Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Looi Teck Kheong – ASEAN specialist consultant, advocate, and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore and author of “The Enforcement Age: The Maduro Capture and the End of Strategic Patience” (2026) – is the 513th of “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Explain why the conventional framing of kinetic conflict in the Strait of Malacca is incomplete.
The conventional framing assumes that the Strait of Malacca becomes strategically relevant only during a direct military confrontation involving blockade, mining, piracy escalation, or missile attacks. That view is increasingly incomplete because modern geopolitical competition is now conducted as much through regulatory coercion, sanctions, inspections, insurance restrictions, and compliance fragmentation as through kinetic force.
Malacca does not need to be physically closed to become dysfunctional. The more plausible disruption scenario is political and operational rather than military. A U.S.-China confrontation over Taiwan or the South China Sea could generate incompatible compliance demands on ASEAN littoral states without a single missile entering the Strait itself.
