By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Southeast Asia Is Starting to Choose

More than most regions in the world, Southeast Asia has found itself at the center of the intensifying U.S.-Chinese rivalry. Most major countries in other parts of Asia are already spoken for: Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all solidly in the U.S. camp; India seems to be aligning with the United States, Pakistan with China; and the countries of Central Asia are forging ever closer ties to Beijing. But much of Southeast Asia, a region of nearly 700 million people, remains up for grabs. The superpower that succeeds in persuading key Southeast Asian countries—such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—to hew closely to its line stands a better chance of realizing its objectives in Asia.

For decades, however, Southeast Asia’s leaders have disavowed the notion that they have to choose. Even as Beijing and Washington have made their rivalry the dominant fact of global geopolitics, officials in the region repeat the mantra that they can be friends to all. Of course, they are not oblivious to the changing geopolitical reality. As Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it in 2018, “I think it is very desirable for us not to have to take sides, but the circumstances may come where ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations] may have to choose one or the other. I hope it does not happen soon.”

Lee’s assessment of this predicament is representative of the views of not only most Southeast Asian countries but also much of the world. It reflects a profound consternation about the imperatives of the overarching superpower competition. A country such as Singapore, after all, has thrived in the era of globalization, styling itself as an entrepôt with its doors open to the world. Vietnam, an ostensibly communist dictatorship, has made itself into an important hub of global manufacturing that is plugged in to both Chinese and Western supply chains. The vast archipelago nations of Indonesia and the Philippines, once racked by internal conflicts, have seen their GDPs grow significantly since 2000. When Southeast Asian officials push back on the idea that they have to pick sides, they are in effect expressing their preference for the global order that prevailed after the end of the Cold War, one characterized by thickening economic connections and diminishing geopolitical contestation.

In the wake of the 2008–9 financial crisis, that order began to evaporate. Southeast Asia now finds itself at the center of great-power competition. China and the United States are increasingly at loggerheads in Asia. And Southeast Asian countries, whether they like it or not, are no longer immune to the pressures that accompany great-power competition. By analyzing the positions of ten Southeast Asian countries on a welter of issues relating to China and the United States, one thing becomes evident: over the past 30 years, many of these countries have gradually but discernibly shifted away from the United States and toward China. Some shifts are more drastic and significant than others. A few countries have indeed managed to “hedge,” to straddle the rift between two superpowers. The overall direction of travel, however, is clear. Southeast Asian countries may insist that they are staying above the fray, but their policies reveal otherwise. The region is drifting toward China, a fact that bodes ill for American ambitions in Asia.

 

Power Play

According to the Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index, which measures the relative strength of countries in terms of several variables, including economic and military capability and diplomatic and cultural influence, China’s comprehensive power had approached 90 percent of that of the United States by the late 2010s. This was a result of China’s spectacular growth since the 1980s and of the way that Beijing turned its economic achievements into diplomatic, military, and even cultural prowess. China’s rise prompted American scholars in the 1990s to debate whether the United States should contain or engage the surging Asian giant; the engagers won, hands down. Although the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations had some tense moments with China, they did not view the country as an adversary. The wars in the Middle East after the September 11 attacks distracted Washington, and it was not until the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” that the United States recognized the potential challenge posed by China to American hegemony across the continent. Even then, Obama and his national security team did not identify China as a peer competitor or as a national security threat, in large part because they assumed, as their predecessors did, that China’s integration into the U.S.-led economic order would make China more politically liberal in due course.

That changed with the election of Donald Trump. The first Trump administration dispensed with any notion that China would placidly join the liberal international order or that it would embrace liberal political reforms. This stance, further fueled by Trump’s insistence that he would not allow China to be “bigger” than the United States, transformed U.S. policy. Washington now believed that an increasingly powerful, authoritarian China posed a strategic threat to the United States. The 2017 National Security Strategy, 2018 National Defense Strategy, and other China-related policy declarations of that era—including speeches by Vice President Mike Pence at the Hudson Institute in 2018 and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2020—all cast China as the United States’ most potent and dangerous geopolitical rival. That assessment survived Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020 and the arrival of President Joe Biden to the White House. The Biden administration used more measured language, but the essence of its policy remained the same: China was “the most consequential geopolitical challenge” to the United States, Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy declared, and “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” The Biden administration, however, did the Trump administration one better by deftly corralling U.S. allies to help constrain China, as part of an “extreme competition” across all the relevant dimensions of power.

The U.S.-Chinese competition is likely to become more intense, complex, and dangerous than the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was an economic laggard compared with the Cold War–era United States, China is a much more formidable peer competitor. And there are many potential flash points in Asia, including in the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea. As this rivalry becomes more intense, each superpower will want to get as many countries on its side as it can.

Southeast Asia, a region that receives erratic attention from Western capitals despite its enormous population and growing economic clout, will be a major arena in this contest. For some countries in the region—especially those, such as the Philippines, that have alliance treaties or strong security ties with the United States—the lines are clearly drawn. They would like to maintain close ties with Washington in the belief that the projection of U.S. military power in the region is conducive to peace and stability. Southeast Asian countries that sided with the United States during the Cold War, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, generally prospered because of access to investments and markets; those that sided with the Soviet Union or China—Vietnam, for example—experienced much more lethargic growth. During the Cold War, it was obvious that the Soviets were no match for the West in economic terms. Today, however, many Southeast Asians believe that China can give the United States more than a run for its money.

It is not surprising that many countries that have not already chosen between Beijing and Washington would prefer not to choose at all; they want to have their cake and eat it, too. The conventional (if simplistic) view is that Southeast Asian countries look to the United States for security and to China for trade, investment, and economic growth. But both China and the United States are growing frustrated with this hedging. Beijing wants to wield more than just economic influence in the region. Washington under the second Trump administration wants to strengthen economic and commercial ties with Southeast Asia, in part to extract compensation for the security umbrella it has built in Asia.

Some of the most significant diplomatic alignments in Southeast Asia are yet to be determined. ASEAN, a consortium of the region’s ten countries, has no overarching position on the two superpowers, owing to the varied national interests of its member states. Differences over relations with China and the United States have tested ASEAN’s solidarity in the past and will do so again in the future. To get a better sense of where the region is heading, it is more helpful to look at the alignments of individual ASEAN countries based on their policy choices.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi

 

Continental Drift

To understand the alignments of ASEAN countries, we examined five domains of interaction between these states and China and the United States: “political-diplomatic” and “military-security” engagement, economic ties, cultural-political affinity (or soft power), and signaling (the public messaging of states). We tracked four indicators in each domain, totaling 20 measures of alignment overall. For example, on the political-diplomatic front, we assembled data on UN voting alignment, the strength of bilateral cooperation, the number of high-level official visits, and membership in multilateral groupings. On the economic front, we examined imports, exports, business associations, and levels of foreign debt. Combining these measures allows us to arrive at a single score for each country. A score of zero indicates full alignment with China; a score of 100 indicates full alignment with the United States. By this metric, we consider the countries that fall within the range of 45 to 55 to be successful hedgers straddling the divide between the two superpowers.

The index, which we have called “The Anatomy of Choice Alignment Index,” offers two major findings. First, when Southeast Asian countries say they don’t want to choose between China and the United States, it doesn’t mean that all of them are on the fence. Averaging out their alignment positions over the past 30 years, we found that four countries—Indonesia (49), Malaysia (47), Singapore (48), and Thailand (45)—can be thought of as successful hedgers, doing their best to straddle the divide. Other ASEAN countries are more closely aligned with a superpower. The Philippines (60) is clearly aligned with the United States, whereas Myanmar (24), Laos (29), Cambodia (38), Vietnam (43), and Brunei (44) are all aligned with China.

Second, by disaggregating the 30-year period into two 15-year timespans, a more dynamic picture emerges of how alignments have changed—one that favors Beijing. Indonesia’s alignment score for the first period (1995–2009), for example, was 56, but in the second period (2010–24) it was 43, a change of 13 points in China’s favor. The country moved from being marginally in the United States’ camp to being marginally in China’s camp. Until 2009, Thailand was a determined hedger (49), but it has since leaned China’s way (41). The Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally, has also moved a bit closer to China even as it remains in the United States’ camp; it scores 62 in the first period and 58 in the second. Malaysia (from 49 to 46) and Singapore (from 50 to 45) have also moved marginally in China’s direction, although both remain within the band of hedgers. Cambodia (from 42 to 34), Laos (from 33 to 25), and Myanmar (from 24 to 23) continue their drift toward their northern neighbor, aligning solidly with China. The only country that has moved somewhat away from China and toward the United States in the past 30 years is Vietnam, although not by much (from 41 to 45). Our measurements in the more recent period suggest that Vietnam is about to join the likes of Malaysia and Singapore in straddling the superpower divide.

 

Push and Pull

Southeast Asia’s drift toward China is due not to any single force but a mix of factors, including the domestic political needs of Southeast Asian governments, perceptions of economic opportunities and U.S. staying power, and geography. Domestic politics can play a decisive role. Cambodia provides an illustrative case. The 1997 coup that eventually brought the country’s leader, Hun Sen, to power set in motion a serious decline in U.S.-Cambodian relations and an improvement in Chinese-Cambodian relations. The United States suspended aid and instituted an arms embargo on Cambodia after the coup, which it condemned for undermining democracy. In the 2010s, the United States also denounced Cambodia’s poor record on human rights and corruption. Because of this naming and shaming, the Hun Sen regime came to see Washington as a threat to its security. It is not surprising that Cambodia chose to align more strongly with China, from which it derives myriad forms of support and has received little criticism. Beijing provides Phnom Penh with significant foreign investment, political support, and military assistance; it also does not seek to undermine the legitimacy of the regime.

Many governments in the region draw legitimacy from their ability to deliver strong economic performance. This, too, has aided China, which has become the largest trading partner for ASEAN. Nondemocratic regimes in ASEAN believe that China will best support their economic needs and their desire to secure political legitimacy. When it comes to foreign direct investment, China lags behind the United States in the region, but it is catching up fast in several countries through its Belt and Road Initiative, which has financed major infrastructure projects all over the world.

Such investment has forced many countries to revise their traditional ways of seeing the world. The Indonesian military, for instance, was suspicious of China and sympathetic to the United States during the Cold War, a dynamic most gruesomely illustrated by the mass killings of ethnic Chinese people and alleged communist sympathizers in the 1960s. But in recent decades, new political elites and business groups have succeeded in pushing a pro-growth agenda. They see China as a source of economic opportunity, not as a source of ideological threat. And they have steered Indonesia in China’s direction by welcoming Chinese investments, conducting high-level visits—in 2024, newly elected President Prabowo Subianto’s first foreign visit was to China, and in May 2025, Chinese Premier Li Qiang made a reciprocal visit to Indonesia—participating in military exercises with China, and avoiding the common practice of targeting ethnic Chinese Indonesians as scapegoats for Indonesia’s economic ills.

Trump’s return to the White House has stoked further anxiety about U.S. military and economic commitments to Southeast Asia. The second Trump administration seems intent on shifting responsibility for Europe’s security to European governments. The administration’s strategy regarding China and Asia more broadly remains unclear. On the security front, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s March visit to the Philippines and Japan suggests that the United States remains keen to consolidate its Asian alliances, starting with two of its most steadfast allies in the region. As the Philippines spars with China over disputed maritime territories, Hegseth claimed that the U.S. commitment to the Philippines is “ironclad.” But Thailand, another formal U.S. treaty ally, was not on Hegseth’s itinerary. A wiser approach, based on an understanding of Thailand’s drift in China’s direction and the United States’ interest in arresting that slide, would also have taken Hegseth to Bangkok.

Other strategic partners of the United States will also be keeping a close eye on the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia; they will have to recalibrate their security reliance on and cooperation with the United States if they conclude that Washington is likely to retreat from the region. In 2017, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein voiced concerns about hints from the first Trump administration that it could reduce U.S. overseas commitments. He hoped that the United States would reconsider scaling back its engagement in the Asia-Pacific. If not, he continued, ASEAN had to be prepared for heavier security responsibilities. More recently, in April 2025, Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong argued that the “new normal” will be one in which “America is stepping back from its traditional role as the guarantor of order and the world’s policeman.” No other country, however, is ready to fill the gap. “As a result, the world is becoming more fragmented and disorderly.” Trump’s belief that the projection of U.S. military power serves the protected more than it serves the United States has alarmed some in Southeast Asia. In February, Ng Eng Hen, then Singapore’s defense minister, noted that the image of Washington in the region had changed from “liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent.” As one senior Southeast Asian diplomat based in Washington said half-jokingly to one of us after the debacle of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s February visit to the White House: “Ukraine has critical minerals to offer. What do we have?”

On the economic front, Trump slapped high “reciprocal” tariffs on Southeast Asian countries in early April. Although they have been paused and their future is uncertain, that threat now looms over the region’s economies. Southeast Asian countries fear not just the serious loss of access to U.S. investment and the American market but also the United States’ abdication of its economic leadership—the ceding of its historical role in shaping the economic architecture of the region to others. If it becomes clear that the United States is disengaging economically and militarily from the region, its ten countries will increasingly have to rely on one another and engage with Australia, Japan, and South Korea more seriously. But that imperative will be counterbalanced, and perhaps even overwhelmed, by the temptation to gravitate toward China.

At a fundamental level, geography shapes the decisions many of these countries have to make. Those that share a border with China, such as Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, will feel the natural gravitational pull of Beijing. To be sure, that may be tempered by historical suspicions or animosity, as in the case of Vietnam, which fended off a Chinese invasion in 1979. But proximity can force compromises. In Myanmar, the military junta that took power after the 2021 coup has become reliant on China for diplomatic support and trade, even though it is aware of Beijing’s support for ethnic armed insurgent groups operating in border regions. Laos has become almost entirely reliant on Chinese funds for the building of hydroelectric dams along the Mekong River within its borders; infrastructure loans from China now account for half of the foreign debt that the landlocked country has incurred. Geography also helps explain why Vietnam has only cautiously inched toward the United States. Despite Washington’s avowed interest in elevating relations with Hanoi to the “comprehensive strategic partnership” level, Vietnam resisted until 2023, which is 15 years after it had established such a relationship with China. The United States remains far away, no matter its wide network of military bases. And its removal may make it less likely to commit resources and personnel to ensuring peace and stability in the South China Sea, one of the major regional flash points, if push ever comes to shove.

 

Ceding The Field

Even though Southeast Asia is leaning toward China, alignment patterns are not set in stone. Countries can change their orientation rather quickly. For example, under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from 2001 to 2010, the Philippines leaned toward China. Her successor, Benigno Aquino III, who ruled from 2010 to 2016, pulled the country back toward the United States. Rodrigo Duterte, who followed Aquino, swung toward China; his successor, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., has swung back toward the United States.

Among Southeast Asian states with Muslim-majority populations, including Indonesia and Malaysia, anger over Washington’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza has led governments to distance themselves from the United States and to cast doubt on American invocations of the so-called rules-based international order. A 2024 ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute survey found that half of the nearly 2,000 experts it polled across ten Southeast Asian countries—people drawn from academia, think tanks, the private sector, civil society, media, government, and regional and international organizations—agreed that ASEAN should choose China over the United States; just a year earlier, 61 percent of those polled had favored the United States over China.

Many Southeast Asian governments may not recognize that they are taking sides. Because they maintain ties with both superpowers, they assume that their foreign policy is finely calibrated and balanced. They pick à la carte from American and Chinese offerings. They can sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, its Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, the free-trade deal known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and Beijing’s Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative. At the same time, they would have been able to participate in the U.S.-led (but now abandoned) Trans-Pacific Partnership or join the more recent Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity and other U.S. schemes designed to counter the Belt and Road Initiative. They also welcome American private-sector investments with open arms. U.S. foreign direct investment in Southeast Asia surpasses American investments in China, Japan, and South Korea combined. Through such choices, a country may reach a tipping point and end up more in one camp than the other without realizing that it has crossed a line. Indonesia, for example, may be sleepwalking into closer alignment with China—not as a result of conscious, coherent, and grand strategic choice but because the accumulation of its choices (such as its joining of various Chinese multilateral initiatives) in different sectors may over time tilt it decisively toward Beijing.

Even as China rises and the United States retreats, Southeast Asians are not willing to give up on Washington. Poll after poll shows that Southeast Asia sees China as the most influential economic and strategic power in the region, outpacing the United States by significant margins. But Southeast Asians also harbor considerable reservations about how China might deploy that power. When asked whom they trust, elites from various sectors of society rank Japan first, the United States second, the European Union third, and China a distant fourth, according to the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute’s 2024 poll. Put another way, even though China will remain a persistent and formidable challenger to the United States, and even though much of Southeast Asia seems to be gravitating toward China, Beijing still has a lot of work to do to allay concerns and win the trust of regional states.

The second Trump administration may make Beijing’s task easier if the punishing “Liberation Day” tariffs that it imposed on April 2 on key ASEAN states, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, are not lowered significantly; if key U.S. officials fail to show up for the annual ASEAN meetings; and if it acts on its threat to impose 100 percent tariffs on countries that have joined (Indonesia) or are moving to join (Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam) BRICS, a coalition of non-Western powers that includes China and Russia. If it doesn’t change its ways, the Trump administration will freely cede the trust and goodwill that its predecessors have built up in Southeast Asia over the past half century.

 

 

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