JULY 13 — History has always warned us about the danger of choosing enemies and then mistaking everyone opposed to them for friends.

The Athenians learned it. The Romans learned it. Europe relearned it during the Thirty Years’ War. The Cold War repeated it across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Great powers armed local actors, local actors pursued their own ambitions, and ordinary people paid for strategies designed elsewhere.

The names change. The pattern does not.

Today, much of South-east Asia looks at Gaza with horror. That response is understandable. The devastation has been immense — civilians killed, displaced and deprived on a scale that has shocked the world. No serious moral position can ignore the suffering of Palestinians, or the mounting international legal findings against the conduct of Israel’s campaign, including the ICJ’s provisional measures and the ICC’s arrest warrants.

But history also warns against selective morality. If law matters only when our enemies violate it, then it is not law. It is rhetoric. That standard has to cut in every direction — including toward the powers the region is inclined to sympathise with.

Three actors, one standard

Start with Israel, because that is where regional sympathy currently sits least in question. Sympathy for Palestinian suffering does not require suspending judgment about the war’s conduct: the scale of civilian casualties, the destruction of hospitals and universities, the restriction of aid, and a settlement project in the West Bank that continues under cover of the Gaza war. A state can be responding to a real security threat — the October 7 attacks were real, and Hamas’s role in them is not in dispute — and still be conducting that response in ways that violate the laws it claims to fight for. Both things are true at once.

Then the United States, whose selectivity is the essay’s real hinge. Washington invokes a rules-based order while supplying the weapons that make the current campaign possible, and while treating international courts as binding when they rule against its rivals and as illegitimate when they rule against its allies. That is not a minor inconsistency. It is the same rhetorical move the piece is trying to diagnose in Iran — strategy dressed as principle — practiced by the country that most often lectures the world on principle.

And Iran, which South-east Asia is least practiced at scrutinising, because it wears the language of resistance. Iran’s regional model is not new — empires have used intermediaries for centuries. Rome maintained client kingdoms on its frontiers. Persia cultivated allies beyond its borders. During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow armed movements they called freedom fighters or revolutionaries, depending on which side of the divide they stood. Proxy warfare is attractive because it lets power be exercised at a discount: the sponsor gains influence, the proxy absorbs the casualties, the battlefield lies elsewhere.

Iran’s relationships with Hezbollah, the Houthis and armed factions in Iraq follow that logic. Tehran calls them independent movements of resistance; its opponents call them instruments of Iranian power. The truth sits between the slogans — these groups have their own leadership and ambitions, but they also run on Iranian money, weapons and training. Tehran gains reach without always owning the consequences.

At home, Iran governs through repression that its foreign-policy branding is built to obscure: institutional discrimination against women, tightly controlled dissent, criminalised same-sex relationships, extensive use of capital punishment. None of that is disqualifying to a cause — Palestinian statehood does not become less just because one of its backers is authoritarian. But it is disqualifying to treating Iran’s sponsorship as a moral endorsement rather than a strategic one. Does Iran support Palestine because it seeks justice, or because Palestine gives Tehran reach and legitimacy? Almost certainly both — states rarely act from one motive. France backed the American Revolution to weaken Britain, not from sudden republican conviction. The Soviet Union backed anti-colonial movements while crushing freedom at home. Sincerity and utility are not mutually exclusive, for Iran or anyone else.

Asean and the discipline of distance

Asean’s instinct has long been to avoid entanglement in great-power rivalry. That is not cowardice — it is historical memory. South-east Asia knows what it costs when distant powers turn a region into a chessboard: the colonial era’s carved borders, the Pacific War’s devastation, the Cold War’s killing fields in Indochina.

Neutrality has real value. But neutrality must not mean intellectual surrender. There is a difference between refusing alignment and refusing judgment. Asean should not become an appendage of Washington, Tehran or Tel Aviv, and it should not confuse anti-Westernism with independence. A country is not virtuous simply because it opposes the United States. A government is not just because it speaks the language of resistance.

The Bandung Conference of 1955 was not meant to produce a bloc of automatic opposition. Its deeper promise was moral and strategic autonomy — the right of newly independent states to think for themselves. That principle still holds, and it demands saying several things at once: Israel’s campaign can be unlawful and devastating; American power can be hypocritical in its selective defence of the law; Iran can be manipulative and repressive at home while backing a legitimate cause abroad. None of these cancel each other out.

Why this matters here

This isn’t a distant argument. The Gulf is tied directly to South-east Asia’s economic life — energy, shipping, fertiliser, food prices and trade routes all run through its stability. The Strait of Hormuz is not an abstraction: a crisis there raises fuel prices in Jakarta, freight costs in Port Klang, food prices across the region.

Proxy wars also tend to expand past their starting terms. A local assassination in 1914 became a global war once the alliance system engaged. A civil war in Lebanon, beginning in 1975 as a domestic conflict among sectarian factions, drew in Syria and Israel within its first year, and became a longer-running proxy theatre once Iran built Hezbollah in the early 1980s — each external power claiming limited objectives while deepening the catastrophe. Escalation rarely announces its final destination at the start.

That is why Asean should back de-escalation, freedom of navigation, civilian protection and international law, without becoming morally captive to any camp. The region should ask hard questions of every actor: Can Israel claim security while destroying the conditions for future peace? Can Iran claim solidarity with the oppressed while repressing its own citizens? Can the United States speak of rules while applying them selectively? Can we condemn a government’s conduct without letting that criticism curdle into hatred of a people — Israeli, Iranian, Palestinian or otherwise?

These aren’t comfortable questions. They’re necessary ones. The easiest political emotion is hatred — it assigns innocence to one side and evil to the other, and relieves us of the burden of thought. The real test of moral seriousness isn’t whether we can condemn those we already dislike. It’s whether we can recognise wrongdoing among those whose cause we instinctively support.

That is not betrayal. It is principle. And in a world dividing again into camps, principle may be the last truly independent position left.

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