To evaluate the implications of the Hormuz Crisis for the Strait of Malacca, the Ankara Center for Crisis and Political Studies (ANKASAM) presents below the interview with Dr. Graham Ong-Webb, Adjunct Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
1. In your opinion, what were the effects of the Hormuz Crisis on the Strait of Malacca? How do regional states view the possibility of coastal states (Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia) being paid fees for transit through the Strait of Malacca?
Two different kinds of effect are easily conflated here, so let me separate them. Operationally, the crisis has had remarkably little measurable impact inside the Strait of Malacca. If anything, the strait has grown safer. Armed robbery incidents in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore fell from 80 in the first half of 2025 to 21 in the first half of 2026 — down roughly 74 per cent, and the lowest half-year figure since 2019. By the measures that concern a shipowner, conditions have improved.
The more important effects are on assumptions rather than conditions. What the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps showed in Hormuz was that a strait can be monetised, and access to it restricted, with modest means — and that the legal regime protecting transit offers less practical insulation than had been assumed. That shifts what planners treat as thinkable, which often matters more than any change on the water. There has also been a concrete effect: displacement. An estimated 50 to 70 shadow fleet tankers reportedly transited Malaysian waters each month in 2025 carrying sanctioned Iranian crude. Pressure at the western end of the voyage is already creating enforcement problems at the eastern end.
On transit fees, I would question the premise, because it is more assumed than real. A single Indonesian minister raised the idea in April 2026, and Indonesia’s own foreign ministry walked it back within days. No littoral state has made a formal proposal, and I do not expect one.
There is also a firm legal obstacle. Under the Law of the Sea Convention, a coastal state cannot charge foreign vessels for passage alone; charges are allowed only as payment for specific services rendered — pilotage, traffic management, navigational aids. This is Article 26, and while it sits formally within the rules on innocent passage, it is widely read across to the stronger transit-passage regime that governs Malacca. Your readers will know the shape of this better than most: even the Turkish Straits, under the 1936 Montreux Convention, levy charges for specific services (sanitary, lighthouse, and rescue) rather than a toll on passage itself.
What often gets missed is that a burden-sharing mechanism already exists. The Cooperative Mechanism, launched in 2007 under the International Maritime Organization, was the first practical use of Article 43 of the Convention: through it, the strait’s user states contribute voluntarily to navigational safety and environmental protection, alongside the three littoral states. The equitable-contribution question has, in other words, already been answered institutionally, and the answer is deliberately not a toll.
2. It appears that the approach of coastal states — particularly Singapore and Malaysia — to the issue of fee payments differs from that of Indonesia. Singapore, in particular, appears to be firmly opposed to this. What do you think is the reason for this?
The first thing to say is that the divergence is smaller than it looks, and that it runs within one government rather than between three. The April episode was really a difference of emphasis between the economic and diplomatic arms of the Indonesian state, not a stand-off between Jakarta on one side and Singapore and Kuala Lumpur on the other.
The underlying interests do differ, though, and Singapore’s position is best explained structurally.
Singapore monetises the strait through services, not passage. Its whole value proposition rests on port operations, bunkering, transshipment, ship repair and marine insurance — value captured when a vessel calls, not when it passes. A levy on passage would raise the cost of the corridor and encourage diversion, cutting against the very model the country depends on. Its opposition is therefore economic before it is diplomatic. Malaysia’s logic is similar, given the transshipment roles of Port Klang and Tanjung Pelepas.
For Singapore there is a second consideration, which is the value of the norm itself. For a small state, freedom of navigation is not an abstraction but an instrument of security. A country that relies on international law to restrain the strong cannot lightly endorse departures from it, since that would weaken the very principle it depends on elsewhere. Opposing the monetisation of passage is part of defending the wider rules-based order.
Indonesia’s periodic interest reflects a different geography and a legitimate grievance. Much traffic crosses Indonesian waters without ever calling at an Indonesian port, while Indonesia bears real costs in search and rescue, pollution response and patrol. I read its occasional interest in charges less as a coercive impulse than as an expression of that imbalance. This is a question about burden-sharing, and one the Cooperative Mechanism was built to address.
3. Can we say that Singapore’s foreign policy involves a delicate balancing act? How is Singapore positioning itself in the competition between the U.S. and China?
Let me adjust the word “balancing” slightly, since it implies an equidistance that doesn’t quite fit. Singapore’s approach is better understood as an effort to preserve the conditions in which it never has to choose: an open trading system, working multilateral institutions, and a regional order that keeps both powers engaged rather than forcing alignment with either.
The substance is structural, not tactical. Singapore hosts United States logistical facilities under the 1990 Memorandum of Understanding and the 2005 Strategic Framework Agreement — the latter naming it a “Major Security Cooperation Partner” — and maintains close defence cooperation with Washington. China, meanwhile, is its largest trading partner. Neither relationship is recent, and neither can be unwound at will. Singapore’s stated position has been consistent and, I think, sincere: it is not an ally of either power, does not wish to choose, and sees a forced choice as harmful to the whole region. Tellingly, it is believed to have declined an offer of Major Non-NATO Ally status some years ago, and a deliberate way of keeping room to manoeuvre.
The difficulty is that this position is getting harder to hold, not because Singapore’s preferences have changed, but because both powers increasingly demand exclusivity in particular domains: semiconductors, telecommunications, data infrastructure, financial rails. One can stay unaligned at the level of grand strategy while being pressed hard to choose at the level of technical standards and supply chains. That is where the real pressure now falls; one that is less visible than the headline contest, but more consequential, and the ground on which the durability of Singapore’s approach will actually be tested.
4. If the Trump administration begins to focus on the Strait of Malacca after the Strait of Hormuz, what would be the reaction or approach of the regional states? Can ASEAN countries maintain the balance between the U.S. and China in the event of a potential Malacca Crisis?
There is an important asymmetry between the two scenarios; they are not the same problem in different dress. In Hormuz, the coercion came from the weaker littoral state, against commercial shipping. A Malacca version of the kind you describe would involve a major external power restricting access to a strait governed by transit passage. Those are legally and politically different situations, and they would draw different regional responses.
On the law, a blanket restriction on transit would be hard to square with the Convention. It is worth recalling how the Hormuz episode actually played out: the initial maximalist declaration was, as I understand the reporting, later narrowed by operational guidance from United States Central Command, so that it applied to vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports while preserving transit for everyone else. That the rhetoric was pulled back toward something legally defensible is, if anything, a reassuring precedent, and it shows legal constraint still bites even under heavy political pressure.
Regionally, this is one of the few issues on which ASEAN genuinely converges. Freedom of navigation through the straits is a settled and unifying interest, unlike the South China Sea, where positions fragment along the lines of competing claims. So I would expect firm and fairly coordinated resistance from the littoral states to any external attempt to control passage.
Whether that resistance would be effective is another matter, and here I am more cautious. ASEAN’s own instruments are largely declaratory. The mechanism that actually works in the straits is the Malacca Straits Patrol, set up in 2004 by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, combining coordinated sea patrols, the Eyes-in-the-Sky aerial surveillance initiative and intelligence-sharing through Singapore’s Information Fusion Centre. It remains active; Singapore hosted the sixteenth meeting of its Joint Coordinating Committee in January 2026. But it is a coalition of four states, not an ASEAN body, and it was built to counter maritime crime, not state coercion.
That is my broader concern, and where I think attention belongs. The more likely near-term pressure on Malacca is not a blockade but the cumulative weight of grey-zone activity: sanctions evasion, shadow fleet traffic, and uncrewed systems of the sort found in the Lombok Strait earlier this year. This is exactly what existing arrangements handle least well — it falls between law enforcement and defence, and the binding constraint is attribution, not interdiction. If a Malacca “crisis” comes, I suspect it will arrive not as one dramatic closure but as a slow accretion of ambiguity that no single instrument was designed to answer.
