ASEAN’s Hormuz Dilemma: Why Southeast Asia’s Energy Dependence Has Become a Strategic Crisis

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The Day the Strait Went Dark

“On 28 February 2026, at 03:14 Gulf Standard Time, the United States and Israel launched simultaneous air strikes against Iran. By dawn, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had blocked the Strait of Hormuz. By the following week, maritime traffic through the world’s most critical energy chokepoint had fallen to less than ten percent of pre-war levels.”

That single paragraph — condensed from what is now a detailed historical record — describes the moment Southeast Asia’s energy security strategy, built patiently over three decades, was exposed as dangerously inadequate. Not because policymakers were naive. Not because the intelligence was absent. But because the political will to act on what everyone privately understood — that ASEAN’s addiction to Gulf oil and gas was a structural vulnerability—had never been mustered.

In the months since, oil prices have risen by 65 percent. LNG spot prices in Asia have surged by over 140 percent. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex — the heart of global liquefied gas supply — was struck on March 18, reducing production capacity by 17 percent and setting back repair timelines by three to five years. Across Southeast Asia, offices have closed early, travel has been restricted, and governments have scrambled to explain to their citizens why the lights cost so much more to keep on.

And through all of it, ASEAN — as an institution — has been largely silent.

This essay asks why. It argues that ASEAN’s silence is not accidental, not merely procedural, and not strategically neutral. It is the compounded result of energy dependency, institutional design flaws, and a diplomatic culture that has consistently chosen ambiguity over clarity at exactly the moments when clarity was most needed. And it argues that the cost of that silence — measured now in fuel prices, fiscal deficits, and eroded public trust — will only rise if ASEAN’s member states do not find the courage to speak, and act, together.

The Anatomy of Dependence: What the Numbers Actually Mean

It is worth pausing on the data, because the numbers are more alarming than the headlines have conveyed. According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2024, 84 percent of all crude oil and 83 percent of all LNG transiting the Strait of Hormuz were bound for Asian markets. Nearly 70 percent of that oil was destined for China, India, Japan, and South Korea — but Southeast Asia’s share was substantial and, crucially, far less diversifiable.

Philippines	~98% crude from Middle East	Effectively no alternative
Vietnam	~88% crude from Middle East	Rapid diversification needed
Malaysia	~69% crude from Middle East	Partially mitigated by own production
Thailand	~59% crude from Middle East	Moderate exposure
Singapore	~52% crude from Middle East	Refining hub — complex exposure
Indonesia	~20% crude + 37% gas from Gulf	LPG dependency critical

These figures reveal something important: the ASEAN states most dependent on Gulf energy are precisely those with the least geopolitical leverage to do anything about it. The Philippines and Vietnam import the vast majority of their crude from a region now engulfed in a war involving their primary security partner, the United States. Expressing solidarity with Iran — or even neutrality — carries enormous diplomatic risk. And so the default has been silence.

“84% of all crude and 83% of all LNG passing through Hormuz in 2024 was bound for Asian markets. Southeast Asia did not cause this crisis. But Southeast Asia is paying for it.”

There is also the LPG question, which receives far less attention than it deserves. For Indonesia — a country of 270 million people where hundreds of millions of households cook with LPG cylinders — the Gulf accounts for 30 percent of LPG imports. This is not an abstraction. When gas prices spike, the cost is felt most immediately and most painfully not in the boardrooms of Jakarta’s energy companies but in the kitchens of Aceh, East Java, and Sulawesi. The geopolitical crisis in the Persian Gulf has a very direct impact on every Indonesian household.

The Hormuz crisis has also delivered an uncomfortable lesson about the limits of “energy transition” as a near-term security strategy. While ASEAN has made ambitious commitments to renewable energy, the reality is that the region remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for electricity generation, transportation, and industrial production. Solar panels do not power cargo ships. Wind turbines do not produce the petrochemicals that fertilise the rice fields that feed Southeast Asia. The energy transition is a necessity — but it is a ten-year project being invoked in a ten-week crisis, and that gap is where the suffering lives.

The Architecture of Strategic Silence

To understand why ASEAN has been so quiet in the face of a crisis that directly threatens the livelihoods of its 680 million citizens, it is necessary to understand how ASEAN actually works — not as it is described in official communiqués, but as it functions in practice.

ASEAN’s founding principle is non-interference: member states do not comment on each other’s internal affairs and, by extension, prefer not to take collective positions on external conflicts that might embarrass any member. This principle, crafted in the Cold War context of 1967, has served certain purposes well — it kept Southeast Asia from fragmenting along ideological lines when the world was divided between Washington and Moscow. But it has calcified into a reflex that ASEAN now applies even when the logic no longer holds.

The US-Israel-Iran war is not an “internal affair” of any ASEAN member. It is a geopolitical event that has directly raised the cost of cooking gas for 270 million Indonesians, closed LNG supply lines to the Philippines, and prompted Malaysia to enter into emergency bilateral negotiations with Tehran. It is, by any reasonable definition, a matter of direct and urgent ASEAN interest. Yet the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Statement on the Middle East situation — issued in May 2026 — confined itself to calls for “dialogue,” “restraint,” and “adherence to international law.” It has no actors. It assigned no responsibility. It offered no concrete mechanism.

“Strategic ambiguity,” one senior ASEAN diplomat told the author privately, “is not a strategy. It is the absence of one, dressed in diplomatic language.”

This absence has real consequences. When ASEAN speaks with one voice — as it has done, occasionally, on trade negotiations, on the South China Sea, on pandemic response—it commands attention. It brings leverage. It creates the possibility of collective action. When ASEAN speaks in diplomatic fog, individual member states are left to manage crises alone, with far less power than the bloc would have collectively. Malaysia negotiates individually with Tehran. Indonesia signs a bilateral deal with Washington. Singapore works its refining relationships. Each is doing the best it can. None is doing what only ASEAN can do: speak on behalf of a region of 680 million people and demand that its energy security be treated as a global priority.

The silence is also, in part, a function of who benefits from it in the short term. ASEAN governments facing domestic inflation are reluctant to publicly acknowledge the depth of their energy vulnerability — doing so would invite opposition criticism and might unsettle financial markets. Better, from a narrow political calculus, to absorb the cost quietly through subsidies and hope the crisis resolves before the next election cycle. This is not cynicism; it is the rational behavior of governments under pressure. But it is neither leadership nor strategy.

Indonesia’s Particular Bind: Between Washington’s Deal and Islamic Solidarity

No ASEAN member faces the dilemma more acutely than Indonesia — and understanding Indonesia’s position is essential to understanding why ASEAN as a whole has been unable to act.

In February 2026 — the very same week that US and Israeli aircraft struck Iran—Indonesia and the United States finalised the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART), which eliminated tariffs on 1,819 Indonesian export products. The deal was a significant economic win for Jakarta. But buried in its clauses was a commitment that has since become acutely uncomfortable: Indonesia agreed to import approximately USD 15 billion worth of US energy commodities annually — nearly half of its total oil and gas import bill.

The timing, to put it gently, was extraordinarily poor. Indonesia had just economically entrenched itself with the country that launched the war that closed the strait through which it buys its gas. The deal has generated fierce domestic debate. Critics argue that Indonesia has surrendered its “bebas aktif” (free and active) foreign policy — the cornerstone of Indonesian diplomacy since the Sukarno era — in exchange for tariff concessions. Supporters counter that the US energy deal actually reduces Indonesia’s exposure to the Gulf. Both sides have a point, which is precisely what makes Indonesia’s position so difficult to navigate.

“Indonesia’s ‘bebas aktif’ foreign policy — free and active, non-aligned — is being tested by the hardest question any Muslim-majority democracy can face: what do you do when your economic partner is at war with a Muslim nation?”

At the same time, Indonesia is home to the world’s largest Muslim population. The Iranian Embassy in Jakarta has publicly welcomed Indonesia’s offer to facilitate dialogue. Muslim civil society organisations — including major voices within Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah — have expressed solidarity with Iran, a fellow Muslim nation under attack. President Prabowo has attempted to thread an impossible needle: maintaining the US trade relationship, offering to mediate, and staying off the Board of Peace that Washington pushed him to join. The result has been a foreign policy posture that pleases no one and provides cover for no one.

What is most striking is the contrast with Indonesia’s historical instincts. At the 1955 Bandung Conference — held in West Java, the foundational moment of the Non-Aligned Movement — Indonesia stood at the moral centre of the global South’s demand for a world order not dictated by great powers. President Sukarno’s “New Emerging Forces” speech electrified the decolonising world. Seven decades later, facing a war that replays many of the same dynamics — a powerful Western military alliance striking a nation in the Global South — Indonesia finds itself unable to articulate a clear position, constrained by a trade deal signed the same month the bombs started falling.

The View from Aceh: When the Geopolitical Is Personal

From Aceh—Indonesia’s westernmost province, its most Islamic, and the one closest geographically to the Indian Ocean routes that link Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf—this crisis has a texture that satellite analysis cannot capture.

Aceh’s economy remains fragile. The province never fully recovered the economic dynamism it had before the 2004 tsunami and the conflict years. When LPG prices rise — as they have, sharply, since the Hormuz crisis began — the burden falls on households already operating on thin margins. Small fishermen, food stall operators, and transport workers absorb cost increases that are invisible in Jakarta’s GDP figures but are visible in the daily arithmetic of survival.

But there is a second layer that goes beyond economics. Aceh has deep historical, theological, and emotional connections to the Islamic world — connections that predate the Indonesian Republic itself. The war on Iran is not, for most Acehnese, a distant geopolitical event. It is perceived through a lens of Islamic solidarity, post-colonial grievance, and acute awareness that Muslim nations remain disproportionately vulnerable to great power violence. When Jakarta stays silent, that silence registers in Aceh not as neutrality, but as complicity.

This is not a call for Indonesia to go to war or to break its relationship with the United States. It is a call for honesty about the costs of silence — political, moral, and economic — and for the kind of principled diplomatic engagement that Indonesia, at its best, has always been capable of.

The Acehnese experience offers one further lesson. Aceh’s own path through conflict — from armed insurgency to the Helsinki Peace Agreement to special autonomy — demonstrated that durable peace is built not through military dominance but through political negotiation, acknowledgment of grievances, and the willingness of powerful parties to accept constraints. The same principles apply in the Persian Gulf. ASEAN, speaking from the moral authority of a diverse, peaceful, predominantly Muslim region, could contribute something unique to that conversation — if it chose to speak.

What ASEAN Must Do: Beyond the Language of Restraint

This essay is not a counsel of despair. ASEAN has surprised before. It found a way to speak on Myanmar when many said it could not. It coordinated vaccine procurement during the pandemic when the task seemed impossibly complex. The institutional machinery exists. What is needed is political will and recognition that the costs of continued silence now exceed those of speaking.

On energy policy

ASEAN must accelerate the creation of a genuine regional energy security architecture—not aspirational documents, but binding agreements on strategic reserves, supply diversification protocols, and mutual assistance mechanisms. The ASEAN Power Grid and Trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline, long discussed, must move from planning to execution. Every year of delay is another year of exposure to exactly the kind of external shock that the Hormuz crisis represents.

In a diplomatic voice

ASEAN must find a way to speak about the Iran war that goes beyond calling for “dialogue.” Specifically, it should call for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under international maritime law — a demand that is legally grounded, politically defensible, and directly serves the interests of every ASEAN member. This is not taking sides in the war. It is asserting the region’s right to economic survival. There is a significant difference, and ASEAN’s foreign ministers know it.

On Indonesia’s leadership

Indonesia — as ASEAN’s largest economy, its most populous member, and its leading Muslim democracy — has a particular responsibility here that it has not yet fully exercised. The “bebas aktif” doctrine is not a synonym for silence. It is a mandate for independent, principled engagement. Indonesia mediating between the US and Iran is not a fantasy; it has historical precedent and current-day motivation on all sides. What it requires is a presidential decision that this is worth the diplomatic risk. Given what is at stake for the Indonesian people, KBA13 INSIGHT argues that it clearly is.

Conclusion: The Price of Speaking, The Price of Silence

History will not remember this moment as a geopolitical abstraction. It will remember it as the moment when a war in the Persian Gulf raised the cost of cooking gas for half a billion Southeast Asians, and when their regional institution — designed precisely to coordinate and amplify their collective voice — chose instead to issue a statement calling for “restraint.”

ASEAN’s founding generation understood something that appears to have been forgotten: that silence in the face of power is not neutrality. It is a choice. And it has consequences — economic, political, and moral — that compound over time.

The Strait of Hormuz will reopen. The war will, eventually, end. A ceasefire framework is already being discussed in international forums. But the structural vulnerability that this crisis has exposed — ASEAN’s energy dependency, its diplomatic paralysis, its unwillingness to speak from the moral authority that its diversity and peaceful record actually grant it — will remain unless the region’s leaders choose to address it.

From Banda Aceh, at the western edge of the ASEAN world, the Persian Gulf does not feel distant. The price of gas, the prayer for peace, the memory of what it means to live through a conflict that powerful outsiders prolong with their silence — all of it is near. KBA13 INSIGHT calls on ASEAN’s leaders to close the gap between the silence of their institution and the suffering of their people. The region is waiting. The world is watching.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Is ASEAN’s principle of non-interference — designed for a Cold War context — still a strategic asset, or has it become a liability that prevents the bloc from protecting its members’ core interests?

2. Indonesia signed a US energy import deal the same month the US launched war on Iran. Can Indonesia’s ‘bebas aktif’ (free and active) foreign policy survive this contradiction — and what would rescuing it actually require?

3. If 84% of Asia’s oil and LNG passes through a single strait controlled by a country now at war with a US-Israeli coalition, what does genuine ASEAN energy security architecture look like in practice — and why has it not been built?

4. The Hormuz crisis is imposing severe economic costs on Muslim-majority ASEAN nations. Does Islamic solidarity have any operational role in ASEAN foreign policy, or is it purely a domestic political discourse disconnected from the bloc’s diplomacy?

Sources

East Asia Forum — ‘Asia Bears the Brunt of the Hormuz Crisis.’ eastasiaforum.org, 14 May 2026
The Diplomat — ‘Why Asia Feels the Hormuz Crisis Most.’ thediplomat.com, April 2026
The Diplomat — ‘Amid the Hormuz Crisis, Indonesia Rewrites Its Energy Playbook.’ thediplomat.com, April 2026
The Diplomat — ‘Responding to the Israel-US vs Iran War: Indonesia’s Board of Peace Dilemma Intensifies.’ thediplomat.com, March 2026
Gulf News — ‘Strait of Hormuz Shutdown: How the 2026 Oil Shock Threatens ASEAN’s Energy Security.’ gulfnews.com
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — ‘Southeast Asia’s Agency Amid the New Oil Crisis.’ carnegieendowment.org, April 2026
Bloomberg — ‘Iran War: How High Could Oil Prices Get with Strait of Hormuz Closure?’ bloomberg.com
IEA — ‘Middle East Crisis Disrupts International Natural Gas Markets.’ iea.org, 2026
World Economic Forum — ‘How the Middle East War Hits Asia’s Energy Transition.’ weforum.org, May 2026
IEEFA — ‘Golden Age or Energy Dependence? Evaluating the Indonesia-US Trade Deal.’ ieefa.org
Al Jazeera — ‘Southeast Asia Leaders Confront Fallout from Iran War at ASEAN Summit.’ aljazeera.com, 8 May 2026
Zero Carbon Analytics — ‘Asian Countries Most at Risk from Oil and Gas Supply Disruptions in Strait of Hormuz.’ zerocarbon-analytics.org
ASEAN Secretariat — ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Statement on the Situation in the Middle East. asean2026.gov.ph, May 2026
ORF Online — ‘The Middle East Crisis and Southeast Asia’s Energy Vulnerability.’ orfonline.org

About The Author

Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad

Prof. Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad (KBA) has followed his curiosity throughout life, which has carried him into the fields of Sociology of Anthropology of Religion in Southeast Asia, Islamic Studies, Sufism, Cosmology, and Security, Geostrategy, Terrorism, and Geopolitics. Prof. KBA is the author of over 30 books and 50 academic and professional journal articles and book chapters. His academic training is in social anthropology at La Trobe University, Islamic Political Science at the University of Malaya, and Islamic Legal Studies at UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta. He received many fellowships: Asian Public Intellectual (The Nippon Foundation), IVLP (American Government), Young Muslim Intellectual (Japan Foundation), and Islamic Studies from Within (Rockefeller Foundation).

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