Is the US really losing to China in Southeast Asia?

Over the past couple of years, a consensus among analysts and scholars has emerged: except in the Philippines, the United States is losing ground to China in Southeast Asia. Whether it’s a lack of positive US economic engagement with the region, patchy diplomatic attention, or a loss of support in Muslim-majority countries owing to US support for Israel, the story has not been a good one. The second Trump administration’s policies, especially to raise tariffs on the region’s trade-exposed economies, are only likely to worsen the US position in the region.

Yet writing in The Interpreter earlier this year, the Carnegie Endowment’s Elina Noor described the great power competition narrative in Southeast Asia as:

“a lazy, tired trope, repeated inside the region as well as beyond, that refuses to disappear despite pleas and exhortations by government leaders for greater nuance in explaining the foreign policy conduct of smaller states.”

Other scholars, such as The Asia Foundation’s Thomas Parks, have sought to set out a more comprehensive picture of Southeast Asia’s foreign policy partnerships. In his book, Southeast Asia’s Multipolar Future: Averting a New Cold War, Parks argued that the region was experiencing an “influx of external partner engagement”, to the extent that it was inaccurate to describe geopolitical competition in Southeast Asia as characterised by bipolar US-China competition.

A new Lowy Institute report, the Southeast Asia Influence Index, seeks to bring data to bear on two related questions: Is it right to describe the geopolitical dynamic in the region primarily a contest for influence between the United States and China? And secondly, to the extent there is a US-China competition in Southeast Asia, who is winning?

Drawing on the repository of data from the Asia Power Index, and other Lowy Institute research publications such as the Southeast Asia Aid Map and Global Diplomacy Index, this new project ranks the relative importance of ten external partners for each of the 11 countries of Southeast Asia, as well as the importance of Southeast Asian countries to each other. Taking in 60 diverse indicators from trade and investment to international student destinations and high-level diplomacy, the Southeast Asia Influence Index offers a bottom-up approach to measuring influence.

Overall, we found that China and the United States are the most influential partners for Southeast Asia as a whole. Reflecting their superpower status, no other external partner comes close to the same level of influence as Beijing or Washington.

China ranks first for economic relationships and diplomatic influence overall and has a consistent presence across almost all countries. The United States has not necessarily lost ground overall to China since 2017 (the first year covered by our data). But what is notable about US influence in the region is that it is heavily concentrated in just two countries: the Philippines and Singapore, for both of which Washington is a deep and indispensable security partner. Elsewhere in the region, US influence varies wildly. In Laos and Cambodia, for example, it is a more peripheral presence.

As for the role of the region’s other major partners – Japan, Australia, India and South Korea – none comes close to matching China or the United States overall across the region. Japan, the next most influential partner, and the only one of these partners with a truly multidimensional presence across the region, has around 75% of the influence of the United States. Australia is strong when it comes to government-led engagement through defence and diplomacy, but weaker on economic and cultural ties. India’s influence is concentrated in Myanmar and maritime Southeast Asian countries where the strategic rationale for defence cooperation is strongest. South Korea is a critical partner for Vietnam, and an important defence partner for the Philippines and Indonesia, but not a leading player in most other areas.

In many cases, especially for the region’s smallest countries – Brunei, Timor-Leste and Laos – neighbourhood relationships within Southeast Asia are more important than partnerships with these Indo-Pacific major powers. For Brunei, ties with Singapore and Malaysia dominate the horizon, for Timor-Leste, Indonesia is a powerful source of economic and people connections and in Laos, both Thailand and Vietnam, as well as China, vie for influence.

In fact, China and the United States occupy first and second place for overall influence in only three countries – Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. In every other country, either a Southeast Asian neighbour or Indo-Pacific middle power ranks as a top two partner. And every country has well diversified partnerships, in the sense that no one external partner dominates across diplomacy, defence, economic and cultural engagement.

Where does all of this leave the two big picture questions raised above? To the extent that there is a US-China competition in Southeast Asia, China is indeed “winning”. But describing the region’s geopolitics in these terms alone does little to illuminate the complex choices facing its diverse countries.

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Photo: 三猎, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons