Prelude
Discussions about geopolitics in the A
This understanding, however, is very limiting. To better understand Malaysia’s choices and dilemmas in the 21st century, two mental shifts are needed.
Two Reframings
The first is to move away from this understanding of “rules” as dominated by laws, statutes and regulations.
That is not to say conventions like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are unimportant. However, it can be argued that what really defines the “rules-based order” as a social reality for most Malaysians are the deep norms that undergird their daily social and economic lives, not least common understandings of progress, modernity, and status.
These norms inform policies that pursue economic growth via technological industrial modernity; the upkeeping of a relatively open economy (“ease of doing business” rankings are something governments still care deeply about); public faith in scientific problem-solving (governments not questioning vaccines as a public good) and; a general appreciation of good relations with neighbours, which explains why – despite historical baggage – Malaysia’s current bilateral relations with Thailand and Singapore are excellent by most measures.
The second shift is to grasp what we collectively experience as the erosion of the “rules-based order” as the result of a perfect storm in which all three great powers in the contemporary order (the United States, China, and Russia) are revisionist powers.
This realisation comes with two implications.
First, when great powers want to substantially modify the order, they might not succeed, but their activitie
Second, a world with three great revisionist powers could easily lead to a spiral, where revisionism begets revisionism, thus potentially leading to an “all-systems change” situation.
Under such circumstances, changes in deep norms are likely. For example, the jettisoning of free trade, nuclear non-proliferation or even global health responsibilities by one great power will quickly lead to the same by the other.
Nevertheless, barring the outbreak of a systemic war, order change is not going to be experienced as abrupt and all-encompassing. What is more likely for Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian countries, is a situation where old imperatives are mixed with new uncertainties.
For example, intense decoupling pressures between the United States and China (as well as the United States and the rest of the world) may force Malaysia to reconfigure its economic model and relationships to maintain viability.
At the same time, however, the Malaysian government and its businesses will still have to deal with an economic order operating on more or less the same competitive rules. Even as the United States retracts from the global economy, Malaysians will still need to attract investments, maintain competitive exports, upskill their workforce and plug themselves into global value chains and financial networks wherever possible.
Old Rules, New Uncertainties
In that eventuality, what might ensue is fiercer competition among the Southeast Asian countries to grab a piece of the shrinking economic pie. Intra-ASEAN trade (hovering at 21.5% of total ASEAN trade in 2023) is no replacement, as a significant portion of it is inadvertently bound up with regional supply chains intended for extra-ASEAN markets, such as China, the United States, Northeast Asia and the European Union.
Much is made of China’s status as Malaysia’s largest trading partner, but this relationship has long been defined by China having a sizeable trading surplus with Malaysia (RM75bn for the first half of 2025). This exposes the latter to the risk of dumping when the effects of the United States tariffs set in because overcapacity in China needs a release valve.
On foreign direct investments (FDI), Malaysia’s more diversified portfolio may shield it from overreliance on the United States and China, but those two countries combined still hold approximately a quarter of total FDI stock in Malaysia. In other words, if maintaining equidistance between the United States and China is a tricky task, losing the (economic) heft of either might be even more devastating.
I have thus far focused on the economic realm because Malaysia’s deep investment in the rules-based order, as I have defined it, is largely rooted in economic imperatives. These imperatives, in turn, help generate political stability by establishing norms for regime legitimacy and satisfying social expectations of upward mobility.
However, the current wave of revisionism, in particular the one mounted from the United States, has a significant economic dimension that puts relatively frictionless trade on trial by design and may usher in a recession by accident.
There is certainly an irony here because, while the Malaysian leadership is very vocal in criticising the US foreign policy (as compared to the other great powers), they appeared somewhat underprepared when the United States administration took up their challenge and dramatically altered its international posture (admittedly, not in a way to Putrajaya’s liking).
This is not to say Malaysia has not hedged or diversified its relationships and interdependencies. Still, Malaysia’s plan to achieve high-income status appears to be based on old parameters and projections.
For example, of the five priority sectors identified by the New Industrial Masterplan 2030, the United States still ranked highly as a primary export location in the policy documents: aerospace (number two); pharmaceuticals (number one); electrical and electronics (number two); medical devices (number one), and; chemicals (plastic products, number three). China only outranked the United States as an export location in the chemical sector (chemicals and chemical products, number one).
The tendency to chase “hot” sectors, such as the race to build data centres that came with significant land and energy costs relative to the limited employment and technological gains, also reveals two concerns.
First, the economic vision seems to rely on an assumption of continued abundance and stability in the broader economic environment, which may be overturned as “slowbalisation” trends intensify. Second, the indiscriminate attitude towards foreign capital appears to reveal gaps in strategic bridging of investment and capacity building. However, capacity building, be it upskilling the workforce or generating local multiplier effects, is instrumental in fostering national resilience in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Resilience, Not Rhetoric
Finally, this idea of resilience leads us back to the question of politics.
In an environment of relative revisionism (that is, a situation where the order is revised at different ends by different actors), it can be surmised that the threat to Malaysia’s political stability would not be external, but rather internal.
As mentioned above, revisionism begets revisionism, and Malaysia is certainly not short of ideological actors who would read the current global turn to far-right politics as especially energising to their anti-liberal project, whose essence, it can be argued, is not in the anti-liberalism.
Instead, it lies in the extreme majoritarianism that draws from a revisionist historiography and a language of rights that is abjectly hostile to minority rights and any form of pluralism, be it cultural, religious, intellectual, or even political.
What would make these ideas – which are generated within the middle classes (as is elsewhere) – leapfrog to the mainstream is when middle-class aspirations are dented. Scholars have long found relative deprivation to be key to radicalisation dynamics, which is also why countries with substantial middle classes, such as Malaysia, are found to be more prone to political uprisings than lower-income ones.
In this co
A recent World Bank report writes that, “high inequ
This means relative and absolute deprivation live side-by-side as a toxic combination in a multicultural society where progressive outlets are still sorely lacking (and systemically hammered) for the articulation of grievance, rights, and redistribution. Ample examples have shown middle-class dissatisfaction is ripe for hijacking by authoritarian forces.
The fact is, the “rules-based order” is always more dynamic (or prone to revisionism) than supporters of the term appreciate. Not only that, most revisionism that manifests itself as order-changing exercises always stems first from power reconfigurations in domestic politics, even if those changes were made in response to dissent against the current world order.
Will that happen in Malaysia? That is difficult to predict, but developments in other countries that share its First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) electoral system and penchant for ethnoreligious nationalism show wild swings towards the far-right, whether through institutional or electoral capture, are certainly possible.
At the same time, if the status quo is already shifting, then a realignment of interests, models and priorities becomes necessary regardless of whether regime change occurs.
It is in this context that national resilience is most vital to Malaysia’s democratic health. Resilience does not just mean the ability to absorb shock; it is also a state of being where sufficient social, policy and intellectual space exists to maximise options, sustain long-term planning, exercise restraint, and recalibrate national interests in a high-pressure environment. With that in mind, certain habits of the administration, such as its constant pandering to illiberal forces and the tendency of national leaders to reveal their cards in grandstanding rhetoric (even if not in action) on the international stage before the rules of the game are even settled, will become a liability by undermining the very conditions needed for resilience.
