Editor’s Note
by Siu Tzyy Wei, Lead Editor - Maritime Crescent Desk
Direction is the first thing to go missing.
This week, Indonesia’s navy drifts into a drill it never meant to send a message with. Malaysia’s skies fill with smoke that started somewhere else. Brunei’s enforcers chase a drug trade moving faster than the frameworks meant to hold it. Three different waters, one shared problem: knowing which way is forward when the horizon won’t stay still.
What the horizon continues to waver, the hands holding the compass has to hold.
Indonesia 🇮🇩
Adrift
by Simon
On the morning of August 12, an Indonesian warship drew alongside a Chinese guided-missile frigate in the waters east of Taiwan and ran through a set of maneuvers. It was the first time China had exercised with a foreign navy there. Within hours, Taiwan called the drill dangerous and Washington called it destabilising. Jakarta said it was just a routine drill on the way home from Russia. In one morning, a country long known for its diplomacy had ended up on the wrong side of almost everyone.
To see why that matters, it is important to be reminded that Indonesia’s bebas-aktif doctrine - independent and active - meant that Indonesia belonged to no minilateral blocs; its weight in the region was therefore diplomatic and never military. Indonesia helped found ASEAN, helped broker an end to the war in Cambodia, and helped win the archipelagic principle that lets an archipelago hold together as a single state. That was the currency, to be trusted by every side because it was owned by none.
A foreign navy alongside China’s own on the east of Taiwan, reads as exactly the kind of image Beijing has sought elsewhere in the strait: proof, of a kind, that another country accepts a presence in waters it does not fully control. That is why Taiwan and Washington reacted, and why the routine framing did not hold. The ship was returning from an exercise with Russia and stopped to drill with China as a passing courtesy, the kind of call that looks routine at the point it is made and consequential only in hindsight. A state built on non-alignment can survive being read the wrong way once. What it cannot afford is for that reading to become a habit.
Indonesia’s own veteran diplomats and strategic think tanks have been warning of this for months. The picture they draw is consistent. A diplomacy that has turned reactive and personal, run by impulse and built around the President rather than the professionals who once conducted it, with a foreign minister widely seen as a presidential loyalist with no diplomatic background who is barely visible in the job he holds. ASEAN, the platform Indonesia’s influence was built on, is left to idle while Jakarta prefers deals struck one capital at a time. The patient institution-building has given way to something narrower and more defensive. And the drill is that shift at sea, which is motion without direction.
In fairness, a Taiwanese official said navies run exercises with all kinds of partners, and therefore a country that guards its independence owes Washington no explanation for talking to anyone. as much, that navies do this routinely. The complaint is not that Indonesia dealt with China, but that it did so without appearing to decide anything, and let its flag serve a message it would never have chosen to send. A generation ago, Indonesia wrote the rules other states followed in these waters. Today, it followed someone else’s.
Simon is an external contributor for The ASEAN Frontier.
Malaysia 🇲🇾
The Return of Haze
by Muhammad Aiman Bin Roszaimi, in Cyberjaya
The haze has returned to Southeast Asia. Once again, Malaysia is breathing air polluted by fires that do not necessarily begin within its own borders. What makes the current episode particularly concerning is its timing, as Southeast Asia is entering a period of stronger El Niño conditions, potentially fuelling a dry and hot environment in which land and forest fires can spread rapidly.
Malaysia has already begun feeling the effects. In mid-August, several locations recorded unhealthy Air Pollutant Index (API) readings, with Sarawak among the worst affected. Samarahan, Serian and Kuching recorded particularly high readings, while unhealthy conditions were also reported in parts of Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya. The haze has been attributed largely to land and forest fires, particularly in neighbouring Indonesia.
The underlying problem, however, is more complicated than simply blaming “forest fires”. Land clearing and agricultural practices, including the use of fire, remain important drivers. Peatlands make the situation particularly difficult because drained peat can burn for extended periods and produce large quantities of smoke. El Niño does not create these fires, but it creates the conditions that allow them to start more easily, spread faster and become harder to extinguish.
The consequences extend well beyond poor visibility and into public health, disruption of livelihood from education to aviation and tourism. Malaysia experienced this in 2015 where almost 7,000 schools were closed as air pollution reached hazardous levels.
The problem is arguably regional by nature. Haze does not respect national borders, while the authority to prevent fires largely remains national. This has long been one of ASEAN’s most difficult environmental governance challenges.
ASEAN has responded through the 2002 ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (AATHP), a framework for prevention, monitoring and cooperation. More recently, ASEAN established the Sub-Regional Ministerial Steering Committee and has been working towards operationalising the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Transboundary Haze Pollution Control. At its 27th meeting on July 2026, ASEAN members reaffirmed their commitment to the AATHP and supported initiatives on sustainable peatland and haze-free land management.
Yet the recurrent haze suggests that regional cooperation still has a gap between coordination and implementation. ASEAN can monitor hotspots, share information and coordinate assistance, but the most important interventions such as land management, enforcement against illegal burning and protection of peatlands still remain dependent on individual states.
Malaysia therefore needs to approach haze as more than an annual environmental emergency. Strengthening domestic fire prevention, satellite and hotspot monitoring, public health preparedness and coordination between federal and state authorities will be essential. At the ASEAN level, Kuala Lumpur should push for stronger joint monitoring, sustainable peatland management and financing mechanisms that make prevention economically viable.
The challenge is ultimately political as much as environmental.
ASEAN has spent decades developing mechanisms to manage transboundary haze. The question now is whether those mechanisms can prevent the next crisis rather than simply manage its consequences. If haze continues to return whenever El Niño arrives, Southeast Asia still lacks a genuinely regional solution.
Aiman is a PhD candidate in Security and Strategic Analysis at the National University of Malaysia. His research focuses on Malaysia’s space policy, ASEAN regional security, and the strategic implications of emerging technologies. His work explores how Malaysia’s defense policy and strategic culture shape its approach to outer space.
Brunei Darussalam 🇧🇳
ASEAN's Drug Framework at the 47th ASOD
by Wira Gregory Ejau, in Bandar Seri Begawan
Between August 4 and 6, Brunei participated in the 47th ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Drug Matters (ASOD), held virtually under Thailand’s chairmanship. The delegation, led by Narcotics Control Bureau Director Datuk Paduka Mohd Zalani Ismail, joined senior officials from all ten ASEAN member states and Dialogue Partners to exchange views on the region’s drug situation and shape the next phase of cooperative policy, with the meeting’s most significant output being the launch of the ASEAN Drug Monitoring Report 2026.
The report’s findings demonstrate a sharp deterioration in progress, as UNODC data released in June confirmed that methamphetamine seizures in East and Southeast Asia reached 349 tons in 2025, which was a 48% increase over the previous year’s already-record figure, and more than five times the quantity seized a decade ago. Ketamine seizures simultaneously reached 52.5 tons, at an 185% increase from 2024. As it stands, these fluctuations are indicative of a regional drug market that has expanded faster than the enforcement architecture assembled to contain it.
The structural driver is Myanmar’s ongoing civil conflict, which has created conditions in Shan State under which industrial-scale methamphetamine production has expanded largely unchecked since 2021. The state that is the primary source of the regional drug crisis is simultaneously one in which ASEAN’s non-interference principle has constrained meaningful collective action. This places ASOD in an analytically uncomfortable position, whereby a cooperative policy forum whose central challenge is faced with a governance collapse that cooperative policy will find difficulty in resolving. Working group outcomes, treatment standards and preventive education represent genuine regional work, but it operates downstream of a production dynamic that must be addressed at source.
The current ASEAN Work Plan on Securing Communities Against Illicit Drugs ran from 2016 to 2025, and its Final Review is now underway, with meetings like these shaping the terms that define the bloc’s drug cooperation architecture for the next decade. The question now is whether said framework is specific to the synthetic drug surge and the maritime trafficking corridors that increasingly carry it, or to largely reproduce the assumptions of its predecessor.
As a small maritime border state with strict domestic enforcement, Brunei’s Narcotics Control Bureau sits within the Prime Minister’s Office and operates under a legal framework that maintains zero tolerance on drug offences. Characteristic of a transit risk state rather than a production or consumption centre of significant scale, Brunei’s contribution to ASOD is procedural and normative, with consistent participation, data contribution to the monitoring system, and sustained institutional presence. Flagged as a priority at the 47th ASOD, the preparation for the October ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Drug Matters will be the next indicator of how the bloc intends to respond to a regional drug situation that its existing tools have so far been unable to reverse.
Gregory is an MSc candidate in Strategic Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He works as a freelance writer specializing in international history, conflict, and counterterrorism, with experience in academia, investigative journalism, and voluntary uniformed service. He currently provides research assistance with the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) under their Southeast Asian Security and Defence Internship Programme and conducts investigations on regional security and transnational crime for a confidential company.
Editorial Deadline 15/08/2026 11:59 PM (UTC +8)
