US allies and partners are nervous about Donald Trump’s positions on the South China Sea, the Korean peninsula and Ukraine, and might pursue more independent policies while boosting their mutual ties this year, Indo-Pacific experts said on Tuesday.
American leadership under Trump, the prohibitive favourite for the Republican presidential nomination this year, would bring about “significant changes” in the postures adopted by US allies on issues like nuclearisation or their own defence, according to Charles Edel of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Nobody should be surprised that a change in US administration could prompt “allies to begin pursuing more independent policies”, said Edel, a former senior adviser to the State Department, during an event at the Washington based-think tank on Tuesday.
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Citing an anonymous Japanese diplomat, he added that “whoever is elected in the United States, you have to act like it’s Christmas morning”, suggesting that despite being wary of Trump’s return, allies would try to work with the US.
US allies and partners would prefer to “accelerate” bolstering deterrence against the likes of China, Russia and North Korea, but they were moving towards a “wait-and-see-mode” pending the American election results this November, Edel said.
The Indo-Pacific was one of many theatres that the US was paying attention to, along with Ukraine and the Middle East, amid a fiercely partisan debate domestically over the federal budget, he added.
After his inauguration in 2021, US President Joe Biden declared that “America is back” on the global stage. US support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and a patchwork of alliances in Asia signalled his resolve to maintain American global leadership.
If Trump withdrew American support for Ukraine’s war, the “knock-on effects” both in Europe and the Indo-Pacific would be “quite vast”, Edel said.
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But Trump, who on Monday handily won the support of Republican voters in Iowa in that state’s caucuses to identify a candidate to run against Biden, is widely expected to reverse that stance and renew the “America-first” approach he came to embody.
For instance, he has claimed he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of being president.
And even though the Trump administration from 2016 to 2020 enjoyed “relative” popularity in the Philippines, Gregory Poling of CSIS said that was partly because Trump focused on making South Korea and Japan spend extra on defence.
Noting that Trump never publicly uttered the phrase South China Sea during his presidency, Poling said there were concerns in the Philippines about “unpredictability” over where the former leader stood on the contentious region.
“It’s just not an issue he cared about,” added Poling, a South China Sea expert, calling it a “tall order” to convince Trump that a rules-based order and freedom of navigation were in America’s national interest.
To strengthen their defences, the Philippines and Japan are currently negotiating a deal allowing the deployment of their respective troops on each other’s soil.
Poling also warned the US could risk losing support from Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia if a Trump administration proved “indelicate” over Middle East tensions.
A historic trilateral deal Biden secured last year between the US, Japan and South Korea could lead Seoul and Tokyo to announce normalised bilateral defence ties at “some point this year”, said long-time Indo-Pacific expert Christopher Johnstone of CSIS.
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The two Asian countries have long viewed each other with deep suspicion, but in recent years have cooperated on overlapping strategic interests.
Johnstone believed “this might be a year where you see a real sort of solidifying of the Japan-South Korea leg of this trilateral in particular”.
Amid concerns over what a Trump presidency would likely mean for Washington’s standing in the eyes of its allies, experts at an Atlantic Council event on Tuesday stressed the importance of working with democracies to build defence capabilities.
One of democracy’s fundamental comparative advantages was that it facilitates “attracting allies and partners” in capabilities that are currently undervalued by Washington, said James “Hondo” Geurts, a former undersecretary of the US Navy.
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The retired US Air Force colonel’s remarks came at the launch of a report aimed at improving both the implementation of technologies and management of defence resources in the US.
“We need to have the knowledge, we need to build networks, we need to start building trust, and then that can really open up a much greater industrial capacity than just what we have onshore here on the US side,” Geurts said.
“Great ideas exist all around the world, not just in the US.”
Additional reporting by Igor Patrick in Washington
More from South China Morning Post:
- ‘Likely to agitate China’: European powers step up their Indo-Pacific presence – to a mixed Southeast Asian reaction
- South Korea says US troops won’t be reduced even if Trump wins presidency
- Eyeing ‘if Trump’ scenario, Japan must commit to its own defence
- Can US maintain focus on Asia-Pacific while distracted by conflicts in Ukraine, Middle East?
- India to seek ‘reassurance’ on US Indo-Pacific focus, defence ties in ‘2+2’ talks amid China outreach
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