*Note: This article covers the period through mid-May 2026.*
The South China Sea has long been described as the most dangerous body of water in the world. By May 2026, that assessment is no longer rhetorical. Following the Hormuz Strait disruption and its cascading effects on LNG and crude tanker routes, ASEAN member states gathered in Cebu for their 48th summit confronting a set of pressures that have fundamentally altered the strategic calculus for the bloc. What emerged from three days of closed-door sessions was less a dramatic declaration and more a quiet recalibration — one with lasting consequences for how Southeast Asia manages its relationship with Beijing, with Washington, and with its own internal cohesion.
**The Cost of Being Caught in the Middle**
ASEAN’s geographic position has always been its strategic asset. It sits astride the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints — the South China Sea to its east, the Malacca Strait to its west, and the broader Indo-Pacific corridor through which roughly $3.8 trillion in trade flows annually. What the Hormuz disruption exposed was how dependent the bloc’s energy infrastructure remains on routes that sit squarely in the crossfire of US-China strategic competition and Middle Eastern volatility.
For nations like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, the spike in energy prices following the disruption was an external shock. For ASEAN’s own members — several of whom are net oil importers — it was a structural warning. Indonesia’s state-owned Pertamina activated emergency fuel reserve protocols for the first time in over a decade. Vietnam’s industrial sector reported output contractions. Thailand’s government convened an emergency energy taskforce. The message was consistent: when the chokepoints tighten, ASEAN’s economies tighten with them.
This is the context in which the Cebu Summit took place. Not as a crisis response, exactly — no single event triggered the gathering — but as a reckoning with accumulated vulnerabilities that no amount of “ASEAN centrality” rhetoric had addressed.
**China’s Dual Hand in the South China Sea**
The South China Sea remains the defining strategic fault line for the bloc. China’s nine-dash line claim overlaps the exclusive economic zones of five ASEAN member states: Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. The Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), adopted in 2002, provided a framework for dialogue but no enforcement mechanism. Negotiations toward a binding Code of Conduct (COC) have dragged on for more than two decades, stalled by fundamental disagreements over geographic scope, legal status, and dispute resolution.
At Cebu, Philippine Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo was direct. Addressing his counterparts, he noted that ASEAN could not afford to treat the South China Sea as “just another agenda item” — pointing to ongoing confrontations at Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal, where Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels have engaged in escalating water cannon and ramming incidents over the past 18 months. Manila’s posture has shifted measurably since the 2022 Marcos Jr. administration began expanding US access to Philippine bases under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA). Beijing has responded by increasing its presence at contested features and accelerating infrastructure construction on artificial islands within its claimed territory.
But ASEAN’s response to Chinese behaviour has never been uniform. Cambodia and Laos, both close to Beijing through the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation mechanism and substantial Chinese investment, have consistently softened any collective criticism. Indonesia, the bloc’s largest member, has pursued its own channel — maintaining that “ASEAN family” diplomacy is the appropriate vehicle and resisting language that would frame China as an adversary. Vietnam, which has its own unresolved territorial disputes with Beijing in the Paracel Islands, has quietly deepened maritime domain awareness cooperation with the Philippines and the United States while avoiding public confrontations at the summit level.
China, for its part, has pursued a consistent dual strategy throughout the Cebu meetings. On the diplomatic track, it engaged substantively on economic integration — pushing for acceleration of RCEP implementation reviews and offering new investment commitments in green energy infrastructure under the Belt and Road Initiative. On the physical track, its coast guard and maritime militia vessels maintained persistent presence at contested features. Neither track was designed to escalate; both were designed to remind ASEAN members that cooperation has rewards and confrontation has costs.
**The COC Negotiations: Progress or Performance?**
The most substantive agenda item at Cebu was the Code of Conduct. A fourth round of “single draft text” negotiations concluded in the weeks before the summit, producing a document that is longer and more detailed than its predecessors but still lacks an enforcement mechanism. Legal experts familiar with the negotiations describe the current draft as “aspirational with a disclaimer” — meaningful as a political signal, insufficient as a legal instrument.
What has changed is the context. The absence of a binding COC is no longer simply a diplomatic inconvenience. With US-China strategic competition intensifying and with Philippine-US exercises expanding under EDCA to include sites within 400 kilometres of Taiwan, ASEAN’s failure to establish its own norms for the South China Sea carries real consequences for how external powers will shape the region’s security architecture. Several summit participants privately acknowledged that the bloc risks being marginalised in decisions that will define the region’s future — a prospect that, for a body built on the principle of “ASEAN centrality,” amounts to an existential question.
Indonesia’s outgoing foreign minister, in a valedictory intervention at Cebu, framed it starkly: ASEAN must decide whether it is a rules-based regional order or a spectator to one being written elsewhere. The statement drew wide support in the room but limited actionable commitment.
**A Bloc Forged by Crises, Tested by One More**
The most durable insight from Cebu is not what ASEAN achieved but what it revealed. The bloc remains the region’s primary convening authority — the only organisation that brings all ten Southeast Asian states into a single room on a regular basis. That function has value even when it does not produce binding outcomes. The ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit, and the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus all provide channels for communication that, in a crisis, become crisis-management tools.
But the gap between ASEAN’s institutional architecture and the security challenges it faces continues to widen. The South China Sea disputes require legal clarity that ASEAN’s consensus-based model struggles to produce. The energy security challenge requires coordinated infrastructure investment that member states’ individual fiscal positions often cannot sustain. And the broader Indo-Pacific security environment — defined by AUKUS, the Quad, expanding US-Philippine defense cooperation, and China’s growing blue-water navy — operates on timelines and logics that ASEAN’s consensus process was not designed to match.
The Cebu Summit ended with a chairman’s statement that affirmed ASEAN’s “unified and cohesive” position on the South China Sea. The phrase has appeared in every summit communiqué for years. What was different this time was the undertone — a recognition, present in corridors as much as in meeting rooms, that this may be one of the last windows in which the bloc can shape its own regional environment before external actors shape it for them.
That is not a dramatic outcome. But in the careful language of ASEAN diplomacy, it may be the most consequential statement the bloc has made in years.
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*Leo Nakamura is a regional affairs correspondent covering Asia-Pacific developments. He writes from the region.*
