DECEMBER 6 — The world has entered a phase where instability is no longer an interruption of normality but the permanent architecture of global life.

Crises overlap, norms fracture, and systems strain under forces that refuse to behave predictably. We now live in post-normal time – where the old balance has collapsed but a new equilibrium has not emerged.

Seismic shocks that shaped the global system

To understand how we arrived here, we must revisit the earliest seismic shocks that shifted the global system.

One of the most defining moments came in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. It was a small metallic sphere emitting a faint radio beep, yet it sent strategic tremors across every major capital.

That single beep altered the psychological balance of the Cold War. If the Soviet Union could place an object in orbit, what prevented it from placing something more lethal above American skies?

The fear triggered the space race, accelerated scientific innovation, and reconfigured global competition.

Sputnik marked the first major episode of post-normality – showing how small events in a tightly connected world can unleash systemic consequences: The Cold War. An event with multiple versions. First involving US and Soviet Union; now US versus Russia, China and North Korea.

The idea that stability could be disrupted by a single technological leap was already taking shape. Even a wrong word from Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae in the Japanese Parliament that any threatening situation in “Taiwan” will affect Japan’s security has unleashed a hailstorm of Chinese protests.

With China sending a flotilla of more than 100 naval gun boats into the East China Sea – an act bound to slow down the conclusion of the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea.

Global fragility in 2025

In 2025, this fragility has became ever clearer.

Many point to President Donald Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy as a catalyst of disorder. Yet his actions were only one contour in a larger pattern of global unraveling.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 further shattered the assumption that post-Cold War Europe was stable. A major power redrew borders unilaterally, breaking norms that many believed were permanent. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later confirmed the end of predictable geopolitical behaviour.

Meanwhile, climate breakdown dissolved what humanity once assumed were stable seasons. Floods, droughts, typhoons, and fires intensified. Events once labelled “natural disasters” are now amplified by human inaction, poor planning, and unsustainable development. Ecological security has become inherently unstable. Southern Thailand alone can be hit with the worst rain fall in 300 years.

The global economy has also entered post-normal flux. Supply chains stretch, snap, or contort under geopolitical pressure. Technologies once considered mundane now carry strategic significance.

Export controls, sanctions, and industrial policy have replaced the laissez-faire certainty of previous decades.

The Nexperia dispute between the Netherlands and China – involving legacy semiconductors – exemplifies these shifts.

Even low-end chips – not 2 to 5 nanometres – can trigger state-level intervention in Netherlands and industrial anxiety all across European Union (EU).

Nothing in the modern economy is insulated from geopolitics anymore.

Post-normality in practice

This is what post-normality looks like:

• Small inputs, outsized effects.
• Local disputes, global consequences.
• Technological shifts, strategic tremors.

Malaysia and Asean sit squarely within this turbulence.

Yet Malaysia has a leader unusually prepared for such a moment. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim did not rise through comfort or privilege. His life has been defined by crisis – imprisonment, political persecution, and repeated predictions of his downfall. He understands instability intimately.

His foreign policy reflects this realism. He sees how global competition has shifted from ideology to technology, currency, data, energy, and supply chains.

He recognises that great powers now act narrowly, and that small and middle states must diversify partnerships and build resilience.

But many Malaysians still underestimate the magnitude of global disruption. There remains a belief that Malaysia’s peace is self-sustaining, that Asean cohesion will continue unchallenged, or that global shocks will simply bypass us. These assumptions belong to a bygone era.

In post-normal times, no country is insulated. Asean faces its own vulnerabilities – overlapping disasters, humanitarian crises, regional conflicts, and institutional paralysis.

The wider world is shifting faster than institutions can adapt. The pace of change is relentless.

Crisis and plots in the Middle East

Consider the sudden fall of Basshar al-Assad at the end of 2024. With Ahmad Al Shara now serving as interim president, Assad’s former intelligence chief i.e. Kamal Hassan in Moscow and his billionaire cousin continue to plot to regain control of 14 tunnels. Why?

More than 50,000 Alawite communities, primarily in Latakia, a former Russian air base in Syria, are told to stage their uprising based on the arms and ammunition in these underground tunnels.

History increasingly unfolds as a web of plots and counter-plots, each capable of triggering fresh instability.

Against this backdrop, some Malaysians call for Anwar’s removal. Yet this is a leader who has stitched together a functioning coalition under difficult circumstances.

The Malaysian ringgit is strengthening. Advanced-sector FDI is coming in. Malaysia has produced its own EV. Credit ratings are improving. Bank Negara’s reserves have surpassed US$110 billion.

Anwar’s balanced diplomacy – spanning Indonesia, Türkiye, Egypt, Brazil, India, and Pakistan – has widened Malaysia’s strategic space. His approach aims to anchor Malaysia before the next global tremor arrives.

But leadership cannot stabilise society if the public does not understand the storms forming around it.

Preparing for post-normal times

Post-normal time demands collective understanding. Malaysians must appreciate that volatility is now the baseline.

As affirmed earlier, dispute over chips in Netherlands can threaten entire industries in EU, when the chip company is owned by China.

Meanwhile, any policy shift in Washington affecting Taiwan can reverberate instantly across East Asia and Asean.

We live in a world where coincidence is merely the surface of deeper causality.

Complexity unfolds everywhere, all at once. And everything that will happen, will erupt.

Malaysia must be ready. Asean must be ready.

Post-normal time is not coming. It is already here.

* Phar Kim Beng is Professor of Asean Studies and Director at the Institute of International and Asean Studies

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.