How Trump’s trade policy is handing Asia to Beijing

Ted Osius is the former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.

For a decade, Washington urged the world’s manufacturers to move their factories out of China and into friendly Southeast Asian states—only to attack the very countries and companies that answered the call.

Usually, U.S. economic statecraft is designed to help American companies succeed abroad. President Donald Trump’s punitive trade program is having the reverse effect. Broad-based import taxes have jolted manufacturers across ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), including American ones.

Rather than checking China, trade policy is alienating regional partners, harming supply-chain diversification, and eroding America’s influence over the bloc’s trade decisions. The U.S. is engaged in what Evan Feigenbaum, a veteran diplomat and former Republican, terms a “reverse pivot.” Bogged down in foreign crises elsewhere, Washington now projects hesitation and retreat in Asia rather than dynamic leadership.

In the months after President Trump’s April 2025 announcement of “Liberation Day” tariffs, some of ASEAN’s non-tariff barriers fell. A few countries used the exogenous threat to bring about needed reforms.  Deals were done, including Boeing sales and–at least prospective–LNG contracts. It appeared that coercion worked, at least in the short term. In February the Supreme Court struck down much of the initial tariff regime and the administration pivoted to workarounds: 150-day emergency measures under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and expansive Section 301 investigations into forced labor, intellectual property violations, and “excess capacity.” 

America’s labor, intellectual property, and excess-capacity concerns are really about China, not Southeast Asia. The administration substituted an improvised China policy for a coherent........

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