How is the war in Iran impacting Southeast Asia?

0:00This message comes from Carvana. Finance and buy your next vehicle with Carvana. Shop a huge selection, customize terms to fit your budget, and buy completely online. No hassle, no pressure. Get the car you love the easy way. with Carvana. Today on State of the World, how is the war in Iran impacting Southeast Asia? You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. In a few minutes, Iran has been using a novel weapon in the war with the United States, internet memes. But first, the economic impact of the war in Iran has been felt globally.

0:44And one of the hardest hit regions is Southeast Asia. Many of those nations are almost entirely dependent on foreign energy. And it's quickly running out, as we hear from Michael Sullivan in Thailand. The island nation of the Philippines is especially vulnerable, and it knows it. With President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announcing a national energy state of emergency on Tuesday. Nothing is off the table. We are looking at everything, everything that we can do. Cutting fuel taxes and providing subsidies for poorer Filipinos is one option the government is employing, but its options are limited. The archipelago in the South China Sea imports roughly 90 percent of its oil and much of its natural gas.

1:30And according to the government, has only about two months of gasoline and diesel on hand. And it's not alone. Vietnam has 30 to 45 days of reserves. Thailand has about 61 days. Singapore has 20 to 50 days. And Indonesia and Malaysia, it's not quite clear what they have. That's because both of the latter are substantial producers of both oil and natural gas, says Indra Overland, who follows Southeast Asia as head of energy research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. In Vietnam, meanwhile, the shortage of jet fuel is already being felt. Vietnam Airlines has already announced it's scaling back dozens of domestic flights beginning in April because of a shortage of jet fuel.

2:18And that's not the only problem, says a worried-looking Nguyen Chi Kung. He's French market manager at Hanoi Travel who's come to the airport to see the situation for himself. He says many international flights have already been disrupted too and many of his customers who booked flights through Doha and Qatar because they're cheaper had them canceled. But the bigger question for Hanoi is manufacturing. Whether it can keep its burgeoning manufacturing sector humming to fulfill new leader Tho Lam's ambitious double-digit GDP growth target of 10 % a year through 2030 in order to make Vietnam a high-income nation by 2045.

3:02You know, Vietnam has peace, it has food, it has growth, and it has power. So it is pretty well prepared in terms of resilience. About half its power, electricity, is produced by hydropower and natural gas, says Dominic Scriven of Dragon Capital in Ho Chi Minh City. And Hanoi's got friends who'll help. Russia, China, Japan, and Korea. the relationships are deep, the manufacturing supply chain. And so everybody has an interest in making sure that supply chains can continue to function. Things are functioning here in northern Thailand too, but it's getting a bit chaotic as I discovered today on a trip to the gas station a half mile up the road from my house.

3:53As Thailand, which like Vietnam imports about half the energy it needs, tries to make alternative arrangements. It's 5 o 'clock in the afternoon, and I'm standing at the PTT gas station, and I see about 80, maybe 90 cars lined up on the highway waiting to get into this station, and there's about 30 more motorcycles hoping to get gas as well.

4:20An attendant with a bullhorn guides customers to available pumps. I find a motorcycle food delivery driver named off and a quiet place to talk. He spends about an hour a day in line just for fuel these days, he says. And just last month, he says, he was doing okay. Before the war, I was clearing about 1 ,800 baht a day, he says, a little more than$50. Now I'm lucky to clear$10 a day to feed a family of four. Gas keeps getting more expensive, and people aren't buying as much, he says. They're worried things will get worse. They're not alone. That's Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand. There's a new battle space in the war with Iran, a virtual one.

5:08The Iranian government has been using social media to troll the United States, and President Trump is the regime's favorite target. Of course, there's a long history of war propaganda, but as we hear from NPR's Kerry Khan, in 2026 it's hitting a wider audience and at a much faster pace. Trolling Trump is a new Iranian regime pastime. It shifted into high gear soon after the start of the war when the White House put out a controversial media mashup mixing NFL tackle highlights with missile strike footage in Iran. Iran's retort features an animated Lego multiverse where Iranian soldiers avenge miniature Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bombs.

6:01The AI-generated Iranian missiles hit targets throughout the Middle East, sending boxy Lego figure scrambling from tiny Orthodox Jewish men in Israel to Saudi sheikhs in the Gulf. Iran's vast state media apparatus has taken up trolling in official communiques, too, and in English, Like this recent dry delivery of Trump's trademark phrases by the Iranian Revolutionary Garcord's spokesman, Ebrahim Zulfagori. You are fired. You are familiar with this sentence. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Trolling has long been in grassroots Internet culture for more than 15 years, says Whitney Phillips, who teaches media ethics at the University of Oregon.

6:47But she says with the rise of Donald Trump, it's catapulted into global politics. This is the language in which Trump speaks, and so this is the language in which world leaders are speaking to him. Like the IRGC spokesman Zulfa Gari, who often invokes the president's ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his notorious island. A reminder to the corrupted island man, the ground and the map of the war is in our hands. Former head of Iran's National Security Council, Ali Laranjani, also liked to troll Trump, with Epstein Island references too. He was assassinated last week in a targeted Israeli airstrike.

7:26The real experience of war is getting lost in the focus-grabbing and income-generating world of memes, says Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. It's this content and commodification of war, war becoming part of the attention economy. which I think is another very weird, disconfiting experience that so many of us are going through and feeling right now. According to Iranian health officials, more than 1 ,500 civilians have been killed there, as well as at least 14 U.S. servicemen. Brookings says Iranian propaganda is not new, but with its flair for Trump trolling, it's now successfully reaching large numbers of Americans like never before.

8:09They are not used to seeing the messages of a country that the U.S. government is bombing, that are directed toward them. This is quite new. And he says Iranians are pioneers at global propaganda, longtime adapters of social media starting decades ago. However, their AI-generated videos of late seem to be more about quantity than quality, with a lot of content generated apparently by 30-year-old state workers, with a nostalgia for the late 1990s kids' show Teletubbies.

8:46In this video, a Trump tubby is dressed in an American flag-themed pudgy outfit as he sits on the floor of the Oval Office, playing with fighter jets over a map of the Middle East. And more Legos-inspired videos, too, set to rap music. Cross the ocean just to find your credit. Sacrifice your own boys for a lie. Listen. Yeah. Yeah. Make America great again. It ends on a cut to a black screen with white writing. Your grave mistake of attacking us will be judged by history, and it won't be in your favor. And then ends with this message. Thank you for your attention to this matter, the people of Iran.

9:30That's NPR's Carrie Kahn.

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