Southeast Asia’s balancing act and revisionist forces

We are living in a world with three great powers – all with explicitly revisionist aims when it comes to the international “rules-based order.” It is the most significant moment since the end of the Cold War.

Since its formation, President Vladimir Putin’s Russia has invaded its neighbors and taken territory and populations by force. 

The United States and its allies have also worried about China’s stated imperative to “reunify” Taiwan and assertions of its maritime territorial claims since 1950. 

In 2025, the US under the second Donald Trump presidency announced an agenda to “take” Greenland and annex Canada. Revisionist powers do not play by agreed rules.

In radically revising the terms of trade, Trump follows a long line of US leaders since 1945 struggling with the Triffin dilemma, or the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. 

His White House administration cannot sustain currency convertibility alongside control over domestic currency valuation and trade balances. 

Cutting aid

Previous American leaders wielded monetary instruments to control inflation and improve current account deficits. Trump is now using the blunter tool of raising tariffs and cutting foreign aid, with the aim of improving US export access and competitiveness.

His tariffs ring the death knell of the low- or no-tariff global trading system. Trump’s giant shove is likely to stimulate economic initiatives among “the rest,” excluding the US. 

The ultimate decoupling may turn out to be between Washington and the rest of the world, not just the US and President Xi Jinping’s China.

A revisionist regime in the Oval Office also presents an opportunity to think equally unpalatable thoughts about a new US-China economic-security bargain. Transglobal technologies will continue to break borders, but geography may reassert itself too. 

A more self-centered United States is much less likely to conduct military campaigns on the other side of the world. Europe would be forced to deal directly with Russia’s threat. East Asia would have to live with a dominant China without an unreliable offshore partner.

The rest of the world is a large and amorphous bunch. They can and have been followers, pawns or sites of great power rivalry and conflict. But they can and have also been innovators, leaders, collective action specialists and out-of-the-box thinkers and shakers.

Consider the Non-Aligned Movement, the European and African Unions, BRICS and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to name just a few examples.

Regions including East, South and Central Asia, Africa, Latin America and parts of the Middle East are used to value-diverse, dynamic and often dangerous environments. 

They have had to navigate regional and international orders not of their own making, and without neat categories of perpetual friends or sworn enemies. They may hate it, but the Global Majority is better prepared psychologically to face a world of relative revisionism.

Right now, being willing to go beyond old assumptions and to ask different questions will help all countries to navigate the new normal dominated by three revisionist great powers.

Firm friends

One supposedly worst-case scenario under discussion in Australia is that Southeast Asia falls into China’s sphere of influence. Canberra has limited direct ability to prevent that development, yet it is a scenario that is unlikely to happen. 

Fear about its potential “loss” is misplaced. 

Regional doubts surrounding the US are not new. Washington has allies and firm friends, but Southeast Asia does not see it the same way as Australia.

Instead, it regards the US as neither a necessarily benign nor an altruistic hegemony. Responses from Southeast Asian nations to China’s power are also not conditioned by what they think about the United States. 

They largely do not see themselves as living in a world controlled by two great powers locked in rivalry. Most engage in a complex balancing act in a layered hierarchical regional order.

Because of China’s vital role in economic production and as a growing source of investment and consumption, the region’s main concern now is the prolonged slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy. 

This will impose a huge, additional strain on the economic prospects of Southeast Asian countries on top of US-created volatility. The Trump tariffs will compel some regional economies to manage an even greater influx of cheaper Chinese products. 

Precisely because the United States might remain aloof, the region will have to continue to work closely with what they hope will be an economically vibrant China. 

Also, Beijing is part of many of the region’s territorial disputes, so Southeast Asia must continue to manage them as best they can.

This is not necessarily a recipe for simply giving in to Chinese demands. 

Security frameworks

The region has generally been reluctant to align exclusively with the United States, even when that option was available. 

Still, countries will need to navigate a path with multiple revisionist powers on their own terms. For allies deeply integrated with the US, a defining era has ended, requiring a fundamental rethinking of their economic and political security frameworks. 

This process is politically complex, involves costly domestic trade-offs, and may take decades to fully realize.

Evelyn Goh is the Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies and Director of the Southeast Asia Institute at The Australian National University.

This edited article is republished from East Asia Forum under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of China Factor.