Meet the Cousins First: How Post-Brexit Britain Is Courting ASEAN
In this article, Luo Chen Jun highlights a striking historical inversion: Britain’s deepest post-Brexit partnership in Southeast Asia is with Vietnam—a country it never colonized—rather than its former possessions like Malaysia or Singapore. This shift demonstrates that Southeast Asia now sorts external partners by current utility rather than imperial nostalgia, forcing London to navigate a 25-year ASEAN dialogue partner gap, domestic political instability, and strategic tensions between ASEAN centrality and its AUKUS commitments. Rather than passively granting London access, Luo argues that ASEAN must leverage its quiet gatekeeping power to extract concrete commitments, including long-term ASEAN Power Grid financing, technology transfer, fairer educational access, aligned Myanmar policy, and explicit clarity on how minilateralism fits alongside regional mechanisms.
