US-China rivalry forcing Southeast Asia to pick sides, congressional panel hears
Southeast Asian countries now recognise they may have no choice but to take sides in the Sino-American rivalry, at least in certain sectors, even as they seek to avoid that dilemma, a US congressional advisory panel heard on Thursday.
Moreover, this reality should prompt Washington to adopt a sector-by-sector approach to the region and shape its choices before Beijing does, according to testimony given at the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
“Increasingly, they are accepting that, even though they don’t like it … they might have to choose on specific issues,” said Lynn Kuok of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, referring to Southeast Asian countries.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
With that in mind, the US should view competition in the region in terms of “swing sectors” and not “swing states” as other observers have suggested, said Prashanth Parameswaran of the Wilson Centre, also a Washington think tank.
Swing states are countries that possess clout but are not firmly aligned with either the US or China.
Jon Finer, US deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration, advocated prioritising ties with Southeast Asian heavyweights like Indonesia. Photo: White House alt=Jon Finer, US deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration, advocated prioritising ties with Southeast Asian heavyweights like Indonesia. Photo: White House>
The swing-states approach for Southeast Asia, as advanced by former senior American officials like Jon Finer, Joe Biden‘s deputy national security adviser, would prioritise ties with regional heavyweights like Indonesia.
Swing sectors that Washington should prioritise for the region, Parameswaran said, included artificial intelligence, critical minerals, strategic infrastructure and telecommunications.
Some countries have already shown an openness to making sector-specific choices, he added, pointing to Vietnam‘s stance on semiconductors – an area of utmost interest for the US and China that each has sought to control.
Vietnam has been “socialising this idea of thinking about technology more as an ecosystem rather than as a transactional approach of something you buy off the shelf from one country and then another country”, said Parameswaran.
When it comes to sectors, Vikram Nehru of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington urged the US to focus on areas in which it has a “comparative advantage” over China.
These areas, according to Nehru, are concentrated in the service sector and hi-tech industries, including advanced chip manufacturing, telecommunications and aerospace.
Kuok, meanwhile, argued that the US had an opening to encourage Southeast Asia to take a firmer stance on international law, an area she said countries in the region had consistently emphasised as vital.
“Southeast Asia cannot fairly be expected to choose between the United States and China, given what both countries bring to the table,” she said. “But they should be expected to align clearly with principles of international law.”
The testimony came amid growing recognition in the US that Southeast Asia does not want to be forced to choose between Washington and Beijing, a point that officials from the region have stressed for years as they grappled with the two superpowers’ expanding competition.
Under the Biden administration, Washington tried to boost its engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, pitching its outreach to the bloc as based on a belief in the region’s intrinsic importance and not only in the context of US-China competition and security concerns.
Washington formally upgraded the US-Asean relationship in November 2022, expanded people-to-people programmes and scheduled numerous ministerial-level meetings on issues ranging from climate to health.
But the US could still be losing Southeast Asia, said Kuok, citing a 2024 survey by the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, which found that, for the first time, China edged past the US as the region’s preferred partner when forced to choose between the two.
And any lost ground could accelerate, Thursday’s witnesses said, unless the Donald Trump administration puts strategic changes into place.
Gregory Poling of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, another Washington think tank, described the US as “extremely competitive” against China if it maintained its current presence in Southeast Asia.
“The most important thing is first, do no harm,” said Poling, referring to recent actions by the Trump administration like its deep scaling back of the US Agency for International Development as well as reductions at Radio Free Asia, a US government-funded news outlet.
“Disbanding” RFA and “dismantling” USAID, which had “huge” benefits compared to the “meagre” costs, was only “damaging” America’s advantage, he added.
The USCC, an independent panel set up by the US Congress in October 2000, reports to lawmakers about the national security implications of the US-China trade and economic relationship.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
