[1] According to media reports, Abdul Hadi Awang told the recent PAS muktamar in Kota Baru that a US Embassy official once offered to help PAS topple the BN administration and take over the government. The alleged approach, he says, took place at an embassy reception during President Barack Obama’s 2014 visit to Malaysia. The US Embassy has flatly denied the story. Others have asked why Hadi waited until now –– 12 years later –– to reveal it.

[2] Obama’s April 2014 visit came only months after GE13, when Najib Razak’s BN coalition had secured a stable parliamentary majority. PAS was still in Pakatan Rakyat alongside PKR and DAP. The 1MDB scandal had not yet become the defining international crisis it would later be. More importantly, Malaysia-US relations were then at their closest in decades.

[3] Obama was the first sitting US president to visit Malaysia since Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Under Najib, the two countries had elevated their relationship to a “Comprehensive Partnership.” Malaysia was also an early supporter of Washington’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agenda. As well, Najib welcomed American leadership in the context of Obama’s pivot to Asia and argued that the US presence in Asia contributed to regional peace, stability and prosperity. Indeed, critics at the time accused him of moving too close to the Americans.

[4] Obama’s visit was therefore not just a sign of the good bilateral relationship but an indication that Washington regarded Najib as a dependable economic and security partner, a marked contrast to the often acrimonious ties of the Mahathir years. The United States was clearly investing in Najib’s government, not shopping for his replacement. By the end of that same year, Najib and Obama were playing golf together in Hawaii — hardly the behaviour of a president plotting regime change.

[5] The claim is even less plausible when one considers PAS itself. Washington has long viewed political Islam with deep caution, especially after 9/11. PAS, with its ambitions for an Islamic state and its hudud agenda, would scarcely have appeared to American policymakers as a safe or predictable partner. A PAS-led Malaysia, sitting astride one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways, would likely have alarmed Washington rather than appealed to it.

[6] To believe Hadi’s story, one must accept that American officials preferred an uncertain Islamist experiment led by an extremist ideologue to a relationship they had just elevated with a reliable incumbent government. That is not merely unlikely; it goes against the basic logic of American strategic interests.

[7] If Washington had a preferred alternative in Malaysian politics, it would more plausibly have been Anwar Ibrahim — viewed at the time by Washington circles as liberal, reform-minded and more comfortable with the West. Recall that Mahathir and his allies spent years trying to discredit Anwar as “the American candidate.”

[8] None of this is to pretend that the CIA or the United States has clean hands. America has an extensive and ugly record of intervention, coups and regime-change operations abroad. Scepticism of Washington is often justified. But scepticism must still be governed by facts and context. The notion that the US wanted to remove Najib in 2014 and install PAS is not serious analysis; it is pure fiction.

[9] Manufacturing dramatic, unverifiable claims for political gain is nothing new for PAS. In 2016, one of its officials claimed Israel had offered DAP RM1.2 billion in exchange for an Israeli military base in Port Dickson — without producing even a scintilla of evidence. Such claims may excite a party congress, but they do little to enhance Hadi’s credibility.

[10] Hadi is free to tell this tale. But Malaysians should ask why a seasoned political leader would offer such an extraordinary allegation. Is he perversely trying to use the very superpower PAS professes to distrust as a badge of legitimacy –– if even the Americans once saw him as a credible alternative to Najib, that retroactively validates PAS’s claim to be a respectable contender for power come GE16? Whatever it is, when evidence is absent and the facts point the other way, the story does not expose an American plot; it exposes Hadi Awang’s willingness to mistake fantasy for statesmanship.

[Dennis Ignatius |Kuala Lumpur |06 December 2026]