How Trump’s trade policy is handing Asia to Beijing

From the source

For a decade, Washington urged the world’s manufacturers to move their factories out of China and into friendly Southeast Asian states—only to attack the very countries and companies that answered the call. Usually, U.S. economic statecraft is designed to help American companies succeed abroad. President Donald Trump’s punitive trade program is having the reverse effect. Broad-based import taxes have jolted manufacturers across ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), including American ones. Rather than checking China, trade policy is alienating regional partners, harming supply-chain diversification, and eroding America’s influence over the bloc’s trade decisions. The U.S. is engaged in what Evan Feigenbaum, a veteran diplomat and former Republican, terms a “reverse pivot.” Bogged down in foreign crises elsewhere, Washington now projects hesitation and retreat in Asia rather than dynamic leadership. In the months after President Trump’s April 2025 announcement of…

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