• Southeast Asia

October 15, 2025, 1:00 AM

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: Vietnam struggles to handle damage after Typhoon Matmo, Trump’s unconventional ambassadors, Singapore and Australia’s security upgrade, Malaysia’s soccer naturalization scam, and cease-fire strained at the Thailand-Cambodia border.

Swaths of Vietnam, including the capital of Hanoi, flooded early last week after being hit by Typhoon Matmo.

While the flooding has receded, the country is still struggling to handle power outages and major property damage in numerous areas.

This was the third major storm to hit Vietnam in two weeks, following on from Typhoon Ragasa and Typhoon Bualoi in late September. Other countries, including the Philippines and Thailand, have also been hit hard by storms.

Southeast Asia’s geography, oodles of islands and long coastlines strung along tropical latitudes, makes it vulnerable to storms.

But hydro-meteorological disasters in the region are becoming more frequent and intense, according to a recent report by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Other factors are making the situation worse. Sea levels are rising, with large parts of major regional cities including Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Yangon, and Bangkok located below sea level. Increasing swaths of the population are settling in vulnerable low-lying areas. Sprawling urbanization replaces absorbent soil with impermeable concrete and tarmac.

As a result, national governments are struggling to forecast and manage the disasters. This has implications beyond the human cost. Disaster recovery is expensive. The political impact can be destabilizing.

In Vietnam this year, natural disasters have killed at least 238 people, damaged more than 258,000 homes, and caused economic losses of about $1.4 billion, according to Vietnamese authorities. The government has spoken of a “compound disaster,” each blow amplified by the previous ones. And with key industrial zones hit, many people are worrying about the wider economic impact.

The Philippines, too—hit by the same typhoons on top of an earthquake—is similarly reeling, as I covered last week. And heavy rain in Thailand last week caused widespread flooding that left at least 22 people dead.

The human costs alone can give pause. In the last 32 years, more than 202,000 people in Southeast Asia have died due to hydro-meteorological disasters, mostly storms. Millions are displaced very year.

And the economic losses can also be eyewatering, with the cumulative costs of typhoons alone since 1987 running into the tens of billions of dollars.

An underrated factor in extreme weather is the political impact. Vietnam has seen grumbling about the government failing to provide sufficient warning or properly coordinate relief efforts. The Vietnamese leadership, which is going through a spasm of paranoia about public dissent, is doubtless taking note.

Just across the water, the Philippines in recent weeks has been rocked by huge protests over graft in flood defense construction. Top politicians have resigned, and the military has had to publicly declare that despite the entreaties of some, it will not launch a coup. The latest wave of floods will surely only stoke rage over the issue.

The intertwining of disaster and politics is not new. The enormous 2011 floods in Thailand intertwined with the fight between the then-newly elected government and its opponents, undermining an effective response and helping to fan political tensions. With the latest round of floods, we are once again seeing arguments over who gets the blame.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar in 2008, Cyclone Nargis, which left some 140,000 people dead, may have helped loosen the ruling junta’s grip before it launched its brief experiment with democratization in 2011.

Zooming out further, it’s worth considering that many successful states in Southeast Asia have historically hinged much of their power and legitimacy on effective hydraulic management. Angkor—the seat of the great Khmer Empire, which thrived from the ninth to the 15th century—was sustained by an intricate system of water management. More recently, the previous Thai monarch was often feted for his achievements in this area, often called the “Father of Thai Water Management” and “Royal Rainmaker.”

As the weather grows wilder and the impacts more severe, don’t be surprised if political turmoil follows.

New U.S. ambassador raises eyebrows. On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate confirmed its latest batch of ambassadors. There were some unusual choices, but the appointment garnering the most attention was that of the new ambassador to Singapore, Anjani Sinha. The orthopedic surgeon’s main qualification seems to be that he plays golf with U.S. President Donald Trump and has Donald Trump Jr. as a client. An embarrassing Senate confirmation hearing where Sinha struggled to answer basic questions about the U.S. relationship with Singapore attracted a lot of coverage in the country.

Singaporeans, with typical tact, are stressing the potential value of a personal connection. “Certainly better than the normal State Department types who are despised by the MAGA group,” Bilahari Kausikan, a former permanent secretary in Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told CNA in July.

The nominee for ambassador to Thailand will raise fewer eyebrows. Sergio Gor, a Republican operative who until recently served as director of White House personnel under Trump, is a party operative and Trump loyalist, but partisan ambassadorial appointments are typical for the United States. Meanwhile, the most controversial nomination—Nick Adams, a self-declared “alpha male” and conservative influencer, for ambassador to Malaysia—remains to be confirmed.

Singapore-Australia ink defense pact. Singapore and Australia signed a new defense cooperation agreement last Wednesday. The exact terms of the agreement are to be confirmed, but key points seem to be enhanced access for the two countries’ militaries, defense technology cooperation, strengthening supply chains, and increased cooperation in areas including “cyber and information.”

The two countries have long cultivated close security ties, most notably via the Five Power Defence Arrangements—a pact between Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom to consult if any party to it is attacked. Still, the move to further strengthen ties should also be seen as a sign of both countries attempting to mitigate uncertainty about the reliability of their main security partner, the United States.

Australia in particular is amping up its connections in the region as it seeks to hedge against China’s rise and U.S. capriciousness. In 2024, it signed a new security agreement with Indonesia, though it seems to have read a lot more into its significance than the Indonesians did. And it is currently working on an agreement to further bolster its already strong security relationship with the Philippines.

China winning the influence race? China is Southeast Asia’s leading partner, according to a new report by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute. The United States comes in second. A key difference between the two seems to be that China is influential in all countries in the region via its deep economic integration. Some countries, such as Cambodia, are frankly dependent on China in this regard. The United States, meanwhile, is far stronger when it comes to security relationships, but the strength of these relationships varies enormously country to country. Trump’s actions are likely to erode its position further.

But don’t take this to mean that Southeast Asia is China’s backyard, the report cautions. Collectively, Southeast Asian nations are more important to one another than any external player. Other regional powers and global middle powers—most notably Japan but also Australia, India, Russia, South Korea, and the U.K.—have strong relationships with certain countries or in certain areas.

Malaysia’s fake soccer players. Malaysian soccer has been rocked by the scandal that seven players on its national team were allegedly not Malaysian at all. Like many countries hungry for soccer glory, Malaysia has in recent years looked to bolster its team by finding successful players abroad who have a familial connection, however tenuous, to the country and naturalizing them.

However, an investigation by the international soccer association FIFA found that seven of the players who were powering Malaysia’s return to the top of Southeast Asian soccer don’t have a drop of Malaysian blood in them. Apparently, according to FIFA, birth certificates showing all of the players to have a Malaysian grandparent were forged. The seven players have been banned from playing for 12 months, and the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) has been slapped with a $437,000 fine.

FAM is digging in and appealing the findings. But the national response seems to have shifted from defensive to embarrassed and angry. If FIFA’s findings are proved true, Malaysia could even be banned from the 2027 Asian Cup.

Photo of the Week

The Chinese warship Yi Meng Shan arrives at a commercial port in Sihanoukville, southern Cambodia, on Oct. 10. AP Photo/Heng Sinith

Cambodia is one of China’s closest allies in the region. But the Yimeng Shan is also scheduled to stop off in Thailand and Singapore in a show of evenhandedness at a time when Thailand is suspicious that China supports Cambodia’s position in the border conflict between the two countries.

The Philippine military has said retired officers lobbied it to launch a coup against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as rage over corruption rises. Raissa Robles in the South China Morning Post digs into why the military demurred.

“Vietnamese tigers have also vanished from the wild, leaving only some held in captivity or preserved in jars of wine or tubes of ointment, which are occasionally discovered and seized.” Trung Thanh in VnExpress laments the destruction of Vietnam’s wildlife, devastated by development and poaching.

The collapse of an Islamic boarding school in East Java in late September left 67 dead, and Ismi Damayanti in Nikkei Asia does valuable reporting on the wider context of illegal construction in Indonesia—and if anything will change after the dust settles.

Is Timor-Leste shaping up to be Southeast Asia’s next scam center hot spot? A piece by Michael Rose in the Conversation examines a recent scandal over fraudulent licenses used by major criminal groups to begin infiltrating the country.

The cease-fire that ended the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia in late July is under dangerous strain. Negotiations intended to cement the peace are breaking down.

On the border, Thailand is resorting to dirty tactics to drive Cambodians from land that Thailand claims. Outside forces—mainly Malaysia and the United States—are pushing to keep the show on the road. But Thailand may not be willing to bargain.

On Oct. 10, the planned meeting of the Regional Border Committee (RBC), which handles the nitty-gritty of managing the cease-fire, did not occur after Thailand pulled out.

Instead, Thai forces entered a contested area that they had occupied during the border conflict and cordoned off with barbed wire. Thailand said it was a landmine removal operation. Cambodia saw it as a provocation and a land grab.

The actions prompted furious condemnation from the Cambodian government, which declared it was a “grave violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

In an attempt to get things back on track, Thailand’s and Cambodia’s foreign ministers met alongside Malaysian and U.S. representatives on Oct. 12 to discuss the border issue. And the RBC is now due to meet on Oct. 15-17.

Malaysia and the United States both played big roles in securing the initial cease-fire and have kept up the pressure for further steps: Malaysia due to its position as ASEAN chair and the United States because of Trump’s hunger for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The big picture, though, is not promising. Thailand has long avoided international involvement in the border dispute. Its calculation has been that a bilateral negotiation would favor its interests as the more powerful party.

Thailand’s new government has taken a hard-line stance, declaring that for peace talks to resume four conditions must be met: verification of weapons withdrawal, demining, a cross-border crime crackdown, and an end to what it sees as Cambodian territorial encroachment.

If these conditions must be met before peace negotiations can start, rather than become subjects of negotiation, Thailand might be setting an impossible bar.

The Thai government has even suggested that it might revisit the 2000-01 memorandums of understanding it has with Cambodia about the border, which would unpick some of the few joint agreements on the issue.

Meanwhile, the Thai military is saber-rattling, warning of its readiness for action should conflict resume.

What this all adds up to is that on the ground, the situation is tense.

Thai forces by the border have apparently taken to blasting Cambodians in contested areas at night with eerie noises, including helicopters hovering, dogs barking, and women screaming. And last month saw an exchange of fire for which both sides blamed each other.