Associate Research Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Henrick Tsjeng believes that a united response involving palpable action will be severely constrained by member states that are unwilling to fully abandon relations with North Korea, as well as ASEAN’s longstanding principle of non-interference.

“ASEAN is hardly in a position to have a fairly unified response that entails concrete action, let alone mediate the crisis. Furthermore, any such mediation efforts would be made even more complicated by the likely involvement of both the US and China,” he told The ASEAN Post in an email response.