By Jo-Anna Sue Henley Rampas, @joannasuehenleyrampas
KOTA KINABALU: While Sabah was celebrating Kaamatan our harvest festival, the most joyful time of the KDMR calendar I was in Singapore, in a room full of defence ministers and generals, thinking about what home means in a world that is changing faster than most people realise.
Three days. A room full of defence ministers, diplomats, generals, and some of the sharpest strategic minds in the world. And I came home with one thought I can’t shake: the threats that will define our generation aren’t the ones most people in that room are preparing for.
This year I had the privilege of attending the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 ,Asia’s premier defence and security summit as one of 40 Young Leaders selected globally, and one of only 3 Malaysians chosen for the programme.
It was, without question, one of the most formative experiences of my life.
The summit opened with a keynote from Vietnam’s General Secretary and President Tô Lâm the most senior Vietnamese leader to ever address the Dialogue.
What stayed with me was this: development is not secondary to security. Development is the foundation of enduring security. In a room that usually talks about missile systems and military buildups, that framing felt like a breath of fresh air. And a challenge.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth followed the next morning. More measured on China than last year, but his message on burden-sharing was pointed “strong, quiet, and clear” was how he framed America’s posture, and the era of the US subsidising allied defence, he said, is over.
The underlying tension in the room was unmistakable: can the US-China relationship hold? Does burden-sharing mean abandonment in disguise? Nobody had clean answers.
At the Fourth Plenary on cross-regional security threats, I stood up and asked my question. I’ll reproduce it here because I mean every word of it:
“Supply chain fragmentation, technological concentration, and climate disruption are cross-regional in origin, cross-regional in impact, and already destabilising governance and social cohesion across Southeast Asia.
From Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, the security threat I see most clearly in my community is not invasion. It is the erosion of the economic conditions that make stable governance possible.
The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has not fired a single shot at Southeast Asia but it is raising food and energy costs, compressing government budgets, and narrowing the fiscal space that sustains the social contract between states and citizens.
Does a regional architecture exist that treats development failure as a security threat in its own right? And if it does not, what is this forum prepared to do about it?”
I also had the chance to meet Defence Minister DS Khaled Nordin on the sidelines. At the Fifth Plenary which he shared with Japan’s Defence Minister Koizumi Shinjiro and the Netherlands’ Deputy PM the theme running through the room was trust: how it is built, how it is broken, and how hard it is to rebuild. Koizumi put it simply: what the region needs is trust, transparency, and talks because without a shared conviction that international law means something, regional order loses its foundation. Minister Khaled took it further in his own address: when international law is observed strictly by the Global Majority but selectively interpreted by stronger powers, it stops being law. It becomes leverage. Two different countries, two different strategic positions, one shared anxiety.
The highlight of the summit for myself and I say this genuinely was a private session with Singapore’s Foreign Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, together with three of my fellow Young Leaders. It was off-record and I’ll honour that.
What I can say is that his intellect, his depth of experience, and the genuine curiosity he brought to a conversation with four young emerging voices from the region is something I will carry for a long time. I left that room more serious about my own responsibilities than when I entered it
Here’s what I brought home.
The world is not becoming more dangerous because of one bad actor or one contested strait.
It’s becoming more dangerous because the architecture we built to manage competition was never designed to handle the convergence of forces we’re living through right now , great power rivalry, supply chain fragmentation, development failure, and the erosion of trust all at once.
For Malaysia, the lesson is about strategic autonomy. Who are our real partners?
For Sabah, the lesson is about visibility. We are not the periphery of this story. We sit at the intersection of the South China Sea and the Sulu and Celebes Seas.
We carry real security exposure on our eastern seaboard. And we carry decades of development deficits that narrow the state’s ability to respond when global shocks hit and they will keep hitting.
One last thing I’ve been sitting with since coming home.
Understanding a problem and having the authority to influence it are two very different things.
And perhaps for Sabah, the more useful exercise isn’t trying to solve the Indo-Pacific security architecture, it’s understanding how those broader geopolitical shifts eventually flow downstream into issues that affect us directly.
Our economy. Energy security. Trade routes. Food security. Migration. Maritime boundaries.
In that sense, the value may be less in trying to control the outcome and more in learning to anticipate it.
