U.S. Asia policy over the last 40 years has been a success. There have been no major interstate wars in East Asia since 1979. The United States has built a dense and increasingly collaborative network of alliances and partnerships that enjoys bipartisan support. American private sector investment in Asian countries with the region’s largest economies dwarfs that of any other country, and the United States is the primary destination for foreign direct investment from all major economies in Asia (except China). Even as democracy erodes elsewhere, many countries in the region remain vibrant democracies. And thanks to a strong basis of bipartisan agreement, U.S. policymaking in the region can often rise above the gridlock and polarization in Washington.
With his victory in the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump will inherit a formidable Asia policy that has been passed down through Republican and Democratic administrations. President Joe Biden built his impressive record in the region around this consensus. The diplomatic partnership among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States known as the Quad, or Quadrilateral Dialogue, which Biden elevated from a ministerial-level forum to a leaders’ summit, began under George W. Bush’s administration as a joint task force to rescue victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and was revived by the Trump administration as a regular meeting of the members’ foreign ministers. (Biden acknowledged the Quad’s bipartisan lineage at the first summit held during his presidency.) Biden’s initiatives on U.S. military force posture, semiconductor technology controls, and trilateral relations with Japan and Korea all have roots in the Bush, Obama, or Trump administrations. And the new components his presidency added, such as AUKUS (the submarine and defense technology partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), enjoy broad support in Congress and will likely endure for administrations to come. Once in office, Trump will not lack for potential avenues for engagement in Asia.
Yet as the United States learned from 1919 to 1941, successful strategies work until they don’t. Taken in its parts, American interwar statecraft, driven by the assumption that economic interdependence and multilateral diplomacy could keep the peace, was more proactive and innovative than it had ever been. But it was not enough to stave off global conflict. With catastrophic consequences, experts failed to appreciate the danger of Japan’s navy surpassing U.S. capabilities in the Pacific, the growing appeal of Japan’s anti-Western narratives, or the hollowness of European imperial power in the region.
The incoming Trump administration would be wise to remember this history. The stakes today are familiar: if China had its way, it would force Japan out of the East China Sea, overwhelm the Philippines and other countries in the South China Sea, coerce Taiwan into accepting Beijing’s authority and severing any meaningful connections to the United States and Japan, and establish a military base structure throughout the region that would corner India and Australia and control the sea-lanes that account for half or more of U.S. allies’ imports. China is pursuing the most revisionist strategy of any state since the end of the Cold War and the most dangerous since 1945, and the U.S. alliance system is the only thing keeping it in check. As China’s rising military power chips away at U.S. dominance, the United States has a dwindling margin for error.
The Trump administration does not need to invent a new Asia strategy out of whole cloth. But it does need to determine what is working and what is not, and it should shore up the weaknesses in the United States’ current approach. It must revive American economic influence in the region, accelerate efforts for collective defense, make disciplined and consistent outreach to countries that may tilt toward China, and clarify the long-term goals of competition with Beijing. The new president will have a strong foundation to build from, but the scale of the threat means there is much more work to be done.
Mutual funds
Although U.S. market power in Asia remains strong, American economic statecraft has atrophied. In 2018, the Lowy Institute’s annual Asia Power Index lowered the U.S. ranking for economic influence in the region after the first Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that was meant to bind Asia’s more open economies, including Australia, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore, together to gain leverage against China. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, the Biden administration’s 2022 initiative to effectively replace the TPP, has made little headway. As a result, China is much better positioned than before to rewrite the rules for trade, infrastructure, and investment in key parts of Asia. The Trump administration now needs to get serious about shaping regional and global conventions regarding digital trade, anticorruption, and intellectual property rights to counter Beijing’s efforts to bend weaker states to its will and obstruct U.S. economic access.
Trump, for his part, has criticized both the TPP and the IPEF, arguing that traditional trade agreements take jobs from American workers. Instead, he has threatened to impose 60 percent tariffs on Chinese goods and a universal ten percent tariff on imports. In addition to exacerbating inflation at home, these strongly protectionist measures would push other countries closer to China and obstruct U.S. cooperation with like-minded states such as Australia and Japan. Last week, at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru, Chinese leader Xi Jinping took a slew of meetings with trade partners and condemned efforts to “[hinder] economic cooperation” as “reversing the course of history,” effectively positioning Beijing as the standard-bearer of the international economic order. The Trump administration will need to recognize that the United States cannot compete with China while threatening tariffs that target the very partners it needs to thwart Beijing’s attempts to change established international economic rules.
The United States will also need to improve its military readiness in the region. Here, the interwar years offer a lesson. U.S. advances in amphibious warfare strategies, replenishment of ships at sea, and submarine and aircraft carrier operations in the 1920s later helped the Allies win in World War II, but they did not stop the conflict from breaking out in the first place. American innovation today, such as the Pentagon’s Replicator program to rapidly field new high-tech weapons, is equally impressive—and equally insufficient. The United States and its allies will have to step up their defense production if they are to deter China, whose force buildup is outpacing their own. The U.S. and allied militaries also desperately need more munitions and reliable access to critical minerals such as germanium, 70 percent of which is mined in China and Russia, to build advanced systems such as thermal detectors for missiles and fighter aircraft. Trump should press Congress to approve multiyear defense contracts; work with U.S. partners to expand access to critical minerals; loosen some export control rules so that the United States can better integrate its defense production with that of its allies; and push for procurement reform that breaks the hold of legacy platforms on access to Pentagon funding and makes investment in newer, more innovative equipment possible.
Working with key allies such as Australia and Japan to bolster deterrence will require urgent effort.
The United States’ partners in Asia must do the same. Unlike in Europe, key U.S. allies in the region are already spending more than the equivalent of two percent of their GDP on defense or are on pace to do so soon. But the Biden administration has not done enough to encourage them to keep their spending on track. Australia’s defense spending exceeds the two percent threshold and the country has big increases planned for the future, but defense experts in Australia have warned that these increases are all scheduled several years from now, which may be too late to deter Chinese belligerence in the near term. Japan’s new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is struggling to hold on to power and will face political headwinds reaching the two percent mark that his predecessor, Fumio Kishida, promised. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s military remains fixated on advanced fighters and ships when it should be focusing on stockpiling missiles and hardening its defenses to keep Beijing from thinking an invasion would succeed.
The Trump administration should also redouble collective defense efforts, taking cues from Ishiba’s admittedly far-fetched proposal to create an Asian version of NATO. U.S. allies and partners are already conducting more joint exercises than ever before: Australia, Japan, and New Zealand sent warships through the Taiwan Strait, and Japanese and South Korean forces train regularly in northern Australia. But better coordination and connectivity among each country’s command-and-control structures and greater intelligence sharing will be necessary before allies and partners can operate together in real battlefield conditions. Washington must also lead the way in better connecting NATO with U.S. allies in Asia, a task made all the more urgent by the presence of North Korean troops in Ukraine and Russian assistance to the Houthis’ targeting of oil shipments bound for Asia.
China has continually surprised the United States and its allies with unexpected military maneuvers and new weapons systems. When used effectively, surprise can shake an adversary’s confidence in its military plans and reinforce deterrence. Trump is famous for using unpredictability as a weapon. In his first term, however, Trump’s surprise actions were often counterproductive, as they threw not just U.S. adversaries but U.S. allies off balance—unsettling the same partners the United States needs to take on more risk by standing alongside it in a crisis. Biden’s unexpected convening of AUKUS, which reinforced U.S. allies’ advantage in undersea warfare, offers a better model for the kinds of policies the Trump administration can introduce to seize initiative back from China. Beijing was deeply unhappy with the formation of AUKUS and used diplomacy to try to undermine it, a clear indication of its success.
Patience is a virtue
Working with key allies such as Australia and Japan to bolster deterrence will require urgent effort. But other parts of U.S. strategy in Asia, particularly its outreach in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, will require patience and discipline. Historically, the United States has paid attention to those regions only intermittently, usually only insofar as they relate to higher-priority challenges such as communism, Japanese postwar economic expansion, and terrorism. This trend is likely to continue, as competition with China drives U.S. engagement with countries such as Indonesia. But the Trump administration should try to move away from defining U.S. policy toward these countries purely in competitive terms. And it certainly should not make pulling them away from China its sole objective, since doing so will only make those governments more wary of American engagement.
Such a policy has a poor track record. In the 1950s, during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pushed newly constituted postcolonial states to resist overtures from the Soviet Union and join the West, but most shunned both powers, instead forming the defiant Non-Aligned Movement. The administration of Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, recognized that it was more important that those states be independent and resilient than fervent ideological allies of the United States—a smart, if short-lived, approach to the struggle for global supremacy. Resilience should once again form the basis for U.S. engagement. The United States should help countries in the region bolster their defense capabilities, provide technical and diplomatic support for regional organizations such as the Pacific Islands Forum, and expand trade and investment relationships across Asia.
The Trump administration will also need to combat anti-Western propaganda and disinformation, especially in the wake of the war in Gaza, which has badly damaged the United States’ image in Southeast Asia and reinforced Beijing and Moscow’s narrative that the United States provides cover for colonial oppressors, whereas China and Russia stand for the world’s oppressed. The U.S. government is adept at sharing intelligence with allies about Beijing’s and Moscow’s information campaigns but does very little to coordinate a response. In this war of narratives, the Trump administration must do more to support free media, rebut disinformation, and encourage credible proxies in the region to do the same.
None of these efforts should come at the expense of the United States’ commitment to promoting democratic values. Authoritarian rivals of the United States thrive in countries where governance, transparency, and accountability are weak, making support for democracy all the more important. Indeed, key allies such as Japan and South Korea now emphasize support for democracy in their own strategies, and surveys conducted by the U.S. Studies Centre in Sydney in 2024 indicate that Australians are even more likely than Americans to want their government to promote democracy and human rights in the region. Of course, all U.S. policies, such as advancing democratic values and negotiating investment deals, become much more difficult to implement if U.S. diplomatic offices sit vacant. The Trump administration should therefore work with Congress to expedite confirmation of qualified ambassadors to posts in the Pacific and across South Asia.
New man, new plan?
Neither Trump in his first term nor Biden today resolved the all-important question of the United States’ long-term objectives in Asia. Even as Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea build up their defense capacity and resist Chinese coercion, they all aim to eventually return to more productive relationships with Beijing. In contrast, the Biden administration seems to take a more pessimistic view, paying lip service to the idea, referenced in the 2022 National Security Strategy, that “it is possible for the United States and [the People’s Republic of China] to coexist peacefully.” The Trump administration will likely take a harder line, pursuing an objective reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s famous prediction about how the Cold War would end: “We win, they lose.”
This approach does correctly assess the urgent need for an updated Asia strategy. But it is deeply uncomfortable for U.S. allies that remain economically dependent on China and are at greater risk of harm because of their proximity to China’s massive missile inventory. Core U.S. allies will almost certainly be at the center of any confrontation with China. Planning for potential conflict—not to mention decision-making in the heat of a crisis—will be more challenging if Australia, Japan, and South Korea question American intent or self-restraint. The Trump administration will not necessarily need a clever new way to placate China, which could make allies such as Japan worry that the United States has gone too soft, but it should avoid espousing triumphalist theories of victory. For now, instead of channeling Reagan, Trump’s team is better off following Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Finally, the Trump administration will have to recognize that achieving deterrence and stability in Asia depends in part on its actions elsewhere. Some prominent figures, including Vice President–elect JD Vance, have argued that the United States needs to step back from Europe to deal with China. Trump has flirted with the unrealistic idea that if the United States makes nice with Russian President Vladimir Putin, it can turn Russia against China. Both factions underestimate the intractability of Chinese-Russian alignment and the importance of Europe. The war in Ukraine affects security in Asia: U.S. allies there do not want Washington to make concessions to Moscow for fear that it could embolden China to act more aggressively in their region. And although NATO may not have a large military presence in Asia, Europe is an economic and diplomatic power that Beijing will not want to alienate in a confrontation with the United States and its Asian allies. For the United States, therefore, demonstrating strength in Ukraine and nurturing its ties with European partners will be critical to maintaining security in Asia. Europe today matters more, not less.
In an increasingly multipolar era, U.S. leadership in Asia will depend not just on the United States’ own capabilities but also on the technological, military, diplomatic, and geographical advantages its allies bring to the table. These countries understand their own roles, but they also understand the vital importance of the United States. U.S. alliances are overwhelmingly popular, with polls conducted between 2019 and 2024 showing they enjoy about 90 percent approval in Japan and South Korea, and similarly high favorability in Australia and the Philippines. People in the region recognize that what is happening in Ukraine will happen in Asia without U.S. leadership. Given the perils of the years ahead, now is not the time for the Trump administration to shirk that responsibility.