No part of the world will be hit harder by President Trump’s barrage of “reciprocal” tariffs than the Asia-Pacific region.
Despite his 90-day pause in imposing them, some of Mr. Trump’s steepest tariff rates still hang over developing economies such as Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka that are highly dependent on trade. He has also threatened lower but still substantial penalties on wealthy trading partners — Japan, South Korea and Australia — that are important U.S. geopolitical allies in the region, as well as Taiwan.
Mr. Trump thinks this will lower American trade deficits and bring manufacturing back to the United States. That remains to be seen.
But his misguided, incompetent attack on global trade threatens to irreparably harm U.S. influence across the world’s most commercially dynamic region, leaving a vacuum for China to fill. In the long run, Mr. Trump’s actions raise the possibility of the United States ceding its dominant position in Asia-Pacific security. Why, after all, would an increasingly inward-looking America defend a region where it has a reduced economic stake?
The U.S. leadership in Asia that Mr. Trump is gambling with was patiently built up over generations. After World War II, diplomats like George Kennan developed a strategy for prevailing over the Soviet Union by knitting together the most prosperous regions of the world — the United States, Europe and Japan — into one political and economic bloc. That resulting rules-based economic system later expanded to export-focused economies across Asia.
Security alliances accompanied this — NATO in Europe, defense treaties with Japan, South Korea and others in the Asia-Pacific. This brought American allies under the U.S. military umbrella and protected the broader liberal economic order. Free trade and capital flows flourished. U.S. multinationals profited from supply chains rooted in Asia, American consumers enjoyed cheaper products and Asian countries developed rapidly and integrated with the U.S.-led system. Decades of American economic and geopolitical pre-eminence in the Asia-Pacific followed.
