"Malaysia Reassesses Security: The Mid-Term Review of the Malaysian Defence White Paper" by CWP alum Cheng-Chwee Kuik
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY • Malaysia’s Ministry of Defence launched a Mid-Term Review (MTR) of the 2019 Defence White Paper (DWP) in September 2025. The MTR reassesses the changing security environment, reinforces the key strategies of the DWP, and reaffirms the government’s commitment to defending Malaysian security and sovereign interests. • The MTR reflects Malaysia’s changing threat perceptions, particularly concerning cyber insecurity and tensions in the South China Sea. Without naming any country explicitly, the document’s depiction of maritime tensions is much more direct and stronger in tone than the DWP’s, linking the growing regional risks largely to the “aggressive stance” and “rapid increase in military capability of a country that claimed almost the entire South China Sea”. • The document also shows a recalibrated strategic posture to welcome and widen credible bilateral and multilateral defence ties with partners near and far, across the Indo-Pacific region and beyond. These include the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA). This is perhaps the first time a Malaysian official document explicitly, albeit indirectly, mentions the South China Sea in connection with the FPDA. • The capacity of the MTR to reinforce strategies and renew commitments to actualise the DWP vision, however, will depend on the authorities’ ability to bridge the multiple gaps in the Malaysian defence ecosystem, most notably between strategy and doctrine, between defence needs and fiscal constraints, and between government aspirations and various systemic problems.
Cheng-Chwee Kuik is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is Professor of International Relations at the National University of Malaysia (UKM)’s Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS) and concurrently a Nonresident Scholar at Carnegie China. He is Co-Founder of the East Asian International Relations (EAIR) Caucus, a research platform for exchange, engagement, and empowerment among foreign affairs professionals in Malaysia. He served as Head of the Writing Team for the Government of Malaysia’s inaugural Defence White Paper (2019-2020) and a member of the Consultative Council on Foreign Policy, Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2023-2024). Previously he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton-Harvard “China and the World” Program (CWP) and a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations.
Professor Kuik’s research focuses on small-state foreign and defence policies, Asian security, and international relations. Cheng-Chwee’s publications have appeared in such peer-reviewed journals as International Affairs, Pacific Review, Journal of Contemporary China, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Journal of Chinese Political Science, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He is co-author with David M. Lampton and Selina Ho of Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, October 2020), and co-editor with Alice Ba and Sueo Sudo of Institutionalizing East Asia: Mapping and Reconfiguring Regional Cooperation (Routledge 2016). Kuik's essay, “The Essence of Hedging” was awarded the biennial 2009 Michael Leifer Memorial Prize by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies for best article published in any of the three ISEAS journals.
Kuik is a regular invited speaker to international conferences and closed-door policy roundtables. His current projects include: hedging in international relations, elite legitimation and foreign policy choices, and the host-country agency in connectivity cooperation. Cheng-Chwee serves on the editorial boards/committees of Contemporary Southeast Asia, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Asian Perspective, Asian Politics and Policy, International Journal of Asian Studies, and East Asian Policy. He holds an M.Litt. from the University of St. Andrews and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University.
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