MAGA Show on ASEAN’s Stage: Guarded Expectations

When US President Donald Trump lands in Kuala Lumpur for the 47th ASEAN Summit on Sunday (26 October), it will mark his first appearance at an ASEAN meeting since 2017. This will present a significant opportunity for the US to regain some diplomatic currency in the region. While expectations for concrete deliverables remain modest, Trump’s visit is likely to serve more as a political stage that allows him to score points at home and reinforce his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) message, rather than as a forum for substantive policy breakthroughs.

At the least, the optics of the visit will be positive. It is expected that Trump will repeat the same shibboleths mouthed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the ASEAN Ministerial meeting in July: affirming ASEAN centrality and the grouping’s importance in US Indo-Pacific strategy. Yet, his decision to attend seems driven more by spectacle than policy. The summit offers him a stage to project his peace-making credentials: brokering a ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia (expected to be formalised under the Kuala Lumpur Accord), and a historic end of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. And the fact that China would only be sending Premier Li Qiang to the same meeting would bag Uncle Sam some brownie points.

 However, what the region wants from Washington is consistency and clarity, not episodic diplomacy. The US remains ASEAN’s largest investor, with over 6,200 American companies operating in the region, anchoring sectors from finance to manufacturing. At the same time, Washington remains primus inter pares as a security provider, underpinning regional stability through alliances and defence cooperation. Yet Southeast Asia’s confidence depends on how Washington aligns this regional footprint with ASEAN priorities in digital infrastructure, energy transition and maritime cooperation. These are areas where ASEAN seeks reliable, long-term engagement rather than tactical gestures.

This, however, is unlikely. Since 2017, US involvement with ASEAN has drifted, sustained by virtual meetings, Cabinet-level visits, and sweeping Indo-Pacific speeches with few tangible outcomes. There were three bright spots in the Biden era: the Quad offered the promise of public goods and a perfunctory nod to ASEAN centrality; the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) evinced some US verve to push ahead on economic architecture, and the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy stressed a rules-based order premised on security and prosperity. All three pillars are teetering on the brink of collapse under Trump. Even if Washington manages to revive ASEAN’s confidence, it will still have to deal with Southeast Asian countries’ dismay with its reciprocal tariffs, which have cast a shadow over the region’s trade outlook and could yet deal a blow to its export-led economies.

Trump is unlikely to offer any succour to Southeast Asian countries on this front. According to Republicans, MAGA is about restoring national pride and economic strength. Practically, Trump has redefined trade deals. Now it means a foreign trading partner accepts high US tariffs on its exports to the US (which are paid by US importers to the US government) and commits to making investments in the US. This was the case for ASEAN countries such as Vietnam, as well as South Korea and Japan.

Trump’s obsession with MAGA will not make the US’ relationship with ASEAN — or the wider region — great again.

MAGA will replay itself in Japan and Korea, which Trump will visit after Kuala Lumpur. The prognosis is not salubrious. Trump has sought to cash in, with investments into the US to the tune of US$550 billion from Japan and US$350 billion from South Korea. Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has hinted that the investment, as part of a previous US-Japan tariff deal, could be renegotiated (Trump has said that he would decide which part of the US economy the Japanese money goes into). South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung was more direct: stumping up the US$350 billion in cash would put his country in the same perilous situation it faced in the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Trump would likely affirm Washington’s long-standing alliances with Japan and South Korea. But equally likely is Trump’s parroting of what Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, said at the Shangri-La Dialogue in June: that US allies should go the way of NATO and spend 5 per cent of their GDP on defence. By any measure, this would be a long shot. Japan has promised to double defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP by 2027 — this is already a stretch for an economy coping with high debt, low growth and an ageing population. South Korea’s corresponding figure stood at 2.3 per cent of GDP in 2024, and the defence ministry has stressed that the figure, as compared to other key US allies, is already “very high”.

To restore trust, Trump and the US would need to offer a new economic vision for the Indo-Pacific: something akin to the Biden-era IPEF with pillars centred on trade, supply chains, clean economy, and a fair economy. Despite its flaws (for example, negotiations on the trade pillar floundered last year), IPEF signalled a commitment to multilateralism. This appears unlikely under Trump, whose instinct has been to pursue transactional, one-off deals rather than institutional frameworks. A rules-based arrangement like IPEF would sit uneasily with his “America First” ethos and MAGA’s policy fixation on clawing back gains made by US trading partners at the expense of Washington (At any rate, Trump will not resuscitate a policy approved by his predecessor at the White House).

This puts the region back at square one. Trump will insist that regional countries stomach his reciprocal tariffs, stump up more for US security guarantees and accept the ignominy of no new US economic initiative on the cards. Put simply, Trump’s obsession with MAGA will not make the US’ relationship with ASEAN — or the wider region — great again.

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