For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of China’s new high-level 2026 Southeast Asia tour and Beijing’s shifting regional influence;

• Mapping of regional developments, including coming Indo-Pacific summitry watch and Malacca Strait maritime clarification;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as emergency transfers; hidden 2027 APEC race and membership checkpoint;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including maritime threat; green pact chatter; investment deep dive and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out our ASEAN Wonk review of a new book which puts a rare spotlight on Asia’s aging security dilemma timebomb.

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,427 words (~11 minutes)

Coming Indo-Pacific Summitry Watch; Malacca Strait Clarification & More

Supply Chain Resilience; Grid Building & Aid Futures

• “[S]upply chain resilience should be paramount,” notes a new paper assessing the Japan’s efforts in the semiconductor industry and the pursuit of economic security within the country’s wider policy landscape (link).

Graphic Depicting Market Shares of Advanced Logic IC Manufacturing Countries, 2023

• “[W]hat it lacks is the governance architecture to fully unlock it,” argues a new commentary published over at East Asia Forum on overcoming challenges in building the ASEAN Power Grid in Southeast Asia (link).

• “Within the broader financing landscape, ODA should remain focused on core development investment, consistent with its defining purpose,” according to a new brief published by the Center for Global Development (link).

What Did China Really Gain in New 2026 Southeast Asia Tour?

What’s Behind It

• China announced new inroads with Southeast Asian states following foreign minister Wang Yi’s three-country regional tour1. The inroads occurred alongside regional engagements by other key powers. While the focus this past week was on the publicizing of new U.S. steps against giant scam networks including those targeting Chinese nationals, other powers including the European Union were also taking steps of their own on a global challenge2. The outcomes following South Korea President Lee Jae Myung’s Vietnam visit also highlighted Seoul’s role in a wider mix of powers engaging in geoeconomic areas such as nuclear power plants amid the long list of agreements touted by both sides3.

Select Key Recent and Related Developments Amid Latest China Southeast Asia Tour

• The tour occurred amid scrutiny on the regional flashpoint landscape. Ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trip to China, a senior official suggested that Washington had “more of an advantage” over Beijing in terms of economic vulnerability despite suggestions of mutual economic destruction4. Beyond the focus on China’s reactions to increasingly multinationalized U.S.-Philippines Balikatan exercises and implications for the South China Sea, the delayed issuance of an ASEAN chair statement on Myanmar also reinforced differences within the evolving intraregional conversation that some officials privately say has also been visible in the handling of Middle East conflict fallout thus far5.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Future Policy Datapoints to Watch, Alongside New Major Developments and Key Partners

Read more

WonkCount: 1,347 words (~6 minutes)

Review: Will Asia’s Aging Security Dilemma Timebomb Explode?

Context

“[L]ike many advanced economies, our population is rapidly aging,” Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong cautioned in a recent address to the nation on longer-term challenges to manage beyond the immediate focus on what he termed “the end of the global order that we had long operated in.”1 The comment was just the latest among many that capture the complex challenges individual Indo-Pacific countries face beyond the aggregate reality of the region’s growing geoeconomic heft, with implications for everything from defense spending to economic planning.

Select Key Recent Security-Related Developments in the Indo-Pacific Region

A new book Asia’s Aging Security by scholar Andrew Oros book puts rare spotlight on a critical underexamined security challenge in the Indo-Pacific with implications for subregions such as Southeast Asia2. In doing so, it adds a regional perspective to a series of country-focused book-length works on the subject amid a period of intensified geoeconomic change and engagement3. Asia’s Aging Security forecasts possible futures in what is termed an “aging security dilemma” in Asia — with longstanding conflict flashpoints continuing and aging states deploying new technologies and weapons to maximize security4. “Asia’s aging security…should be brought to the forefront when designing new security architecture and strategies for regional and global peace in the coming decades,” the book argues as it specifies pathways for doing so out to 2050 and beyond5.

Analysis

The book also highlights key datapoints to watch on potential futures (see originally-generated ASEAN Wonk table below for a summary of important contours. Paying subscribers can also read the rest of the “Analysis” section and “Implications” section looking at how these dynamics play out in the future).

Major Future Datapoints to Watch, Alongside Priority Variables and Key Strategic Components

Read more

For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of a newly revealed billions support bid and its wider Indo-Pacific and global implications.

• Mapping of regional developments, including new critical supplies pact talks and Europe summitry spotlight;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends, such as new supply chain hub; flashpoint forecast futures; and mining crackdown;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including a new regional trade agreement addition; quiet maritime transfer; major resource shortfall disclosure and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out the latest episode of the ASEAN Wonk Podcast featuring a former White House senior official on forecasting US Asia strategy futures and wider Indo-Pacific implications;

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,237 words (~10 minutes)

New Critical Supplies Pact Talks; Europe Summitry Spotlight & More

Great Power Perceptions in Global Competition Dynamics; Evolving 2026 ASEAN Agenda & New Defense Strategy Assessment

• “China, Russia, and Iran are gaining ground in perceived legitimacy, though…publics are not uniformly supportive,” according to data released from Arab Barometer on regional public views of the United States and China amid global great power competition in select countries in the Arab world alongside recent developments such as the Gaza war and Iran conflict fallout (link).

US vs. China on Maintaining Regional Security (% Saying the Following Statements)

• “Within ASEAN’s agenda for 2026 and beyond, food security should be elevated as a core focus,” argues a new commentary published by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. The piece argues that greater attention should be placed on the human concerns of vulnerable groups, including bridging knowledge and skill gaps in digital technologies (link).

• “The defense strategy and investment program released this week is the largest step Australia has taken to confront the 21st-century strategic realities in a world of disorder and conflict,” according to a new article published over at The Sydney Morning Herald on Australia’s newly released defense strategy. The article suggests areas where key questions remain unanswered, including on the U.S.-Australia alliance, drone technology and the involvement of non-government stakeholders in conflict preparedness (link).

Japan Reveals New Southeast Asia Billions AZEC Bid Support

What’s Behind It

• Japan unveiled a new multibillion-dollar sectoral support plan covering Southeast Asian states in the latest iteration of an expanding regional initiative1. The meeting occurred amid several other initiatives at play by key powers, including new sectoral pacts highlighted in Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Southeast Asia tour and Russia’s continued rhetorical pledges when receiving regional leaders, with the latest being Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto this past week2. The calibration between addressing severe domestic challenges while also building out wider regional engagement has been a recurrent theme, and even Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi had to clarify that assistance would not have “any adverse effect” on domestic needs3.

Select Key Recent and Relevant Regional Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Developments

• The initiative also shed light on the wider evolving geoeconomic and geopolitical context and its effects on how powers are engaging. While powers like Japan have continued to be active conveners in 2026 both on their own as well as with partners in this realm, there is also a recognition even in some internal assessments that others including China are gaining significant regional ground4. That said, officials also note that these more high-profile comparisons also belie quieter, first-of-its-kind sectoral advances in other domains, including the addition of new defense positions in regional diplomatic posts5. Meanwhile, in a more global context, wider geoeconomic uncertainties were also a recurrent theme among senior officials who attended this past week’s iteration of the spring meetings by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ahead of an annual meet set to be convened in Thailand later this year6.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Major Policy Actions to Watch, Alongside Priority Pillars and Select Key Cooperation Areas

Read more

INTRODUCTION

ASEAN Wonk: Welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast, where we bring you expert insights and regional perspectives on Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific geopolitics and geoeconomics. I’m your host Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk platform at www.aseanwonk.com so you don’t miss our full posts.

Our guest today is Dr. Michael Green who worked at the National Security Council on Asia policy and is now the CEO of the US Studies Center at the University of Sydney. We’ll start our conversation talking about contemporary US Asia policy dynamics. Be sure to stay tuned as we also look ahead on other subjects, including what to expect with respect to future US policy in the region and the dynamics we might expect with upcoming midterm elections.

Note: The transcript that follows the above free clip preview has been lightly edited for clarity and organized into sections for ease of quick browsing. For all ASEAN Wonk Podcast episodes, full video and audio podcasts, along with edited and sectioned transcripts as well as block quotes, will be a premium product for our paying subscribers, but we will include a short free transcript preview and a clip for all readers to maintain accessibility. Paying subscribers can find the rest of the full transcript and the full video podcast right below the paywall. If you have not already, do consider subscribing, and, if you have already done so and like what you see and hear, do consider forwarding this to others as well who may be interested. Thank you for your support as always!

US ASIA STRATEGY TODAY IN PERSPECTIVE

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast, Mike, and let’s start if we could on US Asia strategy more generally, with the caveat, of course, that we are in the midst of Iran war fallout and a president who has some of the greatest latitude we’ve seen in terms of policymaking in recent history. You’ve written what I would say is the most extensive book on the subject of US Asia strategy By More Than Providence, and that looks at US Asia strategy even before the founding of the United States all the way up to some of the contemporary dynamics that we’re sort of talking about. With the second administration of US President Donald Trump, there’s a lot of focus on some of the personalistic dynamics. I’m hoping that we can get beyond that and talk a little bit more about some of the structural realities and some of the measures of continuity and change. If you talk to administration officials, they point out that there are still some gains and signs of continuity in terms of security networking with Australia, Japan, and the Philippines, and some of the things that we saw in the first Trump administration like the Development Finance Corporation, some of the rebranded minilaterals like Pax Silica. At the same time, if you look at some of the big broader trends in terms of trade, in terms of values, and in terms of some of the aspects of the policy ecosystem, there’s some really dramatic change there as well. So having long been a professor yourself and also written a book on this subject, how would you grade the administration’s approach to Asia so far?

Dr. Michael Green: Well thanks Prashanth. It’s great to be an honorary ASEAN wonk for an hour and to spend time with a CSIS alum. How would I grade them? Gosh. I would send them to the school counselor for examination is the honest answer, but I wouldn’t expel them from school because there are, as you suggest, some real points of continuity. We’re in this strange situation where there has perhaps never been as much consensus on Asia, the importance of Asia, the nature of the strategic challenge from China, and the criticality of alliances. There hasn’t been this much consensus – and this consensus has been around for eight, ten years now – in the whole postwar era, but we haven’t had a president who is as disinterested or almost hostile to that consensus as we have with Donald Trump. So when my book came out, it was 2017, so it was the first year of the Trump administration. And the reviews were all generally very good, but some reviewers said, well, you know, that’s been a fine explanation for the last two hundred and forty years. But now that Donald Trump is president, America doesn’t have a foreign policy or strategy anymore. And, you know, actually, in the first Trump administration, they did. The National Security Strategy put out by the Trump administration was the first to say that our focus has got to be on strategic competition with China and with Russia. Officials like Steve Biegun at state, Matt Pottinger at the NSC, General Mattis, the secretary of defense, and a lot of others really built a kind of balance of power – what my old boss Condoleezza Rice used to call a balance of power that favors freedom – upgrading the Quad, strengthening the alliance with Japan. And the first Trump term gets reasonably high marks in places like Tokyo and the Philippines. Then the Biden administration continued a lot of it. The Quad, for example, which was made a foreign minister’s summit by Secretary Mike Pompeo, the Biden administration made a presidential level summit. They didn’t undo basically anything that the Trump administration done in Asia.

But then the second Trump administration turned out to be much more of a departure from that trend. And a lot of it is because President Trump himself clearly believes that he now has the authority and the experience and maybe even the mission to do big things. And what those big things are, it kind of changes from day to day. And so, you know, he’s not strategic at all, he’s extremely tactical. It’s day to day. He is interested in enhancing his ways and means, his reputation, his power, his tools. But what for is never clear, and I don’t buy these arguments that he believes in spheres of influence or that we are in a neo-monarchical [state], I think that’s just basically kind of the vibe or the mood or as he puts it his gut on any given day. So that makes it very hard to sustain strategy, and he’s appointed a lot of people who frankly think that the enemy of America is within. That’s not the best frame of mind to deal with strategic competition from without. So there’s a lot more uncertainty. But underneath it all, as you suggested in your intro, if you look at congressional views including Republicans, if you look at public opinion, if you look at military alliances in Asia, there’s far more continuity than change underneath the surface. And we can talk about how much the surface matters. It matters. But I don’t see us on a new trajectory. I see us in a period of incredible turbulence, but not a fundamental change in the way that the American system is going to be viewing competition in Asia for the coming decades.

RECONSIDERING “PIVOT” DYNAMICS AND CONTEMPORARY REALITIES

ASEAN Wonk: So another point you referenced earlier Mike is that there’s chatter with respect to this US episode with Iran in terms of “we’ve seen this playbook before” with respect to the war on terrorism and the Bush administration which you were in as well. My issue with that is that the world has changed pretty fundamentally in the last twenty years. We’ve had a war in Ukraine that has reinforced connectivity between different regions, rather than this notion that we were in the Obama administration of a pivot or rebalance to Asia. And in fact, some of the advocates of the pivot, including Kurt Campbell, have actually admitted that these realities are actually much more sophisticated relative to where they were twenty years ago. The US position is also quite different in terms of hydrocarbons from where it was twenty years ago. And the China challenge is a much more fundamental challenge today than it was twenty years ago as well. So how would you sort of think about this notion of the sort of evolution from the pivot and rebalance to where we are at now, where we’re seeing a lot more focus on hemispheric and homeland concerns. When I look back further at U. S. history, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Monroe Doctrine, these things are not exactly new. It seems like a rebalancing of US interests on Asia relative to the rest of the world.

Dr. Michael Green: Yeah. None of this is new in a way. I started my book By More Than Providence in 1783 because that’s when Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to the commander of US forces in the frontier, which was somewhere in Pennsylvania at the time, warning that our spies in London had learned that the British were planning an expedition across Canada to find a fast route to the Pacific Northwest and access to the Pacific Ocean. And Jefferson said to Colonel Clark, we need to find a way to get there first, which, of course, was a big part of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was geopolitical. So geopolitics is in the American DNA even if it’s sloppy and contested and inconsistent. I was actually surprised to find that when I did my research. What was going to be a two-year project became a seven-year project because there’s so much rich strategic debate about the Pacific in Congress, in congressional hearings, among men of letters. And so that’s one of the reasons, frankly, why I think we have to look at the Trump era not as a new unprecedented trajectory in American foreign policy, but a period of turbulence. And how much damage the turbulence does, we can discuss.

I don’t think I put this in my book, I use it in class, but there’s a great cartoon by Herb Block, the famous Washington Post cartoonist you’re old enough to remember: he had a cartoon in the 1940s during World War Two, and it shows General MacArthur who commanded in the Far East meeting with General Marshall, the chief of staff of the army. And MacArthur has brought in a globe of the world to discuss strategy, and the globe is a cube, and East Asia’s on top. And Marshall says, well, you know, general, here, we prefer to use a round globe. And it was making fun of the fact that MacArthur wanted everything in North Africa and Europe put in second place or dropped to pivot military resources to the Pacific. And I do that at Georgetown in my class because I don’t want people who major in Asian studies to think that good Asia strategy is neglecting the rest of the world, and especially for the US, which is a global power, a two-ocean power, and all the rest.

And so I was in the White House on 9/11, I was in the White House during Afghanistan and Iraq. I did not go into meetings and say: we can’t be doing any of this. We’ve got to focus on Asia. I thought, how do we — and I was hardly alone in this [Richard Armitage] and many others — but how do we basically take advantage of this crisis to strengthen our alliances and partnerships in Asia? And I think sometimes advocates of Asia strategy think we can hit pause on the Middle East or on Europe, but especially on the Middle East because it’s such a quagmire. You keep trying to get out, you get pulled back in. But as Lee Kuan Yew said, Americans think geopolitics is a video game and you can hit pause in one part of the world and then come back, and nothing will have happened while you’re dealing with another. And Lee Kuan Yew actually recognized the US and Singapore’s and Asia’s interests had to tend to security in the Middle East, had to tend to security in Europe.

So I’m not an advocate of just ignoring Iran. And there’s a lot that the Trump administration did wrong with the Iran war in terms of their assumptions, poor planning, complete disregard for allies and for the congress and the American public. It’s a pretty long list. But the underlying challenge for Iran was not created by Donald Trump. The missile program in particular was potentially heading towards ten thousand ballistic missiles in a few years. Unacceptable. So you can’t just hit pause in the Middle East and hope everything will be fine. It’s going to take some level of resources. Now maybe more resources than we needed because of the way the war’s been prosecuted. We’ll see. But you have to have an Asia strategy within a global strategy. And I don’t know if you want me to talk more about Trump’s lack of strategy or what we see as continuity, but, obviously, one big feature of his second term is going to be Iran. And it’s undoing his presidency. You can see it in public opinion in the fights in MAGA. The effect on Asia is not – you know, people who say this is that he’s Bismarck and this is brilliant are wrong, obviously – but people who say this is a complete destruction of interest in Asia are also wrong. It’s a mixed picture, and I think you have to be balanced in how you look at it.

DEFENSE PERIMETER, ISLAND CHAIN STAKES AND SECURITY FUTURES

ASEAN Wonk: One of the things you mentioned with respect to MacArthur is the conversation around the defense perimeter and how the United States is looking at its worldview and its vision for the region. Some of the chatter around the narrowing of the administration’s approach to the first island chain, for example, and the implications for – if you’re looking at, say, Vietnam and the South China Sea, for example – there are some elements of change there and concern, which I understand. There are also some elements of continuity that I see as well: in the last couple of administrations, the Philippines has really cemented its role in terms of the US security architecture around the alliances, but also Guam, Hawaii, and so on and so forth with respect to Japan, Australia: the networking there is pretty intense. What’s your view on this notion of the defense perimeter and the forward defense line relative to what we’ve seen in other periods in history, including MacArthur, the Korean War, and so on: is it as much of a change, or do you see more continuity there with respect to the security aspect?

Dr. Michael Green: You know, drawing your defense perimeter – put it another way, where you’re willing to fight or risk war – is one of the hardest things in grand strategy. And in my book it’s a conundrum for American strategists for 250 years. In the book I wrote after that on Japan’s current strategy called Line of Advantage, it’s a conundrum. Where do you draw the line? Where do you decide you’re going to take risk? John Lewis Gaddis, in his book on strategy, says you need the discipline to sit inside the castle walls and listen to the villagers being burned alive or something like that. He’s obviously an advocate of clear defensive perimeters and being disciplined. And one of my old bosses, Steve Hadley, to say, you keep drawing red lines and you don’t defend them, you end up creating a red carpet. I love that line. And so it’s very, very tricky. I think one problem US strategists make sometimes is, to quote Homer Simpson, the great geopolitical thinker, sometimes they make the mistake of saying the loud part soft and the soft part loud. So when Dean Acheson in January 1950, after a review within the State Department of how to protect our interests and contain communism after the fall of mainland China to Mao, decided, well, don’t worry – it was a political thing as much as it was strategic for the Democrats – he said, don’t worry. We’ve got this very strong defensive line with the first island chain, which was all thinking in American geopolitics. And he had that famous line between Japan and Korea in January 1950, which was a red carpet. It was an invitation to Mao, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung to test containment and allow Kim Il Sung to attack six months later, June 1950. That was a mistake to draw that defensive perimeter so clearly. Of course, the Vietnam War had the flip problem, which is they didn’t know where the defensive perimeter was. So, you know, strategy is basically about reconciling two mutually contradictory goals. If you didn’t have mutually contradictory goals, you wouldn’t need to think about it: you just pursue your interests. But sometimes the goals compete.

But I do think we are guilty in the United States sometimes of drawing the line too crisply, too clearly sometimes, and too much. So to give you more recent examples – the National Defense Strategy that came out. It was a dog’s breakfast, as they say in Australia – it had all kinds of stuff in it, some of it was ridiculous – but it did have a very clear and very historic focus on, as you said, on defending the first and second island chain in the Western Pacific. But it was very reductionist, and this sort of follows Bridge Colby’s thinking about Taiwan being the major central front. It was very reductionist. So everything’s about Taiwan. And this is also a mistake because the defense of Taiwan is not just – and certainly not in the first instance – about military deterrence in North Asia and in the first island chain. I mean, that’s absolutely core to the strategy, but Beijing’s strategy is to win without fighting. So if you overly focus on the military deterrence piece – which is critical – but if that’s all you’re worried about, you neglect, for example, diplomacy and development in Southeast Asia or the transatlantic alliance. And the flavor of the National Defense Strategy, Bridge’s thinking is – I mean, he’s a smart guy, and he’s very focused on the core problem – he’s worried about U.S. resources. But the danger of being overly reductionist and drawing a very clear line around what you’re willing to fight for too much is you end up ceding in Phase Zero – in peacetime – strategic influence in Southeast Asia that allows China to flank you from the south with their own power projection or prevent U.S. access to the archipelagic southern flank, which is critical for access basing overflight and dealing with a PLA campaign strategy that’s the entire first and second island chain.

And it’s not a simple matter of deterrence as you know well from your work. It’s much more complicated. It’s about development. It’s about diplomacy. It’s about soft power. It’s about partnering with Australia, Japan, and others. It’s not a kind of John Mearsheimer simple war and peace, black and white issue. It’s complex. And if you get it wrong, you make it easier for China to fight without winning. And in a similar way, the transatlantic relationship: it is way too reductionist to say the central problem we have – the pacing threat – is dealing with the PLA on the Taiwan contingency so we don’t have time for Europe. And then to gratuitously sort of beat up Europeans and tell them we don’t want your ships in Asia. Life’s not that simple, and strategy is not that simple. And Beijing would love to have Europe remain neutral, NATO remain neutral in a Taiwan contingency.

And it’s not whether the order of battle changes because the Dutch send a frigate. It’s about the geopolitical dissuasion effect, the geopolitical cost imposition that NATO can impose on China. And so, like losing interest in the IP-4 – the Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand summits with NATO – the gratuitously fighting with Europe, especially right now, is just an onside goal. So yes, as a historian and a geography nut, I love the focus on the first and second island chain, you’re absolutely right. But don’t reduce the whole strategic problem to the military equation in the first island chain. Got to get that right. But if you get only that right, you lose anyway. So kind of a long answer. But a strategy, you know the famous dime construct, you need diplomacy, informational, military tools and economic. And I think part of the problem there is continuity for sure on the military side. For sure, we can talk about it. But the dime construct overall, we’re not performing on the d and i and the e in Asia. We’re doing a lot of good stuff on the m, and there’s a lot of continuity, which is why the alliances will survive. But in terms of strategic competition, we are not using our toolkit fully.

FORECASTING US ASIA STRATEGY AND POLICY FUTURES BEYOND TRUMP II

ASEAN Wonk: And on that Mike, just looking ahead, the conversation that we will get to as the midterms loom closer, diplomats and officials from the region will be asking including in allied capitals: how do we think about this question of Trumpism or America First after Trump in terms of US Asia policy? And what is that going to look like in terms of that sort of new bipartisan consensus around strategic competition, China, but also the famous DIME construct – and the very difficult balance that policymakers have to make between the security and military inroads where the United States has always led, and the difficulties on the economic, diplomatic, and informational aspects that we’ve seen?

Dr. Michael Green: Well…

[Note: This is the end of a free preview podcast, with the full version in an earlier post published on April 16, 2026 available to our paying subscribers. This is not meant to serve as new content and is part of our free preview content within the dedicated website podcast section].

ASEAN Wonk: Welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast, where we bring you expert insights and regional perspectives on Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific geopolitics and geoeconomics. I’m your host Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk platform at www.aseanwonk.com so you don’t miss our full posts.

Our guest today is Dr. Michael Green who worked at the National Security Council on Asia policy and is now the CEO of the US Studies Center at the University of Sydney. We’ll start our conversation talking about contemporary US Asia policy dynamics. Be sure to stay tuned as we also look ahead on other subjects, including what to expect with respect to future US policy in the region and the dynamics we might expect with upcoming midterm elections.

Note: The transcript that follows the above free clip preview has been lightly edited for clarity and organized into sections for ease of quick browsing. For all ASEAN Wonk Podcast episodes, full video and audio podcasts, along with edited and sectioned transcripts as well as block quotes, will be a premium product for our paying subscribers, but we will include a short free transcript preview and a clip for all readers to maintain accessibility. Paying subscribers can find the rest of the full transcript and the full video podcast right below the paywall. If you have not already, do consider subscribing, and, if you have already done so and like what you see and hear, do consider forwarding this to others as well who may be interested. Thank you for your support as always!

US ASIA STRATEGY TODAY IN PERSPECTIVE

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast, Mike, and let’s start if we could on US Asia strategy more generally, with the caveat, of course, that we are in the midst of Iran war fallout and a president who has some of the greatest latitude we’ve seen in terms of policymaking in recent history. You’ve written what I would say is the most extensive book on the subject of US Asia strategy By More Than Providence, and that looks at US Asia strategy even before the founding of the United States all the way up to some of the contemporary dynamics that we’re sort of talking about. With the second administration of US President Donald Trump, there’s a lot of focus on some of the personalistic dynamics. I’m hoping that we can get beyond that and talk a little bit more about some of the structural realities and some of the measures of continuity and change. If you talk to administration officials, they point out that there are still some gains and signs of continuity in terms of security networking with Australia, Japan, and the Philippines, and some of the things that we saw in the first Trump administration like the Development Finance Corporation, some of the rebranded minilaterals like Pax Silica. At the same time, if you look at some of the big broader trends in terms of trade, in terms of values, and in terms of some of the aspects of the policy ecosystem, there’s some really dramatic change there as well. So having long been a professor yourself and also written a book on this subject, how would you grade the administration’s approach to Asia so far?

Dr. Michael Green: Well thanks Prashanth. It’s great to be an honorary ASEAN wonk for an hour and to spend time with a CSIS alum. How would I grade them? Gosh. I would send them to the school counselor for examination is the honest answer, but I wouldn’t expel them from school because there are, as you suggest, some real points of continuity. We’re in this strange situation where there has perhaps never been as much consensus on Asia, the importance of Asia, the nature of the strategic challenge from China, and the criticality of alliances. There hasn’t been this much consensus – and this consensus has been around for eight, ten years now – in the whole postwar era, but we haven’t had a president who is as disinterested or almost hostile to that consensus as we have with Donald Trump. So when my book came out, it was 2017, so it was the first year of the Trump administration. And the reviews were all generally very good, but some reviewers said, well, you know, that’s been a fine explanation for the last two hundred and forty years. But now that Donald Trump is president, America doesn’t have a foreign policy or strategy anymore. And, you know, actually, in the first Trump administration, they did. The National Security Strategy put out by the Trump administration was the first to say that our focus has got to be on strategic competition with China and with Russia. Officials like Steve Biegun at state, Matt Pottinger at the NSC, General Mattis, the secretary of defense, and a lot of others really built a kind of balance of power – what my old boss Condoleezza Rice used to call a balance of power that favors freedom – upgrading the Quad, strengthening the alliance with Japan. And the first Trump term gets reasonably high marks in places like Tokyo and the Philippines. Then the Biden administration continued a lot of it. The Quad, for example, which was made a foreign minister’s summit by Secretary Mike Pompeo, the Biden administration made a presidential level summit. They didn’t undo basically anything that the Trump administration done in Asia.

But then the second Trump administration turned out to be much more of a departure from that trend. And a lot of it is because President Trump himself clearly believes that he now has the authority and the experience and maybe even the mission to do big things. And what those big things are, it kind of changes from day to day. And so, you know, he’s not strategic at all, he’s extremely tactical. It’s day to day. He is interested in enhancing his ways and means, his reputation, his power, his tools. But what for is never clear, and I don’t buy these arguments that he believes in spheres of influence or that we are in a neo-monarchical [state], I think that’s just basically kind of the vibe or the mood or as he puts it his gut on any given day. So that makes it very hard to sustain strategy, and he’s appointed a lot of people who frankly think that the enemy of America is within. That’s not the best frame of mind to deal with strategic competition from without. So there’s a lot more uncertainty. But underneath it all, as you suggested in your intro, if you look at congressional views including Republicans, if you look at public opinion, if you look at military alliances in Asia, there’s far more continuity than change underneath the surface. And we can talk about how much the surface matters. It matters. But I don’t see us on a new trajectory. I see us in a period of incredible turbulence, but not a fundamental change in the way that the American system is going to be viewing competition in Asia for the coming decades.

RECONSIDERING “PIVOT” DYNAMICS AND CONTEMPORARY REALITIES

ASEAN Wonk: So another point you referenced earlier Mike is that there’s chatter with respect to this US episode with Iran in terms of “we’ve seen this playbook before” with respect to the war on terrorism and the Bush administration which you were in as well. My issue with that is that the world has changed pretty fundamentally in the last twenty years. We’ve had a war in Ukraine that has reinforced connectivity between different regions, rather than this notion that we were in the Obama administration of a pivot or rebalance to Asia. And in fact, some of the advocates of the pivot, including Kurt Campbell, have actually admitted that these realities are actually much more sophisticated relative to where they were twenty years ago. The US position is also quite different in terms of hydrocarbons from where it was twenty years ago. And the China challenge is a much more fundamental challenge today than it was twenty years ago as well. So how would you sort of think about this notion of the sort of evolution from the pivot and rebalance to where we are at now, where we’re seeing a lot more focus on hemispheric and homeland concerns. When I look back further at U. S. history, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Monroe Doctrine, these things are not exactly new. It seems like a rebalancing of US interests on Asia relative to the rest of the world.

Dr. Michael Green: Yeah. None of this is new in a way. I started my book By More Than Providence in 1783 because that’s when Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to the commander of US forces in the frontier, which was somewhere in Pennsylvania at the time, warning that our spies in London had learned that the British were planning an expedition across Canada to find a fast route to the Pacific Northwest and access to the Pacific Ocean. And Jefferson said to Colonel Clark, we need to find a way to get there first, which, of course, was a big part of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was geopolitical. So geopolitics is in the American DNA even if it’s sloppy and contested and inconsistent. I was actually surprised to find that when I did my research. What was going to be a two-year project became a seven-year project because there’s so much rich strategic debate about the Pacific in Congress, in congressional hearings, among men of letters. And so that’s one of the reasons, frankly, why I think we have to look at the Trump era not as a new unprecedented trajectory in American foreign policy, but a period of turbulence. And how much damage the turbulence does, we can discuss.

I don’t think I put this in my book, I use it in class, but there’s a great cartoon by Herb Block, the famous Washington Post cartoonist you’re old enough to remember: he had a cartoon in the 1940s during World War Two, and it shows General MacArthur who commanded in the Far East meeting with General Marshall, the chief of staff of the army. And MacArthur has brought in a globe of the world to discuss strategy, and the globe is a cube, and East Asia’s on top. And Marshall says, well, you know, general, here, we prefer to use a round globe. And it was making fun of the fact that MacArthur wanted everything in North Africa and Europe put in second place or dropped to pivot military resources to the Pacific. And I do that at Georgetown in my class because I don’t want people who major in Asian studies to think that good Asia strategy is neglecting the rest of the world, and especially for the US, which is a global power, a two-ocean power, and all the rest.

And so I was in the White House on 9/11, I was in the White House during Afghanistan and Iraq. I did not go into meetings and say: we can’t be doing any of this. We’ve got to focus on Asia. I thought, how do we — and I was hardly alone in this [Richard Armitage] and many others — but how do we basically take advantage of this crisis to strengthen our alliances and partnerships in Asia? And I think sometimes advocates of Asia strategy think we can hit pause on the Middle East or on Europe, but especially on the Middle East because it’s such a quagmire. You keep trying to get out, you get pulled back in. But as Lee Kuan Yew said, Americans think geopolitics is a video game and you can hit pause in one part of the world and then come back, and nothing will have happened while you’re dealing with another. And Lee Kuan Yew actually recognized the US and Singapore’s and Asia’s interests had to tend to security in the Middle East, had to tend to security in Europe.

So I’m not an advocate of just ignoring Iran. And there’s a lot that the Trump administration did wrong with the Iran war in terms of their assumptions, poor planning, complete disregard for allies and for the congress and the American public. It’s a pretty long list. But the underlying challenge for Iran was not created by Donald Trump. The missile program in particular was potentially heading towards ten thousand ballistic missiles in a few years. Unacceptable. So you can’t just hit pause in the Middle East and hope everything will be fine. It’s going to take some level of resources. Now maybe more resources than we needed because of the way the war’s been prosecuted. We’ll see. But you have to have an Asia strategy within a global strategy. And I don’t know if you want me to talk more about Trump’s lack of strategy or what we see as continuity, but, obviously, one big feature of his second term is going to be Iran. And it’s undoing his presidency. You can see it in public opinion in the fights in MAGA. The effect on Asia is not – you know, people who say this is that he’s Bismarck and this is brilliant are wrong, obviously – but people who say this is a complete destruction of interest in Asia are also wrong. It’s a mixed picture, and I think you have to be balanced in how you look at it.

DEFENSE PERIMETER, ISLAND CHAIN STAKES AND SECURITY FUTURES

ASEAN Wonk: One of the things you mentioned with respect to MacArthur is the conversation around the defense perimeter and how the United States is looking at its worldview and its vision for the region. Some of the chatter around the narrowing of the administration’s approach to the first island chain, for example, and the implications for – if you’re looking at, say, Vietnam and the South China Sea, for example – there are some elements of change there and concern, which I understand. There are also some elements of continuity that I see as well: in the last couple of administrations, the Philippines has really cemented its role in terms of the US security architecture around the alliances, but also Guam, Hawaii, and so on and so forth with respect to Japan, Australia: the networking there is pretty intense. What’s your view on this notion of the defense perimeter and the forward defense line relative to what we’ve seen in other periods in history, including MacArthur, the Korean War, and so on: is it as much of a change, or do you see more continuity there with respect to the security aspect?

Dr. Michael Green: You know, drawing your defense perimeter – put it another way, where you’re willing to fight or risk war – is one of the hardest things in grand strategy. And in my book it’s a conundrum for American strategists for 250 years. In the book I wrote after that on Japan’s current strategy called Line of Advantage, it’s a conundrum. Where do you draw the line? Where do you decide you’re going to take risk? John Lewis Gaddis, in his book on strategy, says you need the discipline to sit inside the castle walls and listen to the villagers being burned alive or something like that. He’s obviously an advocate of clear defensive perimeters and being disciplined. And one of my old bosses, Steve Hadley, to say, you keep drawing red lines and you don’t defend them, you end up creating a red carpet. I love that line. And so it’s very, very tricky. I think one problem US strategists make sometimes is, to quote Homer Simpson, the great geopolitical thinker, sometimes they make the mistake of saying the loud part soft and the soft part loud. So when Dean Acheson in January 1950, after a review within the State Department of how to protect our interests and contain communism after the fall of mainland China to Mao, decided, well, don’t worry – it was a political thing as much as it was strategic for the Democrats – he said, don’t worry. We’ve got this very strong defensive line with the first island chain, which was all thinking in American geopolitics. And he had that famous line between Japan and Korea in January 1950, which was a red carpet. It was an invitation to Mao, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung to test containment and allow Kim Il Sung to attack six months later, June 1950. That was a mistake to draw that defensive perimeter so clearly. Of course, the Vietnam War had the flip problem, which is they didn’t know where the defensive perimeter was. So, you know, strategy is basically about reconciling two mutually contradictory goals. If you didn’t have mutually contradictory goals, you wouldn’t need to think about it: you just pursue your interests. But sometimes the goals compete.

But I do think we are guilty in the United States sometimes of drawing the line too crisply, too clearly sometimes, and too much. So to give you more recent examples – the National Defense Strategy that came out. It was a dog’s breakfast, as they say in Australia – it had all kinds of stuff in it, some of it was ridiculous – but it did have a very clear and very historic focus on, as you said, on defending the first and second island chain in the Western Pacific. But it was very reductionist, and this sort of follows Bridge Colby’s thinking about Taiwan being the major central front. It was very reductionist. So everything’s about Taiwan. And this is also a mistake because the defense of Taiwan is not just – and certainly not in the first instance – about military deterrence in North Asia and in the first island chain. I mean, that’s absolutely core to the strategy, but Beijing’s strategy is to win without fighting. So if you overly focus on the military deterrence piece – which is critical – but if that’s all you’re worried about, you neglect, for example, diplomacy and development in Southeast Asia or the transatlantic alliance. And the flavor of the National Defense Strategy, Bridge’s thinking is – I mean, he’s a smart guy, and he’s very focused on the core problem – he’s worried about U.S. resources. But the danger of being overly reductionist and drawing a very clear line around what you’re willing to fight for too much is you end up ceding in Phase Zero – in peacetime – strategic influence in Southeast Asia that allows China to flank you from the south with their own power projection or prevent U.S. access to the archipelagic southern flank, which is critical for access basing overflight and dealing with a PLA campaign strategy that’s the entire first and second island chain.

And it’s not a simple matter of deterrence as you know well from your work. It’s much more complicated. It’s about development. It’s about diplomacy. It’s about soft power. It’s about partnering with Australia, Japan, and others. It’s not a kind of John Mearsheimer simple war and peace, black and white issue. It’s complex. And if you get it wrong, you make it easier for China to fight without winning. And in a similar way, the transatlantic relationship: it is way too reductionist to say the central problem we have – the pacing threat – is dealing with the PLA on the Taiwan contingency so we don’t have time for Europe. And then to gratuitously sort of beat up Europeans and tell them we don’t want your ships in Asia. Life’s not that simple, and strategy is not that simple. And Beijing would love to have Europe remain neutral, NATO remain neutral in a Taiwan contingency.

And it’s not whether the order of battle changes because the Dutch send a frigate. It’s about the geopolitical dissuasion effect, the geopolitical cost imposition that NATO can impose on China. And so, like losing interest in the IP-4 – the Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand summits with NATO – the gratuitously fighting with Europe, especially right now, is just an onside goal. So yes, as a historian and a geography nut, I love the focus on the first and second island chain, you’re absolutely right. But don’t reduce the whole strategic problem to the military equation in the first island chain. Got to get that right. But if you get only that right, you lose anyway. So kind of a long answer. But a strategy, you know the famous dime construct, you need diplomacy, informational, military tools and economic. And I think part of the problem there is continuity for sure on the military side. For sure, we can talk about it. But the dime construct overall, we’re not performing on the d and i and the e in Asia. We’re doing a lot of good stuff on the m, and there’s a lot of continuity, which is why the alliances will survive. But in terms of strategic competition, we are not using our toolkit fully.

FORECASTING US ASIA STRATEGY AND POLICY FUTURES BEYOND TRUMP II

ASEAN Wonk: And on that Mike, just looking ahead, the conversation that we will get to as the midterms loom closer, diplomats and officials from the region will be asking including in allied capitals: how do we think about this question of Trumpism or America First after Trump in terms of US Asia policy? And what is that going to look like in terms of that sort of new bipartisan consensus around strategic competition, China, but also the famous DIME construct – and the very difficult balance that policymakers have to make between the security and military inroads where the United States has always led, and the difficulties on the economic, diplomatic, and informational aspects that we’ve seen?

Dr. Michael Green: Well…

CONTINUED TRANSCRIPT AND FULL VIDEO PODCAST EPISODE FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS

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For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of looming global headwinds after a new regional ministerial meeting;

• Mapping of regional developments, such as Kremlin partnership chatter and supply chain resilience boost;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends including critical minerals alternative talk; biggest China launch and maritime boost;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators such as high-speed rail first; rare earth futures; twin new pacts and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out our ASEAN Wonk review of a new book earlier in the week by a former official on a new strategy against geoeconomic weaponization and implications for the Indo-Pacific region.

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,316 words (~10 minutes)

Supply Chain Resilience Boost; Kremlin Partnership Chatter & More

US-China Southeast Asia Survey Headline; Hemispheric Dynamics & Coming Trade Review

• “Reversing last year’s trend, a slim majority of ASEAN respondents selected China (52.0%) over the US (48%) if the region were forced to align itself with one of the two strategic rivals,” according to a new iteration of an annual Southeast Asia survey report published by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. Among other report toplines, global scam operations and the South China Sea are also identified as being among the biggest regional geopolitical concerns (link).

Graphic Depicting Shifting Southeast Asia Perceptions With Respect to China and the United States

• “The…general review must be treated as a high-stakes strategic opportunity,” argues a new brief released by CSIS Indonesia on the review of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement. The brief suggests provisions that should be considered as part of the process, including those covering supply chain resilience and the digital and green economy (link).

• “China’s AI influence on the global stage has only grown, aided by increasingly capable models, dramatically cheaper end-user pricing, and leverage of the global open-source developer community,” according to a new commentary published over at The Cipher Brief on China-U.S. competition in the artificial intelligence domain. The piece suggests “rethinking the parameters” of competition is critical to shifting dynamics in this space (link).

Global Headwinds Loom After New 2026 ASEAN Ministerial Meet

What’s Behind It

• The future outlook on looming global headwinds was front and center in the latest round of key regional ministerial meetings. The engagements took place amid a series of flashpoint-related developments. Dozens of countries — including a majority from Southeast Asia —issued a new call spotlighting the serious issue of peacekeeper security after several deaths in the Middle East, while China and Russia earlier vetoed a United Nations resolution on the Strait of Hormuz with U.S.-Iran conflict futures still playing out1. And though a senior official candidly told top policymakers and experts to prepare for some near-term “pain” in global geoeconomic outlooks, ASEAN’s growth story was cited as an example of rare optimism in terms of longer-term foundations to build on2.

Select Key Recent Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Developments Amid Recent ASEAN Regional Meets

• The wider geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics have also dominated major power engagements. Among key powers, Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s engagements in maritime Southeast Asia have been carefully watched given the conversations around supply chain resilience, as evidenced by new inroads announced such as a previously mulled legally binding protocol on economic resilience as Middle East conflict fallout continues3. On the flip side, regional leaders and senior officials headed to the capitals of major powers this week including China, Russia and the United States have had to weigh in on how their activities are addressing immediate geopolitical and geoeconomic impacts, including Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto with Russia unsurprisingly playing up energy and other diplomatic gains ahead of the voyage4.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Key Policy Datapoints to Watch, Alongside Major Pillars and Select Focus Areas

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WonkCount: 1,568 words (~7 minutes)

Review: Will China Weaponization Fuel More Asia Resistance?

Context

“China will take any additional punitive measure if deemed necessary in the future,” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson noted last week following Beijing’s announcement of new sanctions against a Japanese lawmaker over visits to Taiwan1. The development was just the latest datapoint in evolving responses to the growing use of geoeconomic weaponization in the Indo-Pacific region including by China and the United States as two leading powers in the international system to varying degrees, with cases in point within the past year alone including expanded rare earth export controls and adjusted trade tariffs2.

Select Key Recent China-Related Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Developments

A new book China’s Weaponization of Trade co-authored by former official Victor Cha charts out a new approach for managing geoeconomic weaponization in the Indo-Pacific and beyond3. In doing so, the book, co-authored with think tankers Ellen Kim and Andy Lim, adds to a series of new works by practitioners on evolving geoeconomic dynamics, including ones we have reviewed here on ASEAN Wonk such as How to Win a Trade War by Chad Bown and Soumaya Keynes4. China’s Weaponization of Trade argues that measures adopted by governments to date — be it sectoral groups like Pax Silica or newly-inked critical minerals deals — are too “piecemeal and defensive” to meaningfully address this challenge5. The book lays out a new approach by leveraging first-of-its-kind data across hundreds of cases of economic coercion impacting dozens of governments, companies and individuals, along with granular analysis on country-specific geoeconomic vulnerabilities including for China itself6. “[T]he means of countering trade weaponization thus far concocted by governments is deficient…new strategies are needed,” the book argues before detailing what these strategies could look like7.

Analysis

The book also highlights key datapoints to watch on potential futures (see originally-generated ASEAN Wonk table below for a summary of important contours. Paying subscribers can also read the rest of the “Analysis” section and “Implications” section looking at how these dynamics play out in the future).

Key Datapoints to Watch, Alongside Major Domains and Select Policy Focus Areas

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For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of new plurilateral collaboration futures and their wider strategic implications;

• Mapping of regional developments, such as force deployment futures and peacekeeper death fallout crisis;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as China setback reversal; big pact termination talk; and scam center tracking;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including cyber law scrutiny; quiet sectoral pact networking; new foreign talent goals and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out our ASEAN Wonk review earlier this week of a new book published by a renowned prime minister on rethinking the Global South script for a “postnormal” age.

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,336 words (~10 minutes)

Peacekeeper Death Fallout; Rotational Force Spotlight & More

Global Trade Pulse Check; Nuclear Scenario Futures & Geoeconomic Statecraft Fusion

• “The opportunity is that WTO members finally grasp the nettle and figure out a reform agenda fit for purpose… decisions by subsets of members…may yet spur recognition that times have truly changed,” argues a new commentary published by the Hinrich Foundation assessing the latest ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, which saw some members proceeding with the implementation of a key e-commerce agreement. The commentary argues that opportunities in agreements by subsets of members also comes with risks that could sideline the body in global trade rules (link).

• “The exercise reveals gaps in nuclear-security crisis literacy among Southeast Asian diplomatic-policy stakeholders as well as the absence of alternative mechanisms to address a broader range of nuclear-related regional security crises,” according to a paper drawing on insights from a crisis-simulated exercise published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The exercise surrounds a hypothetical scenario involving a missing nuclear-armed submarine in Indonesian waters in 2031 and how it sparked broader military tensions between China and the Australia–UK–US (AUKUS) partnership (link).

• “[A]ustralia doesn’t lack tools…rather, it lacks an architecture that sufficiently integrates them,” according to a new report on economic statecraft to adjust to Indo-Pacific and global changes published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The report notes that Australia’s challenges in this respect are also arguably shared by middle powers in the Indo-Pacific as well as in other regions of the world such as Europe (link).

Top Australian Imports At Risk From Critical Minerals Disruption by China

New Geoeconomic FIT-P Call Amid Growing Middle East Fallout

What’s Behind It

• Founding members of a key geoeconomic grouping issued a new call for future sectoral collaboration amid rising global Middle East conflict1. The call comes as policymakers react to risks radiating across regions including the Indo-Pacific. One widely-circulated estimate suggesting that more prolonged conflict could result in Indo-Pacific impacts approximating the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis, with Southeast Asia and the Pacific being among the worst region hit in terms of both growth and inflation projections2. Officials also privately concede that the spotlight on narrower dealmaking around maritime access through the Strait of Hormuz in the public domain has also amplified the need by governments to ramp up communications to address questions such as what exactly deal terms might be and what is being traded3.

Select Key Recent and Relevant Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Developments

• The call is one of several regional datapoints on how flashpoint dynamics are reshaping Indo-Pacific geoeconomic collaboration. To take just one example, while the newly upgraded Indonesia-South Korea “special comprehensive strategic partnership” extends across a wide range of areas, both leaders at a summit this past week made specific reference to crisis-induced “resource security” as being an unfortunate reality, with Indonesian officials earlier also announcing a postponement in convening a geoeconomic grouping that the country is chairing4. The Philippines as ASEAN chair has faced questions on how it will stabilize growing fallout even after the declaration of a state of emergency, while Thailand — Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy — has been consumed with handling the scrutiny on the security of its vessels and citizens, with multiple media briefings to address a single incident in this respect even as the new government is taking shape5.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Notable Policy Commitments, Alongside Major Strategic Pillars and Select Key Priorities

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WonkCount: 1,427 words (~6 minutes)

Review: Rethinking Global South Script for a Postnormal Age

Context

“We also welcome Brazil and South Africa…an important step in widening ASEAN’s engagement with the BRICS and the G20 and strengthening our bridge to the Global South,” Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said late last year when convening the past round of ASEAN summitry1. The datapoint is one of several depicting the shifting engagement patterns of Southeast Asian states, a theme which has continued to attract interest this year as the Philippines chairs the grouping amid a range of other domestic and foreign policy priorities.

Select Key Recent and Relevant Global Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Datapoints

A new book Rethinking Ourselves by Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim lays out approaches for countries seeking to navigate a shifting global landscape in what he characterizes as “postnormal times.”2 In doing so, it adds to recent books published by leaders while still in office that articulate potential strategies for navigating changing geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics, including ones we have reviewed here on ASEAN Wonk such as Finnish President Alexander Stubb’s The Triangle of Power3. “The non-West, the Global South, cannot remain complacent in the face of these threats,” the book argues as it lays out components of a more comprehensive approach to navigating the so-called postnormal global landscape4.

Analysis

The book also highlights key datapoints to watch on potential futures (see originally-generated ASEAN Wonk table below for a summary of important contours. Paying subscribers can also read the rest of the “Analysis” section and “Implications” section looking at how these dynamics play out in the future).

Future Policy Datapoints to Watch, Worldview Pillars and Select Focus Areas

Read more

For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of China’s unveiling of a new phase of minilateral geoeconomic cooperation with regional states;

• Mapping of regional developments, such as South China sea talks and new global trade inroads chatter;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as new defense pact; nuclear power inroads; and quiet sanctions disclosure;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including media ban rollout; rail green light; upgrade funding boost and more;

• And much more!

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,679 words (~12 minutes)

South China Sea Talks; New Global Trade Inroads Chatter & More

Unpacking Modern Trade Pact ROOs; Changing Energy Security Agenda & Shifting Conflict Dynamics

• “The surveyed firms…showed strong understanding of the various trade agreements and reported using many of them,” noted an analysis of trends and challenges of modern preferential trade agreements published by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC). The report studies the complex interactions of rules of origin (ROOs) in various trade pacts and how this is affecting practical metrics such as utilization rates (link).

Graphic Depicting Surveyed Firm Knowledge About Various Preferential Trade Agreements

• “[T]he 11 ASEAN member states can deepen regional cooperation to address the energy crisis and define a strategic energy security agenda to ensure that ASEAN becomes the world's fourth-largest economy by 2045,” notes a commentary published by Philippine foreign secretary Maria Theresa Lazaro over at The Bangkok Post with Manila chairing the regional grouping this year. The op-ed comes after measures discussed at the recent ASEAN special foreign ministers meeting which discussed how regional states can manage ongoing fallout from Middle East conflict (link).

  

• “[I]t reflects a broader strategic realignment,” according to an update on Myanmar conflict dynamics published by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) on recent territorial clashes in Myanmar. The analysis delves into links between the shifting balance of power among the country’s various armed groups and the role of external actors including China (link).

Map Of Areas Of Disputes And Stakeholders Near Myanmar-China Border

China Touts LMC 2.0 Mekong Minilateral At 2026 Boao Forum

What’s Behind It

• China used this year’s iteration of its Boao Forum for Asia to play up its vision for regional and global order also evident in its playing up of new phase of its geoeconomic cooperation with Mekong countries in Southeast Asia via its Lancang Mekong Cooperation (LMC) mechanism1. The developments came amid a broader series of geoeconomic datapoints. The European Union and the countries of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) — which includes four current Southeast Asia members in Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam — convened another iteration of a new format of cooperation on the sidelines of the World Trade Organization ministerial in Cameroon2. Separately and within the region, amid a series of overseas engagements including a trip to Japan, Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto and his team have engaged the media to counter doubts around the growth trajectory of Southeast Asia’s largest economy and adherence to its free and active foreign policy after recent moves with the United States3.

Select Key Recent China-Related Geoeconomic and Geopolitical Regional and Global Developments

• The developments were disclosed amid key regional indicators of ongoing flashpoint management. Apart from the Boao Forum itself — which did include a session on the South China Sea as part of its wider agenda as well — this past week China and the Philippines also held back-to back China-Philippines bilateral South China Sea talks in Fujian amid renewed speculation over “initial exchanges” on energy exploration and “momentum” on a binding China-ASEAN code of conduct4. Separately, in an indication of the rising geoeconomic and geopolitical fallout from ongoing Middle East conflict and impacts on regional dynamics, officials also began discussing initial iterations of “stripped down” schedules that could impact some of the hundreds of ASEAN meetings set for the coming months, with one official noting to ASEAN Wonk that the impact of the “significant scaling down” is yet to fully play out5.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Future Datapoints to Watch, Alongside Major Policy Priorities and Select Key Cooperation Areas

Read more

For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of key new regional additions to an Indo-Pacific defense partnership;

• Mapping of regional developments, including a new strategic partnership launch and coming leadership reshuffle;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as big coming trade pact deadline; debt trap escape plan and counter-scam move;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including quiet maritime tech handover; new sectoral mechanism kickoff; cyber capacity-building exchange and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out our ASEAN Wonk review earlier in the week of a new book co-authored by a former chief economist which lays out future geoeconomic strategies beyond trade wars and flashpoint shocks;

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,507 words (~11 minutes)

New Strategic Partnership Launch; Coming Leadership Reshuffle & More

New Geoeconomic World Chatter; Trading Order Assessment & Taiwan Indo-Pacific Connections

• “Despite shared apprehension over Beijing’s expanding reach in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Australia and Taiwan engagement within broader regional partnerships or initiatives has to date been limited, if not wholly absent,” according to findings from a report released by the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney analyzing priorities for bilateral, regional and global engagement in Australia-Taiwan relations. Southeast Asia features in several aspects covered by the report, including links to geoeconomic engagement via the CPTPP trade agreement and a focus on countering gray zone coercion (link).

• “For countries across Southeast Asia and the broader Global South, this evolving context does not necessarily call for immediate or dramatic policy realignment,” cautions a new commentary published by CSIS Indonesia analyzing recent developments in the global geoeconomic landscape. The commentary notes that “maintaining flexibility” on policy questions will be key for countries as they manage complex and fluid systemic changes globally, including doubling down on the model of open regionalism (link).

• “These agreements send a powerful geopolitical signal that participating countries want to trade and cooperate on predictable, rule-based terms,” according to a new piece published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics on the prospects for the European Union leading a “new world order” in trade including through new free trade pacts with Southeast Asian states. The commentary notes that while the EU’s efforts to diversify ties with countries are welcome, Europe itself “must stay open” to remain a trustworthy partner rather than alienating partners by making trade and investment more difficult (link).

New Indo-Pacific Defense Partnership Gets Thailand Addition

What’s Behind It

• Southeast Asia was among the regions in the focus with the publicizing of membership expansion in a key new U.S.-led defense arrangement1. The development was just the latest highlighting regional security engagement beyond headlines around trade deals and Middle East conflict, with officials also highlighting interactions gradually taking shape in what are designated “priority geoeconomic sectors” such as artificial intelligence, energy and critical minerals beyond publicized datapoints like the rebranded Pax Silica summit meeting2. Washington has also been working with partners to build out tangible examples of positive regional geoeconomic cooperation even amid uncertainty around flashpoints and trade wars, with recent case in point spotlighted by U.S. officials in briefings with interlocutors being the convening of an energy security ministerial with Japan which produced new collaboration outcomes with four Southeast Asian states in areas like nuclear power and addition to Indo-Pacific partners such as Australia, India and South Korea3.

Select Key Related Security Developments Amid New Indo-Pacific Defense Partnership Additions

• The development occurred alongside other security-related interactions that spotlighted the complexities of regional responses to partner engagements. Malaysian government officials rushed to clarify the country’s approach to foreign vessels following opposition to the docking of twin U.S. ships that quickly spilled over into the public domain, prompting additional communications from other regional governments as well after the fallout including in neighboring Singapore4. Meanwhile, at the same time, quieter examples of security cooperation continued between Washington and other Indo-Pacific states through various channels in other parts of the region as well, including the sharing of maritime domain awareness platforms and expanding military exercises of various kinds with partners that largely flew under the radar5.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider regional and global implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Key Policy Datapoints to Watch, Alongside Priority Areas and Select Major Initiatives

Read more

WonkCount: 1,427 words (~6 minutes)

Review: How to Win a Trade War and Indo-Pacific Stakes

Context

“The ministry…has provided the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) with this information and will be engaging the USTR to seek further clarification on the trade data,” Singapore’s trade ministry disclosed in a blunt media statement contradicting U.S. statistics as Washington opened new Section 301 investigations targeting dozens of countries this past week1. The response was one datapoint in the spectrum of evolving regional approaches in navigating a more contested and shock-prone geoeconomic environment, with the continuing fallout from Middle East conflict being just the latest case in point.

Select Key Recent Regional and Global Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Datapoints

A forthcoming book How to Win a Trade War co-authored by former chief economist Chad Bown and ex-policy advisor Soumaya Keynes articulates critical strategies for countries to navigate coming geoeconomic futures2. In doing so, it adds to a series of books on evolving geoeconomic dynamics, including ones we have reviewed here on ASEAN Wonk such as Chokepoints by Edward Fishman3. How to Win a Trade War distills advice on how to manage geoeconomic competition based on the authors’ experience and conversations with over a hundred top officials and executives. “In order to wage war, you need to know the battlefield,” the book notes before going on to articulate future scenarios and potential approaches4.

Analysis

The book also highlights key datapoints to watch on potential futures (see originally-generated ASEAN Wonk table below for a summary of important contours. Paying subscribers can also read the rest of the “Analysis” section and “Implications” section looking at how these dynamics play out in the future).

Future Geoeconomic Scenarios, Major Outlook Features and Potential Policy Datapoints

Read more

For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of “bridge builder” pitch in regional UN Security Council seat push;

• Mapping of regional developments, including coming trilateral defense chatter and twin new trade probe launches;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as critical minerals pact push; new space center launch and quantifying fallout;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including missile deal hype; coming cyber law; first data center talk and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out the latest episode of the ASEAN Wonk Podcast featuring insights from a former official and trade lawyer on how disruption is affecting Southeast Asia’s geoeconomic agenda and implications for businesses and governments.

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,116 words (~10 minutes)

Coming Trilateral Chatter; Twin New Trade Probe Launches & More

China’s Influence Operations Playbook; “Cuspness” World Order Play & Peace Process Futures

• “A playbook of these information operations is now identifiable,” according to a new report detailing China’s influence operations playbook published by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Methods identified within this playbook include “borrowing mouths” of influencers to lend credibility to Chinese messaging; “laundering” information for strategic use; and obscuring the origin and attribution of China-derived content (link).

• “While they are not superpowers, cusp states often serve as important middle powers, featuring unique languages and economies,” argues a new commentary published by the RAND Corporation urging Australia to embrace “cuspness” as part of its positioning efforts in the global order. The commentary notes that the approach would necessitate a multipronged effort beyond engaging across subregions like the Pacific and Southeast Asia, with the effort including dedicating more resources to defense; reducing superpower dependence; and prioritizing relationships to prevent overextension (link).

• “The peace process in the Bangsamoro, the Muslim-majority parts of the southern Philippines, is at a critical stage,” notes a new analysis published by the International Crisis Group. The analysis suggests that the Marcos government should use the less than three years left in its term to “get the peace process back on track” given that the lack of urgent action could result in “the tenuous calm in the Bangsamoro risks giving way to renewed instability” (link).

Bridge Builder Pitch in Philippines UN Security Council Bid

What’s Behind It

• Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. made a future pitch for a United Nations Security Council seat even as Manila continues its current ASEAN chairmanship during a period of heightened geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions1. The pitch occurred alongside a busy week at the UN that included a vote on twin resolutions — one passed that was supported by the Gulf Cooperation Council and another backed by Russia failing to do so amid Western opposition2. Meanwhile, within the Indo-Pacific itself, governments had to reframe regional engagements around fast-changing developments, with one case in point being a Indo-Pacific energy security ministerial forum co-hosted by Japan and the United States which officials had been briefing on weeks prior as being a “tangible example” of an affirmative and concrete policy platform3.

Select Recent and Relevant Global and Regional Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Developments Amid Philippines UN Security Council Seat Pitch

• The pitch also highlighted the breadth of challenges confronting regional states. ASEAN Wonk understands some governments have already quietly stepped up collaborative efforts in areas such as consular assistance amid conflict in the Middle East, even as they face questions on everything from citizen security to defense commitments. But more broadly, longer-term questions are also being raised about the implications for economic outlooks and security partnerships. A scheduled retreat of ASEAN economic ministers addressed regional agenda items but also saw unsurprising concern around “heightening of unilateralism” in global trade policy — with direct reference to twin new U.S. Section 301 investigations that have already affected a majority of the region’s 11 economies — as well as “sustained challenges to the global economic outlook which has already been battered by multiple headwinds…[and] will also impact…the livelihoods of millions of people in the region and hinder economic progress.”4.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted policy datapoints to watch with wider regional and global implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Future Policy Datapoints to Watch, Alongside Key Pillars and Major Cooperation Areas

Read more

INTRODUCTION

ASEAN Wonk: Welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast, where we bring you expert insights and regional perspectives on Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific geopolitics and geoeconomics. I’m your host Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk platform at www.aseanwonk.com so you don’t miss our full posts.

Our guest today is Edmund Sim, an international trade lawyer and former official who has advised nearly all of Southeast Asia’s governments on a range of subjects, including navigating regional free trade agreements and the entry of East Timor into ASEAN. We will start our conversation talking through ongoing geoeconomic dynamics, including the state of US trade policy. Be sure to stay tuned as we go through a range of other subjects, including the future inroads we might expect out to 2027 with respect to major powers and also within ASEAN in the regional organization’s geoeconomic agenda.

Note: The transcript that follows the above free clip preview has been lightly edited for clarity and organized into sections for ease of quick browsing. For all ASEAN Wonk Podcast episodes, full video and audio podcasts, along with edited and sectioned transcripts as well as block quotes, will be a premium product for our paying subscribers, but we will include a short free transcript preview and a clip for all readers to maintain accessibility. Paying subscribers can find the rest of the full transcript and the full video podcast right below the paywall. If you have not already, do consider subscribing, and, if you have already done so and like what you see and hear, do consider forwarding this to others as well who may be interested. Thank you for your support as always!

FUTURE OUTLOOK ON US TRADE DEALS AND GEOECONOMIC DISRUPTION

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast Ed and let’s start on some of the Southeast Asia dynamics with respect to US trade deals after the Supreme Court IEEPA ruling last month. Talking to Southeast Asian officials, they had already factored in the potential contingencies with respect to the Trump administration we might see. And as you’re aware, the Trump administration has also begun rolling out parts of what they’ve called a Plan B with various section authorities and so on. We’ve had a number of Southeast Asian countries sign trade agreements already – Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia – and a couple of others, including Vietnam are in the state of talks. As a trade lawyer and former official, what do you think we can expect on US policy in the coming months, and what are the datapoints you’re watching?

Edmund Sim: Well thanks for having me Prashanth. I think where we are is in a state of transition, albeit temporary, between what the Trump administration had proposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, and what we have now, which is under a different section of the law. The law in reference to the United States is the Trade Act of 1930. So they’ve resorted to using a section called 122, which deals with balance of payments issues, which historically were a bigger problem before the WTO (World Trade Organization) came into place. It’s under the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). So the president has this authority to impose tariffs of up to ten percent on a comprehensive basis on all imports, which he has done. And he has the authority to do that for 150 days. So we’re in that time period now. The issue and how this relates to the deals that were reached by the various Southeast Asian countries is that ten percent is, of course, less than what countries had negotiated with the Trump administration, ranging from eighteen percent to nineteen percent for most countries.

And it also affects countries that had no deal, like Singapore, which was at ten percent. And then now it potentially faces a higher duty because what’s happening is that right now, the duties are ten percent, but they want to reimpose rates that were negotiated with other countries. And so the administration is now working on a way to amend the ten percent in a way so that it applies to certain products from certain countries. And that might involve just pure amendment of this executive order that went into place previously. It may also involve applying a second executive order of up to fifteen percent. And so what you would have is the net effect of the two orders would impose ten percent for some products, for some countries, fifteen percent for others. So the net effect of all of this is to kind of get them to where they were before the Supreme Court ruling came out. But it’s not quite there. So under this authority that he does have under Section 122, he can’t really get the tariffs up all the way to the level that he had under IEEPA. So what that means is that countries that have already deals in place have to make a choice whether those countries press ahead or try to get some sort of renegotiation. If you’re a country that has eighteen percent, nineteen percent and you know fifteen percent is coming, you do face a choice theoretically of trying to delay implementation and just hoping that the fifteen percent would be what’s applicable rather than your eighteen percent or nineteen percent.

There are problems with this though. This Section 122 has a time limit. So they have until probably a hundred and fifty days after implementation to apply Section 122. And after, when you get to day 151, the president has to go back to the US Congress to get authorization to continue the tariffs beyond day 150. That’s one consideration, because the fifteen percent or ten percent as it may is a temporary situation. So what that means is that you don’t know what they’re going to do after day 151 if you’re one of the countries that have eighteen to nineteen. So whatever advantage you might have under the lower tariffs, it’s not going to be for that long. Second thing, of course, is that countries that go and try to renegotiate the terms could face potential negative blowback from the Trump administration, I think it’s difficult for some of the countries, particularly countries that were just before the Supreme Court ruling. Countries that had attended the Board of Peace meeting and everyone was supportive and all that, and then you turn around, you ask for a reduced rate. I think that wouldn’t go very well with the Trump administration.

And the third point is that we don’t know at this point exactly what type of permanent solution they’re going to have with regard to the U. S. law authorizing the tariffs. So they’re talking about using other sections of the law to impose the tariffs. So they’re talking about Section 232, which is national security, Section 301 for deals with trade barriers. And the president also mentioned Section 338, which is a very old section of the law, which dates back to over one hundred years. And the key thing about 338 is that it allows the president to post tariffs of up to fifty percent – five zero – against countries which have been deemed by the president to have discriminated against American products. So this has not been used in over one hundred years. It predates the World Trade Organization, the GATT. And so for that reason, it hasn’t been used. But it’s still on the books. And invoking that would mean a major shift away from international trade norms like most favored nation. But the potential is there for fifty percent. So unlike these other tariffs so you have a fifty percent potential authorization.

And under the Trade Act of 1930 authorizations, there’s no limit. So 232, he can impose higher rates above fifteen percent. And 301, he can impose rates above fifteen percent. So what all that means is that if you’re a country looking at the immediate implementation of the agreements that you’ve already reached or you’re almost going to reach, do you take what you already have or take a chance of what could happen? And given how the administration has changed the rates and has not been shy about adjusting the rates for purposes other than trade – so for example, the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute and the Trump administration used tariffs as a way to get them to the negotiating table – you have a situation where tariffs can be adjusted at any time, then there’s an understandably great reluctance to revisit those tariff rates.

So in the short term, I don’t see any of the countries in Southeast Asia knocking on the door and saying we would like to revise the rates. I think they’re going to stick with those deals. In the medium term, the longer term, the bigger issue besides the tariffs are all the other implementing conditions of these agreements. So for some countries, while all the countries agree to let in more American products at lower rates, that’s going to be problematic in some industrial sectors and agricultural sectors in Southeast Asia. You’re already seeing some pushback on ratification in countries such as Malaysia publicly and then not so publicly in Thailand and other places where there were very strong agrobusiness interests in those countries that don’t necessarily want to see American products come in. And there’s also the issue about signing up to other things such as the [Pax Silica] agreement or commitments to work in the supply chain.

And crucially, one of the biggest issues is this issue of transshipment. Because at the moment, these agreements all have commitments by the ASEAN states that signed up to prevent transshipment of goods from other countries – i. e China – from coming in and taking on the origin of the local country and then coming in under lower tariff rates. Because at the end of the day, really what a lot of this is aimed at is trying to “de-Sinoize” or reduce the China level of content in products coming into the United States. And so transshipped goods arguably are predominantly Chinese, and they’re really Chinese goods with a new coat of paint or a new mark saying they’re from Southeast Asia.

The problem we have fundamentally, which has been raised by the ASEAN countries, is that the United States follows a legal approach to determining whether a product comes from China or some other country based on a pretty subjective legalistic approach called substantial transformation: you look at how the good is produced and what you do to process and then what comes out at the end of the production process. But in Southeast Asia and most of the world, like the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA), those rules of origin – the rules that assign nationality to a product – those are based on value added. And so it’s more objective because you’re looking at numerical cost information, price information; you’re not really looking at the processing involved. So there is a fundamental inconsistency between the U. S. approach and the rest of the world and Southeast Asia’s approach. And it’s been that way for years. And so how you bridge the gap between the two approaches is going to be very important in that point of view.

So that’s a medium-term problem. It’s going to have an immediate impact on countries that have taken on a lot of Chinese investment to manufacture goods with Chinese inputs. And so especially [Indochina] and to a lesser extent, Indonesia, have benefited a lot over the last seven to eight years from Chinese investment. And trying to adjust away from that is going to be a big issue. And so I think these are the short term and medium-term issues for all these governments in the region. It’s not just a matter of thinking that these changes will go away after a midterm election in November 2026 or go away after a new president comes in in early 2029. A lot of this stuff is going to stay. The U. S. government now has shifted its tax base to a great extent away from a primarily income tax-based system raising revenue to one of which a large percentage of the revenue is coming in from these tariffs. And so that’s not going away. That’s not going to go away with a change in the legislature. It’s not going away with a change in the presidency.

So it’s something everyone’s going have to live with because notably, the United States is one of the few countries in the world that does not have a national sales tax. Well, the tariffs that were imposed through Liberation Day under IEEPA and now under 122 and now and foreseeably under these other sections, that’s pretty much a sales tax. And so you have to think about the revenue generation point of view, not just from the foreign point of view or effects of trade. And so what that means is that in the region, you’re going to have to think about what the long-term effects are. You can’t assume that these are all going to go away in two or three years. They’re here to stay. In what form, in what manner, that’s an open question: what a new government would do or a new president would do regardless of party. So it’s not a matter of waiting it out and waiting for the weather to change, so to say. This is a fundamental change in the trade and investment climate with the United States.

WAYS TO MANAGE GEOECONOMIC RISKS BEYOND BUSINESS AS USUAL

ASEAN Wonk: Right. And just to situate ourselves, we’ve seen a number of datapoints coming out of the region as well. One of those, which we were talking about just before we started recording, is the first ever ASEAN geoeconomics report which we saw released. If you talk to officials that were involved in the drafting, they say this is a pretty significant datapoint in the region’s evolving geoeconomic landscape. The report notes the need for a decisive shift away from business and usual and not just managing short term risks just like you were talking about – accommodating the administration, signing short term deals – but also recognizing that this is a pretty fundamental shift and also one of many shifts that we’re seeing in the geopolitical and geoeconomic climate. And there’s also a need to do things like accelerate regional trade agreements, delivering on the many ambitious goals that ASEAN has talked about over several years, but there’s a lag in terms of actual implementation and monitoring. So you’ve written whole books about things like the ASEAN Economic Community and used to manage a blog on the ASEAN Economic Community which I and others read pretty assiduously. And you’re very familiar with these documents and the gap between rhetoric and reality. What are your takeaways are from the report and the climate in the region as opposed to the weather that you were talking about to capture the kind of moment this is for Southeast Asia and ASEAN?

Edmund Sim: Yeah. I think the report is important because it’s a product of the times. And so they specifically went out and named the United States revised trade policy as the instigator for this rethink of ASEAN trade and investment. And so if you read the report, a lot of the content is aimed at dealing with the changes in the US trade policy around the world. And so that’s a shift in ASEAN as an institution approach because traditionally, they haven’t been willing to name names or identify causes of the climate change, so to say, using this analogy. What is interesting is what is not said. So and again, this is from an American point of view, when you read it from that point of view and you read the report, what’s not said? Who’s not mentioned? Well, China is not mentioned. There’s no mention in there about how if you have to deal with the United States and you have to approach the United States in a different way and you have their concerns, there’s no mention very much about how to deal with China, how to deal with issues related to Chinese investment and trade in the region. And as I said in the previous comment, it is difficult because many industries have benefited from Chinese investment in trade. On the other hand, not everyone has. I mean a lot of the goods that were destined for the United States now are in Southeast Asia. So you have many industrial concerns in the region who are not happy with the increase of imports coming in from China. Yet there’s nothing in there directly naming names with regard to China.

Another country that’s not mentioned is India. There’s language in there talking about RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership], but as we know, India famously elected not to join RCEP. And there’s no language in the report about revisiting that, like whether it’s worth going back to talk to India about joining RCEP now that the conditions have changed. There’s been no mention about re-approaching India. And I think a lot of that has to do with Indian politics. But if you’re really looking at this as a long-term view, reconsidering an approach to India is important because they’re also a major player in the region. And the final part on who’s not mentioned is the European Union. I mean, Europe is a major investor in the region. It is a potential source of investment and trade. Several countries have free trade agreements with the EU, but the report doesn’t say anything about that. So in some ways, the geoeconomic report is important because it does break a bit from ASEAN’s traditional reluctance to name names and call out countries on policy. But on the other hand, there is a lot of it that’s still in the old approach of not singling out countries and not identifying countries.

So I think it’s a good thing. I think it does focus minds. The question is, does this focus ASEAN to look internally at how it operates in terms of implementation? So, from the internal ASEAN point of view, there was a lot of language in there, especially from the private sector. They know that they were talking about implementation. And what that means is that there are many, many ASEAN agreements dealing with aspects of the economy. The question is, are those agreements being implemented on the ground? Do you have effective ways to integrate into the single production base, single market that is contained as a goal in the ASEAN Charter? And this has been a longstanding complaint of the private sector – both foreign investment and local investors about making it easier to do business within the region. So in some ways, you still have internal competition at the regional level among countries – one industry against another country within ASEAN. And that competition historically creates non-tariff barriers – things such as [phytosanitary measures] for plants, health measures to prevent goods from crossing borders for agricultural products, industrial standards of barriers, other barriers. And ASEAN has gone, frankly, a long way to addressing some of those, but it takes a long time.

And the thing mentioned briefly somewhat in the report is a need to increase not necessarily the power of the ASEAN institutions, but the effectiveness. It is not realistic to expect the ASEAN Secretariat to have the authority of the European Commission, despite the fact that that’s usually the comparison model that we always talk about. However, it is possible to improve the flow of information, the monitoring, the assessment. And one way I do think the report comes into play is that if ASEAN is willing to identify the United States as a cause of the climate change, is ASEAN willing to identify particular countries and particular industries within ASEAN as being necessary to deal with that climate change in terms of trade and investment? And I didn’t quite see that in the report, but that’s understandable because that’s been a major structural or cultural issue for ASEAN since the first concepts of dealing with the first economic crisis in the 1970s with the energy crisis and the commodities bust that we had in the 1970s that’s been a real sticking point in implementation. So that’s something that needs to be done.

Of course, I’m a lawyer. I would like them to address this through law. But I also understand ASEAN is a different kind of institution. Southeast Asia is different. It’s going to have to be a combination of law and policy. And it is something where both economic and other resources and power is going to have to be joined up with law to get us into a place where they can handle stresses within the market, stresses within the production base. Because if they don’t do that, then the ability of ASEAN is going to be hampered. The ability to deal with these climate changes with regard to the world investment and trade, that’s going to be hampered if they don’t get their act together. Because no one country in ASEAN – okay, you can argue that some countries are bigger than others – but fundamentally, all the countries are much better off working together through the ASEAN institutions than dealing with other trading partners such as the United States, such as China, EU, India. They’re much better off working together and rather than individually.

But you can’t work together unless you get your internal operations working in a more effective manner. And that’s something that has to be done. So it’s not like we’re talking about having complete flow of people across borders. That’s a very sensitive issue. But I do think they can make it easier for flow of money, flow of capital and investments, flow of people, of goods and making it so that it is easy to operate in the region. Because without that, it will be very difficult for the group to operate when you have internal competition and each one trying to outdo the other on bilateral deals with the trading partners. This is not going to work, and it goes against “ASEAN centrality.” It goes against what is the intended goal of the ASEAN Charter, which is to improve the welfare not just of the nation state, but also the people who live in those nation states in ASEAN.

TOP FUTURE GEOECONOMIC AGENDA ITEMS TO WATCH INTO 2027

ASEAN Wonk: Right. And that gets me to my next question, which is the follow through and what we might see the rest of 2026 and into 2027. There’s a lot of talk and conversation around this notion of understanding the world from more of a sort of G-Minus 2 prism – what other countries are doing in engaging Southeast Asia apart from the United States and China and vice-versa. There’s a gap between rhetoric and reality, but, in fairness, we’ve seen manifestations of this – Canada is working on a free trade pact with ASEAN which will have significant implications on North American geoeconomics, and Singapore and others have come up with FITP addressing sectoral areas like supply chains. There are also a number of intraregional geoeconomic agenda items like the Digital Economic Framework Agreement which will be quite significant once it is in place, and a number of other frameworks in area like artificial intelligence. What are some of the top priorities that governments and businesses that you talk to are watching in the geoeconomic agenda, not just for the rest of this year but also 2027? Because Singapore is going to be ASEAN chair that year, and Singapore has been very active in a number of these geoeconomic areas.

Edmund Sim: Yeah I think the….

[Note: This is the end of a free preview podcast, with the full version in an earlier post published on March 12, 2026 available to our paying subscribers. This is not meant to serve as new content and is part of our free preview content within the dedicated website podcast section].

ASEAN Wonk: Welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast, where we bring you expert insights and regional perspectives on Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific geopolitics and geoeconomics. I’m your host Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk platform at www.aseanwonk.com so you don’t miss our full posts.

Our guest today is Edmund Sim, an international trade lawyer and former official who has advised nearly all of Southeast Asia’s governments on a range of subjects, including navigating regional free trade agreements and the entry of East Timor into ASEAN. We will start our conversation talking through ongoing geoeconomic dynamics, including the state of US trade policy. Be sure to stay tuned as we go through a range of other subjects, including the future inroads we might expect out to 2027 with respect to major powers and also within ASEAN in the regional organization’s geoeconomic agenda.

Note: The transcript that follows the above free clip preview has been lightly edited for clarity and organized into sections for ease of quick browsing. For all ASEAN Wonk Podcast episodes, full video and audio podcasts, along with edited and sectioned transcripts as well as block quotes, will be a premium product for our paying subscribers, but we will include a short free transcript preview and a clip for all readers to maintain accessibility. Paying subscribers can find the rest of the full transcript and the full video podcast right below the paywall. If you have not already, do consider subscribing, and, if you have already done so and like what you see and hear, do consider forwarding this to others as well who may be interested. Thank you for your support as always!

FUTURE OUTLOOK ON US TRADE DEALS AND GEOECONOMIC DISRUPTION

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast Ed and let’s start on some of the Southeast Asia dynamics with respect to US trade deals after the Supreme Court IEEPA ruling last month. Talking to Southeast Asian officials, they had already factored in the potential contingencies with respect to the Trump administration we might see. And as you’re aware, the Trump administration has also begun rolling out parts of what they’ve called a Plan B with various section authorities and so on. We’ve had a number of Southeast Asian countries sign trade agreements already – Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia – and a couple of others, including Vietnam are in the state of talks. As a trade lawyer and former official, what do you think we can expect on US policy in the coming months, and what are the datapoints you’re watching?

Edmund Sim: Well thanks for having me Prashanth. I think where we are is in a state of transition, albeit temporary, between what the Trump administration had proposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, and what we have now, which is under a different section of the law. The law in reference to the United States is the Trade Act of 1930. So they’ve resorted to using a section called 122, which deals with balance of payments issues, which historically were a bigger problem before the WTO (World Trade Organization) came into place. It’s under the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). So the president has this authority to impose tariffs of up to ten percent on a comprehensive basis on all imports, which he has done. And he has the authority to do that for 150 days. So we’re in that time period now. The issue and how this relates to the deals that were reached by the various Southeast Asian countries is that ten percent is, of course, less than what countries had negotiated with the Trump administration, ranging from eighteen percent to nineteen percent for most countries.

And it also affects countries that had no deal, like Singapore, which was at ten percent. And then now it potentially faces a higher duty because what’s happening is that right now, the duties are ten percent, but they want to reimpose rates that were negotiated with other countries. And so the administration is now working on a way to amend the ten percent in a way so that it applies to certain products from certain countries. And that might involve just pure amendment of this executive order that went into place previously. It may also involve applying a second executive order of up to fifteen percent. And so what you would have is the net effect of the two orders would impose ten percent for some products, for some countries, fifteen percent for others. So the net effect of all of this is to kind of get them to where they were before the Supreme Court ruling came out. But it’s not quite there. So under this authority that he does have under Section 122, he can’t really get the tariffs up all the way to the level that he had under IEEPA. So what that means is that countries that have already deals in place have to make a choice whether those countries press ahead or try to get some sort of renegotiation. If you’re a country that has eighteen percent, nineteen percent and you know fifteen percent is coming, you do face a choice theoretically of trying to delay implementation and just hoping that the fifteen percent would be what’s applicable rather than your eighteen percent or nineteen percent.

There are problems with this though. This Section 122 has a time limit. So they have until probably a hundred and fifty days after implementation to apply Section 122. And after, when you get to day 151, the president has to go back to the US Congress to get authorization to continue the tariffs beyond day 150. That’s one consideration, because the fifteen percent or ten percent as it may is a temporary situation. So what that means is that you don’t know what they’re going to do after day 151 if you’re one of the countries that have eighteen to nineteen. So whatever advantage you might have under the lower tariffs, it’s not going to be for that long. Second thing, of course, is that countries that go and try to renegotiate the terms could face potential negative blowback from the Trump administration, I think it’s difficult for some of the countries, particularly countries that were just before the Supreme Court ruling. Countries that had attended the Board of Peace meeting and everyone was supportive and all that, and then you turn around, you ask for a reduced rate. I think that wouldn’t go very well with the Trump administration.

And the third point is that we don’t know at this point exactly what type of permanent solution they’re going to have with regard to the U. S. law authorizing the tariffs. So they’re talking about using other sections of the law to impose the tariffs. So they’re talking about Section 232, which is national security, Section 301 for deals with trade barriers. And the president also mentioned Section 338, which is a very old section of the law, which dates back to over one hundred years. And the key thing about 338 is that it allows the president to post tariffs of up to fifty percent – five zero – against countries which have been deemed by the president to have discriminated against American products. So this has not been used in over one hundred years. It predates the World Trade Organization, the GATT. And so for that reason, it hasn’t been used. But it’s still on the books. And invoking that would mean a major shift away from international trade norms like most favored nation. But the potential is there for fifty percent. So unlike these other tariffs so you have a fifty percent potential authorization.

And under the Trade Act of 1930 authorizations, there’s no limit. So 232, he can impose higher rates above fifteen percent. And 301, he can impose rates above fifteen percent. So what all that means is that if you’re a country looking at the immediate implementation of the agreements that you’ve already reached or you’re almost going to reach, do you take what you already have or take a chance of what could happen? And given how the administration has changed the rates and has not been shy about adjusting the rates for purposes other than trade – so for example, the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute and the Trump administration used tariffs as a way to get them to the negotiating table – you have a situation where tariffs can be adjusted at any time, then there’s an understandably great reluctance to revisit those tariff rates.

So in the short term, I don’t see any of the countries in Southeast Asia knocking on the door and saying we would like to revise the rates. I think they’re going to stick with those deals. In the medium term, the longer term, the bigger issue besides the tariffs are all the other implementing conditions of these agreements. So for some countries, while all the countries agree to let in more American products at lower rates, that’s going to be problematic in some industrial sectors and agricultural sectors in Southeast Asia. You’re already seeing some pushback on ratification in countries such as Malaysia publicly and then not so publicly in Thailand and other places where there were very strong agrobusiness interests in those countries that don’t necessarily want to see American products come in. And there’s also the issue about signing up to other things such as the [Pax Silica] agreement or commitments to work in the supply chain.

And crucially, one of the biggest issues is this issue of transshipment. Because at the moment, these agreements all have commitments by the ASEAN states that signed up to prevent transshipment of goods from other countries – i. e China – from coming in and taking on the origin of the local country and then coming in under lower tariff rates. Because at the end of the day, really what a lot of this is aimed at is trying to “de-Sinoize” or reduce the China level of content in products coming into the United States. And so transshipped goods arguably are predominantly Chinese, and they’re really Chinese goods with a new coat of paint or a new mark saying they’re from Southeast Asia.

The problem we have fundamentally, which has been raised by the ASEAN countries, is that the United States follows a legal approach to determining whether a product comes from China or some other country based on a pretty subjective legalistic approach called substantial transformation: you look at how the good is produced and what you do to process and then what comes out at the end of the production process. But in Southeast Asia and most of the world, like the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA), those rules of origin – the rules that assign nationality to a product – those are based on value added. And so it’s more objective because you’re looking at numerical cost information, price information; you’re not really looking at the processing involved. So there is a fundamental inconsistency between the U. S. approach and the rest of the world and Southeast Asia’s approach. And it’s been that way for years. And so how you bridge the gap between the two approaches is going to be very important in that point of view.

So that’s a medium-term problem. It’s going to have an immediate impact on countries that have taken on a lot of Chinese investment to manufacture goods with Chinese inputs. And so especially Indochina and to a lesser extent, Indonesia, have benefited a lot over the last seven to eight years from Chinese investment. And trying to adjust away from that is going to be a big issue. And so I think these are the short term and medium-term issues for all these governments in the region. It’s not just a matter of thinking that these changes will go away after a midterm election in November 2026 or go away after a new president comes in in early 2029. A lot of this stuff is going to stay. The U.S. government now has shifted its tax base to a great extent away from a primarily income tax-based system raising revenue to one of which a large percentage of the revenue is coming in from these tariffs. And so that’s not going away. That’s not going to go away with a change in the legislature. It’s not going away with a change in the presidency.

So it’s something everyone’s going have to live with because notably, the United States is one of the few countries in the world that does not have a national sales tax. Well, the tariffs that were imposed through Liberation Day under IEEPA and now under 122 and now and foreseeably under these other sections, that’s pretty much a sales tax. And so you have to think about the revenue generation point of view, not just from the foreign point of view or effects of trade. And so what that means is that in the region, you’re going to have to think about what the long-term effects are. You can’t assume that these are all going to go away in two or three years. They’re here to stay. In what form, in what manner, that’s an open question: what a new government would do or a new president would do regardless of party. So it’s not a matter of waiting it out and waiting for the weather to change, so to say. This is a fundamental change in the trade and investment climate with the United States.

WAYS TO MANAGE GEOECONOMIC RISKS BEYOND BUSINESS AS USUAL

ASEAN Wonk: Right. And just to situate ourselves, we’ve seen a number of datapoints coming out of the region as well. One of those, which we were talking about just before we started recording, is the first ever ASEAN geoeconomics report which we saw released. If you talk to officials that were involved in the drafting, they say this is a pretty significant datapoint in the region’s evolving geoeconomic landscape. The report notes the need for a decisive shift away from business and usual and not just managing short term risks just like you were talking about – accommodating the administration, signing short term deals – but also recognizing that this is a pretty fundamental shift and also one of many shifts that we’re seeing in the geopolitical and geoeconomic climate. And there’s also a need to do things like accelerate regional trade agreements, delivering on the many ambitious goals that ASEAN has talked about over several years, but there’s a lag in terms of actual implementation and monitoring. So you’ve written whole books about things like the ASEAN Economic Community and used to manage a blog on the ASEAN Economic Community which I and others read pretty assiduously. And you’re very familiar with these documents and the gap between rhetoric and reality. What are your takeaways are from the report and the climate in the region as opposed to the weather that you were talking about to capture the kind of moment this is for Southeast Asia and ASEAN?

Edmund Sim: Yeah. I think the report is important because it’s a product of the times. And so they specifically went out and named the United States revised trade policy as the instigator for this rethink of ASEAN trade and investment. And so if you read the report, a lot of the content is aimed at dealing with the changes in the US trade policy around the world. And so that’s a shift in ASEAN as an institution approach because traditionally, they haven’t been willing to name names or identify causes of the climate change, so to say, using this analogy. What is interesting is what is not said. So and again, this is from an American point of view, when you read it from that point of view and you read the report, what’s not said? Who’s not mentioned? Well, China is not mentioned. There’s no mention in there about how if you have to deal with the United States and you have to approach the United States in a different way and you have their concerns, there’s no mention very much about how to deal with China, how to deal with issues related to Chinese investment and trade in the region. And as I said in the previous comment, it is difficult because many industries have benefited from Chinese investment in trade. On the other hand, not everyone has. I mean a lot of the goods that were destined for the United States now are in Southeast Asia. So you have many industrial concerns in the region who are not happy with the increase of imports coming in from China. Yet there’s nothing in there directly naming names with regard to China.

Another country that’s not mentioned is India. There’s language in there talking about RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership], but as we know, India famously elected not to join RCEP. And there’s no language in the report about revisiting that, like whether it’s worth going back to talk to India about joining RCEP now that the conditions have changed. There’s been no mention about re-approaching India. And I think a lot of that has to do with Indian politics. But if you’re really looking at this as a long-term view, reconsidering an approach to India is important because they’re also a major player in the region. And the final part on who’s not mentioned is the European Union. I mean, Europe is a major investor in the region. It is a potential source of investment and trade. Several countries have free trade agreements with the EU, but the report doesn’t say anything about that. So in some ways, the geoeconomic report is important because it does break a bit from ASEAN’s traditional reluctance to name names and call out countries on policy. But on the other hand, there is a lot of it that’s still in the old approach of not singling out countries and not identifying countries.

So I think it’s a good thing. I think it does focus minds. The question is, does this focus ASEAN to look internally at how it operates in terms of implementation? So, from the internal ASEAN point of view, there was a lot of language in there, especially from the private sector. They know that they were talking about implementation. And what that means is that there are many, many ASEAN agreements dealing with aspects of the economy. The question is, are those agreements being implemented on the ground? Do you have effective ways to integrate into the single production base, single market that is contained as a goal in the ASEAN Charter? And this has been a longstanding complaint of the private sector – both foreign investment and local investors about making it easier to do business within the region. So in some ways, you still have internal competition at the regional level among countries – one industry against another country within ASEAN. And that competition historically creates non-tariff barriers – things such as [phytosanitary measures] for plants, health measures to prevent goods from crossing borders for agricultural products, industrial standards of barriers, other barriers. And ASEAN has gone, frankly, a long way to addressing some of those, but it takes a long time.

And the thing mentioned briefly somewhat in the report is a need to increase not necessarily the power of the ASEAN institutions, but the effectiveness. It is not realistic to expect the ASEAN Secretariat to have the authority of the European Commission, despite the fact that that’s usually the comparison model that we always talk about. However, it is possible to improve the flow of information, the monitoring, the assessment. And one way I do think the report comes into play is that if ASEAN is willing to identify the United States as a cause of the climate change, is ASEAN willing to identify particular countries and particular industries within ASEAN as being necessary to deal with that climate change in terms of trade and investment? And I didn’t quite see that in the report, but that’s understandable because that’s been a major structural or cultural issue for ASEAN since the first concepts of dealing with the first economic crisis in the 1970s with the energy crisis and the commodities bust that we had in the 1970s that’s been a real sticking point in implementation. So that’s something that needs to be done.

Of course, I’m a lawyer. I would like them to address this through law. But I also understand ASEAN is a different kind of institution. Southeast Asia is different. It’s going to have to be a combination of law and policy. And it is something where both economic and other resources and power is going to have to be joined up with law to get us into a place where they can handle stresses within the market, stresses within the production base. Because if they don’t do that, then the ability of ASEAN is going to be hampered. The ability to deal with these climate changes with regard to the world investment and trade, that’s going to be hampered if they don’t get their act together. Because no one country in ASEAN – okay, you can argue that some countries are bigger than others – but fundamentally, all the countries are much better off working together through the ASEAN institutions than dealing with other trading partners such as the United States, such as China, EU, India. They’re much better off working together and rather than individually.

But you can’t work together unless you get your internal operations working in a more effective manner. And that’s something that has to be done. So it’s not like we’re talking about having complete flow of people across borders. That’s a very sensitive issue. But I do think they can make it easier for flow of money, flow of capital and investments, flow of people, of goods and making it so that it is easy to operate in the region. Because without that, it will be very difficult for the group to operate when you have internal competition and each one trying to outdo the other on bilateral deals with the trading partners. This is not going to work, and it goes against “ASEAN centrality.” It goes against what is the intended goal of the ASEAN Charter, which is to improve the welfare not just of the nation state, but also the people who live in those nation states in ASEAN.

TOP FUTURE GEOECONOMIC AGENDA ITEMS TO WATCH INTO 2027

ASEAN Wonk: Right. And that gets me to my next question, which is the follow through and what we might see the rest of 2026 and into 2027. There’s a lot of talk and conversation around this notion of understanding the world from more of a sort of G-Minus 2 prism – what other countries are doing in engaging Southeast Asia apart from the United States and China and vice-versa. There’s a gap between rhetoric and reality, but, in fairness, we’ve seen manifestations of this – Canada is working on a free trade pact with ASEAN which will have significant implications on North American geoeconomics, and Singapore and others have come up with FITP addressing sectoral areas like supply chains. There are also a number of intraregional geoeconomic agenda items like the Digital Economic Framework Agreement which will be quite significant once it is in place, and a number of other frameworks in area like artificial intelligence. What are some of the top priorities that governments and businesses that you talk to are watching in the geoeconomic agenda, not just for the rest of this year but also 2027? Because Singapore is going to be ASEAN chair that year, and Singapore has been very active in a number of these geoeconomic areas.

Edmund Sim: Yeah I think the….

CONTINUED TRANSCRIPT AND FULL VIDEO PODCAST EPISODE FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS

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For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of growing cross-regional fallout from escalating Middle East conflict following Iran strikes;

• Mapping of regional developments, including Cobra Gold multinational exercise spotlight and tech power expansion talk;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as new disinformation alliance; quiet China infrastructure inroads and trade dispute advance;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including rare earths pushback; rising port fears; geoeconomic diversification quantification and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out our ASEAN Wonk review earlier in the week of a new book by a sitting president on future pathways for new world order power rebalancing, with implications for the Global South, the Indo-Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond.

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,526 words (~11 minutes)

Cobra Gold Spotlight; Tech Power Expansion Talk & More

China Geoeconomic Reality; 2026 Trade Agenda & Mounting Regional Security Challenge

• “The global dominance of Chinese clean technology products makes engagement with China an unavoidable reality,” argues an independent energy transition report published with collaboration from Indonesia’s foreign ministry. The findings draw on several engagements including an Indonesia-China Track 1.5 dialogue and an in-depth study of China given what is cited as a “identified gap of knowledge and experience…at the level of foreign policy engagement” in the sector (link).

Report Depiction of Select Major Future Areas in China Indonesia Sectoral Partnership

• “The administration…will focus on six core areas,” according to the 2026 U.S. trade policy agenda officially publicized as being delivered to Congress on March 2. The agenda acknowledges that tools for the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) program – which includes deals with Southeast Asian countries – “are subject to judicial review and may change when appropriate” following a Supreme Court ruling even as it is expected to remain a pathway for engagement. Other cited priorities include China trade, review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement and securing sectoral supply chains in areas like critical minerals (link)

US Annual Trade Policy Report Depiction of U.S. Good Exports to Select Countries/Regions

• “Myanmar’s present instability and the fragile or fragmented governance landscape…require considering how ASEAN discussions in the different sectors of cooperation can address this unique situation in a member state unable to meet its regional commitments,” notes a paper on Myanmar’s security challenges and its wider regional and global implications published by the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia. The paper delves into a range of areas including conflict, cybercrime displacement, and climate (link).

Iran Fallout Rocks Southeast Asia Amid Middle East Conflict

What’s Behind It

• The fallout from Middle East conflict has rocked the Indo-Pacific including Southeast Asia over the past week1. The fallout has further complicated an already complex global flashpoint agenda ahead of engagements related to everything from U.S.-China summitry to Russia-Ukraine-related diplomacy. Disagreements among major powers have disrupted even usually routine datapoints like the release of the Security Council’s monthly agenda that ASEAN Wonk understands included a private meeting on Myanmar this past week featuring a briefing from the Philippines as current holder of the rotating special ASEAN envoy position — the first such designated session since the end of the military junta’s multi-phased election bid2. Developments like the sinking of an Iranian vessel off of Sri Lanka were also testament to cross-regional implications hitting Indo-Pacific areas like the Indian Ocean, with the subject being among those in focus at this year’s iteration of the annual Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi amid some delegate cancellations3.

Select Major Recent and Relevant Geopolitical Developments Amid Middle East Conflict

• The geoeconomic and geopolitical implications are already deepening for regional governments beyond ASEAN’s own response. As one Southeast Asian diplomat noted to ASEAN Wonk, the fact that a majority of Southeast Asian governments had already issued statements on the deteriorating situation in the Middle East before the release of an ASEAN-wide statement at the foreign ministerial level was testament to the grouping’s understandable struggle to release a consensus-based statement amid a new crisis as well as diverging stakes and perspectives4. Philippine officials have been candid about the challenges on this front as this year’s ASEAN chair amid shifting major power and sectoral engagements, and countries in both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia have already begun to announce a series of new policy steps that extend beyond immediate concerns around citizen security and energy supplies5.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

New Policy Actions to Watch, Alongside Major Domains and Key Countries

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WonkCount: 1,658 words (~7 minutes)

Review: New World Order, Triangle of Power and Asia Futures

Context

“[T]he current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order,” Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney noted regarding ongoing Middle East conflict earlier this week while on an Indo-Pacific swing across Australia, India and Japan1. The statements coming out of key Indo-Pacific capitals over the past few days including Southeast Asia have echoed concerns about the deteriorating situation following initial strikes on Iran by Israel and the United States and Tehran’s subsequent retaliation, even if they have not been as blunt as Carney’s statements around a “post-rupture” world that consumed headlines in Davos earlier this year2. More fundamentally, this is also just the latest datapoint in a global conversation grappling with the shifting world order and how policymakers can shape it.

Select Key Recent Global and Regional Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Developments

A new book The Triangle of Power by Finland President Alexander Stubb reveals future pathways for new world order power rebalancing, with implications for the Global South, the Indo-Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond3. In doing so, it adds to a series of books released within the past year that have attempted to shed light on shifting global geopolitics and geoeconomics and Asia’s evolving role in it, including ones by former officials we have recently reviewed here on ASEAN Wonk such as Bilahari Kausikan’s The Myth of the Asian Century and Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints. The Triangle of Power issues a new blueprint for policymakers across competing power centers to both avoid conflict and forge selective cooperation on core geoeconomic and geopolitical challenges. Along the way, Stubb also recounts revealing personal reflections of global interest on topics ranging from the cutting of undersea cables to a call he received to “f*** the Global South.”4 “We cannot sit this new contest out…we need to engage with our colleagues from all corners of the globe,” the book argues before going on to define what global futures may look like5.

Analysis

The book also highlights key datapoints to watch on potential futures (see originally-generated ASEAN Wonk table below for a summary of important contours. Paying subscribers can also read the rest of the “Analysis” section and “Implications” section looking at how these dynamics play out in the future).

Order Scenarios, Major Outlook Features and Future Policy Implications to Watch

Read more

For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of the first Southeast Asia participation in a key Indo-Pacific regional defense dialogue;

• Mapping of regional developments, including proliferating Iran attack fallout concern and Kremlin diplomacy conduct;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as a new pact kickoff; semiconductor partnership and contagion containment;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including new AI law; quiet outer space links and tracking investment flows;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out the ASEAN Wonk review of a new book earlier this week that charts out Indo-Pacific futures and Southeast Asia’s evolving geopolitical and geoeconomic stakes within it.

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,218 words (~10 minutes)

Proliferating Iran Attack Fallout Concern; Kremlin Diplomacy & More

Hellscape in Flashpoint Futures; Minding Defense Pact Gaps & Confronting Scam Ground Realities

• “The current asymmetric ‘porcupine’ strategy Taiwan has pursued for the past two decades is insufficient…the Hellscape concept offers a potentially transformational approach to island defense by leveraging uncrewed systems,” according to a new report published by the Center for a New American Security. The report includes an assessment of challenges to implementing the approach as well as recommendations for policymakers (link).

Graphic Depicting Summary of Uncrewed Systems Employed in “Hellscape for Taiwan” Concept

• “Prevention and protection efforts are mutually reinforcing,” concludes a new report on the human impact of cyber scam operations in Southeast Asia published by the United Nations. The report’s findings draw on trauma-informed monitoring conducted with 19 victims originating primarily from various parts of the Indo-Pacific and trafficked into scam operations in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates (link).

• “Even with all its big goals, the treaty leaves out several important pieces that could get in the way of it working well,” according to an analysis of the recent milestone defense agreement concluded by Australia and Indonesia published by the University of Melbourne and written by a former Indonesian defense official. The analysis notes that the missing “pieces” include rules for handling access to strategic straits, crisis response and “sensitive territorial topics” like Papua (link).

Why the First Japan Pacific Defense Dialogue ASEAN Showing?

What’s Behind It

• Several Southeast Asian countries participated for the first time in Japan’s defense dialogue with Pacific Island states, spotlighting an aspect of Indo-Pacific convening in the security space1. The regional engagement intersected with a series of global security-related developments. Apart from the fallout from Iran attacks later in the week which triggered a flood of statements of concern and citizen alerts, Japan’s defense minister also noted to participants in his keynote remarks that the engagement was being held amid the “weaponization of everything” blurring the lines between peacetime and wartime as the world marked four years since Russia’s war against Ukraine, reiterating that status quo changes by force “must never be tolerated” and also directly acknowledging Southeast Asia’s first involvement in this cross-regional dialogue.2

Select Indo-Pacific and Global Security Developments Amid Japan’s Pacific Defense Dialogue

• The dialogue also reinforced the proliferation of defense interactions between the region and key powers. For instance, all but two ASEAN states were involved in this year’s iteration of India’s premier multilateral maritime exercise MILAN 2026 over the past week, with Myanmar’s junta unsurprisingly being among the most enthusiastic in highlighting participation3. Japan also continued its record of comprehensive security-related engagement in Southeast Asia itself, with a case in point being the Philippine military publicizing what it said was the 15th joint maritime activity of its kind that included Japan and the United States and China state media provocatively disclosing Beijing had challenged the “so-called joint patrol area” of Manila and “co-opted countries”.4

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted datapoints to watch with wider implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Future Datapoints to Watch, Alongside Key Policy Priorities and Major Pillars

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WonkCount: 1,237 words (~6 minutes)

Review: Demons Haunt Southeast Asia Indo-Pacific Futures

Context

“Some pressures will be overt…others may be subtle — seeking to influence opinions, shape narratives, or even sow division among our people,” Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong warned regarding pressures from competing major powers in a speech this week1. Wong’s comments echo the increasing concerns voiced publicly by regional leaders on this front as evolving geopolitical and geoeconomic agenda items head closer towards the second quarter of 2026.

Select Key Recent Developments Involving Major Powers and Southeast Asia

A new book From Southeast Asia to the Indo-Pacific by scholar Amitav Acharya argues that Southeast Asia needs to urgently “escape a geopolitical nightmare” to prevent a future where the Indo-Pacific region is consumed by severe challenges that undermine its geoeconomic potential2. In doing so, it adds to a series of new books on the subject, including ones we have recently reviewed here on ASEAN Wonk. From Southeast Asia to the Indo-Pacific argues that while Southeast Asian states were able to manage past phases of geopolitical competition through initiatives like the creation of ASEAN or bilateral trade pacts, this is no guarantee the region will be able to “exorcise its demons” in the future given the new and severe array of challenges that confront it today3. “Will the Indo-Pacific idea sink ASEAN, drowning the very idea of Southeast Asia?” the book provocatively asks early on before revealing key factors that can help forecast regional futures4.

Analysis

The book also highlights key scenarios to watch in regional futures (see originally-generated ASEAN Wonk table below for a summary of important contours. Paying subscribers can also read the rest of the “Analysis” section and “Implications” section looking at how these dynamics play out in the future).

Future Scenario Labels, Major Policy Contours and Key Datapoints to Watch

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For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:

• Assessing the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of trade and Board of Peace Southeast Asia engagement futures and wider global implications;

• Mapping of regional developments, such as new minilateral security datapoint and cross-border summitry in focus;

• Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as new coming artificial intelligence center rollout; megaproject deadlock breaking and geoeconomic blacklist update;

• Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including new joint humanitarian center chatter; maritime governance framework launch; election infrastructure spotlight and more;

• And much more! ICYMI, check out the latest episode of our ASEAN Wonk Podcast covering the recent global middle power call and Europe’s future with Southeast Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific region.

This Week’s WonkCount: 2,437 words (~11 minutes)

New Minilateral Datapoint; Cross-Border Summitry & More

Global Contestation Fallout; Energy Transition Futures & Broadening the Statecraft Lens

• “[T]he ripple effects extend far beyond semiconductors and artificial intelligence,” argues a new report published by JPMorgan Chase on how U.S.-China competition is disrupting global business and investment. The report makes reference to impacts affecting Southeast Asian states, including the relocation of companies to hubs like Singapore and the effects of geopolitics on evolving domestic politics in the Philippines (link to PDF).

Country Relative Share of Trade with US and China

• “[A]SEAN’s growing reliance on LNG coincides with a period of unprecedented instability in global gas markets,” according to a new policy brief released by the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA). The brief highlights insights from expert dialogues which point to the role of variables such as affordability, volatility in both demand and supply as well as tradeoffs for greenhouse gas emissions reductions (link).

• “Education capacity deficits in Southeast Asia and the Pacific are viewed as an opportunity for Australia to be innovative with education in the international development space,” notes a new report published by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defense Dialogue (AP4D). The report observes that Australia could be among the countries capitalizing on growing intra-Asian student mobility evident in regions like Southeast Asia, which ranks third within Asia for outward student mobility after China and India (link).

Australia in Global University Ranking Systems

Trade Turn and Board of Peace Push in US Southeast Asia Ties

What’s Behind It

• Southeast Asia engagement in the United States was on display in developments tied to the Board of Peace and trade deals. While the leaders of Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam were in attendance at the Board of Peace (BoP) launch event in Washington, D.C. — with Indonesia signing a trade deal just before the Supreme Court had struck down the administration’s initial round of tariffs — scrutiny has also been on non-members including treaty ally Thailand (officially at observer status along with several U.S. Indo-Pacific treaty allies like Japan and South Korea)1. Geopolitical questions were raised around the rollout of some of the deliverables. One datapoint officials pointed out to ASEAN Wonk was the (unsurprisingly) hyperbolic White House statement declaring a “NEW GOLDEN AGE for the U.S.-Indonesian Alliance” — terminology Indonesia has traditionally avoided as part of its “free and active” foreign policy — amid a recent heated domestic debate back in Jakarta on U.S. engagement that had spilled over into the public domain and involved several former top diplomats2.

Select Key Recent Geoeconomic and Geopolitical Developments Related to US Policy and Southeast Asia

• The developments also highlighted lingering uncertainties for Southeast Asian states despite policy inroads. Some countries issued clarifications following new White House policy announcements, even though they had already somewhat baked in this year’s flurry of U.S.-China summit diplomacy and the Supreme Court’s tariff decision into their calculations (it is no coincidence that trade deals to date have explicitly referenced how compliance may either affect future U.S. trade actions under so-called ‘triple number section authorities’ or be seen relative to country dealings with other states without directly referencing Beijing). Vietnam, which had been downplaying prospects for a full trade deal announcement, was nonetheless able to announce already agreed commercial pacts during party chief To Lam’s first U.S. visit during his new term after its party congress3. At a rescheduled United Nations session ahead of the U.S. BoP engagement, Indonesia joined some countries in raising the need for it not to move in “different directions” from the UN Charter which officials say is among the conditions for Jakarta’s commitment to the so-called Gaza stabilization force beyond the headline “8,000 troops” number4.

Why It Matters

• The dynamics also spotlighted future policy datapoints to watch with wider regional and global implications (see originally generated ASEAN Wonk table below on notable areas to monitor and additional specifics. Paying subscribers can read on for more on what to expect and future implications in the rest of the “Why It Matters” and “Where It’s Headed” sections, along with paid-only sections of the newsletter as usual).

Future Priority Policy Datapoints to Watch, Dealmaking Status Shifts and Major Countries

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