Southeast Asia Multialignment and U.S. Grand Strategy: Beyond China and Trump Prisms

By: Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran

Figure 1: Participating Ships from ASEAN and U.S. Navies Sailing in Formation
Source: MINDEF Singapore

Introduction

As the world faces a confident and assertive China, longstanding anxieties around U.S. commitment in Asia have persisted and intensified in some quarters under U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Southeast Asian nations experience these concerns acutely. Located at the heart of the Indo-Pacific region, Southeast Asia is on the front lines of major power geopolitical competition and is central to evolving geoeconomic dynamics. Several of these countries harbor concerns about challenges to the rules-based international order. While a diverse region and far from a unified market or polity, Southeast Asia is nonetheless collectively the world’s fifth-largest economy and third-most populous actor when characterized as comprising the region’s 11 countries: Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

This policy brief explores Southeast Asia’s role within shifting dynamics in U.S. grand strategy, the Indo-Pacific order, and the global order. Informed by extensive interviews conducted on off-the-record and on-background bases with policymakers in the United States and all 11 countries in Southeast Asia, along with field research to regional capitals from 2023 through the first half of 2026, this brief makes three arguments:

1. U.S. attention to Southeast Asia is being constrained by the reality that U.S. policymakers, operating in a more contested domestic political environment, are stretched for resources as they manage a series of geopolitical and geoeconomic shocks, including Russia’s war in Ukraine, globalized U.S.-China competition, and military involvement in Latin America and the Middle East. This is visible across the three components of an originally -generated “3S” framework­—sustenance, sovereignty, and stewardship—used to describe U.S. grand strategy, developed by the author and informed by policy conversations with U.S. officials and diplomats. Southeast Asian states are exercising their own agency in response to this U.S. policy environment. The author’s extensive on-the-ground conversations in regional capitals revealed that these local adjustments can be described with a parallel, corresponding Southeast Asian “3S” framework, featuring synergistic, systemic, and solidarist components. The use of these dual, separate, and parallel “3S” frameworks—one to describe U.S. policy and one to describe Southeast Asian responses—best explains the action-reaction dynamics between U.S. policy and Southeast Asian responses. This is occurring through a wider process through which countries are aligning actions across various layers of their foreign policy worldviews subnationally, nationally,  subregionally, regionally, and globally in what may be characterized more simply as multialignment.
2. Southeast Asian states are exercising their own agency in response to this U.S. policy environment. The author’s extensive on-the-ground conversations in regional capitals revealed that these local adjustments can be described with a parallel, corresponding Southeast Asian “3S” framework, featuring synergistic, systemic, and solidarist components. The use of these dual, separate, and parallel “3S” frameworks—one to describe U.S. policy and one to describe Southeast Asian responses—best explains the action-reaction dynamics between U.S. policy and Southeast Asian responses. This is occurring through a wider process through which countries are aligning actions across various layers of their foreign policy worldviews subnationally, nationally,  subregionally, regionally, and globally in what may be characterized more simply as multialignment.
3. To navigate the dynamics inherent in the two aforementioned frameworks and forge closer ties in the years to come, the United States and capable and willing Southeast Asian countries need to engage across all four domains of statecraft encompassed in the acronym DIME—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.

Southeast Asia and U.S. Grand Strategy in Perspective

U.S. grand strategy can be simply explained using the author’s “3S” framework (first posited in the author’s book Elusive Balances: Shaping U.S. Southeast Asia Strategy; see Figure 2.): (1) sustenance (preserving access to trade routes and military outposts); (2) sovereignty (protecting the U.S. way of life and managing the influence of foreign and nonstate actors); and (3) stewardship (undertaking U.S. leadership in convening and agenda-setting). How any American government prioritizes each “S” depends on its relative primacist, nationalist, and internationalist inclinations.

Seen from this perspective, U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia has undergone a recurrent series of ebbs, flows, and imbalances since the Vietnam War. Examples of U.S. episodic attention to the region include perceived over-securitization during the Bush administration’s war on terror; under-resourcing of the Obama administration’s “pivot” or “rebalance”; and a deprioritization of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (subsequently renamed the CPTPP) under both Trump and Biden. It is no surprise Singapore’s late founding premier Lee Kuan Yew once noted that “Southeast Asians are more acutely aware of the uncertainties of U.S. policies than other regions of the world.”

Figure 2: Depiction of Southeast Asia’s Relevance to Key U.S. Interests, Priorities, and Tendencies

Source: Table generated by author

When asked by the author to forecast the strategic environment in the late 2020s and into the 2030s in on-background settings, most Southeast Asian policymakers admitted that they would expect a more selective U.S. engagement with Southeast Asia to continue. As one senior official from a Southeast Asian country put it, Washington is seeking to “do more with less and sometimes less with less.”

The second Trump administration has arguably practiced a more extreme variant of selective engagement, with a narrowed U.S. interest definition across all three elements of the “3S” framework. In briefings the author attended featuring U.S. officials both in Washington, DC, and in key Southeast Asian capitals, U.S. and Southeast Asian policymakers agreed that American policy would be responsive to how Southeast Asian states contribute to making America—as one U.S. official put it—“safer, stronger, and more successful.” The usual talking points about Southeast Asia’s aggregate significance—such as its relatively young population or location along major trade routes—are being replaced by narrower scrutiny on what value each individual Southeast Asian country has to offer in terms of concrete U.S. interests.

Evolving Southeast Asia Responses to Shifting U.S. Policy

Conversations with policymakers across Southeast Asian capitals suggest a corresponding Southeast Asian “3S” framework is helpful in assessing regional responses to shifting U.S. policy (see Figure 3): (1) synergistic adjustments (rebalancing priorities in bilateral relations with the United States); (2) systemic adjustments (reforming internal and external structures and processes); and (3) solidarist adjustments (reinforcing relationships with other countries and institutions beyond Washington amid a shifting global order). As this “3S” framework illustrates, countries are responding to shifting U.S. policy in three distinct ways. This is occurring through a wider process through which countries are aligning actions across layers of their foreign policy worldviews subnationally, nationally, subregionally, regionally, and globally through a process posited in the author’s book Mandalas of Multialignment.

First, on the synergistic front, Southeast Asian states are rebalancing bilateral relationships in response to shifting partnership expectations and realities, including growing U.S. requests. For instance, some Malaysian interlocutors have noted that the country recognizes the need to shape Washington’s thinking on Kuala Lumpur’s position within regional partnerships and “trusted” networks, which it has sought to do via a new comprehensive strategic partnership (agreed to in October 2025) and a series of other pacts pertaining to issues like critical minerals. The Philippines has intensified conversations with the United States and like-minded partners like Japan on contingency planning related to the South China Sea (which accounts for at least a third of global shipping) and Taiwan (where invasion fallout could cost the world 10 percent of global GDP by one estimate). Thailand, despite its own challenges, has positioned itself as a key state in addressing scam centers, a priority for the second Trump administration, which by one count affected more than a third of the world’s countries.

Second, on the systemic front, Southeast Asian states are also taking actions to adjust their internal and external structures and processes. Internally, to take just one example, amid concerns around Chinese “overcapacity” in the Global South and a “second China shock,” Southeast Asian states including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam have introduced measures designed to insulate their markets from unfair competition. These measures include probes, duties, and restrictions on specific items of concern as well as requirements and regulations in certain sectors like electric vehicles and critical minerals. Externally, officials also note that there are efforts at play to break down silos within ASEAN and promote more “cross-pillared” and interagency conversations. In 2025, for example, ASEAN convened the first joint foreign and economic ministers meetings in decades. In 2026, it held the first-of-its-kind combined defense exercise among ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus) members, which include Southeast Asian states and dialogue partners including the United States.

Third and finally, on the solidarist component, Southeast Asian states are also reinforcing relationships with other countries and institutions beyond Washington amid a shifting global order. Examples include Indonesia and Thailand pursuing accession to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Philippines and Indonesia officially applying to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Some countries are also playing a role in new groupings as well. Singapore is a founding member of the cross-continental Future of Investment and Trade Partnership (FIT-P), which has included workstreams on so-called “economic security” issues like supply chain resilience.

Figure 3: Depiction of Select Regional Responses to the United States and Shifting Regional and Global Dynamics

Policy Component	Description	Regional Examples
Synergistic	Rebalancing bilateral relationships in response to shifting partnership expectations and realities	New bilateral pacts in areas like critical minerals and the digital domain; reinforced contingency planning around flashpoints like the South China Sea and Taiwan
Systemic	Adjusting internal and external structures and processes governing foreign policy management	New geoeconomic insulation measures in response to China’s rising economic influence, including product probes and “cross-pillar” activities in ASEAN
Solidarist	Reinforcing ties with other like-minded countries and institutions amid a shifting global order	Institutional participation in groupings such as BRICS (originally comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the OECD; founding of the FIT-P as a pathfinding sectoral initiative

Source: Table generated by author

Policy Recommendations

Given these changes, what can policymakers in Southeast Asia and the United States do moving forward? To comprehensively navigate shifting dynamics and forge closer ties in the years to come, the United States and capable and willing Southeast Asian countries need to engage across all four domains of statecraft encompassed by the acronym DIME—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. Six particular lines of effort laid out below should be prioritized—the first three for Southeast Asian states and the next three for the United States.

Southeast Asian states should:

1. Intensify domestic sectoral ecosystem building to manage geopolitical competition.

Southeast Asian states should actively shape geoeconomic ecosystem building in key sectoral areas at home and abroad so that they can make choices of their own as they engage with Washington and other partners and as U.S.-China competition continues to play out in the coming years. The focus should be on the management of so-called “commanding heights” of economies such as telecommunications. Emphasis should also be placed on regulating financial flows in areas considered to impact national security like electoral infrastructure, critical minerals, and advanced technologies.

2. Broaden and deepen stakeholder engagement as a foundation for ties.

Southeast Asian states should broaden and deepen stakeholder engagement in the United States in order to advance their own interests in a more competitive policy environment. With respect to U.S. government engagement, Southeast Asian governments should prioritize issue areas like technology or critical minerals that have bipartisan support, as mechanisms built around these issue areas are more likely to endure. For instance, Singapore’s previous forging of a tech partnership with the United States helped in agenda-setting in the U.S.-Singapore partnership. Beyond the U.S. federal government, Southeast Asian embassies should accelerate ongoing efforts to step up diplomatic activity in individual American states. Engaging more with players in regional technology hubs beyond Silicon Valley and with educational institutions will also be critical given the multi-stakeholder nature of sectoral policy development in the United States in areas such as artificial intelligence.

3. Strengthen regional responsiveness to shocks affecting relations.

Southeast Asian states should work with other partners including the United States to strengthen regional responsiveness to geopolitical and geoeconomic shocks. Geopolitically, one area to prioritize is conflict prevention and crisis management, which has already gotten emphasis from partners like Australia given intra-regional episodes such as the Thailand-Cambodia border clashes. Forward-leaning Southeast Asian countries also need to push for establishing more institutional coordination in areas like consular assistance for citizen evacuation flights, the need for which has become apparent during the intensifying Middle East conflict (and could also become relevant in a future Taiwan scenario). Geoeconomically, Southeast Asian states should institutionalize and regularize exercises like the first-ever ASEAN Geoeconomics Report, in which the private sector was directly engaged as part of the report’s formulation. The report’s key recommendations included shoring up monitoring mechanisms and advancing sectoral pacts in priority areas such as the digital and energy domains.

The United States should:

4. Solidify regional maritime deterrence in and beyond the First Island Chain.

The United States should work with allies and partners within and outside the region to solidify maritime deterrence in and beyond the First Island Chain. A central part of this approach will be to intensify the integration of the Philippines into minilateral security networking with fellow treaty allies like Japan and Australia to prepare for future scenarios. A more challenging but critical component is finding flexible ways to expand access, basing, and overflight (ABO) arrangements with other maritime Southeast Asian states, which are typically used to looser alignments but open to more modest ways of working more closely with Washington. In this regard, the expansion of military exercises to include new partners may prove fruitful. Recent examples include the trilateralization of the U.S.-Malaysia Keris Strike exercise to include Australia and the multinationalization of U.S.-Indonesia exercises via Super Garuda Shield—the third such major effort in Southeast Asia after Cobra Gold in Thailand and Balikatan in the Philippines.

5. Deliver on reimagined and targeted regional capacity-building.

The United States should work with allies and partners to deliver on reimagined and targeted capacity-building that takes into account recent American aid cuts. The emphasis should be on leaning into the demand signal for plugging governance gaps in spaces lacking “soft infrastructure”—the services, systems, and standards that undergird physical assets such as power grids. The Mekong subregion should be a critical focus given both the effect of giant scam centers on average Americans as well as the inroads China is attempting to make to fill development needs. Beyond this, Washington should embrace alternative modes of capacity-building, as it did with the “corridor” model previously applied to the Luzon Economic Corridor in the Philippines, that could provide it with asymmetric advantages over Beijing.

6. Boost prioritization of regional narrative development and the information domain.

U.S. policymakers should boost prioritization of regional narrative development to better engage with Southeast Asian publics, reinforce policies, and counter disinformation. The primary emphasis should be on supporting regional media resilience and independence by engaging with a diverse array of content creators and trusted interlocutors in this space. This may also afford U.S. policymakers opportunities to reinforce the transparency of the American system relative to that of China. Another priority area should be reinforcing ongoing quiet collaboration with regional states in countering foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) by actors including China.