Southeast Asian leaders adopted a contingency plan Friday in Cebu, Philippines, to blunt the impact of the Iran war on ordinary people and their economies, while admitting that some of the most basic fixes, like a regional fuel reserve, will be hard to enforce. The summit was held on the central island province of Cebu, where President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordered the usual pomp and pageantry stripped away in the name of worldwide economic headwinds — a tidy way of saying the region’s rulers are trying to manage a crisis they did not create and cannot easily contain.
Who Pays First
The people already taking the hit are the ones at the bottom: Southeast Asians facing fuel price spikes, and more than a million of their citizens who work and live in the Middle East. Several Southeast Asian citizens have been killed since the United States and Israel launched military strikes on Feb. 28 against Iran, and the hostilities have continued sporadically despite a month-old ceasefire, especially in the strategic Strait of Hormuz. The war’s effects are not abstract for workers, families, and migrants; they are showing up in deaths, disrupted travel, and the kind of price shocks that hit households long before they reach summit communiques.
ASEAN’s contingency plan calls for actions including the ratification possibly this year of an agreement that would pave the way for coordinated emergency fuel sharing, planning a regional power grid and fuel stockpile, and diversifying the region’s sources of crude oil. Promoting the use of electric vehicles and studying the use of new technologies, including civilian nuclear energy, were also part of the crisis plan. The contingency steps will be implemented immediately, but the establishment of a regional fuel stockpile and power grid is a complex matter and may take a long time, Marcos said.
The Machinery of “Coordination”
Marcos framed the problem as one of logistics and regional resilience, but the facts point to a familiar hierarchy: decisions are made at the top, while ordinary people absorb the costs of delay. He asked, “Let’s talk about the fuel reserve. Is it going to be in one single place? Is it going to be scattered through the whole of ASEAN?” A regional power grid that allows countries to trade electricity has been considered for years but has only been realized “at a fairly small level,” Marcos said, adding that the leaders were unfazed. “They are committed to making this succeed because everyone is suffering and everyone wants to get out of this situation,” he said.
That suffering is the real headline. The summit’s language about stockpiles, grids, and emergency sharing is a response to a system in which energy security is managed through state coordination after the damage is already done. The leaders are talking about future agreements while the present crisis keeps grinding through fuel markets, infrastructure, and the lives of people far from the conference room.
A key dilemma for the ASEAN leaders was how to carry out large-scale evacuations from the Middle East if widespread hostilities flared up again. The joint declaration issued by the leaders called on the regional bloc’s 11 state members to share information and strengthen coordination with international organizations “to ensure the safety and welfare of ASEAN nationals in affected areas.” That is the language of institutional management, but it also reveals the scale of the problem: more than a million citizens are exposed to a war zone while officials debate coordination mechanisms.
What They Call Stability
Marcos told fellow leaders during their summit that the Iran war exposed the weaknesses of Southeast Asian nations to external shocks and warned that recovery could take years even if the war ends now. “Even if the tensions de-escalate in time, the damage to critical infrastructure, to vital systems and trust in general will continue to be felt for years to come,” Marcos said. He also said Southeast Asia will remain “in this limbo situation” until the Iran war ends. “Until the fighting ends, until the bombing ends, then it is very difficult to put together any kind of solution,” he said.
Known for their conservative and careful rhetoric, top delegates to the ASEAN summit avoided blunt expressions of their disappointment over the continuing hostilities. Thailand’s Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow was more emphatic, calling for the current ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran to be extended and assurances for the safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz. “This war should not have occurred in the first place,” Sihasak told AP in a brief interview and added that all ASEAN states were alarmed. “We don’t know what the objectives are right?”
Despite the focus on the Middle East, the leaders also took up major regional flash points, including the South China Sea territorial disputes involving Beijing, a five-year civil war in Myanmar and a recent border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia. Aside from the Philippines, ASEAN consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. East Timor was accepted as a full member in October last year.