Southeast Asia Responds to Trump’s Victory

As I noted in an earlier post, countries in Southeast Asia, probably the region most directly impacted by China’s growing military and economic clout, have long tried to hedge between Beijing and Washington. U.S. popularity in the region has waned in recent years due to the Gaza conflict and a perception among some Southeast Asian leaders that the White House could not match China’s regional economic policies. Thus, leaders in countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and, to some extent, Indonesia have become more openly welcoming to Beijing. The only Southeast Asian state to move clearly against China, the Philippines, seemed to be a regional exception.

Now, with Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Southeast Asian states have had mixed responses. In the first Trump term, some Southeast Asian leaders worried that Trump would raise tensions with China so sharply that it would cause regional economic fallout, or even risk war. Trump took a transactional, if mostly hands-off approach to the region, even as U.S.-China relations hardened. Southeast Asian countries understand and can certainly deal with transactional politics, and many of their leaders, including the presidents of Indonesia and the Philippines, are quite skilled at it. The region’s biggest states, even before the first Trump term, also had a higher level of distrust of regional U.S. leadership than, say, comparable countries in Northeast Asia.

The Biden administration actually took as tough, if not a tougher, stance toward China than Trump had in his first term, and it remains unclear what China policy will emerge from a second Trump presidency. Trump’s campaign rhetoric could indicate a much more confrontational approach to China in a second term, but his transactional approach could mean, as in his first term, that much of the anger about China comes to little in practice.

And while a second Trump administration is unlikely to be involved in any regional trade integration, and probably will scrap the Biden team’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), the initiative was relatively modest in its aims and potential anyway. A transactional Trump team could sign bilateral trade deals, but regional trade engagement has been broadly unpopular in the United States since before the first Trump administration, and a Democratic administration would not have been able to take part in significant regional integration either.

The biggest fear that many Southeast Asian countries have is that a second Trump administration will live up to some of Trump’s campaign rhetoric. While the region’s states can mostly accept a more transactional U.S. foreign policy and already have embraced other regional powers like Japan in the absence of clear U.S. leadership, a much bigger U.S.-China economic or strategic conflict would be devastating in Southeast Asia. It could trigger an actual conflict in the South China Sea and it would resonate enormously in Southeast Asia in other ways, forcing some states to choose sides between the powers, which they have always tried not to do. While some Southeast Asian countries—Vietnam, Malaysia, and others—could benefit from a continued cooling of U.S.-China relations as companies move out of China, in general, the region’s economies would be badly damaged by major U.S.-China economic conflict.