision so that ASEAN is able to stay on track for the long term. What are your thoughts on this given that this is something that ASEAN has been grappling with since the time you were there?

Dr. Pushpanathan Sundram: Yeah. So we had previously what we called Vision 2020, if you recall. So that was also a very long vision. And then in between, we had the AEC blueprint and the various blueprints and so on. So I remember my time, the blueprint was seven years implementation, 2009 to 2015. And then we had a ten-year plan. Now we have a twenty-year plan. One, it shows that ASEAN will need more time actually to implement. Actually, if you really want to implement it in-depth, I think it will take time. So it's good that on the economic community as well as the connectivity aspects, they have a shorter term five-year plan because things are changing so fast, and there's so much economic uncertainty. So having these five-year plans, strategic plans, I think the economic one is going to be 2026 to 2030 or so. So that's going to be very important, actually. So every five years, they relook at what's happening because I think ASEAN cannot work in isolation by itself. It has to really look at what's going on out there. So I think that's important to have that kind of short plan, and then they make adjustments.

So under the new 2045 plan, they have these implementation mechanisms like the annual progress reports, the midterm review in 2030, and the final assessment in 2045. Then they will create some dashboard, and I think external evaluation teams will look at it and track and verify it. So I think they're putting in those mechanisms so they can track the progress.

ADJUSTING TO GLOBAL GEOPOLITICAL CONTESTATION

ASEAN Wonk: I agree with the point you made earlier about ASEAN needing to adjust to a fast-changing world, and Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim mentioned at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that the region has to hold its own ground amid a series of challenges including tariff wars and U.S.-China competition via what he called active non-alignment. He has referenced some of the measures being taken, including the first-ever ASEAN-China-GCC summit and a new ASEAN geoeconomics task force. What is your sense of how Southeast Asia and ASEAN are holding the ground in this changing world?

Dr. Pushpanathan Sundram: Yeah. I think ASEAN will be facing a lot of challenges. As you know, ASEAN centrality is going to be still very important for all of us. So I think ASEAN will have to adopt a strategy where it's working with the world in a sense.

Like the U.S. tariffs. ASEAN as a whole has decided not to retaliate but to cooperate and work with the US. So I think that’s a good strategy in the sense that we want to see how we can further progress in terms of the tariff negotiation. So each country will do its part. The aim is to work out an amicable solution bilaterally with each of the ASEAN countries and the US. At the same time, I think this is an opportunity for ASEAN to really look internally. So, one of the things that is going to be very important is this upgrade of the ASEAN trade in goods agreement, ATIGA. ASEAN has learned from the COVID pandemic situation that intra-ASEAN trade is so important. So during the COVID pandemic, the intra-ASEAN trade was a buffer. So I think they recognize this.

“Like the US tariffs…I think this is an opportunity for ASEAN to really look internally…”<