Asia Is Getting Dangerously Unbalanced

With all the chaos currently engulfing U.S. foreign policy, it’s easy to lose sight of some more fundamental aspects of global politics. We’ve all been distracted by Signalgate, the Russia-Ukraine negotiations, the Trump administration’s increasingly obvious animus toward Europe, a looming trade war, the self-inflicted wound of a deteriorating U.S.-Canada relationship, and the systematic assault on democratic institutions inside the United States. If you’re having trouble keeping up with all this mishigas, you’re not alone.

Let me pull you away from the headlines for a moment and invite you to focus on a big issue with long-term implications: the future of U.S. alliances in Asia. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking a break from using an insecure app to text his colleagues (and a journalist) about attack plans in Yemen and is off trying to reassure U.S. allies in Asia. I wish him luck because the combination of Hegseth’s inexperience and the administration’s policies to date won’t make that easy.

Until recently, I would have explained this topic with a simple, familiar, and rather reassuring story based on good old-fashioned, realist balance of power/threat theory. That story would begin with China’s extraordinary rise from poverty, technological deficiency, and military weakness to its present position as the world’s No. 2 power, along with its sustained efforts to assert territorial control over the South China Sea and revise other important aspects of the international and regional status quo.

In this story, these dramatic developments eventually alarmed the United States and most of China’s immediate neighbors. As a result, a balancing coalition began to form—starting with America’s existing Asian allies but gradually expanding to include several other states. The clear objective of this coalition was straightforward: to prevent China from dominating the region. Key elements of that effort included shifting additional U.S. forces to the region; negotiating the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States; signing the Camp David agreement for enhanced security cooperation between the United States, South Korea, and Japan; convincing the Philippines to reverse course and deepen its ties with the United States (including a greater U.S. military presence there); expanding security cooperation with India; and continuing the work of the so-called Quad (including the United States, India, Japan, and Australia). Another sign was greater regional support for Taiwan, including then-Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi’s June 2021 statement that “the peace and stability of Taiwan are directly connected to Japan.”

The moral of the story is clear: The United States and its Asian partners have powerful and obvious reasons to continue and deepen their alliance ties, no matter who occupies the White House. It also implies an optimistic conclusion: The balance of power will work as described, and a Chinese attempt to dominate the region would be self-defeating.

Make no mistake: I like my simple story, and I think there’s considerable truth in it. But there are also growing reasons to question it—and above all not to be overly complacent.

For starters, China hasn’t been sitting on its hands. It’s adapting to these new circumstances and, in some cases, succeeding. The launch of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence model isn’t quite a “Sputnik moment,” but it demonstrated an ability to innovate around some of the barriers the United States has tried to impose on Chinese technology developments. China continues to pour a lot of money and effort into its domestic chipmaking capacity and quantum computing, and it already dominates a host of green technologies (such as electric vehicles) that the United States is turning its back on. China’s universities and research institutes continue to improve, at a moment when the Trump administration is targeting U.S. universities on dubious grounds, making it harder for American scientists to collaborate with foreign counterparts, and cutting federal funding for research and development. If you’re accustomed to thinking that the United States will always lead the technological frontier, think again.

Second, one of America’s most important Asian allies—South Korea—is in political turmoil, following impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol’s failed attempt to impose martial law back in December 2024. Even if the present crisis is eventually resolved and stability restored, South Korean society is likely to remain sharply polarized. There is also the distinct possibility that opposition leader Lee Jae-myung will eventually gain the presidency, and Lee has been more skeptical of U.S.-Korea ties and has favored a more conciliatory approach to China and North Korea in the past.

Third, China faces serious demographic issues, but so do Japan and South Korea. The median age in Taiwan is 44, in South Korea it’s nearly 45, and in Japan it is almost 50. In the United States it’s roughly 38, and in China it is a little over 40. By contrast, the Indian, Indonesian, and Philippine populations are much younger, with median ages under 30. For the former countries, shrinking and increasingly older populations will make it harder to increase their military capabilities significantly, if only because taking young men and women out of the workforce and putting them in uniform makes the economy less productive.

And then there’s the collective action problem. Even when states face a common threat and have obvious incentives to help one another address it, they will be tempted to let others do the heavy lifting or take the biggest risks. This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course, but it is also not going to go away. It can be overcome with strong alliance leadership and sustained diplomacy, but it is not obvious that either will be in abundant supply in the years ahead.

Which brings me to the Trump administration.

On the one hand, President Donald Trump has said China is an economic and military rival, and there are prominent China hawks in key positions in his administration. Confronting China is also one of the few issues on which there is wide bipartisan support. But on the other hand, U.S. businesses leaders (and especially people such as Elon Musk) don’t want a clash with China to disrupt their own commercial dealings with Beijing. Trump has expressed doubts about defending Taiwan in the past, and one of the administration’s first moves was to pressure Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC to invest some $100 billion in the United States over the next few years. Trump thinks of himself as a master dealmaker (despite an unimpressive track record), and he’d like to negotiate some sort of bargain with Chinese President Xi Jinping, with whom he claims to have a good relationship. Who knows what he might give away in that context? The bottom line is that it is hard to know exactly how the Trump administration sees China or what it might be prepared to do (or not do) in Asia.

Furthermore, there’s a deep contradiction between the strategic objective of countering China and Trump’s protectionist approach to allies and adversaries alike. The United States hasn’t had a serious economic strategy for Asia since Trump killed off the Trans-Pacific Partnership at the start of his first term, and the Biden administration didn’t come up with one either. The tariffs just announced on foreign automobiles and auto parts will hit South Korea and Japan hard, which is hardly an ideal way to encourage greater strategic solidarity with either country. Beijing was quick to exploit the opening, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressing the “great potential” for trade and stability in a recent meeting with Japanese and South Korean officials, telling them that “close neighbors are better than relatives far away.”

Trump and Musk are also in the process of disrupting important government institutions, replacing experienced officials with loyalists, and presiding over amateur hour at the National Security Council and the Defense Department. If I were a U.S. ally in Asia, the loss of expertise and the removal of restraints on presidential whims would worry me. A lot.

Finally, one must consider whether the basic character of the U.S. government is being transformed in ways that will undermine some of the glue that has held America’s Asian alliances together. Although these arrangements have never been dependent on shared values or institutions (i.e., South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines were all dictatorships for extended periods), the fact that most U.S. partners in Asia have been like-minded democracies in recent years has helped reinforce those ties. If the United States is on the road to autocracy itself, however, that additional source of unity (not to mention the previously clear distinction between the U.S. and Chinese political orders) will be gone.

Good realist that I am, I still think my simple story has merit. States in anarchy tend to be acutely sensitive to threats, and a powerful and increasingly ambitious China gives its neighbors and the United States ample reason to work together to limit Beijing’s sway. If forced to guess, I’d say that America’s Asian alliances will survive because the United States does not want China to become a hegemonic power in Asia, it cannot work to prevent that without partners in the region, and those potential partners don’t want to live within a Chinese sphere of influence. But I’m not as confident of that prediction as I once was.