ASEAN Must Build Strategic Weight as US-China Rivalry Intensifies

Abstract

Southeast Asia faces growing US-China rivalry reminiscent of pre-WWI tensions. ASEAN’s traditional diplomatic balancing act is under strain as both superpowers pressure the region. Malaysia and Southeast Asia must build collective strategic weight beyond polite neutrality to avoid becoming casualties of great-power conflict.

Key Points

• An ancient Southeast Asian instinct of careful navigation resurfaces as US-China rivalry intensifies, mirroring dangerous pre-WWI patterns of declining hegemony, rising challengers, territorial disputes, and nationalist tensions that threaten regional stability.

• ASEAN’s decades-long diplomatic balancing act — absorbing American security, Chinese trade, and multiple powers’ investments — faces unprecedented strain as both superpowers pressure the region to align with their competing visions of world order.

• Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia, has become a critical geopolitical hinge in the technology and supply chain war, making passive neutrality increasingly untenable as great-power competition penetrates the region’s economic infrastructure.

The Return of Great-Power Rivalry

Southeast Asia faces a world that smells dangerously like 1914. History is repeating its familiar patterns: a declining hegemon, a rising challenger, territorial disputes, naval build-ups, and nationalist fever amplified by new technologies. Author Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm serves as a critical warning that the region must heed. If America and China stumble into conflict, Asean’s 684 million people and US$3.84 trillion in global trade will not be spectators — they will be the table. The challenge is no longer simply avoiding a choice between Washington and Beijing, but building enough collective resilience that neither superpower can treat Southeast Asia merely as terrain.

Asean’s Diplomatic Balancing Act Under Strain

For decades, Southeast Asia performed a remarkable feat of strategic improvisation, absorbing American security, Chinese trade, Japanese capital, and European markets while transforming swamps into ports and fishing villages into industrial hubs. This wasn’t cowardice — it was survival. However, Washington now speaks through export controls, tariffs, and technology denial, while Beijing leverages coastguard vessels, artificial islands, and infrastructure loans. Both superpowers publicly respect Asean’s autonomy while privately preferring it exercised in their favour. The region’s famously consensus-driven, carefully worded diplomacy — once its greatest strength — is buckling under the pressure of a fundamentally harsher geopolitical reality.

Malaysia’s Precarious Position at the Crossroads

Malaysia sits almost perfectly inside this great-power contradiction. Facing the strategically vital Strait of Malacca and deeply embedded in both Chinese commerce and American technology supply chains, Malaysia cannot afford complacency. Penang alone, as a critical global semiconductor hub, has become part of the nervous system of 21st-century geopolitical competition. Modern rivalries are no longer fought only on battlefields — they play out through customs forms, export permits, sanctions lists, and undersea cables. As Southeast Asia becomes the world’s favourite supply-chain workaround, it simultaneously becomes the place where both powers test each other’s limits. The elephants are moving. The question is no longer whether the storm can be avoided — but where the lightning strikes first.

Source : Opinion: The table, not the audience — Asean and the coming US-China collision