Amid the usual diplomatic pageantry, the 2025 Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit revealed a widening disconnect between the United States and Southeast Asia. While President Donald Trump’s attendance and a series of bilateral announcements—especially with Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam—drew considerable attention, regional responses to the outcomes reflected a more cautious and calibrated reading. For many ASEAN member states, going along with the flurry of U.S.-led trade and security deals was a tactical response to unpredictable U.S. trade policy rather than a reset in strategic trust.
At the heart of this dynamic lies a growing divergence in how ASEAN and the U.S. view economic engagement in a contested Indo-Pacific region. The U.S. offered sector-specific concessions, such as zero tariffs for select goods, reciprocal market access and major purchases of agricultural and manufactured products from the region. But it maintained a high baseline tariff rate overall, while leaving key issues unresolved, including the absence of enforcement mechanisms and lack of clarity on origin and transshipment rules. Arguably more beneficial to the U.S. than to the other signatories, these deals were mostly narrow in scope and ad hoc in structure, lacking the institutional depth and multilateral foundations that ASEAN typically favors.
The emphasis on bilateral deals reflects a longstanding pattern in Trump’s approach to trade negotiations, one marked by open skepticism toward multilateral frameworks like ASEAN. From his 2017 withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to his preference for transactional, one-on-one negotiations, Trump has consistently sidelined regional institutions in favor of bilateral leverage, a posture that sits uneasily with ASEAN’s commitment to inclusive, rules-based cooperation. Malaysia, for example, admitted that it had no choice but to accept a provision in its deal requiring it to align with U.S. sanctions and export controls on third countries, sparking criticism of what some Malaysians called an “act of surrender.” This highlights the asymmetrical nature of the negotiations and the limited maneuvering space for smaller states under pressure.
