US President Bashes His Way Through East Asia
The perils were never greater of standing alone
Assessing the damage from Typhoon Trump, which blew through East Asia last week, is difficult as some of the agreements with regional states were hastily cobbled together and may prove of scant consequence or durability. However, one thing stands out for small and middling powers.
Faced with the US President’s wrecking ball for free trade, multilateralism, and insistence on individual country deals, the only constructive response is greater cooperation among themselves. Picked off one at a time, they were bullied into allowing US goods into their respective countries tariff-free while agreeing to onerous increases of varying sizes on their exports into the US.
The frameworks for expanding trade within and between regions mostly exist, but the Trump visit showed how little commitment there was to them. Intra-Asean trade, for instance, has languished at around 26 percent for decades, compared with 60 percent in the EU despite annual lip service and well-meaning seminars. Asean’s capacity to implement urgent decisions and innovate quickly has been undermined by a weak, underfunded, and understaffed secretariat.
For a start, the very fact that Trump could come to an Asean summit to conduct bilateral deals showed how little sense of its own worth the organization has. Not a gesture of common interest was on display. Asean chairman, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, led the way, desperate for a superficially “successful” encounter with Trump that ended with smiles and a US-Malaysia declaration that has critics at home seething.
But some of the clauses were humiliating. In return for a tariff of “only” 19 percent, Malaysia would give preferential access to US goods of all sorts and accept US standards on items such as food and vehicles while Malaysia – which has followed British standards from its colonial days and the metric system – will be required to address environmental issues and give the US some sort of oversight of Malaysian rare earths production and processing.
Malaysia commits to the purchase of 30 aircraft, US$3.5 billion of LNG, spend US$150 billion on semiconductors and data centers, and invest US$30 billion in the US.
Maybe the dependence of the Malaysian electronics industry on the US market, and now the siren allure of AI data centers, which are already overburdening the Malaysian grid, could justify such an apparent surrender of other national interests. Perhaps it is a signal too that Malaysia wants to insinuate a warm and deep relationship with the US without seemingly taking sides on the US-China rivalry.
Agreements with Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia were rather less onerous but included requirements to buy Boeing aircraft and US energy, and give preferential access for rare earths. Where all these deals leave regional trade pacts and relations with countries from the EU to Brazil and China is not clear. But given the size of its trade surplus with the US, and given suspicion that it has been a back door for Chinese products, Vietnam appeared to get off lightly with a 20 percent tariff and not much else apart from buying Boeing aircraft and US agricultural products. US strategic interests were clearly in play.
In another sign of regional weakness, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto didn’t stay for the whole meeting. He wants Indonesia to play a larger role in world affairs, but being a bit player on the Gaza discussion is scant compensation for failure to be a leader for the region of which Indonesia is by far the largest and most populous nation. Instead, he focused on the Korean summit of APEC, an unwieldy body whose main function was to provide an approximate occasion for Trump to meet President Xi.
In the event, Trump’s economic truce with Beijing was in effect largely a win for China, showing that the contrast between his demands from Asean member states who are supposed to be friends but have limited bargaining power, and a China which has largely stood up to him and is now able to proclaim itself as a bastion of free trade and multilateralism. Unlike Trump, Xi also stayed for APEC which, offering Xi another opportunity to display the difference between their public postures and to push ideas such as greater use of the yuan and other non-dollar currencies in trade.
Yet in contrast to his impact on Southeast Asia, Trump’s meetings with the leaders of Japan and South Korea may have actually strengthened their relations to China’s strategic disadvantage. Both now face a relatively modest 15 percent tariff barrier. Expectations that Korea invest hundreds of billions of dollars in US projects, including power grids and shipbuilding, are clearly beyond reach and have caused offense. Yet talk of cooperation on nuclear-powered submarines underlined the military relationship between the two.
Likewise, new Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi’s own hawkish desire for increased defense spending fits the Trump agenda – and the hopes of the US military. Trump had earlier reaffirmed the US commitment to AUKUS, the submarine deal with Australia and the UK, which had earned criticism from some in his administration. Japan may also feel thankful that it was not pressured into massive revaluation as with the 1985 Plaza Accord, intended to reduce a massive US trade deficit, which saw the yen rise from 240 to the dollar, to 128 by 1987, and to 80 in 1995. Japan still suffers 35 years later from the consequent boom and bust in asset values.
Trump and Xi avoided the vexed subject of Taiwan. There is nothing to agree about. But meanwhile, the direction of policy in Korea and Japan, combined with US activities in the Philippines overlooking the Bashi channel, suggests a military solution remains out of the question for now, despite the ever-growing power of China.
Of course, Trump can turn on a dime, and has according to whom he last met with or felt insulted by. Likewise, the bilateral deals with Southeast Asian countries may never be ratified and eventually be replaced by simpler and common arrangements. But it leaves one major lesson for Asean members: in the face of a superpower, divided you fall, a theme for the next Asean host, the Philippines. In respect of the South China Sea, a matter which concerns most of the members. China has divided the region by insisting on bilateral dealings and applying varying levels of pressure to the different countries.
A step forward would be for an agreement between Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, and Thailand that they will settle their sea disputes with each other and without any need for China’s participation. Overlapping claims, such as between the Philippines and Malaysia, and Vietnam, would be held in abeyance, and all would accept the principles set out in the 2016 ruling of the Court of Arbitration.
Philip Bowring is correct to argue that Donald Trump’s recent “transactional diplomacy” through the region, starting in Kuala Lumpur, has once more exposed ASEAN’s fundamental disunity and, as a consequence -- again -- forced these regional states into stunningly humiliating, unilateral concessions. That’s like selling the earth beneath their people’s feet to American interests.
Those who have been following ASEAN since its geopolitically-motivated formation in 1967 will tell you, despite ASEAN consistent boasting otherwise, that it is far from unified across all known fronts. Intra-ASEAN relations continue to be plagued by hype and hubris delivered by the hands who govern these states. The entire premise that ASEAN is a politically “neutral” regional organization, consistent with the old Non-Alignment Movement, is entirely delusional. Behind the chimera of handholding on stage lies a smorgasbord of problem too numerous to discuss here.
That said, Bowring’s reasonably compelling narrative, it is however overly deterministic and overlooks a weird sort of strategic agency. The article correctly identifies the immediate, transactional nature of the bilateral agreements, but framing the Southeast Asian countries and Japan and South Korea as passive victims who were simply "picked off" and "bullied" by Trump dismisses the point that ASEAN states individually, especially Malaysia, allowed themselves to be picked off and bullied.
Bowring’s perspective neglects a crucial geopolitical reality: many regional actors, particularly those reliant on both US security and Chinese trade, despite actively seeking to hedge their bets against an increasingly assertive Beijing, allowed themselves to draw closer to swamp of a debased Trumpist Washington. It’s also a clear sign not of an ASEAN seeking to “balance” itself between two so-called superpowers but of an ASEAN pedaling two sampans in deeply troubled waters with one set of oars.
Deals involving large purchases like Boeing aircraft or LNG and investment commitments in critical supply chains like semiconductors and data centers can be viewed not merely as a "surrender" but as a deliberate effort to diversify security partners, on the surface, but embed the U.S. in their economic and geopolitical futures. The only way to do this is for the ASEAN’s leaders to be transactional themselves.
For ‘nations’ (what the heck is a ‘nation’ twenty-five years into the 21st century?), such as Malaysia, committing to U.S. standards or investment is kowtowing at its best but it is also a strategic cost incurred for the long-term benefit of deeper alignment and protection. In that vein, it is a stunningly humiliating defeat on the part of Malaysia and its neighbors who are pretending to carve an independent path towards economic growth and development in accordance with the fallaciousness of ‘free market’ economics.
A few quick conclusions. One, Bowring’s critique of ASEAN’s lack of a united front is structurally sound, though he could have gone much further. ASEAN’s core operating principle of non-interference and consensus inherently privileges national interest and bilateral engagement over bloc-level confrontation.
There has been a great deal of pretense attached to the claim by ASEAN leaders, especially since 1976. Of their “unity”, of their ability to speak with one mind, let alone one mouth. There simply haven’t been any runs on the board to suggest that non-interference and consensus behind the curtains have proven to be materially real or true. ASEAN, as servile as it has always been to the U.S, even allowed Trump to lay claim to winning peace in the Thai-Cambodia conflict without daring to protest. There has been an awful lot of ASEAN political theater to show their domestic audiences, foremost, just how ASEAN deals with differences, let alone perceived challengers and geopolitical enemies – by bowing nice and low to the U.S. and to China for their desperately needed capital investments and markets.
ASEAN could never in its wildest dreams achieve 60% internal trade like the EU. That’s primarily because ASEAN’s structural economic differences and the political realities fundamentally constraint the espoused claims of unity when the domestic structural political constraints impede and substantively undermine that objective. Presenting a "gesture of common interest" is in fact the long-hidden sign of ASEAN’s historical institutional weaknesses.
Two, contrasts drawn between the U.S. as a "wrecking ball" and China as a "bastion of free trade" are too simplistic and laughable. Bowring himself later notes China’s effective use of bilateral pressure to divide the region on issues like the South China Sea. Fact is China's multilateral posturing is always strategic, and its trade practices are hardly free-market driven. Free-markets do not exist. They never have anywhere in the world. So why would it in mercantilist China?
The differential treatment of Japan and South Korea, who faced lower tariffs, likely stems from their distinct leverage, high-value technology industries, and different trade imbalances with the U.S. -- not purely a result of change in U.S. demeanor. Indeed, the challenges facing ASEAN and its dealings with the U.S. and number one enemy China are not embedded on the tired cliché of divided one falls but on strategic calculations made within each of these states and in competition with each other, not to achieve the path to glory but, as has always been glaringly clear all along, for each ASEAN state’s path to political survival.
Words of a lifetime of experience & reflection. Thank you, Mr. Bowring