There is an old instinct in Southeast Asia, older than Asean, older than the nation-state, older than the flags now fluttering outside our ministries and five-star hotels. When the sky changes, when the wind turns, when the elephants begin shifting their weight in the jungle, the small animals do not hold seminars on moral clarity. They listen. They smell the air. They move carefully.

Today, the air smells of 1914.

Not because history repeats itself with the punctuality of a Swiss train. It does not. History returns in different clothes, carrying newer weapons, speaking in fresher slogans, and insisting it has never been here before. But the pattern is familiar enough to be disturbing: a declining hegemon, a rising challenger, nervous allies, territorial disputes, naval build-ups, trade resentments, nationalist fever, and new technologies that make leaders believe they can move faster than wisdom.

This is the world Odd Arne Westad warns about in The Coming Storm. It is a warning Southeast Asia should not read as spectators in the cheap seats, but as people sitting uncomfortably close to the kitchen fire.

Because if America and China stumble into conflict, Asean will not be an audience.

It will be the table — and a sprawling one at that, anchoring a region of 684 million people and some US$3.84 trillion (RM15.29 trillion) in global goods trade.

Asean’s challenge is no longer simply how to avoid choosing between Washington and Beijing. It is how to build enough collective weight, resilience, and strategic usefulness that neither power can treat the region merely as terrain. Southeast Asia is not a chessboard. It is a crowded, noisy, ambitious, half-chaotic, half-brilliant neighbourhood of sovereign states with memories, interests, wounds, appetites, and agency.

For decades, Southeast Asia has performed one of the great diplomatic balancing acts of modern history. We have taken American security, Chinese trade, Japanese capital, European markets, Gulf money, Korean factories, Australian universities, and our own local genius for improvisation, and turned it into something resembling prosperity. We built malls over swamps, ports over fishing villages, data centres beside palm oil estates, semiconductor plants in Penang, industrial parks in Johor, and new capitals in the imagination of politicians who believe concrete can cure history.

We learned to smile at everyone. Shake every hand. Sign every memorandum. Serve tea to the Americans, lunch to the Chinese, dinner to the Japanese, and still have enough appetite left for a late-night nasi kandar with the Europeans.

This was not cowardice. It was survival.

Asean’s genius has always been its refusal to become anyone’s spear. It does not move like Nato. It does not thunder. It prefers commas, consensus, and communiqués so carefully worded that even the most aggressive sentence arrives wearing batik and apologising for the inconvenience. Western strategists mock this. They call it weak. They call it indecisive. They say Asean lacks teeth.

Perhaps. But in this part of the world, teeth are not always the point. Sometimes survival belongs to the creature that does not bite first.

Yet the old formula is under strain. The polite fiction that Southeast Asia can be everyone’s friend is being tested by a harsher world. The US no longer speaks only in the language of open markets and naval patrols. It speaks of export controls, friend-shoring, tariffs, technology denial, supply-chain security, and strategic alignment. China no longer speaks only in the language of shared development and ancient friendship. It speaks through coastguard vessels, artificial islands, maritime maps with heroic curves, infrastructure loans, rare earth leverage, and the enormous gravitational pull of its market.

One superpower wants Asean to help preserve the old order. The other wants Asean to help soften the arrival of a new one. Both insist they respect Asean’s autonomy. Both would prefer that Asean exercise it in their direction.

Malaysia sits almost perfectly inside this contradiction.

Geographically, it is blessed and cursed. It faces the Strait of Malacca, one of the world’s great maritime arteries, through which energy, goods, and strategic anxiety flow daily. It has claims and interests in the South China Sea, where Chinese assertiveness has turned reefs, shoals, fishing grounds, and oil blocks into pieces on a board larger than any one Asean country can control. It is deeply tied to China through trade, investment, tourism, manufacturing, and the quiet daily business of commerce. It is also tied to the US through technology, capital, education, security cooperation, and the semiconductor supply chain that makes modern life possible.

Penang, in this new world, is not merely Penang. It is no longer just char koay teow, colonial shophouses, clan temples, old money, new traffic, and uncles arguing about where the best prawn mee still lives. As one of the world’s important semiconductor hubs for packaging, assembly, and testing, it is now part of the nervous system of the 21st century.

In the old days, empires fought over ports, spices, rubber, tin, oil, and sea lanes. Today, they fight over wafers, algorithms, lithography machines, cloud infrastructure, rare earths, and who gets to train the machines that may one day help decide the opening hours of war.

The battlefield is no longer only where the soldiers stand. It is in customs forms, export permits, undersea cables, data centres, insurance premiums, shipping routes, sanctions lists, and the fine print of technology regulations drafted in Washington and answered in Beijing.

Southeast Asia has become the world’s favourite workaround.

When Washington tries to reduce dependence on China, supply chains do not simply come home to Ohio with a flag and a marching band. They move to Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore — often still connected to Chinese inputs, Chinese capital, Chinese components, or Chinese demand. When China seeks to hedge against American pressure, it too moves through Asean, using the region as market, factory floor, diplomatic partner, and strategic cushion.

This has been good for business. Factories hum. Ports expand. Ministers cut ribbons. Consultants discover new ways to say “resilience” while charging by the hour.

But there is a darker side.

The more Asean becomes the hinge between America and China, the more it becomes the place where both powers test each other’s limits.

That is where the comfort of the old Asean formula begins to run out.

For years, Southeast Asia treated great-power rivalry like weather. Sometimes hot. Sometimes stormy. Occasionally dangerous. But manageable, if one knew when to stay indoors, when to come out smiling with an umbrella, and when to pretend the thunder was someone else’s problem.

This time, the weather is becoming the climate.

Because the next phase of US-China rivalry will not be fought only in speeches, summits, tariffs, naval exercises, or those carefully disinfected communiqués that make war sound like a disagreement over catering.

It will run through the arteries of Southeast Asian life: chips, ports, data centres, sea lanes, insurance premiums, export permits, energy flows, sanctions lists, and the quiet assumptions on which our prosperity has been built.

That is why Asean cannot afford to be merely polite.

And Malaysia cannot afford to be merely lucky.

The elephants are moving again.

The question is no longer whether Southeast Asia can stay out of the storm.

The question is where the lightning will strike first.

Part Two: When the lightning strikes.

Abbi Kanthasamy is a Canadian entrepreneur, photographer and writer.