They Will Not Park a Fleet at Our Doorstep. They Will Not Have To.

Let me ask you a question before I begin. When you read about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and bringing the most powerful military on earth to the negotiating table, did it occur to you that someone else was watching? Not just watching — studying. Taking notes. Running scenarios.

Because it occurred to me.

The Strait of Malacca is not the Strait of Hormuz. It is nine times narrower. At its tightest point — the Phillip Channel, near Singapore — it measures just three kilometres across. Approximately 40% of global trade passes through it every year. Over 80% of China’s oil imports transit this waterway. It sits between two majority-Muslim nations — Malaysia and Indonesia — and it is, at this moment, the most strategically consequential body of water that most Malaysians have given the least serious thought to.

That is about to change. Whether we want it to or not.

What Happened on 13 April 2026

On the same day that Trump announced a naval blockade of Iran’s ports — the same day oil surged past $100 a barrel, the same day the ceasefire he had celebrated six days earlier was openly collapsing — US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was hosting Indonesian Defense Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin at the Pentagon.

They signed a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership.

Al Jazeera reported that the signing came days after reports that the US was seeking “blanket” overflight access for military aircraft through Indonesian airspace, with several media outlets reporting that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto had approved the proposal. The Indonesian Ministry of Defence clarified that only a preliminary draft was under internal discussion and that the document was “neither final nor binding.”

Military.com confirmed the parameters of the partnership: deeper military modernisation, joint training and operations, exploration of asymmetric warfare and advanced technologies. Separately, Indonesian officials confirmed that talks continue on a Letter of Intent for blanket overflight access for US military aircraft through airspace that sits directly atop the Strait of Malacca’s vital sea lanes.

The Print noted what the strategic framing makes clear: any potential overflight access to US military aircraft through Indonesian airspace would allow the US to monitor activity over the Strait of Malacca — another global chokepoint for trade. Defense Secretary Hegseth posted on X: “It was an honor to host Indonesian Defense Minister Sjafrie Sjams at the Pentagon today. I was proud to announce that we are elevating our relationship to a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership, in recognition of the strength and potential of our bilateral defense ties.”

Hegseth said this the same day Trump was blockading Iran.

Think about that sentence for a moment.

The Numbers That Make Malacca Irreplaceable

The Strait of Malacca spans approximately 800 kilometres and ranges in width from 2.7 kilometres to 250 kilometres. It serves as the principal maritime corridor linking the Indian Ocean to the Pacific via the South China Sea, bordered by Peninsular Malaysia to the east and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the west. Over 90,000 merchant vessels pass through the strait annually, transporting nearly 25% of global trade.

The strait carries roughly 40% of global trade. Malaysia is home to two of the world’s top 20 busiest ports — Port Klang and Port of Tanjung Pelepas — both of which depend entirely on the Strait’s traffic. Any disruption is not a distant geopolitical problem for this country. It is a direct hit to how Malaysia earns and moves its money.

The US Energy Information Administration confirms that the strait recorded over 94,000 vessel transits in 2024 alone. Nearly half of those vessels are bound for China. 80% of China’s oil imports and 60% of its total maritime trade pass through this chokepoint.

This dependency is not a secret in Beijing. It has a name. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao coined it decades ago: the Malacca Dilemma. The Bloomberg analysis from Taipei Times summarised it plainly: “Chinese strategists worry that, in a conflict, US forces could threaten the sea lanes that carry much of its imported oil. Washington has far greater capacity to project power in this area than China does, thanks to its naval reach and network of allies and partners.”

The Iran war has made that vulnerability unmistakably visible to everyone paying attention.

Gu Dingguo, a research fellow at East China University specialising in diplomacy and security, published a research note in the South China Morning Post arguing that the US war with Iran reflects Washington’s increased focus on a “global maritime blockade” strategy. He described it as an “unchangeable reality” that the US will intensify its focus on the world’s busiest shipping straits to stifle Beijing’s development. He called the Strait of Malacca “next in line” after Hormuz — and stated directly that the American-Indonesian defence agreement was not a coincidence.

Modern Diplomacy, writing on 24 April 2026, concluded: “The Strait of Malacca may have become a non-military weapon against China for the US. Its recently signed defence pact with Indonesia is nothing but a strategic card against China, which has recently defied the US blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. The USA, being unsuccessful in containing China in the Strait of Hormuz, is now attempting to gauge the capability of China in the Strait of Malacca.”

What Iran Just Demonstrated — And Why It Terrifies Washington

I have argued in previous pieces that the Iran war is, at its core, about what happens when a country with an ideological foundation that forbids vassalage controls a chokepoint that the global economy cannot bypass. Iran did not accomplish what it accomplished through economic might or technological superiority. It accomplished it through geography — and through a governing framework that leaves no legitimate room for surrendering sovereignty to a foreign power.

That combination is what makes a chokepoint dangerous to empire. Geography provides the leverage. Ideology ensures the leverage gets used.

Bloomberg’s analysis, published in the Taipei Times, was explicit: “The war in Iran has underscored Beijing’s Achilles’ heel. In a crisis — whether over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or other points of tension between the two powers — the strait could be drawn into US-China competition.” The same analysis noted that “disruption would reverberate across global supply chains, raising energy costs, delaying trade flows and intensifying economic shocks worldwide.”

What Washington watched happen at Hormuz is a live demonstration of the scenario it most fears in Malacca. An ideologically grounded government in control of a critical strait, with no structural incentive to accommodate American strategic priorities. Iran held Hormuz and forced a ceasefire on its own terms. Two ideologically grounded governments — one on each side of Malacca — would represent a categorically different order of strategic problem for Washington than two secular nationalist administrations that can be diplomatically managed or quietly purchased.

A Lesson Written in Blood: 1973 and What Came After

This is not a new problem for Washington. The playbook was written in 1973.

On 17 October of that year, Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced a total oil embargo against the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa — nations that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The US Department of State’s own historical record confirms the scale of what happened: the price of oil quadrupled. The United States experienced its first significant fuel shortage since World War II. Nixon seriously considered military action to seize oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi as a last resort.

Britannica’s account adds the psychological dimension: “The embargo both banned petroleum exports to the targeted nations and introduced cuts in oil production. Oil’s spot market price soared from under three dollars per barrel to more than twenty dollars per barrel. OPEC successfully exploited the situation to wrest control over the international petroleum market from the cartel of private oil companies that had controlled it for half a century.”

Washington took note. Decades of response followed.

Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, nationalised its oil sector and used oil revenues to build genuine state capacity. It participated in the 1973 embargo and continued pursuing independent economic policy. In 2000, Saddam announced that Iraqi oil would trade in euros, not US dollars. Three years later, the United States invaded on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Iraq has not recovered as a functioning state.

Libya, under Gaddafi, was Africa’s most prosperous nation after nationalising its oil industry following the 1973 crisis. Gaddafi was actively working to establish a gold dinar as a pan-African oil currency — an arrangement that, had it succeeded, would have allowed African oil-producing states to price their resources outside the dollar system entirely. In 2011, NATO intervened. Libya became a failed state with open slave markets. Gaddafi was killed. Foreign Affairs noted plainly: “Only Libya’s Gaddafi was dislodged, thanks to NATO’s intervention.” Libya, once the most prosperous country in Africa, was destroyed.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Gaddafi is dead. The government that used the oil weapon in 1973 — Egypt under Anwar Sadat — shifted to a full peace treaty with Israel by 1979 and has been on American financial assistance ever since. Syria has been reduced to ruins. Sudan broken. Every Arab leader who seriously deployed the oil weapon, or attempted to price resources outside the dollar system, or pursued genuine economic sovereignty — the record of what happened to them is not a theory. It is a documented pattern. The US Department of State’s own historians have written about it.

The Secular Nationalist Problem

The argument I am making is precise, and I want to state it without ambiguity.

The Americans and Israelis are not simply afraid of Muslim-majority countries controlling strategic chokepoints. They are afraid of a specific kind of Muslim-majority government — one whose founding ideology makes it structurally impossible to subordinate sovereignty to Washington’s requirements.

Secular nationalist governments in this region can be managed. The mechanism varies. Sometimes it is financial — development loans, trade preferences, currency arrangements. Sometimes it is social — the cultivation of a business and professional class with economic interests tied to the Western-dominated system. Sometimes it is institutional — intelligence relationships, military training programmes, the slow penetration of key governmental agencies over years and decades. Sometimes it is personal — the compromising of individual leaders.

History has demonstrated all of these approaches working, across multiple countries and multiple decades. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the Gulf monarchies, Indonesia under Suharto, Malaysia under various administrations — all operated within parameters that did not seriously threaten American strategic interests, whatever their public rhetoric suggested.

Islamist governments present a categorically different calculation. Not because they are more extreme in any conventional sense, but because their source of political legitimacy is fundamentally different. A government that derives its mandate from divine sovereignty — from the principle that authority ultimately belongs to God rather than to any foreign power or international financial institution — faces an irreducible conflict when asked to make the compromises that external management requires. It cannot grant military basing rights without contradicting its own foundational principles. It cannot suppress its population on behalf of Western strategic interests without betraying the constituency that put it in power. It cannot be bought with development loans denominated in the very currency that its ideological framework identifies as an instrument of subjugation.

Iran has demonstrated for forty-six years that this posture is sustainable, even under maximum economic pressure. Sheikh Imran Hosein described it as “phenomenal integrity” — not an endorsement of the Iranian government’s every action, but a recognition that Iran has held a line that every other Muslim state in the region has abandoned, under pressure that would have broken most governments in the world.

PAS, PKS, and the Nightmare Scenario

The Lowy Institute’s analysis of maritime chokepoints framed the strategic calculus with clarity: “Maritime choke points are narrow sea lanes that funnel international shipping through constrained passages, often bordered by the sovereign territories of multiple states. These passages, while enabling global trade, are also potential flashpoints in times of tension or conflict. Due to their geographic and economic value, they are vulnerable to interdiction, blockade, or militarisation.”

The scenario that does not feature in mainstream analysis — but that any serious strategist in Washington or Tel Aviv has considered — is not a military confrontation at the Strait of Malacca. Military confrontation is expensive, internationally exposed, and produces exactly the kind of backlash that makes managing the region harder.

The scenario that serious strategists consider is democratic. Two elections. PAS winning in Malaysia. PKS forming a coalition in Indonesia. Two majority-Muslim nations, each with a government whose foundational political philosophy holds that sovereignty cannot be surrendered to a foreign power, sitting on either side of the most consequential shipping lane on earth.

That is the scenario that no fleet needs to address militarily — because the destabilisation happens long before it fully forms.

The pattern is not subtle. It has been used in Iran before 1979 — a CIA-backed coup in 1953 that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalised Iranian oil. It was used in Indonesia in 1965 — a military coup that brought Suharto to power and killed an estimated 500,000 to one million people, primarily members of the Indonesian Communist Party, with US intelligence providing lists of names. It was used across South America, across Africa, across the Middle East. The specific mechanics change. The underlying logic does not.

Gu Dingguo at East China University made the connection explicit in his South China Morning Post analysis: Washington’s entire strategic posture — from the Iran war to the Indonesia defence pact — reflects the doctrine of maintaining control through maritime chokepoints. The US, he argued, is building a global maritime blockade capability. The Strait of Malacca is the next node in that architecture.

Bloomberg’s Karishma Vaswani, writing for the Taipei Times on 25 April 2026, was precise about the structural vulnerability: “Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore border the strait and jointly manage it, but have no common framework to deal with pressure in their own waters. Existing cooperation has largely been limited to operational issues such as piracy and safety, but that approach is poorly suited to geopolitical pressure.”

No common framework. No shared security doctrine. Three countries, each with different relationships to Washington, each with different domestic political pressures, each with different calculations about what accommodation of American strategic interests costs and what it buys.

That fragmentation is not an accident. It is a condition that is useful to maintain.

What Indonesia Is Already Being Offered

Military.com confirmed that the US-Indonesia partnership includes “enhanced military exercises, advanced technology collaboration, and the modernisation of defense capabilities.” Indonesia’s military modernisation needs are real — Jakarta has long sought to upgrade its air force and naval capabilities.

Caixin Global’s analysis of the pact noted that the Indonesian Foreign Ministry warned the agreement risks “pulling Jakarta into South China Sea tensions.” It also noted that a security policy shift in Jakarta “could undermine Malacca’s perceived neutrality and stability” — the quality that has allowed the strait to function as a neutral commercial artery for the entire region.

This is the mechanism. Not fleets. Not ultimatums. Military modernisation packages. Training programmes. Technology transfers. Intelligence sharing. The gradual deepening of institutional ties that reshape what is politically possible in Jakarta over years and decades, creating dependencies and relationships that make certain decisions — the wrong decisions, from Washington’s strategic perspective — progressively harder to make.

Pepe Escobar, whose work on Southeast Asian geopolitics spans three decades, has consistently argued that American strategy in maritime Southeast Asia is precisely Mackinderian — prevent the consolidation of any Eurasian power bloc by maintaining leverage over the chokepoints through which Eurasian trade must pass. Modern Diplomacy’s analysis, drawing on Alfred Mahan’s sea power theory, concluded: “Countries across the world are engaged in a race to control sea lanes, gradually leading to the weaponization of maritime chokepoints worldwide. The Strait of Malacca, possibly the next one to be weaponised, reminds us of the enduring relevance of Mahan’s sea power theory in the contemporary scenario.”

Mahan’s theory, reduced to its essentials: whoever controls the sea lanes controls commerce. Whoever controls commerce controls power. Washington has not forgotten this. It has simply learned to apply it through defence pacts rather than gunboats.

The Question Malaysia Has Not Seriously Asked

Let me be direct about what this article is asking.

Malaysia is home to two of the world’s top 20 busiest ports. International trade is central to how this country earns its living. The Strait of Melaka is not on our doorstep — it is our doorstep.

The Iran war demonstrated something that Malaysian and Indonesian policymakers need to understand with cold clarity: geography is leverage only if the government controlling that geography has the political foundation to use it. Iran used its leverage. It forced a ceasefire on its own terms. It did this not because it is militarily superior to the United States, but because forty-six years of a governing ideology that forbids vassalage meant it had nothing left to lose by using its geography as a weapon.

The question for Malaysia and Indonesia is not whether Washington will come for the Strait of Malacca directly. It will not. It never has to. The question is whether the governments on either side of that strait will, over the next decade, develop the institutional, ideological, and strategic coherence to treat their geography as sovereignty rather than as leverage available for rent.

Bloomberg’s analysis warned: “Failing to do so means the Strait of Malacca would become another contested artery of international trade. In an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry, the costs of such fragmentation would be felt far beyond Southeast Asia. The global economy cannot afford another shock.”

It cannot. But the shock, if it comes, will not arrive as a fleet at the Phillip Channel. It will arrive as a defence pact signed at the Pentagon. As an overflight agreement negotiated in Jakarta. As a political crisis in Kuala Lumpur, engineered from outside and sold domestically as something else entirely.

The Arab world understood what 1973 meant — only after every leader who used the oil weapon had been removed from power. By then, understanding it was no longer useful.

We do not have the luxury of learning this lesson after the fact.

Sources: Al Jazeera — “Indonesia, US Sign Major Defence Cooperation Agreement,” 14 April 2026; Military.com — “US and Indonesia Form Major Defense Cooperation Partnership,” 14 April 2026; The Print — “US-Indonesia Sign Key Defence Pact, Washington Eyes Strait of Malacca,” 14 April 2026; Caixin Global — “Analysis: US-Indonesia Defense Pact Sparks Debate Over Malacca Strait Security,” 21 April 2026; Modern Diplomacy — “After Hormuz, All Eyes on the Strait of Malacca,” 24 April 2026; Bloomberg Opinion / Taipei Times — “How Asia Should Deal With the Malacca Dilemma,” 25 April 2026; Lowy Institute — “From Gallipoli to the Strait of Malacca: Why Maritime Choke Points Still Decide the Fate of Nations,” 2025; Open Magazine — “From Strait of Hormuz to Malacca: Is the US Expanding Its Strategic Grip,” April 2026; Daily Star — “US May Be Eyeing Strait of Malacca After Hormuz,” April 2026; SAYS.com — “The US Has Its Eyes On The Strait Of Melaka,” April 2026; Gu Dingguo — South China Morning Post research note, April 2026; US Department of State Office of the Historian — “Oil Embargo 1973–1974”; Britannica — Arab Oil Embargo; Foreign Affairs — “How the 1973 Oil Embargo Saved the Planet,” October 2013; Baker Institute — “Chaos in Energy Markets Then and Now: 50 Years After the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo,” 2023; EBSCO Research Starters — “Arab Oil Embargo of 1973”; US Energy Information Administration — Strait of Malacca vessel transit data, 2024.