The Region That Never Chose a Side

There is a widely read essay circulating this week, by the Hudson Institute’s John Lee in Foreign Affairs, with a bracing argument: Asia has learned to live with “America First” while Europe is still reeling. Washington’s Asian allies, Lee writes, saw the transactional, unsentimental United States coming and got to work; Europe mistook a phase for a permanent order and was caught flat-footed mourning it.

He is right. He is also, from where we sit, describing only half of Asia.

Read the essay closely and the “Asia” in it is a specific place: the treaty allies. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand — the states that live under an American security umbrella and calculate, rationally, that tolerating an unequal deal with Washington beats taking orders from Beijing. That is a real and important story. But it is not Southeast Asia’s story, and the region that handled “America First” with the least drama of anyone is the one Lee mostly leaves out.

The fastest dealmakers in the room

Start with the evidence Lee would appreciate, because it proves his point better than his own examples do.

When the “Liberation Day” tariffs landed in April 2025, Southeast Asia was hit about as hard as anywhere — preliminary duties ranging from the high teens to nearly fifty per cent. There was no bloc-wide threat of retaliation, no lecture about the rules-based order, no scramble to present a united front. Instead, one government after another picked up the phone and cut a deal. Within months, the numbers had converged: nineteen per cent for Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Cambodia; twenty for Vietnam. Fast, bilateral, unsentimental — and, as one Washington analysis put it, delivered with “quick deals” and “lasting dread” in equal measure.

This is exactly the behaviour Lee praises in Tokyo and Seoul: look at the world as it is, not as you wish it were, and get the best available terms in the new system rather than grieve the old one. Southeast Asia did it faster and with fewer illusions than anyone. We traced one version of it in Vietnam’s twenty-per-cent deal, where the sharper penalty was reserved for goods merely passing through from China — the tariff aimed squarely at the hedge itself.

Same calm, opposite reason

Here is where the InsideASEAN vantage adds something to Lee’s.

His allies are calm because they have chosen. Japan and the Philippines deal with an unpredictable Washington because the alternative — a region run by China — is, to them, unambiguously worse. Their pragmatism is the pragmatism of the junior partner who has picked a senior one and intends to keep him.

Southeast Asia is calm for the opposite reason: it has chosen no one. The through-line of the region’s foreign policy, from the Bandung Conference of 1955 to today’s doctrine of strategic autonomy, is a refusal to become anybody’s dependent. Analysts now prefer the term “strategic multi-alignment” to the older “non-alignment” — less a passive avoidance of blocs than an active cultivation of every partner at once. Either way, the instinct is the same, and it is seventy years old: never marry anyone, and you can never be left.

That is why “America First” produced so little panic here. You cannot break a promise you never extracted. Where Europe built its post-war identity inside an American guarantee — and now grieves it — Southeast Asia built its identity around the guarantee it would never receive from anyone. It has been running a transactional, no-illusions foreign policy since long before the phrase was coined in a Washington campaign.

The harder trick

What Southeast Asia is doing is also harder than what Lee’s allies face, and worth saying plainly.

For a treaty ally, China is the threat and America is the check — a clean, if uncomfortable, equation. For most of Southeast Asia, China is the largest trading partner and the power pressing claims in the South China Sea, at the same time. There is no clean equation. The region cannot bandwagon against Beijing the way Tokyo can, because Beijing is also the customer, the lender and the neighbour who is not going anywhere. So it runs both relationships in parallel, taking American security attention and Chinese money and conceding permanent loyalty to neither.

Done well, it is a genuine skill rather than mere fence-sitting, and Southeast Asia has more practice at it than any treaty ally. Done badly, it leaves a country exposed on every side at once — which is the real limit here. ASEAN’s weakness has always been cohesion: ten states with ten different exposures, a mainland that leans toward China and a maritime south that leans toward America, held together by a consensus so careful it can look like paralysis. As the vice tightens — tariffs, chips, the sea — “not choosing” gets harder to sustain, and the hedge stops being free.

What Europe should actually learn

Lee’s essay is addressed to Europe, and its advice — stop mourning, start dealing — is sound. But the deepest lesson comes less from America’s Asian allies than from the Asians who were never allies at all.

Europe’s disorientation, on this reading, is the disorientation of a region that spent eighty years inside a benign hegemon’s tent and mistook the tent for the sky. Southeast Asia never made that error, because it was never fully inside. It learned, out of necessity, the one habit Europe now has to acquire late and under duress: to treat great powers as weather rather than family — something you dress for, never something you trust. It is the same posture we described in the region’s wait-and-see capital: hedged, unsentimental, loyal to its own survival first.

Asia learned to live with “America First,” as the essay says. But the part of Asia that learned it earliest, and holds it most lightly, is the part that never believed in the alternative — and never will.

This analysis engages with John Lee’s essay “How Asia Learned to Live With ‘America First,’” published in Foreign Affairs, and draws on reporting and analysis from Al Jazeera, CSIS, the China-Global South Project and the East Asia Forum, each linked above; figures were checked independently against primary reporting, and any errors are our own. See also our companion pieces on Vietnam’s growth ambitions and Indonesia’s wait-and-see capital.