Trump’s War in Iran Prompts Southeast Asia to Turn to Russia

When Brent crude spiked to $130 a barrel in June 2025, the most consequential phone calls weren’t made between Washington and Tehran. They were made between Jakarta, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, and Moscow. That is the story nobody in the West wants to tell clearly: Trump’s war on Iran didn’t just reshape the Middle East — it handed Vladimir Putin a strategic opening in Southeast Asia that three years of Ukraine-related isolation failed to close.

The stakes here go well beyond oil prices. What’s actually happening is a slow-motion geopolitical realignment involving 700 million people, some of Washington’s most strategically important relationships in the Indo-Pacific, and a sanctions architecture that is now leaking from three continents simultaneously. Energy security has become the most powerful wedge in 21st-century geopolitics. And ASEAN is choosing warmth over Western solidarity.

How ASEAN’s Middle East Oil Dependency Became Russia’s Strategic Opportunity After the Hormuz Crisis

Southeast Asia’s vulnerability to Persian Gulf disruption is not a surprise to anyone who has looked at the numbers. The region imports 70–80% of its crude oil from the Middle East, flowing almost entirely through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint through which approximately 21 million barrels per day transit globally, representing roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. For import-dependent economies running on razor-thin energy margins, that is not a vulnerability. It is an existential exposure.

When the Trump administration authorized strikes on Iran’s Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan nuclear facilities in June 2025 — reportedly with Israeli intelligence coordination — Tehran’s response was predictable to anyone who had read the IRGC’s threat doctrine. Hossein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, publicly declared the closure of Hormuz a “legitimate act of war response.” The strait never fully closed. It didn’t need to. The threat alone was sufficient to trigger a global energy panic that sent the Indonesian rupiah, Philippine peso, and Vietnamese dong into immediate freefall.

Russia had already been repositioning itself as a discount energy superpower for the Global South since February 2022. By 2023–2024, India was sourcing over 40% of its total crude supply from Russia, exploiting discounts of $10–20 per barrel below Brent benchmark pricing. Southeast Asian capitals watched that playbook carefully. The Hormuz crisis simply accelerated what several governments had already been quietly modeling.

The pattern that emerges from that table is not random. It tracks precisely with which governments have the most domestic political insulation from American pressure — and the most acute energy poverty exposure at home. As Evan Laksmana of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore has argued, the Hormuz crisis “accelerated a hedging strategy ASEAN was already quietly pursuing — Russia is the beneficiary of American overreach.” For more on the geopolitical dimensions of nationalism and economic vulnerability in this region, see our worldwide political news coverage.

Pertamina Signs with Rosneft, Vietnam Reactivates Soviet-Era Pipelines, and ASEAN Holds Its First-Ever Emergency Energy Summit

The pivot is no longer theoretical. Concrete deals are being signed, Soviet-era partnerships are being dusted off, and the institutional architecture of a Russia–ASEAN energy relationship is being quietly assembled while Washington’s attention is consumed by the aftermath of its Iran strikes.

Here is what has actually happened, in sequence:

• October 2025 — Indonesia: State energy giant Pertamina signed a preliminary Memorandum of Understanding with Rosneft for up to 200,000 barrels per day of Russian Urals crude at a reported 12% discount to Brent. The deal was negotiated personally by Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s CEO and the Kremlin’s most aggressive commercial diplomat, who flew to Jakarta weeks after the Hormuz panic peaked.
• Late 2025 — Vietnam: Hanoi reactivated its Vietsovpetro joint venture channels — originally established during the Soviet era — to import Russian LNG and crude at scale. Volumes were up approximately 35% year-over-year by early 2026. Vietnam’s move is particularly significant because it carries historical legitimacy that newer deals lack; this isn’t a new relationship, it’s a resumed one.
• Ongoing — Malaysia: Petronas began spot purchases of sanctioned Russian crude routed through third-party traders in Dubai and Hong Kong. The mechanics are identical to what India pioneered — paper transactions obscure the origin, the oil moves, and the G7 price cap bleeds another few thousand barrels per day.
• November 2025 — Jakarta Summit: ASEAN held an emergency energy security summit — the first of its kind — producing a non-binding declaration on supply diversification. Diplomatically anodyne. Operationally significant. The declaration gave cover to every member state to pursue bilateral arrangements without collective ASEAN endorsement.
• Thailand and Philippines: Both governments are studying long-term LNG agreements with Russian state energy firms. Manila faces the strongest domestic political headwind given its US alliance obligations, but even there, the conversations are happening.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio dispatched envoys to Jakarta and Hanoi within weeks of the Pertamina-Rosneft MoU becoming public. Both governments received the American delegations politely. Neither changed course. Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono stated publicly: “We cannot let our people suffer energy poverty because of a war we didn’t start.” That sentence should be read in Washington as a verdict, not a complaint.

Trump, Prabowo, Putin, and Sechin: Four Men Whose Decisions Are Redrawing the Indo-Pacific Energy Map

Donald Trump

Donald Trump authorized the Iran strikes framing them as “denuclearization” — a clean, decisive act of American strength. What his administration did not do, either before or after, was construct any multilateral energy reassurance architecture for the allies most exposed to Hormuz disruption. No emergency strategic petroleum reserve coordination with ASEAN. No accelerated LNG export licensing to Southeast Asian buyers. No diplomatic framework to replace Middle Eastern supply. The absence of that scaffolding is not incidental — it is the central strategic failure that created the opening Russia walked through.

Prabowo Subianto

Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s president, has pursued a calculated non-alignment since taking office. He is not anti-American. He is, however, governing a country of 280 million people whose energy costs spiked sharply the moment Hormuz became a threat environment. The Pertamina-Rosneft deal is not ideological. It is arithmetic. Indonesia’s budget cannot absorb $130-per-barrel crude at the volumes it requires — roughly 1.5 million barrels per day of imports. Russian Urals at a 12% discount is a political survival calculation, not a foreign policy statement.

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin personally hosted Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai energy delegations in Moscow in late 2025. He understands, better than most Western analysts are willing to admit, that the Ukraine sanctions regime’s long-term viability depends entirely on isolation being comprehensive. Every ASEAN barrel of Russian crude purchased is revenue that sustains the war effort, yes — but it is also a vote against the premise that Russia can be economically strangled. Dmitri Trenin, the former Carnegie Moscow analyst, has called Russia’s energy pivot to Asia “the most consequential consequence of Western sanctions — not Russia’s isolation, but its Asian integration.” Putin is not improvising. He has been building toward this for three years.

Igor Sechin

Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s CEO, is the operational engine of Russia’s Southeast Asia push. He is closing deals that Western energy majors — Shell, TotalEnergies, BP — vacated when they exited Russia in 2022. Sechin signed MoUs with both Pertamina and Petronas and is reportedly in advanced discussions over refinery co-investment arrangements in both Indonesia and Vietnam. If those refinery deals close, they won’t just lock in supply relationships for years. They will embed Russian technical personnel, Russian financing structures, and Russian political leverage into the energy infrastructure of two of ASEAN’s largest economies for decades.

Why Washington, Moscow, and ASEAN Are All Telling Incomplete Truths About What Is Happening Here

Let’s dispense with the comfortable narratives each side is peddling.

Washington’s framing — that ASEAN’s Russia pivot “undermines Western sanctions and rewards Kremlin aggression” — is true as far as it goes, and stops exactly where the analysis becomes uncomfortable. The Trump administration launched a military campaign against a third country, in a region where its closest partners were acutely energy-dependent on nearby supply chains, without any accompanying energy security offer to those partners. Rubio’s post-facto envoys are not a strategy. They are a recognition that no strategy existed. Blaming Jakarta and Hanoi for responding rationally to a crisis Washington created is not a foreign policy. It is a complaint.

ASEAN’s framing — purely economic, purely practical, nothing ideological — is also incomplete. These governments know exactly what they are doing. They are providing Russia with the one thing sanctions were designed to deny it: a large, legitimate-adjacent market for its primary export at close to market prices. Sugiono’s line about “energy poverty” is politically defensible and strategically convenient. Every barrel of Urals crude Pertamina buys is a contribution to the Kremlin’s war chest, and every Indonesian official in that room understood that when they signed the MoU.

Russia’s framing — that it is simply meeting market demand from willing buyers, offering fair commercial terms — omits the strategic purpose embedded in every Sechin handshake. These are not purely commercial arrangements. The refinery co-investment proposals, the long-term LNG contracts, the below-market pricing — all of it is designed to create structural dependencies that will survive any future diplomatic thaw and outlast any individual government in either Moscow or the ASEAN capitals. As analysts tracking Russia’s global influence operations have noted, economic entanglement is Moscow’s preferred instrument of long-term leverage — far more durable than military presence.

The honest assessment is this: three actors are making rational short-term calculations that collectively produce a long-term outcome none of them has fully priced in — the institutional hardening of a Russia–Southeast Asia energy relationship that will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

Four Concrete Scenarios for How Russia’s Southeast Asia Energy Wedge Reshapes the Indo-Pacific by 2028

The trajectory is not fixed. But the scenarios that matter are concrete, not hypothetical.

• Scenario 1 — Refinery Lock-In: Rosneft’s co-investment proposals in Indonesian and Vietnamese refinery infrastructure close before the end of 2026. Russian technical, financial, and contractual presence embeds itself in both countries’ energy sectors for 20–30 years. No subsequent American pressure campaign can dislodge it without causing domestic energy disruption in both countries — which no ASEAN government will accept. This is the worst-case scenario for Western sanctions architecture and the most commercially plausible given Sechin’s momentum.
• Scenario 2 — Formal Russia–ASEAN Energy Framework: The ad hoc bilateral arrangements of 2025–2026 are institutionalized in a formal multilateral framework by late 2026 or 2027. This gives ASEAN members collective political cover for what are currently individually embarrassing arrangements. It also creates a permanent institutional bypass for G7 price cap enforcement — one that China would quietly support without joining.
• Scenario 3 — US Course Correction Opens a Window: A serious American LNG export acceleration program, combined with genuine diplomatic engagement around ASEAN energy security guarantees, gives governments like Indonesia and Vietnam a face-saving off-ramp from deepening Russian dependency. This scenario requires Washington to offer something concrete — not lectures about sanctions compliance — and to sustain the offer across political cycles. It is possible. It is not happening now.
• Scenario 4 — Philippine Breakaway: Domestic political pressure in Manila — rooted in the US alliance and amplified by China Sea tensions — causes the Philippines to formally distance itself from the ASEAN Russia tilt. This creates a visible split in ASEAN’s energy posture that Washington tries to exploit as a model. Jakarta and Hanoi ignore it. The bloc fractures quietly on this issue without formally dividing.

Shannon Tiezzi of The Diplomat has warned that ASEAN’s Russia tilt could fracture Western cohesion on Ukraine sanctions entirely, as the bloc now represents a critical bypass corridor that neither India nor China — the previously identified primary leakage points — can be blamed for alone. When the leakage becomes regional and institutional rather than bilateral and embarrassing, the G7’s ability to maintain the fiction of effective sanctions collapses. That is where this is heading if nothing changes.

Trump’s Iran war was sold as strength. What it actually produced, in the arc of consequences that actually matters for American power, is a gift to Vladimir Putin that no amount of Mar-a-Lago deal-making can unwrap. Energy security is the most powerful wedge in 21st-century geopolitics — and Washington just handed the other side the blade. The question now is not whether Southeast Asia turns to Russia. It already has. The question is whether anyone in Washington grasps, before 2028, that the door it left open cannot be closed with slogans.

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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