Trump is Back: All Bets Are Off

From Tokyo to Islamabad, Asian leaders are looking to the process underway in the US system – and wondering exactly what might go wrong, and when.

During the Biden term, the US focused on the over-arching Asia- focused policy – like Aukus and the QUAD. It also sought to reassure and deepen alliances and its current engagement in order to compete more confidently with China.

In Canberra, AIIA members and guests at the organisation's National Conference heard that its fairly clear now that the second Trump Presidency will be of another order of disruption than the first, where the President’s naivete’ and self-interest was largely tempered by experienced civil servants who knew a daft idea when they heard one.

Trump’s foreign policy gaffs are legion: North Korea added to its nuclear stockpile and built more and better missiles, despite Trump’s chats with Kim Jong-un. Iran rolled on with its nuclear weapons programme after Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 nuclear agreement. and Russia, Syria, and Iran all increased their influence across the Middle East after America withdrew troops from the region.

This time is very likely to be the same, but different.

It’s very likely now Asia will be part of a wider reduction in the US military footprint worldwide, with allies now being regarded as economic competitors, and defence partners regarded as “bleeding the US dry” by an administration with a much harsher transactional bent.

Parts of Asia are of course already well into the planning for how to deal with the US over the next four years.

South Korea and Japan have already begun to renegotiate their burden-sharing agreements with the US, as well as tie down other arrangements involving Washington in a way that can’t be unwound by a Republican-controlled government.

It’s wise to be cautious – Trump tore up the TPP agreement with the US on his first day of his first term in office. He can do the same thing to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, and pretty much any other such agreement.

President Trump and then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in bid farewell to Kim Jong Un at the demarcation line separating North and South Korea at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 2019 / image : White House Archive

Donald Trump’s perspective on foreign policy is not centred around defending democracy, or fighting autocracy, or protecting the rules-based order that’s been in place since the late 1940’s. Instead, it is a means to an end which can usually be described as a ‘deal’.

Reportedly President Trump required his briefing material for bi-lateral discussions to begin with whether the country concerned had a trade surplus with the US.  

In the Asia-Pacific, New Zealand is among those who do currently run a US trade surplus, along with Taiwan, South Korea, India and Japan.  Just how that fact plays for the National-Act coalition is unclear at present.

Most pressing for South-East Asia is how issues of trade and security manifest in this turbulent and contested region under Trump’s emboldened America First policies.

The US is increasingly seen as a distant and fading power. Earlier this year, an annual survey of attitudes across South East from the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute showed that most people in the region would side with China if forced to make an immediate call.

Bucking that trend was the Philippines, a country already in serious disagreement with China over the South China Sea issue. More than 80% of those surveyed sided with the US, an increase from the previous years survey.

President Trump and the US First Lady welcomed by crowds In Ahmedabad, India, in 2020/Photo White House

At last week’s APEC meeting in Peru, Asia-Pacific leaders again warned against trade barriers and the economic carnage they can cause.

The political leaders ended the regional summit with a concise message about the need for fair and open trade.

But in Washington, the cast of credible officials in trade and security areas are beginning to be replaced by Trump nominees, whose essential quality is not an understanding of the issues, but more a loyalty to Trump. Warnings from APEC will go unheeded.

And Washington 2025 is not the Washington of 2016. In the security realm the US has made some gains in Asia under Biden, but all of it is subject to change, despite words of reassurance from the incoming President.

President Trump delivers remarks at Yokota Air Base, just outside Tokyo, in 2017 / Photo White House :Andrea Hanks)

For Australia its not clear whether Trump would support the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal, or the projected US military buildup in Western Australia. It remains a subject of debate in Canberra whether the US is in fact so far behind in its nuclear sub construction programme, that just maybe when push comes to shove, Washington may well decide to hold onto the new subs for its own defence.

The AIIA heard from speakers warning that a decades-long diplomatic fogginess in Canberra has let Australia slide too easily into a position as a close ally of the USA, without the requisite examination of just where that leads the country – especially under a Trump presidency

The most fundamental changes may well come in Korea, where the Trump entertains the possibility of making some sort of economic deal with Kim Jong UN to bring an apparent end to the North Korean nuclear programme.

Meanwhile in the South, Trump has threatened to withdraw US troops unless Seoul agrees to pay for them, a move that could push South Korea into its own domestic nuclear weapons programme.

Republican voters may have wished for a decrease in military spending and smaller trade deficits, but what thewy will get is altogether too hard to predict.

But with the US looking to by-pass security strategy in favour of a nationalist, transactional relationship with Asia, Asian leaders best look to their own budgets to bolster the sectors deemed unimportant to the US and get out their Rolodex for those Asia contacts they might have been neglecting.

-         Asia Media Centre