How Trump’s trade policy is handing Asia to Beijing

For a decade, Washington urged the world’s manufacturers to move their factories out of China and into friendly Southeast Asian states—only to attack the very countries and companies that answered the call. Usually, U.S. economic statecraft is designed to help American companies succeed abroad. Rather than checking China, trade policy is alienating regional partners, harming supply-chain diversification, and eroding America’s influence over the bloc’s trade decisions. In February the Supreme Court struck down much of the initial tariff regime and the administration pivoted to workarounds: 150-day emergency measures under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and expansive Section 301 investigations into forced labor, intellectual property violations, and “excess capacity.” America’s labor, intellectual property, and excess-capacity concerns are really about China, not Southeast Asia. The administration substituted an improvised China policy for a coherent Southeast Asia policy—a strategic blunder. For nearly a decade, multinational corporations have redirected capital and manufacturing from China into Vietnam, Malaysia, India, and the Philippines. As Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation, has observed , Washington created the incentive structure for alternate supply routes and is now penalizing regional partners for using them. Higher costs and a shortage of skilled domestic labor mean production lines won’t magically shift to U.S. shores. Yet as U.S. policy grows increasingly erratic and punitive, it inadvertently pushes them to hedge elsewhere. Spanning 11 nations, nearly 700 million consumers, and an estimated $2 trillion digital marketplace, DEFA would establish comprehensive standards for cross-border data governance, cybersecurity, digital identity, and artificial intelligence.