A moment of heat between Tengku Zafrul of Malaysia and Sri Mulyani Indrawati of Indonesia said more about ASEAN’s quiet strength than any joint statement.
There is a special form of trust that doesn’t should be written in a treaty. I live within the laughter of two individuals who sat at the identical difficult table, faced the identical inconceivable selections, and got here out the opposite side, still liking one another very much.
It is on this atmosphere that Malaysia’s Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz and former Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati recently (June 10) met at a forum, exchanging the nice and cozy, sharp banter that only comes from years of true regional partnership.
The exchange took place in the course of the panel “Leadership in a Divided World: Lessons from ASEAN for Global Governance” organized on the Blavatnik School of Government on the University of Oxford to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Tun Razak Foundation.
When the moderator suggested that ASEAN sometimes functions as a “big sister” keeping its members in line, Sri Mulyani played the role with ease and charm. Tengku Zafrul smiled and jokingly called it a warning.
It was a brief moment. But in ASEAN terms it was every part.
Stay within the room
The knowledge (intimacy) between them was not performative diplomacy. It was the natural register of two experienced hands who understand that regional warmth will not be a luxury – it’s a strategic asset, especially when the world is pressing in on all sides.
And in 2025, the pressure was heavy. When the “Liberation Day” tariff announcements were released in Washington, Malaysia – then chair of ASEAN’s economic pillar – convened an emergency meeting of economic ministers inside days. The query was stark: can we face this as a bloc, or does each country go it alone?
The response was neither pure nor unanimous. “Some countries said we must always act as a gaggle. Some countries said we must always act individually,” Tengku Zafrul recalls with the careful diplomacy of a person who knows exactly which country he will not be naming.
But an important thing was that everybody stayed within the room. They agreed on three points: tariff changes were unjustified; the rules-based trading system was price defending; and retaliation was not the answer. For a bloc often criticized for moving too slowly, this was – in its own quiet way – quite significant.
Sitting on the fence, with intention
A widely known grievance against ASEAN is inaction. However, Tengku Zafrul has proposed a change that’s price taking seriously.
“You can’t sit on your hands and be neutral if you can’t depend on him or rely on him,” he said. ASEAN’s researched neutrality – rooted within the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality, which dates back to Malaysian Tun Abdul Razak – has never been in regards to the absence of a position.
The idea was to take care of credibility with all parties precisely to be certain that the block remained useful to all. In an era of forced equalization, it is a type of power.
The real opportunity, he argued, didn’t lie in selecting between Washington and Beijing. It is about mutual alternative.
ASEAN has 680 million people, a rise of 4-5 percent, and half of the population is under 30 years old. Intra-ASEAN trade is just 23-24 percent, an unrealized potential that, along with the world’s first Digital Economy Framework Agreement signed just weeks earlier, points to a history of integration by which global fragmentation has only accelerated.
“If you want to bet on the future of ASEAN,” he said, “don’t bet on the US or China, but bet on being together.”
Oxford, Tun Razak and a warning the world needs to listen to
The conversation moved further when Tengku Zafrul and Sri Mulyani participated in a panel on the Blavatnik School of Government on the University of Oxford – organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Tun Razak Foundation – on the subject “Leadership in a Divided World: Lessons from ASEAN for Global Governance.”
What Tengku Zafrul wrote later was not a ministerial blueprint. It was clear and urgent.
“Great powers are pushing harder. Supply chains have gotten more fragile. Small and medium-sized countries cannot afford to make a mistake,” he wrote in X.
“It’s not a weakness. It’s a strength,” referring to ASEAN’s decades-long ability to carry nations of vastly different sizes, politics and interests together without destroying the entire.
Then got here the sentence that cuts most cleanly: “We have to be friends of all, but not tools of anyone.”
It is a distillation of every part ASEAN has tried to be. Not alignment. Not isolation. A sovereign friendship, based on interests, based on trust and, where possible, on a relationship by which a warning might be delivered with a smile because the inspiration beneath it’s solid.
That Sri Mulyani sat next to him at Oxford – Indonesia’s most internationally recognized economic voice, alongside Malaysia’s trade minister, invoking the legacy of the person who drew up the unique plans for neutrality in Southeast Asia – was an announcement in itself. ASEAN knowledge doesn’t stay within the room. It travels. He speaks at Oxford. It goes into the protocol itself.
Fifty-eight years later, ASEAN remains to be constructing this foundation. Slowly, consciously – and still very much together.
