Trump is pushing Asian allies into China’s arms 

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered a message at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last month that any European defense minister would have recognized from a Trump-era NATO summit. 

“The era of the United States subsidizing the defense of wealthy nations is over,” he declared at Asia’s premier annual defense forum “We need partners, not protectorates. We seek alliances built on shared responsibility, not dependency.” 

Then he put a number on it. Every Asia-Pacific ally and partner should commit to spending 3.5% of GDP on defense – with some reports suggesting that Washington’s real floor is closer to 5%. This is the same logic Trump has pressed on European NATO members for years.

But Asia is not Europe. The economic, political, and strategic obstacles to meeting these demands are far greater across the Indo-Pacific than across the Atlantic. Washington is far less likely to get what it wants, and the US approach risks deepening Asian instability.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Singapore spends 2.8% of its GDP on defense, South Korea 2.6% and Taiwan 2.1%. Australia allocates 1.9%, Japan 1.4% and the Philippines 1.3%. Poorer Southeast Asian states spend even less. 

Collapsing trust

Closing those gaps to 3.5% – let alone 5% – would require historic budget increases from economies that are, in many cases, less wealthy than their European counterparts. They are are also now absorbing severe fiscal shocks from the 2026 Iran war.

In Singapore, Vietnam’s President To Lam, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, and Japan’s Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi all pushed back against Hegseth. 

They argued that the region’s real problem is a shortage of trust in Washington’s defense priorities and adherence to rules, not a shortage of arms. That pushback reflects genuine differences compared to Europe, as well as Asia’s collapsing trust in Trump. 

European countries operate within NATO’s integrated command structure, share a threat perception sharpened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and carry decades of institutional habits around burden-sharing with the United States. Asian partners have none of that. 

In addition, European nations “have pulled closely together in the face of US threats to abandon their security through vehicles such as the coalition of the willing that supports a multilateral force in Ukraine,” Zack Cooper and Mira Rapp-Hooper noted in Foreign Policy. 

“They have begun to form a backup plan through bilateral pacts to build resilience in case the United States continues to rethink its commitment to transatlantic cooperation.” US allies in Asia have no such Plan B, they added:

For Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, the alliance with the United States cannot be replaced.

There is no Asian equivalent of NATO, and building such an alliance would take years, if not decades. ASEAN’s founding Treaty of Amity and Cooperation enshrines noninterference and consensus-based decision-making.

These bedrock principles make bloc-wide defense commitments structurally impossible. 

Japan’s pacifist constitution – reinterpreted since 2014 but never formally revised, though that could change soon – still shapes its defense posture and domestic politics. 

Aggressive actions

Southeast and Northeast Asian governments conduct enormous volumes of trade with China and they cannot afford to be seen openly joining an anti-Beijing coalition. Geography and economics compound the problem further. 

Indo-Pacific deterrence turns on maritime choke points, island chains, and the enormous distances of the Pacific Ocean – all of which require capital-intensive naval and air capabilities that take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build. 

Asking less wealthy states such as the Philippines or Vietnam to spend more misunderstands what credible deterrence in this theater actually costs. To be sure, many Asian nations are worried about China’s military buildup and aggressive actions in regional waters. 

They will increase defense spending in the years ahead – not in partnership with the United States, but out of mistrust in it. They will spend more because many, like Japan and South Korea, no longer feel confident that the US will defend them if attacked. 

Many have become openly antagonistic to Washington, especially after the Trump administration tried last year to impose sweeping tariffs on many Asian states and offered outright disdain for allies such as Australia.

Meanwhile, the United States has taken an increasingly soft line toward China – holding off on arms sales to Taiwan and downplaying its military buildup and aggressive actions in regional waters. 

That posture has further convinced many Asian officials, in conversations I have had, that the White House cannot be trusted to protect them from Beijing. 

At the Shangri-La Dialogue, Hegseth said there was “rightful alarm” about China’s military buildup, but also declared, “We respect their ambitions.” He did not mention Taiwan, becoming the first US defense secretary in more than a decade not to do so at the forum. 

As the New York Times reported, current and former officials in the US and Asia read the signal clearly: “Mr Trump intends to accommodate China, other countries should fall in line.” 

Asian partners

The signal that Taipei and other American partners across the region have received is that the United States could use Taiwan’s defense as a negotiating chip rather than a core interest worth defending. 

And if that is how the White House treats the island democracy, Asian officials have said to me, how can they be sure it would not treat them the same way?

The Trump administration’s disdain for Asian partners, willingness to accommodate China, and unreasonable demands for defense spending are leading these states to organize their military planning how they want.

The United States does not want Japan or South Korea to develop nuclear weapons, but they could do so regardless. A 2025 poll by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies found that 76% of South Koreans support acquiring an indigenous nuclear weapon.

That was five percentage points up since 2024 and the highest level of support since the poll began back in 2010.

In Japan, a substantial share of elites who have expressed openness to nuclearization have cited the absence of a long-term US security commitment as their primary motivation. 

The relocation of THAAD missile interceptors from South Korea to the Middle East, tied to the Iran war, has already reinforced the message that US security assurances are conditional rather than permanent – fueling a push toward independent missile defense ambitions.

Still, a nuclear-armed South Korea or Japan would rank among the most destabilizing developments in the post-World War II international order. No one knows how China and North Korea would respond, but proliferation pressures across the region would accelerate.

It would also signal the collapse of the US-led alliance structure in Asia.

Cold War

As Thitinan Pongsudhirak of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok notes, a regional defense buildup on a scale unseen since the Cold War could deliver little net security benefit to Asian states anyway, because China would simply respond in kind. 

An arms race in the Indo-Pacific, without clear US leadership, could instead produce the kind of miscalculation between powers that led to World War I.

Cumulatively, Washington’s approach to Asia continues to hand Beijing what it has long sought – regional influence. China is already the dominant economic and trade power in the region, at a time when the US has essentially withdrawn from multilateral trade agreements. 

Southeast Asian governments that spent decades carefully managing relationships with both Washington and Beijing now watch a United States that demands more from partners and offers weaker security assurances in return.

It also treats China as a great-power peer rather than a shared regional challenge requiring collective management. The 2026 State of Southeast Asia survey found that countries in the region now prefer China to the United States as a partner. 

The survey also showed that US leadership under President Donald Trump had become the region’s biggest geopolitical concern – rather than anything China is doing. 

Sentiment toward the United States across Asia and Oceania has sunk further since the survey was released. An April Ipsos poll found that 55% of respondents across Asia now believe China will have a positive effect on the world over the next decade. Only 40% think the US will.

Dangerous regions

After the Shangri-La Dialogue, Rory Medcalf, a former Australian diplomat and widely respected voice in Canberra, summed up the regional sentiment succinctly. He said of Hegseth’s speech: 

This was perhaps the least confronting speech from a US administration in the 23-year history of the Shangri-La Dialogue.

The White House, alas, shows little sign of understanding how deeply it is alienating the region. Asian states are acting in ways that simply ignore US preferences. Some of those plans also could make one of the most dangerous regions in the world even more prone to conflict. 

Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

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