By Prashanth Parameswaran
The grouping is mulling new defense initiatives under Malaysia’s chairmanship.
As I have written before, Malaysia’s chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) this year will be a busy one. In particular, 2015 is a critical year for regional-community building and economic integration because of the formation of the ASEAN Community as well as the expected completion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
That doesn’t mean we won’t see progress on the defense side of things in 2015. We are still in the early stages of things in this realm as a flurry of meetings take place in the first quarter that culminate with the ninth ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting (ADMM) in Langkawi in March, followed by other critical engagements in the rest of the year. But there are already signs of what we might expect.
A good preview came earlier this week at the 12th ASEAN Chiefs of Defense Forces Informal Meeting (ACDFIM) in Kuala Lumpur. Jane’s Defense Weekly, along with other regional news outlets, reported that Malaysian CDF general Zulkifeli Mohammed Zin, speaking as host of the meeting, said that he and his counterparts were mulling several proposals to deepen defense collaboration. These included formalizing the ACDFIM, integrating CDFs from the broader ASEAN Defense Ministers Plus (ADMM-Plus) umbrella into dialogues, and expanding current bilateral exercises into multilateral ASEAN ones.
Read the full story at The Diplomat