America’s Wobble Is Forcing the Indo-Pacific to Rebuild Itself
While the world watches the Iran drama, the Western Pacific is watching something quieter and arguably more consequential: the way American allies are responding to a Trump administration whose China-Taiwan policy has gone wobbly.
The signal that crystallizes it came last week in Tokyo, where, on the penultimate day of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s visit, Japan and the Philippines announced a comprehensive strategic partnership, the second-highest tier in Japan’s diplomatic hierarchy, below only a formal military alliance.
That announcement is one tile in a mosaic.
Over the past few years Japan has built comprehensive strategic partnerships with most of Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia in late 2023, Laos in early 2025.
It has layered security agreements on top.
Earlier this month Japan and Indonesia signed a new defense cooperation agreement.
Late last year Japan and the Philippines signed a reciprocal access agreement, which lets each country’s forces enter the other’s territory for joint exercises and training, a tier of cooperation Japan maintains with only Australia and the United Kingdom and that observers describe as a quasi-alliance.
This week Tokyo and Manila also agreed to open negotiations on an intelligence-sharing agreement modeled on the one Japan has with South Korea.
And Japan has lifted its long-standing ban on exporting lethal arms, allowing it to sell weapons to countries with which it holds defense cooperation agreements, which is to say, its regional neighbors.
This cable will outline how the allied build-out is a hedge against an unreliable Washington, that the hedge is accelerating precisely because Trump’s China-Taiwan policy has wobbled, and that this produces a perverse outcome for Beijing.
But perversely and ironically for Beijing, by pressuring Trump into accommodation, China is not pacifying the region.
It is instead, driving its neighbors to arm themselves and bind together independent of Washington.
And because Trump has only two years left, China may end up with the worst of both worlds: a Pacific full of newly militarized, mutually committed allies, and then a conventional U.S. Presidential successor who restores conventional American policy on Taiwan.
