In recent times, US imperialism’s increasingly apparent decline and erratic behavior on the world stage has seen it losing wars and losing friends. As a result, its grip is also loosening over Southeast Asia, pushing many of its traditional allies to look elsewhere.

But this has not neatly resulted in the other main power in the region, China, simply taking the US’s crown. Multipolarity is developing in the region. But it is not going to bring any fairness or peace in world relations. It is bringing militarism and instability, and is aggravating the crisis of capitalism.

[Originally published on Marxist.com]

Trump, trade, and US isolation

Since World War II, the US has served as the guarantor of capitalism in Asia, to the point of single-handedly propping up many states, in order to prevent the spread of revolutions, especially following the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

Even after the Cold War, the rise of China as a capitalist rival pushed US imperialism to pour vast resources into Southeast Asia.

On the economic front, US capital is now the largest single investor in ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), with a foreign direct investment stock of nearly $480 billion as of 2023 – almost double its combined investments in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Militarily, Washington spent the decade after the Obama administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ building up its forces along China’s maritime periphery, shifting the bulk of the US Navy to the Pacific. Funding behind this shift rose steeply from 2021, when Congress created the Pacific Deterrence Initiative—a Pentagon program that has earmarked some $40 billion since, explicitly to counter China.

By April 2024, Washington had gone further still, stationing Typhon missile launchers in the northern Philippines, capable of firing missiles that can hit ships at sea, as well as long-range land targets, placing them within range of Chinese bases in the South China Sea and the mainland coast itself.

The coming of the second Trump administration, however, saw a significant reversal of US imperialism’s usual approach.

The “Liberation Day” tariffs the US levied on the world punished Asian countries, especially in Southeast Asia, most severely. Many of them, such as Indonesia and Vietnam, were slapped with tariff rates well above 30%. Yet these were precisely the countries that the previous administration had sought to woo.

This forced all countries in the region to begrudgingly negotiate unsatisfactory bilateral agreements with the US, which only pushed them away and tilted the balance towards China.

Malaysia’s Deputy Minister for Trade and Investment Liew Chin-Tong summarized this aptly in June 2025:

The Trump administration will set goalposts and change them at the last minute. We should think about the long term and rewire the way we think about trade.

Iran War

The sudden eruption of the US-Israeli war against Iran only accelerated this tendency, pushing Southeast Asia even further away from the US.

Economically, Asia (excluding China) was severely affected by the war, on account of its dependence on oil shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. According to the Asian Development Bank, if the disruption persists, GDP growth across the region in 2026 could come in 0.7% points lower as a result of the war, while inflation could accelerate to 5.6%.

Many countries had to take fiscal measures to immediately mitigate the economic impacts, further increasing their debt burdens. Not only that, the disruption to fertilizer imports threatens food security in many countries, such as the Philippines, where food insecurity is already a serious concern and could ratchet up social ferment.

All this is beginning to make the ruling classes of Southeast Asia consider whether the US is a greater danger to them than China. This is despite the fact that China has ongoing territorial disputes with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei in the South China Sea.

In the latest report published by Singapore’s think tank ISEAS—which surveys political and business elites across Southeast Asia—US global leadership has become their biggest geopolitical concern, displacing China’s “aggressive behavior in the South China Sea,” which now ranks third. This is particularly notable as concern about China actually topped the list last year.

The same poll indicates that 52% of respondents would choose to align with China, as opposed to 48% with the US, if they were forced to choose, which is yet another reversal of preference from what the regional ruling class prefers.

The reason is straightforward. China—with its close ties to Russia, its diversified energy sources and its vast stockpiles of strategic reserves—was far less exposed to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and was well placed to share out both its supplies and the green-energy products in which it now leads the world.

Several of the Southeast Asian states hit hardest by the crisis duly turned to Beijing. Vietnam quietly opened negotiations over a Chinese-financed LNG terminal, and even declined to back regional energy measures that might complicate the talks; Thailand asked China to help them convince Iran to free up eight Thai ships trapped in the Strait of Hormuz, in addition to assistance with stabilizing energy supply and costs.

Even the Philippines—locked in maritime disputes with Beijing—felt compelled to reopen talks in early April on joint oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, though the rapprochement proved short-lived.

The disruption also pushed some Asian countries to approach Russia, another of the US’s adversaries, in search of a more stable supply of oil, gas, fertilizer, and agricultural goods. Member states of ASEAN have already been approaching Russia individually, culminating in the bloc meeting with Putin on June 18, to agree to bolster economic ties. Among the attendees was Singapore, which previously joined the western sanctions against Russia at the outset of the war in Ukraine.

The defining dynamic of the situation is this: the US’s own behavior is pushing Southeast Asian countries further away, making some of them have to turn to the US’s adversaries in times of need. A frustrated Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow summed it up amply:

This is not about us taking sides in the geopolitical competition. It’s about what the U.S. is doing, which is forcing us to rethink some relationships.

Japan and the Quad pushed to the fore

Trump’s strategy—to the extent that he has one—is to restore declining US imperialism by making America’s allies pay. That means imposing tariffs that tip the balance of trade in America’s favor, while also forcing allies to pay for their own militaries to plug the gap that an overstretched US can no longer fill.

The Iran War has caused Trump to withdraw some of its military firepower, and lean more on weak local allies. For instance, it withdrew 2,500 Marines from Japan’s Ryukyu Islands, offloading ever more of the burden of containing China on them.

In South Korea, Trump hastily pulled out the THAAD missile system meant to defend the country from North Korea in March, only to put it back in June. Then, in mid-August, Trump suddenly declared his intention to “substantially reduce” ​joint military exercises with South Korea.

The Trump government had persistently demanded that countries on the “first island chain”—a string of archipelagos that together form a barrier between the seas surrounding China and the Pacific, and which include Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines—increase their defense spending.

In this way, these countries and their taxpayers are supposed to pay for the military “deterrence” against China and North Korea that the US has in mind. In Japan and Taiwan in particular, the scale and financing of defense budget increases have become the subject of significant political controversy.

Nonetheless, the Japanese government under Sanae Takaichi is now clearly moving to rearm, bolstering Japanese imperialism’s military strength and attempting to build an economic and military bloc in the region against China.

Since taking office, her cabinet has approved a record defense budget of $58 billion for the financial year beginning in April. This was a 9.4% increase on the previous year, putting Japan on track to become the world’s third-largest defense spender after the US and China.

Justifying a new militarist stance, Takaichi said last November that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” that would prompt Japan to take military action in “self-defense” to support Taiwan, a claim that provoked serious backlash from China. This was then used by her government to campaign for increasing Japan’s military spending, and to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution to formally permit it to engage in more militaristic practices.

Aside from bolstering its own military powers, Japanese imperialism is also aiming to be a part of a regional anti-China coalition in Asia.

In the past five years, Japan has actively stepped up bilateral military cooperation with Australia and Britain. The Quad—the US, Japan, India, and Australia—also plans to upgrade a port in Fiji, as a counterweight to China’s growing influence over the Solomon Islands and the South Pacific, and they plan to coordinate energy and mineral supply chain strategies to square off against China.

In May, during a joint military exercise involving the United States, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines in the South China Sea,Japan also fired a Type 88 anti-ship missile—a highly pointed signal against China. Since Trump took office, there have already been five such provocative military drills that the US, Japan, and the Philippines have conducted in the area.

Meanwhile, the Japanese arms industry has been growing significantly in recent years. The top five Japanese arms producers have been recording double-digit percentage growth in revenue in recent years, with combined arms revenue of $13.3 billion in 2024, up 40% year-on-year. The largest among them, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, grew its arms revenue 37%, to $5 billion that year.

This is no accident: to stop contractors abandoning the sector, the Japanese state has deliberately raised the guaranteed profit margin on defense contracts from 8% to 15%.

On April 21, the Japanese government scrapped the rules that had confined military exports to five non-lethal categories, permitting the export of lethal weapons—warships, missiles, combat aircraft—to the 17 countries with which it has defense equipment transfer agreements. Days earlier, the Australian government had signed a contract of over $7 billion with Mitsubishi to construct three upgraded Mogami-class multi-mission frigates—the first of eleven planned, and Japan’s largest defense export deal to date.

Much of Japan’s “target clientele” is in Southeast Asia. Japan has recently presented Indonesia with high-speed patrol boats, in the hope that the latter will go on to purchase more warships. The Philippines also recently signed a weapons export pact and maritime boundary agreement with Japan, which are pointedly against China.

Japan is also attempting to win over Southeast Asian countries through economic incentives—for instance, Japan has recently pledged to allocate $10 billion to help Asian countries weather the energy crisis, and has indicated it would even consider sharing its own oil reserves.

However, this is small change compared to what China can offer. Despite all of this, the chances of Japan winning over most Southeast Asian countries to an anti-China front remain slim. The depth of Southeast Asian countries’ trade and economic ties with China makes a conflict with China, which could only mean shutting oneself off from a major source of trade and investment, a poor proposition.

In contrast to China, Japan is a waning imperialist power in the region, one that is desperately attempting to maintain its position.

Japanese imperialist interests and influence in the region are unable to compete with growing Chinese influence. In fact, Japanese imperialism has been artificially propped up by the US since the end of World War II. Now, the US, to which Japanese imperialism always played second fiddle, is itself in a serious phase of decline, and it is therefore pushing Japan to foot the bill for its own defense.

Not unlike many of its imperialist peers in Europe, the rise of Japanese militarism is but the flailing of a third-rate power desperate to preserve its influence on the world stage, but which is doomed to fall behind. The result of all this is nevertheless to ratchet up tensions across the region.

Every man for themselves

Nonetheless, this is not to say that Southeast Asian countries are neatly realigning with China and Russia, especially when it comes to the former. Rather, many countries are attempting to balance between the two and gain autonomy from both camps.

As the aforementioned ISEAS survey of members of the ruling class of the region indicates, nearly 80% want ASEAN either to remain non-aligned (24%) or to close ranks and build its own strength to resist great-power pressure (55%). Just six percent favor siding wholly with either Washington or Beijing.

In an increasingly unstable world situation, with a vacuum opening where the US once stood, it is every man for himself. In Southeast Asia, this is manifesting in the growing militarization of all countries to defend their own interests.

For example, the Philippines and Vietnam have their own motivations to arm themselves against the threat that China poses to them in the South China Sea, having been historically locked in the sharpest South China Sea disputes with the rising power.

The Philippines has thrown in its lot with the US and Japan, and this year has had several confrontations with China over Scarborough Shoal, which is under Chinese occupation but claimed by the Philippines. One of these confrontations escalated to a stand-off of warships on both sides.

Vietnam, hewing to its “bamboo diplomacy” of equidistance, has been diversifying away from its longstanding reliance on Russian arms, buying from India, Israel and the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, its new Indian BrahMos missiles are aimed squarely at Chinese incursions into its waters.

Then there are countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, all of whom sit along the Malacca Strait, another key artery of world trade. 21% of the world’s maritime trade and 29% of oil trade pass through the Malacca Strait alone.

In the post-war order, the Malacca Strait had not been controlled by a single country, but the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting economic instability is now causing countries along the Strait to consider the advantages of seizing control for their own ends. In April, the Indonesian finance minister, Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, raised the possibility of installing a toll for Indonesia on the Malacca Strait, causing uproar throughout the region.

The backlash from neighboring countries led Indonesia to quickly walk back on this comment. However, Indonesia has been buying weapons from a variety of countries, such as France, Turkey, and India, in addition to the US and Japan, ostensibly to defend its own interests in the South China Sea.

Whoever controls the Strait has an enormously valuable trump card in their hand. An increasingly militarized Indonesia is thus a potential source of alarm for other countries along the Strait, including Singapore, which is already ASEAN’s largest military spender, and Malaysia. Singapore in particular had been the staunchest defender of the status quo in Malacca, because its economy heavily depends on being a port along trade through the route.

Furthermore, as Brookings Institution researcher Lynn Kuok pointed out, these Straits don’t need to be actually closed to cause serious economic damage; the mere threat of disruption is enough to raise insurance premiums, reroute shipping, and unsettle commodity markets.

On the other side, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia are now tightly part of China’s orbit, bound by deep economic ties and Belt and Road infrastructure projects, and the US has lost its sway over them for some time. Nonetheless, both Thailand and Cambodia are re-arming, especially after the war between them last year. Myanmar is already inundated with weapons as the regime continues to fight several armed militia groups in an ongoing civil war, and continues to have tense relations with other ASEAN countries.

The common thread is not a shared alignment but growing insecurity, which expresses itself in military spending. According to SIPRI, Southeast Asian military expenditure hit $67.1 billion in 2025, up 15% on the year and 43 percent across the decade to 2025, with Indonesia (+28%, to $15 billion) and Vietnam (+27%, to $10.5 billion) leading the surge. The receding of the American hegemon is bringing not order, but a region arming itself against an uncertain future.

March towards militarism

The weakening of US imperialism—which is responsible for countless deaths, destruction, and counterrevolutions—is a welcome fact for the masses of Southeast Asia. But as long as capitalism as a system remains, what follows will not be harmonious co-existence amongst peoples, but an even greater escalation of tensions between powers and states in the region.

This situation clearly refutes those championing “multipolarity” as a preferable alternative system of world relations to one dominated by the US. In fact, the weakening of the US merely means more states will play by the rule of the jungle, and they will play with the lives of millions to maintain their own interests. The specter of war is now haunting Southeast Asia.

The solution is not to call on the ruling classes of these countries to align with this or that power, but for the working class to overthrow capitalism internationally. Alongside the militarism of the ruling classes, there is also the growing revolutionary potential of the Southeast Asian masses, especially the workers and youth. The Gen Z revolution that began in Indonesia last year and spread around the world is but a glimpse of things to come.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in May—attended not just by Southeast Asian states, but also by the US and many European countries—the Dutch defense minister Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius said bluntly that, nowadays, “you’re either on the menu or you’re having a seat at the table.” Such is the cannibalistic nature of the capitalist system.

Towards these bloodthirsty rulers, imperialists and their system, revolutionary communists would counterpose these lines written by Chinese revolutionary writer Lu Xun:

The feast of human flesh goes on, and many want it to continue. Wiping out these cannibals, upturning this feast, and destroying this kitchen, is the task of the youth today.