The White House Transformed Asia in 2025: Expect Much More in 2026

In the days following the January 2025 inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, many Asian governments believed Trump’s second term would bring benefits for the region.

The White House promised a tough line against China, which had been menacing other states in regional waters and also pledged to combat Beijing’s supposedly illegal trade actions. Washington had already started discussing tariffs and a more transactional trade approach, but most Asian governments were accustomed to dealing with such transactionalism. In the first Trump administration, Asian leaders like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were among the most effective in dealing with the U.S. president, and many politicians in the region felt ready to handle a second Trump presidency.

They were wrong. In 2025, the U.S. administration’s policies shook up Asian economics, trade and security more than any White House in decades. Waves of tariffs imposed on both Asian allies and countries historically shunned by Washington upended supply chains and entire trade flows in a region home to the largest free trade zone and some of the world’s biggest exporters. (The White House has raised the United States’ overall tariff rate to levels not seen since the Great Depression.)

Major exporters from Vietnam to Japan struggled to address the White House’s insistence that any U.S. bilateral trade deficits suggested other countries were taking advantage of the United States. Often, these states agreed to bad deals in which they reluctantly accepted tariffs on their products to keep exporting to America. (The U.S. even has used import and export measures to punish countries it has a trade surplus with, like Australia.) The unpredictability of the tariffs has hampered manufacturing and services across Asia, has begun to undermine growth and has led trading economies to look to new partners beyond the United States, including China.

Meanwhile, the two regional and global giants, China and the United States, engaged in a nearly year-long trade war, until China demonstrated it could withstand American pressure and the White House essentially backed down.

At the same time, by dissolving the United States Agency for International Development, shutting down U.S.-backed media such as Radio Free Asia — popular in autocratic states — and leaving allies uncertain as to whether U.S. forces would come to their defense if needed, the Trump White House harmed U.S. popularity in Asia while boosting the appeal of China (and Europe) in the region.

And politically, the White House, which wanted conservative, populist parties to win control of many Asian countries, seemed, through its actions, to actually foster electoral victories by more liberal, anti-populist parties. Positioning itself as a bulwark against the Trump administration, the previously unpopular Australian Labor Party was reelected handily in May. Thailand’s progressive People’s Party, no fan of the White House, could win a majority in the kingdom’s upcoming elections.

Will the Trump administration learn from its counterproductive actions in Asia in 2025? It seems unlikely. On the security front, Washington seems to be sending signals that it may be even less committed in 2026 to Asian partners’ security than it was this year.

In late November, Trump took a call from Chinese leader Xi Jinping and appeared vague in countering Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China and its unification with the mainland is essential. Following the call, Trump spoke with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who had said an attack on Taiwan could be considered a survival-threatening situation for Japan, potentially allowing it to exercise its right to collective self-defense, and cautioned her to dial back her comments.

These actions potentially signal that Trump may jettison U.S. support for Taiwan in 2026 to obtain a major trade deal with China. (To be sure, in early December Trump also signed into law the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, which according to Reuters says “the U.S. State Department should carry out reviews of contacts with Taiwan no less than once every five years” and could possibly boost U.S.-Taiwan ties, though not if Trump decides a U.S.-China trade deal is more important.)

The White House also appears ready, in 2026, to offer full-throated support to some of Asia’s most repressive regimes. Besides this approach potentially undermining rights and democracy, these repressive regimes are not only destroying their own countries but also are spreading crime, disease, refugees and other challenges into neighboring Asian states.

With Myanmar, for instance, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem recently announced that the junta-governed, strife-torn country is becoming more politically stable and suggested military-led elections starting on Dec. 28 might be free and fair, though nearly all impartial observers have said they will be a sham. But by legitimizing the military rulers in Naypyidaw, the U.S. potentially will extend the regime’s tenure.

Already, as I have noted in an article for World Politics Review, “under the junta, roughly half of Myanmar now lives in poverty, a much higher level of impoverishment than just five years ago. About one-fourth of the people still in Myanmar, which has become a massive source of refugees, do not have enough food and the country also has become a global hub of organized crime. Diseases that had been curtailed, like malaria and tuberculosis, have returned and are decimating the population and crossing into the rest of Asia.”

A similar U.S. shift is occurring with Cambodia and is likely to become more pronounced in 2026. The White House has reset relations with Phnom Penh’s autocratic regime even though Cambodia appears to be tolerating many cyber-scam centers that are immensely destructive to citizens in Japan and other developed states in Asia.

On trade, meanwhile, the White House shows no indications of backing off its aggressive tariff strategy and broader economic plans, even as the damage to the United States’ own economy may undermine the Republican Party’s electoral prospects in 2026. And, while the full effects of the tariffs have not been felt in Asia thus far, nearly every forecasting organization believes they will hit hard in 2026 — and that Washington appears uninterested in mitigating the possible damage.

The International Monetary Fund warns that growth across the Asia-Pacific will slow in 2026, in part because of U.S. policy, while Asian consumer demand will remain stagnant, too, due to uncertainty about the global economic environment. And if Washington and Beijing do wind up making a major bilateral trade deal, while excluding other major Asian economies, the agreement could further decimate growth across the Asia-Pacific. 

This article was originally published in The Japan Times.