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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January holds both promise and peril for Southeast Asia. On the one hand, the incoming administration appears poised to reinvigorate the Indo-Pacific strategy devised during Trump’s first term, which focused on countering China and included the strengthening of alliances and partnerships throughout the region. Several countries, namely the Philippines and Vietnam, will applaud this approach. Others, like Indonesia and Singapore, may worry about the potential for war in their neighborhood. But there will be a much broader welcome to Trump’s likely deprioritizing of promoting values—such as democracy and human rights—abroad in favor of a more transactional approach that strictly aims at achieving U.S. national interests, especially among authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes that comprise most Southeast Asian states. Overall, Trump’s likely policies could put the United States in a better position to compete long-term against China in the region.
For Southeast Asia, the clear winners of a more hawkish strategy on China are the Philippines and Vietnam. These two countries are bearing the brunt of China’s expansive nine-dash line sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. They are also at the forefront of challenging these claims, which are based on Beijing’s interpretation of its historical rights and in direct contravention of international law and norms of behavior enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January holds both promise and peril for Southeast Asia. On the one hand, the incoming administration appears poised to reinvigorate the Indo-Pacific strategy devised during Trump’s first term, which focused on countering China and included the strengthening of alliances and partnerships throughout the region. Several countries, namely the Philippines and Vietnam, will applaud this approach. Others, like Indonesia and Singapore, may worry about the potential for war in their neighborhood. But there will be a much broader welcome to Trump’s likely deprioritizing of promoting values—such as democracy and human rights—abroad in favor of a more transactional approach that strictly aims at achieving U.S. national interests, especially among authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes that comprise most Southeast Asian states. Overall, Trump’s likely policies could put the United States in a better position to compete long-term against China in the region.
For Southeast Asia, the clear winners of a more hawkish strategy on China are the Philippines and Vietnam. These two countries are bearing the brunt of China’s expansive nine-dash line sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. They are also at the forefront of challenging these claims, which are based on Beijing’s interpretation of its historical rights and in direct contravention of international law and norms of behavior enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
In recent years, Manila has expanded and deepened its security alliance with Washington to help counter Beijing’s increasing use of gray-zone tactics in the South China Sea, especially at the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, Scarborough Shoal, Sabina Shoal, and Pag-asa Island. What is worrisome is that Trump, during his first administration, seemed to be uninterested in the U.S.-Philippines alliance. When then-President Rodrigo Duterte, for example, attempted to cancel the U.S.-Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement—a key pact undergirding the two countries’ mutual defense treaty—Trump said, “I don’t really mind if they would like to do that. It will save a lot of money … My views are different than others.”
But the current president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., is the opposite of Duterte—pro-United States and anti-China—and thus seeks sustainable commitments from Washington. Without U.S. support, the Philippines would be mostly left to fend for itself against growing Chinese encroachments into its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the South China Sea. A more competitive U.S. strategy would further bolster Manila’s efforts to push back against Chinese encroachments into its waters.
Unlike the Philippines, Vietnam—an emerging key strategic partner of the United States that also keeps a cordial and productive relationship with China—has little if any expectation of U.S. defense of its claims against Beijing in the South China Sea. However, Hanoi continues to benefit from Washington’s military assistance as part of the upgrade to the two countries’ partnership that began in September of last year. Although the first Trump administration contributed to building up these strategic ties, there were frictions on bilateral trade. Indeed, the Trump administration initiated a review of allegations that Hanoi had been manipulating its currency—not an insignificant concern given that the United States is a top trade partner. In the end, however, the Trump administration never designated Vietnam a currency manipulator, and the Biden administration threw out the case. Interestingly, in the readout of their recent phone call, both Trump and Vietnamese leader To Lam discussed economic engagement favorably, suggesting once again that the second Trump administration might overlook trade frictions in the interest of maintaining Hanoi’s cooperation against China.
The other maritime counterclaimants, Brunei and Malaysia, are also likely to benefit from U.S. support of their claims in the South China Sea. But in the case of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has separate concerns about the second Trump administration, including potential new trade tariffs and Trump’s likely strong support of Israel, which is unpopular in the Muslim-majority country. Malaysia has come out in staunch support of Hamas and would thus oppose Trump if his Israel policy remains intact. Notably, neither of the other two Muslim-majority nations in Southeast Asia—Brunei and Indonesia—have taken a similar stance to Malaysia’s.
Still, other Southeast Asian countries may be less keen to see a second Trump administration waging intensified competition in their region. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto visited Beijing last week and pledged to accelerate the heightened economic engagement already seen under his predecessor, and he cut a deal with China on overlapping maritime claims in the South China Sea that many observers have criticized as being inconsistent with Indonesia’s recognized EEZ and adherence to UNCLOS. During his subsequent stop in Washington earlier this week, Prabowo met with outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden and referred to the United States as a “great friend” of Indonesia. The two sides pledged additional military cooperation, demonstrating Indonesia’s carefully balanced embrace of both great powers to avoid getting ensnared by either.
In the past, Singapore has expressed deep anxiety over rising U.S.-China competition in the Indo-Pacific. In his keynote speech at the 2019 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stated, “The United States and China need to work together—and with other countries, too—to bring the global system up to date and to not upend the system.” More recently, in an interview with Foreign Policy, Singaporean Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen said, “We’ve worked with the Trump administration before … I’m not so much concerned,” suggesting that Singapore believes that an uncomfortable situation will at least be manageable.
While it is a security ally of the United States, Thailand has not appreciated increasing great-power competition in the region, either. Much of this has to do with Bangkok’s long-standing historical and cultural ties to Beijing, but it also stems from an aversion to unnecessarily causing problems with its larger neighbor. This has thrown the alliance, originally conceived to counter the spread of communism during the Cold War, into question, and the two nations are trying to find common ground as Washington continues to pursue its rivalry with Beijing.
Potentially, Trump’s approach to great-power competition could also offer an opening to other authoritarian nations in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. Because Trump is likely to engage in a transactional approach, these countries could end up with closer U.S. ties. They seek a values-free environment in which Washington avoids, from their perspective, lecturing them on human rights and the need for democracy. But this might not come to fruition. In his first term, for example, Trump attempted to reset U.S.-Cambodia ties, but in a letter to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen, Trump nonetheless called out the importance of returning to the “path of democratic governance.” Regardless, there is at least the opportunity to reset ties with these countries and unexpectedly challenge Beijing in its own backyard.
From a broader perspective, it will be interesting to see how the incoming Trump administration handles the Biden administration’s legacy of using minilateral groups to achieve U.S. objectives in the region. Whether it is the Australia-United Kingdom-United States pact (AUKUS), the so-called Squad (Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States), or the United States-Japan-Philippines trilateral group, Beijing views these collective security mechanisms as part of Washington’s attempts to contain it. Given Trump’s renewed focus on great-power competition, he is likely to keep these groups intact and perhaps even create new ones. He did, after all, resuscitate the moribund Quad in 2017, suggesting that he is not averse to going beyond one-on-one dealmaking and finding multilateral solutions to challenges in the Indo-Pacific.
But Trump’s willingness to endure multilateralism has limits. He had a strained relationship with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), attending only one ASEAN summit himself (in 2017) and not even dispatching a cabinet-level official to two of the three other summits during his term. If this continues, then Southeast Asia will view the second Trump administration as fundamentally unserious about engaging them and their region. This is a distinct possibility given his past approach, and his administration should seek to become more, not less, engaged.
Over the next four years, Trump is highly likely to accelerate his Indo-Pacific strategy in Southeast Asia by strengthening alliances and partnerships, consistent with his first term. His transactional approach might help to boost this strategy, too. However, many Southeast Asian countries, if not most of them, are concerned about increasing great-power competition in their region and will attempt to steer clear of it, potentially making the Trump administration’s job more difficult. But this is a surmountable problem, especially if Washington calmly explains the benefits of pushing back against Beijing—with the latter proving the former’s point by continuing its assertive behavior throughout the region.