What happened to the East Asia summits?

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the East Asia Summit. In the meeting held this October in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the summit issued a declaration emphasising progress in “substantial cooperation in addressing common challenges and promoting peace, stability, and economic prosperity in the region”.

I doubt it. In reality, the East Asia Summit symbolises the remains of the days of regional power struggle, which, in hindsight, might have been the precursor for today’s decline in multilateralism.

At the turn of the century, there were plausible expectations that the 21st century would be the century of Asia. This prognosis was driven by the economic progress of Northeast Asian countries and the accelerating development in other areas, including Southeast Asia. In 2002, to leverage this momentum, Japan introduced a plan to construct a regional framework called the East Asia Community, similar to the EU’s precedent.

The East Asia Summit was first proposed by China to ‘upgrade’ the annual leadership meetings between the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, Japan, and South Korea, known as ASEAN Plus Three. China, then on the verge of becoming a regional power, allegedly grew dissatisfied with the ASEAN-led Plus Three mechanism and opted for a summit-style conference, where each member participates as an individual nation, making it easier to incorporate their own opinions into the discussions.

Japan, still the second-largest economy in the world at the time, perceived this proposal as a challenge and an initiative-seizing attempt by China, and opted to expand the scope of the summit with ‘like-minded’ countries to proportionately reduce China’s influence.

As a result, India, Australia, and New Zealand, under the government of Prime Minister Helen Clark, joined, and the East Asia Summit began with 16 member countries. But ASEAN members decided to take the initiative at the summit, as it had with other ASEAN-related meetings. This caused China to lose interest in the summit because these developments limited China’s influence over it. Ostensibly, it was a diplomatic win for Japan.

However, Japan’s main intention was to inhibit China’s influence rather than leading the summit. The US, still deeply involved in the Middle East after the 9/11 attacks, became alarmed by a regional institution in Asia operating without its participation. This put Japan off from proactively advocating for the East Asia Summit as well.

Lacklustre inception

Hence, the summit lost traction from its inception in 2005. I covered the inaugural summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur as a reporter for a Japanese newspaper, accompanying then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. All I remember is the lacklustre atmosphere of the conference. The most significant event in the actual meeting was that Koizumi borrowed a pen from the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao when he signed the joint declaration. Back then, the relationship between the leaders was quite cold, not only because of the tug-of-war for leadership in the region, but also because China had objected to Koizumi’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, a site where World War II leaders responsible for aggression against China were enshrined together.

The leaders’ interaction was the centre of attention, but borrowing a pen was no more than a political performance by Koizumi. This awkward ‘news’ lingers as emblematic of the summit’s weakness, which, because of the struggle between the two powers, couldn’t quite manage to “promote community building in this region”, as stated in the declaration.

Naturally, the East Asia Summit never made major headlines in the Japanese press afterwards. I didn’t even know that the US, along with Russia, had finally become a member in 2011.

Multilateralism in decline

Fast forward to 2025. The summit has somehow managed to survive for two decades, but the regional geopolitical landscape has undergone a significant transformation. China and Japan have been advocating for their respective regional schemes, namely the Belt and Road Initiative and the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, while the East Asia Community seems to have been relegated to the dust bin of history.

Moreover, China surpassed Japan in economic scale a long time ago, and today, China is no longer in a struggle for regional leadership in Asia; it is in the middle of a competition for global hegemony, challenging the US. The power dynamics of the region changed more dramatically than foreseen 20 years ago.

The transformation of the power landscape made the summit look even more trivial, and this sentiment was symbolised again in the Japanese prime minister’s behaviour. This year, the newly elected Premier Sanae Takaichi, in her diplomatic debut, only held a bipartisan meeting with ASEAN and returned to Japan without attending the 20th anniversary East Asia Summit. The reason for this absence was reportedly to greet US President Donald Trump, who also skipped the summit to visit Japan.

This also epitomised the decline in multilateralism and the shift towards unilateral action, which places more emphasis on bilateral straightforward deal-making rather than the time-consuming and burdensome process of multinational consensus making. This attitude was observed in Takaichi prioritising holding a talk only with ASEAN and Trump over the summit, and likewise, Trump not only absented himself but also met Chinese President Xi Jinping one on one in Korea immediately after, without attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting held there.

Who is like-minded?

Are multilateral forums such as the East Asia Summit still relevant in Asia today? It’s a fair question, especially when you look at the growing imbalance of power among countries in the region. That gap seems to be widening, and globally, we’re seeing a shift where force and dominance are starting to outweigh dialogue and consensus in both international and domestic decision-making.

Still, there is some hope. For example, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, ahead of this year’s summit, talked of “a real commitment of like-minded countries to come together”.

It is important that we collectively counter hegemonic superpowers and multinational cooperation, but who is like-minded? With the rise of populism and nationalism shaking the foundations of governments and national identities, recognising the ‘mind’ of states has become significantly more difficult than it was 20 years ago, when the original members of the East Asia Summit were established. Searching for like-mindedness might be the major conundrum for this region and the world over the next 20 years.