The New Great Game: Trump’s Tariff Gambit and the Struggle for Southeast Asia

Few modern presidents have made foreign policy so theatrical or so transactional as the 47th U.S. President Donald Trump. From flirtations with autocrats to outlandish territorial gambits, his diplomacy has often resembled a business pitch than any strategic doctrine. In this series, we track the shadow of Trumpism abroad - from Beijing to the Baltics, Gaza to Greenland as Trump, in his second coming, is leaving behind not just disruption, but a trail of broken alliances, bruised institutions and a deepening mistrust of America’s word.

PART - 3

As President Trump escalates economic warfare against China, Southeast Asia finds itself at the fulcrum of a geopolitical contest, navigating between superpower pressures and regional aspirations.

In the clash between President Donald Trump’s protectionist impulses and China’s state-backed expansionism, Southeast Asia has emerged as the reluctant battleground. Once viewed as the pivot of American-led globalisation, the region now finds itself at the mercy of economic shockwaves unleashed by two titans engaged in a modern variant of mercantile warfare. Like the Central Asians caught between Britain and Russia in the 19th-century ‘Great Game,’ Southeast Asian nations today are being asked to pick a side or suffer the consequences of ambivalence.

Tariff Blitzkrieg

On April 2, President Trump, in what he dubbed as ‘Liberation Day,’ had announced a sweeping new set of tariffs: a blanket 10 percent levy on all imports with even steeper duties for countries seen as complicit in China’s economic strategies. Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia - once beneficiaries of the ‘China Plus One’ strategy - were abruptly cast as adversaries in an unfolding economic war.

To the untrained eye, this may look like capricious populism. But to Trump’s intellectual defenders, such as classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson, this was a long-overdue correction. Hanson sees Trump’s measures as a rebuke to decades of Western naïveté: a bid to reassert sovereignty, defend industrial capacity and punish what he calls China’s neo-mercantilist exploitation of global trade.

For Hanson, this is more than an economic dispute; it is almost a civilizational reckoning. In his view, the West made a Faustian bargain when it welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, imagining it would be transformed by capitalism. Instead, China weaponised commerce as a means of control to wage an ‘asymmetric war’ that Trump is finally willing to fight.

Tributary Worldview

The tariffs have exposed the vulnerability of Southeast Asia’s export-dependent economies, many of which have built their prosperity on Western consumption and Chinese capital. Yet as Chinese President Xi Jinping courts the region by travelling to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia with promises of open trade and Belt and Road largesse, the shadow of empire is unmistakable.

In his magnum opus ‘’The Search for Modern China’ (1990), the late great Jonathan D. Spence described the Qing dynasty’s worldview as one rooted in the concept of a tributary system - a hierarchical order where China saw itself as the centre of civilization. Today’s China, appears to be reviving that worldview under a digital and financial guise.

This ‘tributary mindset’ is not lost on Vietnam, where historical memory is long. From resisting Tang Dynasty invasions to rebuffing Ming colonists and more recently the PLA in 1979, Hanoi is cautious. Xi’s charm offensive has been met with polite nods but also with the strengthening of maritime defence partnerships with India, Japan and the United States.

Vietnam, perhaps the biggest unintended beneficiary of the original U.S.-China trade war during Trump’s first term, now finds itself under uncomfortable scrutiny. Peter Navarro, Trump’s pugnacious trade adviser and economic nationalist-in-chief, sees Vietnam not as a reliable partner but as a cunning conduit for Chinese subterfuge. He accuses Hanoi of enabling the transshipment of Chinese goods cleverly disguised as Vietnamese to circumvent American tariffs. The charge, while politically explosive, was not entirely unfounded as investigations had found several cases where Chinese companies had rerouted supply chains through Vietnam.

For a country whose exports to the U.S. accounted for nearly 30 percent of GDP in 2024, and which had carefully cultivated its image as a neutral and nimble economic alternative to China, the implications are profound. Vietnam is caught in a high-stakes balancing act as it tries to reap the spoils of American decoupling from China without becoming collateral damage in Washington’s increasingly binary worldview.

Thailand and Malaysia face similar dilemmas. Their diversified economies are more resilient, yet their links to Chinese supply chains make them easy targets for Washington’s wrath.

Malaysia is a major exporter of semiconductors and electronic components, much of which relies on Chinese capital, labour or upstream materials. Thailand has become a favoured site for Chinese investment in electric vehicles and consumer electronics - sectors which Washington now eyes with suspicion. Both countries had once hoped to position themselves as ‘bridge economies,’ able to accommodate American capital while benefiting from China’s industrial heft. That calculus now looks precarious.

In recent months, American trade officials have ramped up investigations into alleged circumvention of tariffs, with Malaysia and Thailand named in probes involving transshipped Chinese steel, aluminium and solar panels. This has led officials in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur to weigh whether their freewheeling economic pragmatism by welcoming investment from all corners.

In the emerging Trumpian view of global commerce, countries are increasingly sorted into neat binary categories: allies who enforce American lines, and free riders who help Beijing blur them. For governments in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, the challenge is not only to defend their trade practices, but to resist being cast as enablers of a geopolitical adversary.

The anxiety rippling through Hanoi, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur reverberates across the ten-member ASEAN bloc. For decades, ASEAN countries thrived by sitting atop a triangulated flow of capital and goods: Chinese factories, American consumers and local regulatory arbitrage. But in Trump’s second coming, such triangulation is fast becoming untenable.

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), once seen as a vehicle for liberal trade in Asia minus China, now carries new strategic weight. Vietnam and Malaysia, both members, had hoped the agreement might shield them from the volatility of great-power rivalry. Instead, they are finding its rules weaponised by Trump’s Washington.

Even more vulnerable is the 15-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which is often dubbed as ‘strategically led by China’ and that includes all ten ASEAN nations. In the Trumpian lexicon, RCEP is no trade pact but a supply-chain Trojan horse.

Some ASEAN officials now privately worry that the region’s cherished neutrality may be interpreted in Washington as ‘disloyalty.’ The hardliners in Trump’s foreign policy team, especially veterans like Navarro, have little patience for what they see as opportunistic hedging.

Caught between Trump’s hammer and Xi’s embrace, Southeast Asia faces its most difficult moment in a generation. The question is not just one of trade, but of sovereignty, identity and future alignment. Can ASEAN forge a third way, leveraging its strategic geography without becoming a pawn? Or will the New Great Game reduce it to a set of supply chain satellites in an increasingly bipolar world?

As the tectonic plates of global influence shift once more, Southeast Asia finds itself not unlike the Italian city-states of the Renaissance - courted, coerced and ultimately carved into spheres of influence by competing empires. The region’s future will hinge not just on trade figures or naval drills, but political imagination.

Can its leaders summon the Machiavellian cunning of a Cosimo de’ Medici, balancing rivals while nurturing sovereign strength? Or will they, like the tributaries in Jonathan Spence’s retelling of the late Qing, be swept into the orbit of a larger celestial empire, their agency subsumed by imperial inertia? Trump’s return has made the game overt, Xi’s ambitions have made it urgent, but the moves ahead belong to ASEAN. In a world tilting toward bipolarity, perhaps the most revolutionary act is to remain stubbornly multipolar.

(Tomorrow, we examine Donald Trump’s unexpected foray into peace-making, notably, his evolving role in the Russo-Ukraine war, and examining his relations with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and what his recent diplomatic overtures might mean for the conflict’s uncertain future)