Commentary: ASEAN’s energy crisis is not about energy
The security architecture that was supposed to protect the flow of energy to Southeast Asia has become the source of its interruption, says an academic.
A worker fills up a motorcycle while drivers queue at a gas station as oil prices are expected to increase amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, on Mar 9, 2026. (File photo: Reuters/Lisa Marie David)
SEMARANG, Indonesia: The Hormuz blockade has exposed something deeper than a supply disruption – the overarching limits of Southeast Asian agency in a crisis it cannot shape.
Six weeks into the worst energy disruption in modern history, the countries of ASEAN have done a great deal.
Indonesia has frozen fuel prices, expanded subsidies, and ordered flexible work arrangements to cut consumption. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency. Thailand reactivated coal plants and rationed diesel. Vietnam suspended crude exports and accelerated its ethanol blending program.
Across the region, governments have improvised with speed and pragmatism.
What none of them has done is shape the crisis itself. No ASEAN member state has had meaningful influence over the decision to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, the terms of ceasefire negotiations, or the conditions under which the strait might reopen.
The region’s most consequential energy corridor, through which over half of ASEAN’s oil imports transit, has been shut down by a conflict in which Southeast Asia countries have had no seat at the table.
This matters beyond the current emergency. For years, ASEAN’s energy policy discourse has been built around the language of resilience – diversification of supply, renewable energy targets, regional power grid integration, strategic reserves. These are serious and necessary goals.
But the Hormuz crisis has made visible something that this language tends to obscure: Resilience, as currently practised, is a strategy for absorbing shocks, not for reducing exposure to the conditions that produce them.
STRUCTURAL RISKS
Consider the central irony of the current situation. The United States has long been the implicit guarantor of freedom of navigation through the world’s maritime chokepoints, a role that underpins ASEAN’s entire model of trade-dependent growth.
In 2026, it is the United States that initiated the military action against Iran, and the US, having now announced a naval blockade, that is compounding the closure of the strait. The security architecture that was supposed to protect the flow of energy to Asia has become the source of its interruption.
For ASEAN, this is not an anomaly. It is the structural risk of depending on a security order you do not control.
Indonesia illustrates the pattern with particular clarity. The country has been a net oil importer since 2003. It consumes around 1.5 million barrels per day but produces fewer than 700,000, with domestic reserves covering barely 20 days of consumption.
A quarter of its crude imports transit through Hormuz. Each dollar increase in the oil price expands its fiscal deficit by roughly US$400 million; the rupiah’s depreciation against the dollar compounds the damage further.
Jakarta’s response, holding subsidised fuel at 60 cents per litre while Brent traded at above US$118, is politically effective and historically grounded, drawing on a social contract that dates back to the Sukarno era.
But it is also a strategy of fiscal absorption. The state budget acts as a shock absorber, not a shield. And the longer the crisis lasts, the thinner the cushion becomes.
The forced return to coal is perhaps the starkest illustration. Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines have reactivated or maximised coal-fired generation to compensate for gas and oil shortages, precisely as all three governments were promoting energy transition roadmaps.
The transition agenda is real, but it is being pursued on top of a fossil-fuel foundation that remains fully exposed to external disruption. When the disruption arrives, the foundation is reasserted.
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.
