THE war in West Asia is disrupting far more than energy markets. For import-dependent countries already facing climate impacts and fiscal strain, crises are arriving simultaneously and our governance systems are not built for that. 

Oil dominates the conversation whenever West Asia is in crisis. Brent crude tickers scroll across newsrooms. Think tanks model disruption scenarios for the Strait of Hormuz. In Washington and Brussels, policymakers are scrambling to calibrate responses around what conflict means for energy flows. This framing is understandable. It is also, for countries like Malaysia, dangerously narrow. 

Here is what the oil-price lens misses. Malaysia sources roughly 61% of its oil imports and 30% of its liquefied natural gas from the Gulf region, with around 40% of its crude transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Those are significant exposures. But they are not the most consequential ones. 

The country depends on imports. It grows barely half of its own rice while vegetable self-sufficiency sits below 47%. For livestock, the figure drops to under 17%. In 2024, Malaysia spent US$23.4 billion (RM93.7 billion) importing agrofood products. When the supply routes that carry those imports are disrupted, what arrives in Malaysian kitchens is not an energy crisis. It is a food crisis, compounded by dependence on Gulf-origin inputs including fertiliser, helium and sulfur that most people never think about until they disappear. 

We saw the preview when the Houthis attacked the Red Sea shipping in 2023 and 2024. Rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope tacked 10 to 14 days onto Asia-Europe transit times and pushed freight rates sharply upward. Malaysians noticed this first at the supermarket, not the petrol pump. Bread, dairy, infant formula. The price moved before fuel did. 

The knock-on effects reached further than most people realise. When fertiliser supply from the Gulf tightens and prices jump, palm oil smallholders, who form the backbone of rural agriculture, respond the only way they can: they use less fertiliser. That decision, made field by field across thousands of smallholdings, depresses yields for multiple harvest cycles after the original disruption has passed. We saw this happen again during early days of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. The Malaysian government has since brought Petronas, the country's sole domestic producer of urea and ammonia, into strategic discussions to shore up supply. That tells you how seriously the vulnerability is being taken. 

The agriculture of the South East Asian region depends on imports to feed the population. Indonesia, for all its agricultural vastness, depends on imported wheat and fertiliser and gets hit by the same price dynamics. The Philippines, which imports enormous quantities of rice, absorbs every logistics tremor as a cost-of-living shock. What the international press frames as an energy story plays out across Southeast Asian households as something more immediate, escalating food prices. Fiscal security needs to include a thinking that crisis management must include trickle down impacts as this will compound further, a reminder that most of us are still recovering from Covid-19 pandemic just six years ago. 

This crisis adds another dimension to this that receives almost no attention. Every time a major conflict absorbs the world's political bandwidth, climate commitments quietly erode, almost unnecessary to the discussion. Not necessarily through bad faith, though that exists too, but structurally. The Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, the Loss and Damage Fund that governments agreed to at COP28, they all draw on the same pool of donor-country generosity that shrinks the moment defence budgets expand. The Asian Development Bank has projected that climate change could cut GDP across developing Asia and the Pacific by 17% by 2070 under a high-emissions pathway. Preventing that requires sustained investment now.

We are currently experiencing 11 years of warmest global temperature. We cannot think that climate change will stop happening just because our attention is somewhere else more immediate. For countries already living with compound climate impacts, the implicit logic of the international system, security first, climate later, is not just frustrating. It is materially dangerous. The floods do not wait. The end of 2021 and early 2022 saw a large part of Asia experiencing the most extreme flood in modern history. 

That disaster arrived alongside global supply-chain disruption, pandemic-related economic strain and rising commodity prices. Not sequentially. Simultaneously. This is what multiple crises and compounding impacts actually look like, now aggravated by geopolitics.

Responses to this require urgency. Malaysia names geopolitical supply disruption and climate change among the defining challenges facing the agriculture sector in its National Food Security Policy 2030. The government has convened cross-ministry coordination, is tracking over a hundred economic indicators in real time, and has begun scenario planning for different conflict durations. More than half of those indicators have been flagged as requiring attention.

But these scenarios being modelled are framed overwhelmingly around energy supply and fiscal management. What happens when a fertiliser price spike collides with ringgit depreciation, a bad monsoon season and ballooning subsidy costs at the same time? That compound scenario sits in the gaps of governance. No single playbook covers it, because the problem is not any single disruption. It is how disruptions interact with the systems. 

Covid taught this lesson, though too few governments have absorbed it. The countries that handled the pandemic best were not the richest. South Korea moved fast because MERS had burned institutional memory into its public health system. Singapore's whole-of-government response reflected years of running scenario exercises for exactly these kinds of overlapping emergencies. What made the difference was not budgets. It was that senior officials had already rehearsed hard decisions before the real ones arrived. 

Applying that thinking here means something specific. It means modelling how shocks travel across systems, through supply chains and currency markets and food networks and fiscal constraints, before the next multiple and compounding crisis forces adaptiveness. It means putting decision-makers through exercises where the choices are genuinely uncomfortable, because that discomfort in a meeting room is what buys clarity when it counts. 

It also means refusing to treat climate and environment as a side agenda that gets shelved whenever security demands attention and the economy tightens. Climate shocks make every other category of crisis worse. A scenario framework that leaves them out will consistently underestimate what it is trying to prepare for. 

Middle-power countries have a particular role to play. Within Asean and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Malaysia occupies an unusual position: deep economic ties to the Gulf, embedded in Southeast Asian strategic cooperation, acutely exposed to climate impacts, and already demonstrating that it takes crisis coordination seriously. That combination is precisely the vantage point from which to argue that integrated crisis governance is not aspirational language for communiques but an operational necessity that governments need to build now. 

The war in West Asia is a human tragedy first. But for the Global South, it is simultaneously a food crisis, a climate setback and a stress test of governance systems that keep failing under conditions they were never designed for. The danger is not any single disruption. It is the assumption, still embedded in our institutions, that crises arrive one at a time. 

That assumption has been proven wrong repeatedly. We cannot afford to keep governing as though it has not. 

Maszlee Malik is a former minister of education and is chairman of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) Malaysia.
Aznie Rahim is a climate adaptation researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Malaya, specialising in adaptation governance and water-climate systems in Southeast Asia.