ON July 11, 1882, British warships anchored off Alexandria and unleashed a devastating barrage on the city’s fortifications. The pretext was “restoring order” and “protecting the Suez Canal.”
Within weeks, General Garnet Wolseley’s forces crushed the Egyptian army at Tel elKebir, turning the Khedive into a puppet.
The reality was far uglier: London forcibly seized Egypt’s fiscal sovereignty, diverted its vast cotton revenues to European bondholders, and transformed a proud civilisation into a debt colony – bled dry so that Lancashire’s mills could spin and British shareholders could prosper.
Fast forward to Aug 29, 2026. President Donald Trump announces a deal for a “huge US stake” in Venezuela’s 65 billion barrel petroleum reserves.
But this is no negotiation between equals. It is the 1882 playbook, republished with American firepower.
If might alone can seize the resources of the weak, then every international contract, every shipping lane, and every digital transaction becomes a hostage to raw force.
Nowhere is this lesson more urgent than in Southeast Asia. The world has watched the Strait of Hormuz with bated breath, recognising that any disruption there sends oil prices soaring and economies reeling. But we must take that warning and apply it to our own backyard – because the Strait of Malacca is equally, if not more, critical to the survival of globalisation.
Over 90,000 vessels transit the Malacca Strait annually, carrying roughly 40 per cent of global maritime trade and nearly 80 per cent of East Asia’s oil imports – an annual cargo value exceeding US$5 trillion. That makes it the world’s most important economic funnel.
But goods are only half the story. Most people do not realise that the seabed of the Malacca Strait hosts one of the densest concentrations of submarine fibreoptic cables on Earth.
These slender glass threads carry approximately 95 per cent of the world’s communications – 99 per cent of all transcontinental digital traffic. Now imagine the unthinkable: a hostile warship decides to park at the entrance of this 2.8km wide funnel.
It does not need to fire a single shot. By merely anchoring there, it could halt shipping, disrupt cable repair operations, and effectively hold the economies of China, India, Japan, and all of Southeast Asia hostage.
Half the region could go digitally dark in minutes. Financial markets would freeze. Supply chains would shatter. Hospitals would lose telemedicine; airports would lose flight coordination; governments would lose the ability to move money.
This is not hyperbole; it is the new reality of great power competition, unfolding right on our doorstep.
That is why Asean must rise to the occasion and do more. We cannot afford to be passive spectators while the giants circle our waters.
The good news is that we have practical, working mechanisms for cooperative security among the littoral states such as the Malacca Straits Patrol (MSP). But they are not enough. Today’s threats demand a broader, more institutionalised framework.
Asean must upgrade and multilateralise these local initiatives under the umbrella of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) , transforming ad hoc operational cooperation into a binding strategic commitment with explicit protocols for protecting both shipping and submarine cables.
This is precisely where the TAC becomes indispensable. This year marks its 50th anniversary – a treaty whose core principles include mutual respect, noninterference, peaceful dispute settlement, and the renunciation of force.
The TAC today has grown beyond its region to include 62 member states – almost a third of the entire United Nations, including major powers such as Germany, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the United States, China, and Iran.
Remarkably all the principal antagonists in today’s geopolitical rivalries have voluntarily subscribed to this single Asian framework of strategic restraint.
The US and China, Washington and Teheran – they have all signed the same pledge to settle disputes peacefully. This is a historic moment – an unprecedented opportunity for Asean to play a consequential global role. We have the venue, the treaty, and the membership. What we lack is the political will to transform the TAC from a diplomatic document into a living regional compact for crisis management.
Crucially, the machinery to do so already exists in the treaty’s own text. Article 14 of the TAC explicitly provides for the constitution of a High Council – a continuing body “to take cognizance of the existence of disputes or situations likely to disturb regional peace and harmony”.
Article 15 empowers the High Council to recommend appropriate means of settlement – good offices, mediation, inquiry, or conciliation – and to recommend measures to prevent the deterioration of a dispute.
Yet, remarkably, in five decades, the High Council has never been formally invoked. The mechanism sits on the shelf while the world around it grows more dangerous.
Asean must finally activate it – not as a crisis afterthought, but as a standing, credible forum for de-escalation and trust building.
Asean should use this golden anniversary to operationalise the TAC in concrete ways. We need joint maritime surveillance and real time incident hotlines among the littoral states – Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand – including explicit protocols for protecting submarine cables from both physical and hybrid threats.
We need a neutral, Asean chaired arbitration mechanism so that any dispute over transit, military presence, or cable integrity is settled around a table, not at the barrel of a gun. And we need a clear collective commitment that no external power will be granted unilateral “policing” rights over our waters – a commitment that the MSP was originally designed to forestall when the United States proposed policing the strait in the early 2000s.
Our strategic objective must be clear: build enough regional resilience that Southeast Asia remains peaceful and autonomous even when the great powers become unpredictable. If we succeed, Southeast Asia becomes a model for the Global Majority – proof that we can collectively defend our sovereignty without surrendering to any empire.
* Dr Shahridan Faiez is chairman of Citizens International, a civil society organisation based in Penang dedicated to internationalism, peaceful coexistence and global cooperation for a better world
