United States President Donald Trump returns to Southeast Asia this weekend for the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – his first visit to the region since 2017 – before proceeding to Busan, South Korea for the APEC Leaders’ Meeting and a long-anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
As ASEAN’s rotational chair, Malaysia underscores the region’s stabilizing role as a convenor in a shifting world order, hosting both the ASEAN and East Asia Summits that will be attended by Trump and Chinese Premier Li Qiang.
Analysts are already speculating about a repeat of the “Trump effect” seen during his Gulf Tour earlier this year, where nearly US$2 trillion in investment and defense deals re-anchored Washington’s influence across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. But the Indo-Pacific is not the Gulf – and Trump is not a hegemon here.
In the Middle East, stability depends on hard-power projection to contain a binary axis: Iran and Russia on one side, Washington-aligned Gulf states and Israel on the other. The Indo-Pacific, by contrast, operates through webs of interdependence linking great, middle and small powers.
It is true that at the apex, the US and China anchor the regional system. Washington projects maritime reach through alliances with Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and South Korea, and remains the region’s largest foreign investor.
Beijing, meanwhile, wields economic gravity and industrial depth, extending influence through the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and regional supply chains. China is now ASEAN’s largest trading partner.
Yet rivalry alone does not define the Indo-Pacific’s logic. For all the spectacle of the “Trump effect” – diplomacy conducted through high-stakes deals and headline moments – the region’s steadiness rests on the influence of smaller and middle powers, which have long acted as quieter stabilizers.
Flexible multilateralism
The Indo-Pacific’s political culture is built to absorb, not collapse under, great-power competition. Southeast Asia – often described as the place “where the mandalas meet” – has always been a crossroads of empire and exchange, from the Srivijaya and Majapahit thalassocracies to the Cold War’s balancing acts between Washington and Moscow.
Here, Trump’s “America First” posture can coexist with regional interests when competition reinforces equilibrium. Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, urged nations to “update and evolve multilateralism rather than abandon it… lay the building blocks, and eventually others can join.”
This “flexible multilateralism” defines the region’s instinct of expanding networks in trade, digital governance and maritime cooperation to keep interdependence flowing, whether American-led, China-led or shared by both.
Frameworks such as the RCEP and CPTPP, initiated by Indo-Pacific states, were designed to coexist with newer pacts like the Future of Investment and Trade (FIT) Partnership, a 14-nation initiative launched in 2025 to harmonize digital norms and investment facilitation.
Even security arrangements such as the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting-Plus and the Five Power Defense Arrangements (FPDA) preserve open sea lanes and deter dominance by any single major power.
In the Indo-Pacific, smaller states are not bystanders. Singapore’s Digital Economy Agreements with Australia, the UK, and South Korea inspired the upcoming ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA), projected to add $2 trillion to regional GDP by 2030.
The Lao-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project, now transmitting 200 MW, serves as a pathfinder for an ASEAN Power Grid, which is key to regional energy security and future industries such as AI-driven data-center infrastructure.
In this milieu, “America First” and “China First” can both work, provided major powers court, rather than coerce, the smaller states that sustain these overlapping networks.
For Trump, this trip offers a chance to move beyond the transactionalism of his Gulf engagements and reaffirm America’s place within the Indo-Pacific’s interconnected order – embedded within, not dominant over, it.
Chokepoints of stability
Finally, while both the US and China command critical chokepoints across the Indo-Pacific, both rely on smaller and middle powers to offset their vulnerabilities. Geography, long said to be destiny, grants these states leverage of their own, and the Strait of Malacca illustrates this best.
Handling a record 94,301 ship transits in 2024, it carries roughly 80% of China’s oil imports, a persistent exposure dubbed the “Malacca dilemma.” Inland, China’s western provinces remain bottlenecked from ASEAN trade routes, too.
Regional states have stepped up to play constructive roles in offsetting these constraints faced by major powers. For example, Singapore partnered with China in the Chongqing Connectivity Initiative, which, for the first time, links western China directly to Southeast Asia.
Singapore’s investment stock in Chongqing more than doubled from US$5.7 billion in 2015 to $12.7 billion in 2024, financing multimodal rail-river-sea corridors that cut freight times from Chongqing to Singapore to about a week. In doing so, smaller states like Singapore quietly contribute to regional stability by easing China’s geographic limitations and deepening interdependence.
The United States faces the opposite dilemma: overextension. It still bears primary responsibility for securing Indo-Pacific sea lanes, stretching its naval reach across vast distances. Here, Singapore plays a stabilizing role that reinforces rather than duplicates American power.
Its recent acquisition of four P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, two additional Type 218SG submarines, and the launch of a new Multi-Role Combat Vessel (MRCV) fleet expands aerial and subsurface coverage of key sea lines, with unmanned systems integrated into information-fusion networks used by the US Navy and FPDA forces.
At the same time, Singapore’s cooperation with Malaysia and Indonesia through the Malacca Strait Patrols enhances collective maritime surveillance and security across one of the world’s busiest chokepoints.
Agents of stability
Smaller states can still shape the world, even amid a messy transition to multipolarity. As Singaporean Prime Minister Wong shared with the Financial Times this week: “While the major powers, of course, have a lot of say and influence in how these things pan out, the rest of the world… do not have to be passive bystanders.
“We have agency, and we can work amongst ourselves to help preserve the multilateral frameworks that matter… so that in time to come, a new order will emerge, but we do what we can to help this transition and nudge it in the right direction.”
It was a timely reminder that small and middle powers remain the stabilizers of the Indo-Pacific order – convening nodes that embed great powers within flexible frameworks aligned to shared interests.
Which means that when Trump visits the region on Sunday (October 26), the US will not be expected to preside as the rule-setter of the global order, but will be received as an indispensable player who is welcomed with the Indo-Pacific’s “small-state effect.”
Marcus Loh is chairman of the Public Affairs Group at the Public Relations and Communications Association Asia Pacific and a director at Temus, a Singapore-based digital services firm. A former president of the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore, he has played a longstanding role in advancing strategic communication and public affairs in an evolving policy, technology and geoeconomic landscape. He is currently an MA candidate at the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
