Beyond the hub: ASEAN–India cooperation and the quiet shift in Asian maritime resilience

The Asian maritime order will not abandon efficiency but may no longer treat concentration as synonymous with strength.

In October 2025, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi announced that 2026 would be designated the ASEAN–India Year of Maritime Cooperation. The initiative reflects a growing recognition that the future of regional connectivity will depend not only on expanding capacity, but on making that capacity more resilient under conditions of disruption.

This shift is being tested right now. For decades, Southeast Asia has thrived on a highly efficient hub-and-spoke system centred on Singapore. The model brought remarkable gains in trade, logistics efficiency, and industrial clustering. Yet it always assumed a global shipping environment that was at least predictably imperfect. For decades, Asian maritime integration was organised around maximising throughput, minimising friction, and concentrating scale. The model delivered extraordinary gains – but also quietly accumulated systemic dependency.

Recent disruptions have brought this home sharply. Since February 2026, severe disruption to traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has led major carriers including Maersk, MSC, and Hapag-Lloyd to keep rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope. The result, layered on top of lingering Red Sea issues, has been pronounced vessel bunching and noticeably longer waiting times at Singapore and other key Asian hubs.

What is now being questioned is not the value of efficiency itself, but the assumption that extreme concentration always produces the most resilient system.

It is precisely here that the ASEAN–India Year of Maritime Cooperation is beginning to show practical value. The original diplomatic announcement in late 2025 is gradually translating into operational work. In the first few months of 2026, discussions under the 2026–2030 Plan of Action have focused on concrete issues such as port linkages, maritime domain awareness, blue economy projects, and disaster response coordination. The emphasis so far has been on steady, incremental progress rather than high-profile declarations.

At one level, it points to expanded collaboration in areas such as port development, ship repair, and logistics connectivity. At another, less explicit level, it raises a practical question: Whether the region can develop enough secondary ports, regional repair ecosystems, and distributed feeder networks to handle shocks without always depending on a single dominant hub.

Singapore sits at the centre of this transition. Its position as Southeast Asia’s maritime hub is the result of decades of deliberate policy, combining infrastructure investment, regulatory efficiency, and integration into global trade flows. Beyond its massive transshipment volumes, Singapore also dominates regional bunkering, ship finance, legal arbitration, and digital port coordination. It has also built strong operational ties with Indonesia, Vietnam, and India.

For this reason, the question is not whether Singapore will participate in deeper regional integration. It already does. The more relevant issue is how the nature of that integration may evolve.

There are two practical ways to look at this. The first simply feeds more cargo, bunkering demand and feeder services into Singapore, reinforcing the current model. The second accepts that too much concentration has become a vulnerability in itself. It focuses on building real distributed capacity – more dry-dock space in secondary ports, diversified transshipment options, and resilient multimodal routing – so the system can better absorb disruptions.

In practice, Southeast Asia is unlikely to abandon the hub model overnight. The political and economic costs of full redistribution would be high. Data sharing, value-chain decisions, and strategic trust remain sensitive issues. Singapore, for its part, has always preferred gradual adaptation over radical change. Building real redundancy is expensive – duplicating functions that the old system worked hard to eliminate. Resilience, in short, comes with its own price tag.

What is more likely is a hybrid system. Singapore would remain the primary coordinating hub. At the same time, it would deliberately nurture complementary capabilities in other ports. Rather than losing centrality, it would aim to orchestrate a wider, more distributed network.

This approach fits into the wider regional picture. The year 2026 has also been designated the China–ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership fifth anniversary theme year, with both sides continuing work on their 2026–2030 Action Plan. These parallel initiatives focus on similar practical areas – sustainable blue economy, maritime connectivity, and operational cooperation – and suggest that different frameworks can usefully coexist as the region strengthens its overall resilience.

India is doing its part in this direction. It continues to expand ship repair and recycling capacity on its west coast, invests seriously in digital maritime domain awareness, and pushes crew training programmes. When these initiatives link up with ASEAN partners on green shipping corridors and multi-modal logistics, the region gains useful redundancy – without dismantling what already works.

Vietnam is steadily moving up the shipbuilding value chain, particularly in specialised and green vessels, adding industrial depth to the region’s evolving maritime ecosystem rather than displacing higher-end centres outright. Indonesia brings geographic scale and strategic reach across vital sea lanes, though turning that latent advantage into coordinated maritime capacity remains a longer-term challenge.

Taken together, these conditions do not point to a rapid decentralisation of the regional system. Instead, they suggest a gradual layering of redundancy, where capacity is diversified without being fully detached from the central hub.

For Singapore, this presents both opportunity and constraint. On one hand, it can use its strengths to lead a more resilient regional network. On the other, it must accept some sharing of functions, data, and operational space. That openness does not come naturally.

Too little distribution leaves the system fragile. Too much, too fast, risks undermining the very efficiencies that made Singapore dominant.

ASEAN–India maritime cooperation – alongside parallel efforts from other partners – will be defined less by grand declarations than by quiet, incremental adjustments on the ground. The real test is not whether centrality disappears, but how it is redefined.

In this emerging landscape, Singapore’s position is unlikely to shrink in absolute terms. More plausibly, it will evolve from being the indispensable chokepoint to the indispensable coordinator in a more flexible network. That shift is subtle, but it matters.

The age of frictionless maritime globalisation may not return to its previous form. The emerging Asian maritime order will not abandon efficiency, but it may no longer treat concentration as synonymous with strength. Handled pragmatically, this evolution does not have to come at Singapore’s expense.

On the contrary, it may strengthen its long-term relevance in maritime Asia where resilience now stands alongside efficiency as a core organising principle.