The calm in Asian capitals reflects a dangerous misjudgment

By Foreign Policy: The specter of Donald Trump is haunting Europe. Across the continent, an air of thinly disguised panic greets the prospect of his returning as U.S. president next year. But in Asia? Not so much. From New Delhi and Singapore to Taipei and Tokyo, there is palpable sang-froid. We coped with Trump last time, this thinking goes. Those nervy Europeans might be losing their cool, but cannier heads prevail in rising Asia.

This calm in Asian capitals borders on hubris. It misjudges the impact Trump’s return could have on Asian security and misreads the scale and ambition of his plans to remodel U.S. foreign policy. It also overstates the ability of Asian governments—from core U.S. allies to the more nonaligned nations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere—to manage Trump.

To understand this surprising sense of calm, it helps to remember how Asian policymakers viewed Trump during his last term in office. As I wrote in Foreign Policy then, Asian leaders were generally quite comfortable with Trump.

This was true for U.S. allies, such as Japan, as well as close partners, such as India. Then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed with Trump’s anti-China policies and accepted his transactional instincts. Australia’s right-wing prime minister at the time, Scott Morrison, similarly warmed to Trump. And in Taiwan, Trump was loved.

Even in largely nonaligned Southeast Asia, hardheaded analysts would note Trump’s good points. In Singapore, former ambassador Bilahari Kausikan had been critical of the Obama administration’s Asia policy, as embodied by National Security Advisor Susan Rice. “She has very little interest in Asia, no stomach for competition, and thinks of foreign policy as humanitarian intervention,” Bilahari wrote in a Facebook post in 2020, as rumors swirled of Rice possibly being picked as Joe Biden’s running mate. Trump, by contrast, was firm on China and not squeamish about U.S. power.

The view that Trump will be manageable this time around also flows from a comfortable belief in policy continuity. Few analysts lose face by predicting more continuity than change following elections. And during the shift from Trump to Biden, much indeed stayed the same, not least Trump’s approach to China.

During the Trump administration, many in the region felt they improved their ties with Washington, too. At last month’s Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar brushed off concerns that a Trump return might bring challenges. “Like any relationship, there were issues,” he said. “But overall … in those four years, did our relationship deepen? Did it grow? Absolutely.”

Finally, the United States has core interests, whoever is in power. Former White House official Michael J. Green makes this point in By More Than Providence, his masterful 2017 history of U.S. policy in Asia. Washington’s longtime strategic imperative is to ensure the Pacific Ocean remains a “conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland,” he writes.

For more than a century, the United States has aimed to block a rival power dominating either Europe or Asia. Faced with the challenge of China’s emergence as a peer competitor, even Trump will find pure isolationism difficult, given that this would mean ceding much of Asia to Beijing. The nightmare that keeps officials in Tokyo and Seoul up at night, in which Trump makes a deal with Beijing and cuts and runs, remains unlikely.

Yet this sophisticated kind of analysis also risks being too clever by half. Yes, there will be some continuity if Trump takes office in 2025. But there will be plenty of chaos and disruption, too.

At a basic level, many Asian nations are in a worse position to cope this time around. Abe and Morrison might have handled Trump well. But how about less sure-footed leaders, such as Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, let alone those from the political left, such as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese?

Then there are three bigger problems that should alarm Asian leaders.

The first is Trump’s growing unpredictability. Here, the recent case of TikTok is instructive: Trump has totally changed his view on the Chinese-owned app of late, moving from backing a ban to opposing it. His view seems to have changed for no obvious reason beyond political expediency and lobbying by donors.

If he is willing to flip-flop here, U.S. allies and partners must be prepared for significant change in other areas. Trump says he will junk Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which wouldn’t be the end of the world. But will he really back the Biden administration’s hugely expensive AUKUS submarine deal? Or continue to invest in alliances with South Korea and Japan—or in bodies such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue? What about his attitude toward Washington’s nuclear posture in the region? In truth, no one knows.

The second problem is China. Sino-U.S. ties remain far more fragile than in 2017. Even if relations between Beijing and Washington currently seem calm following intense diplomacy by Biden’s team, this state of affairs is unlikely to last. “The weather has improved. But I think the climate … is not in such a happy place,” as Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan put it last year.

The risk of a new Sino-U.S. flare-up remains strong. And with Trump in charge, the risk that any such flare-up could escalate into a genuine crisis would rise. The thought of Trump and his team handling the Israel-Hamas war should give anyone in Asia pause about how he might handle a serious standoff over Taiwan, for instance.

Yet it is the final problem of a Trump victory that is by orders of magnitude the most serious for Asia—namely, the strife another Trump term would cause in the United States itself.

For the last four years, Biden has led an energetic but sober Asia policy. His team has rebuilt—and in many cases, strengthened—U.S. alliance relationships in the region and attempted to restore deterrence against China. It is hard to predict whether a new Trump administration would keep or overturn these efforts, largely because his return would throw the U.S. political system into deep and unpredictable turmoil.

This month, I visited the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Hoover is now a genteel sanctuary for many moderate Trump-era foreign-policy officials, from former Defense Secretary James Mattis to former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger. Yet few, if any, experienced officials in this vein would likely feature in a second Trump term. Instead, Trump’s team looks set to appoint mostly ultraloyalists, many of whom will have little deep foreign-policy experience.

Stanford is also home to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History and the Last Man, who warns that Asian leaders should in fact be deeply alarmed at Trump’s probable impact on U.S. policymaking in areas from alliance management to deterrence posture. But most alarming would be the shake-up a new Trump administration would bring to the U.S. government itself.

Fukuyama points to a new wave of so-called “Schedule F” political appointees, named after an executive order that Trump pushed through a few weeks before the 2020 election. With the goal of dismantling what his allies view as the “deep state” and asserting presidential control, they now talk of forcing as many as 50,000 career civil servants from their jobs and replacing them with political loyalists.

Lawyers are gearing up to challenge any such plans, which would likely lead to a battle in the Supreme Court. If successful, the impact of this move on the core of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment in the State Department and the Pentagon would be seismic. “If I was an Asian ally, I would be very worried indeed,” Fukuyama told me. Whatever happens, domestic infighting will prove an overwhelming distraction for U.S. policymakers. It will invite global rivals, notably China and Russia, to test U.S. alliances and commitments. “If anyone in Asia thinks the U.S. is going to be able to do more to support allies like Japan and Korea at a time like this, they are crazy,” Fukuyama said.

Everything is relative, of course. Asian leaders may indeed have less to worry about than their hapless European counterparts, let alone the Ukrainians heroically defending their country. Trump is unlikely to pull out of Asian alliances entirely, as he has threatened to do with NATO in Europe.

Nonetheless, the blithe approach in Asian capitals toward a very possible Trump return remains a serious misjudgment. When a storm is approaching, it is rarely wise to look on the bright side, hoping everything will be fine just because it went OK the last time the weather turned bad. In Asia, just as elsewhere, it would be smarter to batten down the hatches.