The post-Cold War East Asian and Asia-Pacific strategic landscape has been dominated by three factors: 1) the United States’ military preponderance underpinned by its hub-and-spokes San Francisco system of bilateral alliances; 2) China’s seemingly inexorable resurgence economically as well as diplomatically and militarily; and 3) the proliferation of multilateral regional dialogues, initiatives, and institutions, many with the region’s oldest multilateral grouping—the ten-member ASEAN—at their heart. For the majority of scholars and policymakers who work from a de facto realist standpoint and are unsurprised by the determining effects of great powers, alliances, and relative power distribution on regional stability, the seemingly disproportionate impact of the smaller ASEAN states has drawn attention and contention. Do these strategically less significant Southeast Asian states “punch above their weight” in regional affairs because of their unique ability to create new multilateral institutions for security and economic cooperation, or is their rhetoric about the merits of multilateralism and transformative potential of regional institutions and regionalism “cheap” talk and deluded ambition?

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