Assessing the contributions of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to regional security can be a rather perplexing exercise.  ASEAN has no shortage of admirers who readily valorise ASEAN as, according to one formulation, “the success story of the Third World.”[1] Referring to the grouping as “a well-functioning, indispensable reality in [Southeast Asia],” Kofi Annan, the late former secretary general of the United Nations, once opined that ASEAN “is a real force to be reckoned with far beyond the region.”[2]