Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: ASEAN’s summit makes Kuala Lumpur a geopolitical hub, Laos considers cutting power to crypto miners, a royal baby is announced in Brunei, and  scam gangs’ state ties are exposed in Cambodia.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: ASEAN’s summit makes Kuala Lumpur a geopolitical hub, Laos considers cutting power to crypto miners, a royal baby is announced in Brunei, and  scam gangs’ state ties are exposed in Cambodia.

Have feedback? Hit reply to let me know your thoughts.

The World Comes to ASEAN

This year’s summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) runs this Sunday, Oct. 26, through Tuesday. The U.S.-China trade war will be the main item on the agenda, with an expected bilateral discussion of rare earths occuring on the sidelines.

ASEAN has its own priorities too, including the admission of a new member, Timor-Leste.

An unusually prominent lineup of expected guests includes U.S. President Donald Trump, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

World leaders seem to like that the bloc tends to be resolutely impartial in geopolitics, and they are also keen to cultivate friendships in a region central to the global economy.

Still, the most consequential meeting may not be between leaders but, rather, a planned discussion between U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

The pair will discuss China’s sweeping restrictions on exports of rare earths and products using them. Trump has responded by threatening new 100 percent tariffs on China as well as controls on exports of software to China.

Bessent and He will also set the tone for a potential meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump has suggested that this will take place at the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, which will be held from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1. (Xi, as usual, is not attending the ASEAN summit.)

For the ASEAN summit, Trump has said that he will only attend if he can preside over the signing of a peace deal between Cambodia and Thailand to cement a cease-fire that he says he played a role in brokering.

And, oh—China can’t be in the room when it happens, at the request of White House officials.

Whether the peace deal will go ahead seems uncertain. As I wrote last week, negotiations between the two nations seem to be breaking down. Thailand’s prime minister has also indicated that he’s not interested in further U.S. involvement.

ASEAN itself is focused on dealing with the repercussions of the United States becoming an economic rogue state.

Attempts to coordinate on this have been limited so far, with countries stampeding to cut individual deals with Trump.

What is scheduled—an upgrade of ASEAN’s trade deal with China and the adoption of the bloc’s new digital economic framework—is not going to set the world on fire. Nonetheless, it does indicate the direction of travel: hedging against the United States by integrating both internally and with external partners.

What’s buzzier is the expectation that the ASEAN Power Grid may finally pick up momentum.

The idea of regional integration of electricity grids has been knocking around since the 1980s. But the challenges of decarbonization have given the idea new impetus: rain affecting solar panels in Thailand could be balanced by a sunny day in Vietnam.

Any developments here could invigorate the slow and piecemeal energy projects that are already underway across the region, though a project this big remains a very long-term endeavor. It’s worth noting that ASEAN’s largest country, Indonesia, doesn’t even have a single national grid.

Last but not least, Timor-Leste is finally joining ASEAN. The two-decade process once prompted President José........

© Foreign Policy