EAS (East Asia Summit)

The East Asia Summit (EAS) is a leaders-only dialogue forum launched in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005. It brings together the heads of state or government of the ten ASEAN member states together with eight dialogue partners: Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States. Russia and the United States formally joined in 2011 at the Bali summit, expanding the original "ASEAN+6" configuration.

The EAS is ASEAN-centred: ASEAN sets the agenda, the chair rotates with the ASEAN chair, and meetings are held back-to-back with the annual ASEAN Summit. It is not a treaty-based organisation and produces no binding instruments; outputs take the form of leaders' declarations and statements. Despite this, it is widely regarded as the premier strategic forum in the region because it is the only venue where the leaders of all major Indo-Pacific powers meet annually.

Six priority areas of cooperation have been identified over time: environment and energy, education, finance, global health issues and pandemic diseases, natural disaster management, and ASEAN connectivity. In practice, however, leaders increasingly use EAS plenaries to address hard-security issues including the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, and Myanmar.

Key declarations include the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on the East Asia Summit (2005), the Declaration of the EAS on the Principles for Mutually Beneficial Relations (Bali Principles, 2011), and the Manila Plan of Action to Advance the Phnom Penh Declaration on the EAS Development Initiative (2018–2022). The 2019 ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific also frames EAS as a primary platform for Indo-Pacific cooperation.

For MUN delegates, it is important to distinguish the EAS from the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which is a foreign-ministers-level security dialogue with broader membership, and from ASEAN+3, which excludes Australia, India, New Zealand, Russia, and the US.