America’s Asian Partners Are Not Worried Enough About Trump

One cannot have a political conversation in Asian capitals today without getting pulled into a discussion about Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House. The Japanese have even coined a phrase, moshi-tora (“if Trump”)—shorthand for “What happens if Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November?” Speculation abounds about how a second Trump term might differ from Joe Biden’s first term, during which Washington focused on deepening alliance partnerships and building coalitions to compete with China economically and to bolster Taiwan’s deterrence.

Trump has been vocal about his desire to prioritize America’s narrow self-interest and do less to help U.S. partners. And yet many Asian analysts and political leaders evince a degree of calm over the prospect of a second Trump term. Over the past four years, the U.S. Congress achieved some bipartisan consensus on strengthening alliances, diversifying supply chains, and protecting U.S. markets against competition from China, and some leaders in Asia hope that reasonable lawmakers might guide Trump’s policies. Others believe that because they managed an erratic Trump during his first term relatively successfully, they can do so again.

But this confidence is misplaced. A second Trump administration is likely to be far more disruptive for Asia than the first one was. In Trump’s first term, his most radical foreign policy instincts were blunted by the presence of seasoned appointees; these figures will not be present in a second term. If Trump gets a second chance at the presidency, he is even more likely than before to see allies as trade adversaries, reduce the U.S. military footprint worldwide, befriend autocratic leaders, and challenge the norms that have thus far secured nuclear nonproliferation in Asia. Washington’s Asian security partners will need to become far more self-reliant for their defense as America becomes simply another transactional, self-interested player instead of the benevolent patron that has long supported the liberal order in the region. All U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, including close ones such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea, need to wake up to the reality that a second Trump term will bring new and challenging surprises.

SUNSET PROVISION

To be fair, Asian governments are trying to prepare for another Trump presidency. Conference halls from Seoul to Manila teem with panels of experts predicting what his second-term policies might be. Former Trump officials and would-be appointees are the hottest speakers on Asian conference circuits. Asian embassies in Washington have set up special policy-research units to cover the presidential campaigns and identify and befriend members of Trump’s brain trust.

In some cases, Asian countries are trying to preempt policy disputes with a second Trump presidency. The Japanese and South Korean governments, for example, have started the process of renegotiating existing defense burden-sharing agreements to avoid having to contend with the exponentially higher, multibillion-dollar demands Trump might make on them. White House officials, meanwhile, are racing to institutionalize multilateral arrangements such as the myriad U.S.–Japanese–South Korean defense- and economic-cooperation initiatives that emerged from a key 2023 Camp David summit with Japan and South Korea; the trilateral security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States on nuclear propulsion submarines (known as AUKUS); the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework geared toward building more resilient supply chains; and the Indo-Pacific maritime democracies trilateral between Japan, the Philippines, and the United States, so that Trump cannot undo them.

This legwork makes good sense. During his first term, Trump moved to tear up agreements that he believed “suckered” the United States. On the first day of his administration, he pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement; he also obsessed over the United States’ relationship with allies that he perceived were free-riding on U.S. security guarantees while fleecing the United States economically with trade surpluses. Trump even required that all his briefing papers for a meeting or a call with a world leader start with whether the leader’s country had a merchandise trade surplus with the United States.

Yet Asian leaders coped with this uncertainty by exploiting, where they could, Trump’s idiosyncrasies to further their own political goals. For instance, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe befriended Trump during the transition between his 2016 election and his 2017 inauguration—and then used Trump’s calls for greater defense cost sharing by security allies to press forward with Japan’s rearmament despite domestic opposition. South Korean President Moon Jae-in used Trump’s infatuation with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to pursue an engagement strategy with North Korea. And hard-liners against China leveraged Trump’s obsession with the trade deficit to pursue policies to curtail China’s competitiveness across the board of security and economic issues. In other words, given a lemon, Asian leaders tried to make lemonade.

HOMEWORK PROBLEM

But allies’ belief that they can make the best of a second Trump term is misplaced. For starters, officials who figure they could handle a second Trump presidency just as well as the first erroneously assume they will have a similar caliber of interlocutors in the White House with whom to engage. During his first term, however, Trump populated his administration with a number of experienced policymakers who had served in previous Republican presidential administrations. These veterans are not likely to return. Trump is much likelier to forgo experience and expertise in favor of loyalty when he selects his cabinet members and his national security team.

Trump’s guiding principle on foreign policy is not the defense of freedom, democratic values, or the rules-based international order. Instead, Trump is motivated primarily by mercantilist instincts and egoism. He will surely claim that the United States shoulders no global responsibility. He will treat the United States’ historic allies not as partners but as trade adversaries and seek to befriend autocratic, adversarial leaders such as Kim, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and China’s Xi Jinping. Although such moves might seem familiar, in a second Trump term they will prove especially disruptive to U.S. allies in Asia because both the United States and Asia are in a different position than they were in 2016. Biden has restored trust with key allies and backed new, cooperative initiatives between countries in the region. This long list of initiatives includes improving force integration between the U.S. and Japanese militaries, strengthening the United States’ deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, providing for new U.S. military arrangements in Australia and the Philippines, expanding the United States’ capacity to help Taiwan defend itself, and making new supply chain arrangements with multiple allies.

No amount of institutionalization can really Trump-proof these advancements. For instance, Trump has the executive authority to scrap the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which has already bolstered clean energy, decarbonization, infrastructure, and supply-chain resilience projects in Asia. He will likely also seek to renegotiate any existing defense cost-sharing agreements on the grounds that Biden’s deals allowed allies to cheat the United States.

Both the United States and Asia are in a different position than they were in 2016.

And he will not be happy about the state of U.S.-Asian trade. Currently, seven out of eight of the United States’ core allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific (India, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) have merchandise trade surpluses with the United States, totaling over $200 billion. Because he could not get rid of them in his first term, Trump will fixate on reducing these imbalances, perceiving that the United States’ allies are playing the country like suckers. Smaller Southeast Asian economies with trade surpluses, such as Vietnam ($103 billion) and Malaysia ($25 billion), will not be spared, either. Trump may well target all U.S. allies with tariffs of ten percent or more, irrespective of the tens of billions of dollars these countries have recently invested in the United States to build resilient supply chains. Beyond their economic impact, these tariffs will send a message to allies that the United States is looking out for itself alone and can no longer be relied on as a patron.

Trump will likely try to continue Biden’s efforts to build new semiconductor chip supply chains, claiming—correctly—that that decoupling from China in the realm of emerging technologies was his administration’s idea. He will almost certainly increase the United States’ already substantial Section 301 trade tariffs against China, probably launching a full-blown trade war; he might even consider suspending permanent normal trading relations with China. But the way Trump pursues these economic policies will be complicated by his personal affinity for dictators and strongmen. Trump cannot resist the global television extravaganzas afforded by summit meetings with Kim, Putin, and Xi, and even as tensions rise over trade, he will surely talk positively about his relationship with all these men. His behavior, however, is likely to put Xi in a stronger position: if Trump seeks a deal with Putin on Ukraine, Xi will take the opportunity to expand China’s industrial and defense cooperation with Russia while appearing to stabilize relations with the United States. This kind of deal will likely lead U.S. allies in Asia to hedge rather than to draw closer to the United States economically or militarily.

INFLUENCE PEDDLING

When it comes to security, Taiwan’s new president, William Lai, can be somewhat confident that little will change on the surface. The U.S. Congress will continue to support the island’s deterrence and defense. Trump, too, will support Taiwan’s defense, call for increased defense spending by Taipei, and continue to sell Taiwan weapons in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act. Some potential future Trump appointees have even said that they believe the United States should consider establishing formal security commitments and diplomatic relations with Taiwan, moving away from strategic ambiguity.

But any superficial continuity in the United States’ Taiwan policy will be undergirded not by Trump’s sense that Taiwan is a beacon of democracy that needs support from the United States but by his willingness to use Taiwan as a potential bargaining chip with China. Trump’s Taiwan policy will thus be fundamentally unpredictable. In an April Time magazine interview, Trump was asked whether he would defend Taiwan if China invaded. He did not answer in the affirmative. “I’ve been asked this question many times,” he said, “and I always refuse to answer it, because I don’t want to reveal my cards.” This suggests that Trump cherishes unpredictability on the Taiwan issue as a form of leverage over Xi. If Trump sold Taiwan down the river in some deal with China, any ally could reasonably feel that it would be next.

Although Trump, in a second term, may use the right words to describe the United States’ solidarity with its Asian allies, he will increasingly insist that he wants U.S. allies to pay more and the United States to pay less. “If you’re not going to pay, then you’re on your own,” he told Time. He will almost certainly want to gut all U.S. participation in any joint military exercise unless allied partners are willing to pay for the whole thing. The result could be an alliance structure that looks unchanged—the U.S.–Japanese–South Korean Camp David trilateral summit, for example, will almost certainly continue to exist—but runs the risk of being hollowed out.

It is not at all clear that Trump would support Australia’s new nuclear submarine and technology project, nor is it clear that he will want to pay for a planned new U.S. military presence in western Australia. By demanding billions of dollars in cost-sharing payments from Japan and by defunding military exercises, Trump could also undercut Japan’s watershed investments in its military posture, including increased defense spending and the operational integration of its troops and U.S. forces stationed there. New trade tariffs on Japan could also create a bad political optic with this longtime, loyal U.S. ally. Trump could even decouple the United States outright from Japan’s security concerns by saying he would not back Tokyo in a conflict with Beijing over the Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands in China) or if Pyongyang’s missiles fall on Japan. Abe was known as “the Trump whisperer,” but managing Trump came at a high cost to Japan’s sense of equity with the United States and Abe’s own personal pride. It is not clear that Japan’s current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, or his successor could, or would, do the same.

CHAIN REACTION

A second Trump term could most fundamentally change the Korean Peninsula. This year’s growing drumbeat of North Korean ballistic missile tests will put Trump in a position similar to the one he faced in 2017. But he is unlikely to respond by threatening to rain “fire and fury” on Kim. He already appears, instead, to be considering an overhaul of his North Korea approach, prioritizing cutting a deal with Kim to stop nuclear testing in exchange for lifting U.S. sanctions.

North Korea could seal the deal by offering some less important but tangible form of denuclearization—such as handing over a limited quantity of fissile material or a first-generation nuclear device—that Trump could brag about. Trump loves easy victories. He could insist he has “won” and neutered the North Korean nuclear threat without ever disarming Kim of his huge arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles, and tactical nuclear weapons.

Trump might then also pull U.S. soldiers from South Korea. His desire to do so (as well as to pull troops from Europe and other parts of Asia) is well established. As early as 1990, in a Playboy interview, Trump claimed that South Korea is very wealthy and takes advantage of the U.S. troop presence there; he has repeated this claim frequently in the decades since. His former national security adviser, John Bolton, warned in his memoir that he “feared Trump’s ultimate threat—withdrawing our troops from any country not paying what he deemed to be an adequate amount—was real in South Korea’s case.”

China’s influence in Asia will grow if the United States becomes just another transactional player in the region.

Such a scenario would almost certainly result in the nuclearization of the entire Korean Peninsula. A majority of the South Korean public already strongly supports developing nuclear weapons, but their enthusiasm is counterbalanced by a distaste for nuclearization among the country’s strategic elites—figures such as academics, think-tank experts, and business and political leaders. But in a January–March 2024 survey of these elites conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a majority of respondents agreed that their views on nonnuclearization would change if the United States pulled back from its commitments to South Korean security.

If South Korea launched a nuclear weapons program, that would give China and North Korea dangerous incentives to preempt its capabilities. And South Korea’s nuclearization could trigger wider mimicry: Myanmar, for instance, has shown interest in uranium enrichment and in North Korea’s nuclear weapons designs. Although Japan currently embraces nonnuclear norms, the country also has nearly 50 tons of fissile material at its fingertips—enough to make 5,000 nuclear weapons. Taiwan might not want to be left out of the club.

Trump’s policies could deliver outcomes some Americans think they want: smaller trade deficits, a consolidated military footprint focused more clearly on China, a modus vivendi with rogue actors such as Kim, and greater cost sharing by allies. But China’s influence in Asia will inevitably grow if the United States becomes just another transactional player in the region. The United States’ Asian allies can better prepare for a second Trump term by increasing their defense spending; highlighting their investments in U.S. supply chains, which help create jobs in the United States; and reiterating why the United States needs to remain a benevolent regional hegemon. And they must act in concert: even if one U.S. ally in Asia manages to stabilize its own bilateral relations with Trump, a deterioration of the United States’ relationships with surrounding countries will put the region’s overall security in a more precarious state. Most important, however, is that Asian leaders realize that no matter how much they try to stroke Trump’s ego, the ride is likely to be bumpier and more unpredictable a second time around.