Southeast Asia today sits in a position of great vulnerability, especially when it comes to energy. Consider how exposed we are. We consume 5 to 6 million barrels of oil a day but produce only 2 million. The rest, roughly 3 million barrels, must pass through a single choke point every day: the Strait of Hormuz. Should it close, a region of 700 million people has no serious fallback. And this is not only about the oil of today, but our ability to power tomorrow. To be a stakeholder, rather than a spectator, in the AI narrative, a nation needs 10,000 kWh per capita. Only Singapore and Brunei clear that bar; Indonesia sits at around 1,300. The deeper problem, though, is sophistication. When I served as trade minister, some of our friends in the developed economies were keen to pull Indonesia into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a high-standard trade pact with demanding rules on labor, intellectual property, state-owned enterprises, and procurement. I could not, in good conscience, sell it for this region. Not because the idea was poor, but because we were not yet ready to sit as equals with the developed economies. Without the right foundation, any sophisticated framing of trade collapses into nothing. That foundation is education. It is the root of everything. And even where the economics are settled, our energy vulnerability persists. Over the last seven to eight years, solar has fallen from 44 cents to 4 cents per kWh, wind from 20 cents to 4, and battery storage from around USD 3,000 to USD 120 per kWh, bringing it to parity with fossil fuels. What we lack is not capital or technology, but political will. Which is why, in a world of sharpening rivalries, our ability to swing matters more than ever. To draw technology from one pole and capital from another without being owned by either. But a region can only swing with that kind of agency if it first closes its own gaps, in energy, in education, in sophistication. That is the task ahead of ASEAN's 60th year. Our vulnerability is a shared one, as the haze so clearly demonstrates. And the way out of it, whether we like it or not, must be shared as well. @AsiaPolicy