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?
