KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Southeast Asian foreign ministers begin talks Saturday ahead of a historic ASEAN summit that will formally welcome East Timor as the bloc’s 11th member and mark U.S. President Donald Trump’s first trip to Asia since returning to the White House.
The meeting serves as a backdrop to the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit that begins Sunday in Kuala Lumpur, followed by two days of high-level engagements with key partners including China, Japan, India, Australia, Russia, South Korea and the United States.
Leaders are expected to focus on regional security, economic resilience and maritime disputes, while US tariffs and changing global trade patterns loom large in discussions.
For the first time since 2020, a separate summit of leaders of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trading bloc encompassing ASEAN and five partners: China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will be held.
Its revival comes as regional economies seek trade flows at a time when Washington’s tariff measures have rattled markets and tested stabilizing decades of globalization.
In addition to Trump, Chinese Premier Li Qiang and newly inaugurated Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi are among more than a dozen leaders attending the ASEAN summit and related meetings.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will also participate as new sectoral dialogue partners, part of Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s effort to deepen ASEAN’s economic ties with Africa and Latin America.
Trump’s trip marks his first ASEAN meeting since 2017 and his first trip to Asia in his second term. The last US president to attend an ASEAN meeting was Joe Biden in 2022.
Officials say Trump is expected to witness new trade deals with the United States, including with Malaysia.
Trump is also expected to preside over the signing of an expanded ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia, following border clashes between the countries earlier this year. The ceasefire agreement was negotiated in Kuala Lumpur in July with the support of ASEAN and under Trump’s threat to suspend trade negotiations.
“Trump’s presence reflects a rare moment of direct US presidential engagement in the region,” said Joanne Lin, co-coordinator of the ASEAN Studies Center at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He noted that Washington still sees value in ASEAN as part of its Indo-Pacific outreach, he said.
“But more than deepening US involvement, this visit is aimed at visibility. Trump wants to project himself as a global negotiator at a time when his domestic policies, especially tariffs, have unsettled key partners in the region,” Lin said.
Security has been beefed up in Kuala Lumpur ahead of planned protests against Trump’s visit, particularly over his administration’s stance on the Palestinian issue.
Anwar has said the government would allow peaceful demonstrations but promised the gatherings would go smoothly. While Anwar acknowledged that some critics may have called Trump anti-Muslim, Anwar praised Trump for helping negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza “that is almost impossible under normal terms.”
Malaysia, however, maintains that the truce has not resolved the Palestinian issue and intends to raise the issue directly with Trump during the summit, Anwar said.
This year’s summit marks a milestone for ASEAN as it welcomes a new member for the first time in 26 years. It has been a long but rewarding journey for East Timor, also known as Timor Leste, which applied for membership in 2011. The last member to join ASEAN was Cambodia in 1999.
The integration of the region’s youngest and poorest nation (with only 1.4 million inhabitants) is being hailed as a symbolic step for regional inclusion. East Timor was a Portuguese colony for more than four centuries before the Indonesian invasion of 1975.
A brutal 24-year occupation followed, claiming tens of thousands of lives through conflict, famine and disease. A UN-supervised referendum in 1999 paved the way for independence, which was formally restored in 2002.
ASEAN membership gives East Timor access to the bloc’s free trade agreements, investment opportunities and a broader regional market, vital to diversifying an economy that has long depended on oil and gas.
“They are poor, yes, but they still have potential. As a community, it is our duty to shore up these countries,” Anwar said.
The leaders are also expected to discuss flashpoints such as the South China Sea dispute, Myanmar’s civil war and the expansion of cross-border scam rings.
During the meetings, ASEAN will sign an enhanced free trade pact with China and continue negotiations on a long-delayed code of conduct for the disputed waterway.
Meanwhile, the civil war sparked by the military takeover of Myanmar in 2021 continues to test ASEAN unity, and leaders of military governments remain excluded from summits after failing to comply with the bloc’s 2021 Five-Point Consensus on peace and dialogue. Myanmar’s plans for December elections, dismissed by critics as neither free nor fair, have put the bloc in a difficult situation and will be discussed at the summit.
The military government has invited ASEAN countries to send election observers, but accepting it could be seen as legitimizing the regime, while refusing it risks further isolating Myanmar and weakening ASEAN influence.
“The bigger question is what will happen after the vote: whether ASEAN will continue to disinvite Myanmar’s political representatives from future summits if the junta claims legitimacy through this election,” said Lin, the Singapore-based analyst.