The best Asean Meeting held in Singapore

The three day Asean Foreign Ministers Meeting and Summit with the big powers just ended. The happiest man was Vivian Balakrishnan. He was so pleased with how the meetings went that he announced in the press briefing that this was the best and least quarrelsome meeting Asean ever conducted in recent years. The big powers bickering and fighting were left to themselves to fight with Asean remaining on the sideline as non participants, absolutely neutral, and Singapore being a small country, played the role of an honest broker, not taking sides, not acting as proxy for any big powers.

Why was it that the last few Asean meetings were so hot, so aggressive and unfriendly and so heated? Anyone wants to give the answer?

Asean was set up by the founding fathers to be a neutral organisation of South East Asian countries. That was the key principle of Asean. But in recent years, not this recent meeting, Asean meetings were like a boxing match for he big powers with Asean countries taking sides and some Asean countries arrogantly stood up as proxies for the big powers. Asean neutrality was like a ghost of the past, forgotten. The proxies were so proud to play their role to provoke and agitate for the big power masters, taking sides and firing at other big powers, acting like braggarts and hooligans.

This recent meeting is a big change. The little proxies somehow did not do what they did best, behaving like barking dogs of big powers. This time they meekly stood on the side lines. Without these monkeys jumping up and down at the biddings of the big powers, the big powers could not do much. They could not go yelling around like the little monkeys used to do. See, big men knew that behaving badly is bad. So they let the little monkeys to do such silly things, and some silly monkeys really loved their roles, punching above their weights, to punch at big powers.

They punched and punched until they kena blue black instead of the big powers. So they wise up this time, and play low key. So the meeting became more proper for serious discussions with a little bit of chest thumping but not going too wild.  Instead of mischievous rhetoric, many things were done and achieved in this meeting.

Let's hope future Asean Meetings would be just as polite and respectful without the little monkeys jumping all over the place. As long as Asean remains neutral it is easy to take a common position and he big powers would have no leverage to stir shit and turn Asean Meetings into a circus for their private agenda.