A New Realism at the Indo-Pacific’s Edge: India, ASEAN, and the Perils of Transactional Power in a Post-Trump Order

The Indo-Pacific of 2025 has entered another phase of strategic recalibration. The region, once animated by promises of a “free and open” order, is again navigating uncertainty under President Donald Trump’s second term.1 His return to the White House has reignited a familiar sense of unpredictability across Asian capitals. Trump’s policy instincts remain consistent with his first tenure: transactional, tariff-driven, and grounded in the belief that American leverage is best projected through coercive economic power rather than cooperative alliance-building.

For India and ASEAN, the twin anchors of the Indo-Pacific, Trump 2.0 represents both a challenge and an opportunity. His renewed 50 percent tariff on Indian goods, coupled with a hard-bargaining stance on defense, technology, and immigration, has shaken one of Washington’s most promising partnerships. Southeast Asian states, already uneasy about the intensifying great-power rivalry, face the task of navigating between Trump’s revived protectionism and China’s relentless expansion of economic reach through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The key question defining the Indo-Pacific today is deceptively simple yet deeply consequential: Does Trump 2.0 still see India and ASEAN as the fulcrum of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, or merely as competitors to be contained through tariffs and transactional diplomacy? And, if America continues to turn inward under Trump’s “economic nationalism,” can Asia sustain its Indo-Pacific vision? And, equally important, can ASEAN, India, and Japan find collaboration pathways to do so? This paper argues that Trump’s renewed “America First” realism, designed to reclaim leverage from both adversaries and allies, is inadvertently pushing Asia toward self-correction. His cold, mercantile posture is forcing India, Japan, and ASEAN to explore new trilateral linkages, accelerating an Asia-led recalibration of the Indo-Pacific narrative beyond Washington’s orbit. The result is an emergent strategic pluralism, one that may reshape the region’s architecture for years to come.