ASEAN REMAINS VULNERABLE
What is most striking, however, is the collective silence. ASEAN, as an institution, has issued no substantive statement on the Hormuz crisis, proposed no coordinated diplomatic position, and exercised no leverage, individually or collectively, on the belligerents.
China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on the Hormuz Strait. India is recalibrating its entire energy diplomacy. South Korea has activated an emergency economic task force. ASEAN is managing fuel coupons and work-from-home mandates. The gap between the region’s economic exposure and its geopolitical weight has never been more visible.
This is not an argument for ASEAN to intervene militarily or to abandon its tradition of non-alignment. It is an argument for recognising that energy security cannot be reduced to supply management.
The crisis has made clear that ASEAN’s vulnerability is not primarily technical but political. It stems from a position in the global order where the region absorbs the consequences of great-power decisions without the capacity to influence them. Resilience without agency is adaptation on someone else’s terms.
The policy implications are not new, but the urgency is. Accelerating renewables, building regional storage infrastructure, and diversifying supply routes are necessary steps, and the current crisis may well catalyse investment that years of summitry could not.
But they will remain insufficient if they are not accompanied by a harder conversation, about whether ASEAN’s institutional architecture is capable of producing collective positions on the geopolitical conditions that shape its energy security. The Hormuz crisis will eventually end, but the structural exposure it has revealed will not.
Aniello Iannone is a lecturer in Indonesian and Southeast Asian Politics at the Department of Political Science and Government at Diponegoro University. This commentary first appeared on the Lowy Institute’s site, The Interpreter.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/asean-energy-crisis-us-iran-war-hormuz-strait-6055621
