How Should ASEAN respond to the Global Leadership vacuum?

Over the past few years, a leadership vacuum has opened within the global community. On the surface, this absence of leadership should provide opportunities for the smaller, less powerful states of the international system to rise up and fill the gap with ideas and initiatives of their own. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) should be especially well-suited for this task. The organization was developed, in part, to allow Southeast Asia to exercise control of its local environment rather than being subject to the whims of powerful states external to the region. The weakening of the major powers should provide an extra impetus to that original goal. Moreover, to many of ASEAN’s strongest defenders, the organization’s greatest influence is in its role as a purveyor of regional norms.