U.S. trade tensions with Asia could fray anti-China security pacts : NPR

As he did with NATO members in Europe, President Trump is undermining trust with key allies on the other side of the globe. His administration’s decisions are straining relationships with the Asian countries that the U.S. would rely on in the event of conflict with China or North Korea.

Beijing was an early target of Trump’s latest tariff war, but the White House appears to be applying its aggressive stance on trade to the rest of the region as well. Washington has imposed tariffs on aluminum and steel from Australia, threatened them on cars from Japan and hinted that South Korea could be next target of U.S. tariffs.

As with Europe, the Trump administration is sending conflicting signals to America’s long-standing allies in Asia, with whom the U.S. has deep-rooted security agreements that date back to the 1950s.

In recent years, the Biden administration bolstered these ties with the goal of containing China, launching a pair of strategic security pacts — one among the U.S., Japan and South Korea and the other, known as AUKUS, with the U.K. and Australia.

These alliances are are vital to the “First Island Chain” strategy, a war plan whose name refers to a line of islands that stretches from Japan, through Taiwan, to the Philippines — a natural barrier that could be used to circumscribe China’s naval and air operations if war were to break out.

Biden even moved past decades of deliberate U.S. ambiguity concerning Taiwan, openly declaring that America would defend the island against an attack by China.

Seth Jones, president of the defense and security department of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says a trade war that punishes U.S. partners in the region threatens to weaken ties with Asian allies, possibly forcing them to reassess the reliability of U.S. security commitments.

“Tariffs against the Australians, or current or future tariffs — particularly increases against the Japanese and South Koreans — would certainly not be helpful in contributing to a close partnership with those countries,” he says.

Worries that tariffs could trigger an Indo-Pacific trade war

There’s concern that the ongoing tit-for-tat tariff dispute seen in North America and Europe could also land in Asia.

“I think there is a fear that … this is only going to escalate,” says Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center.

President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un talk before a meeting in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on June 30, 2019, in Panmunjom, Korea.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

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Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

During his first term, Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy was a difficult read for the region. In one of his first acts as president, he withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact, a trade agreement with 12 Pacific Rim nations negotiated by the Obama administration (although Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the 2016 election, also opposed the deal).

Trump followed that up with a round of brinkmanship with Kim Jong Un before a complete reversal and profession of love for the North Korean leader. Then came the China trade war, version 1.0.

In the current Trump term, “we are in uncharted territory,” says John Nilsson-Wright, head of the Japan and Koreas Program at the Center for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. “There is a profound sense of anxiety and I think a sense of urgency [in] countries like Japan, Australia, European states which have a stake in the Indo-Pacific, particularly the U.K.”

Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, thinks Trump’s focus on trade and toughness on China indicates that “he cares about economic benefits” the U.S. could reap.

“He doesn’t have strong issues with China’s authoritarian system,” he says. “He doesn’t really have issues with China’s regional aggression as long as those regional aggressions do not immediately threaten American interests.”

In a campaign interview last year, Trump also suggested that Taiwan’s dominance in microchip manufacturing meant it had the money to pay the U.S. for defending the island.

Trump’s new term comes amid regional political uncertainty

The maneuvering is happening as political uncertainty roils not just the U.S., but also the Pacific region. South Korea is in the middle of a major constitutional crisis over the ouster of Yoon Suk Yeol as president after he tried to declare martial law.

Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe — with whom Trump had enjoyed an apparently genuine friendship — was a strong advocate of building up Japan’s military to meet the threat posed by China. He resigned in 2020 and was later assassinated. Shigeru Ishiba is Japan’s third premier since Abe.

Australia could also get a new prime minister after elections in May.

Trump’s approach to the Indo-Pacific reflects his personal view of how the U.S. fits into the larger global context, according to Kanishkh Kanodia, a fellow in the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

“I think President Trump sees [alliances] as secondary to him. He prefers one-on-one/bilateral relationships,” Kanodia says. In short, he “[views] allies and alliances generally as liabilities which have historically disadvantaged the U.S.”

During his first term, Trump strongly suggested that he might pull a significant number of U.S. troops from South Korea, a military presence seen as a key deterrent against North Korean aggression. In an interview with Time magazine in April last year, he reiterated demands from his first term that Seoul “step up and pay” to maintain U.S. troops on its soil.

Not long ago, such a stance by a U.S. president would have been unthinkable, Nilsson-Wright says. Today, though, “we have to realistically consider whether Trump might see that as a bargaining card that he would deploy,” he says.

South Korea tried to lock in its defense payments

Concern in Seoul over renewed arm-twisting from Washington led it to “Trump-proof” the level of funding it’s expected to provide for U.S. military bases in the country by locking in a new joint agreement in the final year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s past implications that the U.S. might close bases in South Korea and withdraw at least some of its forces could have the unintended consequence of pushing Seoul to pursue its nuclear weapons to counter North Korea’s strategic arsenal, according to Shihoko Goto, director of the Indo-Pacific program at the Wilson Center.

A South Korean army K1A2 tank seen during a combined live fire exercise between South Korea and the U.S. Army at the Rodriguez Live Fire Range in Pocheon, South Korea, on Feb. 10.

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Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

Nuclear nonproliferation has long been a cornerstone of America’s foreign policy, but in the first Trump term “there had been public interest in South Korea for the country to acquire nuclear weapons … in response to some of the anxieties that Seoul has had about U.S. security guarantees,” she says.

Although India — an open nuclear power — is not part of the First Island Chain strategy, it nevertheless plays a critical part in ensuring security and stability in the region, Goto says. The U.S. and India have no security treaty, but Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have had warm relations.

In Japan, she says, “there is really no public appetite to … become a nuclear power.” Nonetheless, Japan now says it is committed to doubling its defense spending by 2027. That’s seen as a major step toward rearmament, reversing the demilitarization imposed by the allies at the end of World War II. “Behind this change of posture has been from a single source: China,” according to Tomohiko Taniguchi, a senior adviser at Fujitsu Futures Studies Center.

Indo-Pacific partners want stability

There are roughly 28,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea. In addition, the Biden administration had sought to bring the 55,000 troops currently deployed to Japan under a joint command in the country, rather than the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command thousands of miles away in Hawaii. The change would mean U.S. troops could meet the threat from China more rapidly and effectively.

In an effort to quash media reports that new Pentagon cuts might nix any such move, Japan’s Defense Minister Gen. Nakatani said Friday that there is no change in the plan.

Like Japan, in Australia there doesn’t appear to be any serious public debate about going nuclear. However, a 2022 survey conducted by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute found that 36% of Australians were strongly or somewhat in favor of the country acquiring nuclear weapons, up from only 16% in 2010.

The U.S. Navy’s USS Minnesota (SSN-783), a Virginia-class fast attack submarine, sails in waters off the coast of Western Australia on March 16.

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Colin Murty/AFP via Getty Images

During his first term, Trump praised then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for his “wonderful job” in prosecuting a deadly anti-drug war — an extrajudicial crackdown that led to Duterte’s recent arrest on International Criminal Court charges of crimes against humanity.

Speaking shortly after Trump’s reelection, Philippine Defense Minister Gilberto Teodoro said he didn’t expect any demands from Washington to pay more for defense. Meanwhile, more than three decades after the U.S. abandoned Subic Bay in the Philippines, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps will again have a presence at the strategic outpost in the form of prepositioned military equipment.

Ultimately, America’s Indo-Pacific partners are hoping the new Trump White House will prove a more constant ally in what Taniguchi, a former Abe adviser, describes as “perhaps the most precarious neighborhood … on the globe.”

They “want stability in trade relations,” Goto says. “They also want stability when it comes to security relations with the United States.”

NPR’s Anthony Kuhn contributed to this report from Beijing.