It is not easy being a U.S. ally these days—particularly in Europe but also on the front lines of strategic competition in Asia. Like passengers traveling into outer space with Sigourney Weaver, these allies have had to endure inexplicable horrors erupting from Washington with little warning. Tariffs top the list, with Japan and South Korea currently under threat of a general 25 percent duty and Australia outraged at the specter of 50 percent tariffs on steel. Meanwhile, the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and other instruments of American soft power like Radio Free Asia and the National Endowment for Democracy has left allies trying to fill gaps in Southeast Asia and the Pacific before Beijing fills them with Huawei telecommunications infrastructure and dual-use military bases for its People’s Liberation Army. And most recently, the U.S. Defense Department announced a review of the trilateral AUKUS agreement, under which Britain and Australia have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build nuclear-powered submarines alongside the United States.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s visible disdain for Ukraine and Europe is also raising questions about the reliability of U.S. security guarantees in Asia. These are questions that the White House is increasingly unable to answer after firing most of the highly qualified Asia experts it had initially hired to work on the National Security Council (NSC) staff.
Given this onslaught, one would expect polls in the region to show a sharp drop in confidence in the United States, and indeed they do. In March, the Lowy Institute found that only 36 percent of Australians trusted the United States—the lowest number ever polled by the institute. In April, Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, found that only 15 percent of Japanese citizens believed the United States under Trump would defend Japan, which is a sharp drop from the more than 40 percent the year before. Meanwhile, only 20 percent of Taiwanese consider the United States trustworthy, a 10 point drop from last year.
However, the polls also show something else: U.S. alliances in Asia are far more resilient than headlines might suggest. For example, the Lowy poll found that 80 percent of Australians support the U.S.-Australia alliance; surveys in Japan and South Korea continue to find that nearly 90 percent of citizens in those countries support the alliance with the United States. As former U.S. President Joe Biden said, “Don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative.” In Asia, the other guy continues to be the growing menace of China that U.S. allies simply cannot manage alone or even in concert with each other absent the United States. European allies, with their intense partnerships and facing a much smaller challenge with Russia, can pretend that is an option—but Asian allies cannot.
As a result, rather than de-align, bandwagon with China, or pursue autarky through nuclear weapons, U.S. allies are doubling down on integration with the United States. Put another way, these allies are managing risks of abandonment by becoming even more indispensable to U.S. strategy.
Japan is continuing on the path set by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who reinterpreted the Japanese Constitution in 2014 to allow for “collective self-defense” with the United States and other close partners like Australia. Rather than seeking distance from the United States in the Trump era, Tokyo is working with Washington to link their new joint force headquarters with an upgraded Headquarters U.S. Forces Japan to better respond jointly to regional contingencies.
Through AUKUS, Australia is not just procuring Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States but also enabling an expansion of U.S. military force in the country. This includes major rotations of Marine expeditionary forces, air wings, and submarines across the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Canberra is also gearing up for production of munitions and missiles through the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance initiative, which will supply both the Australian Defence Force and the U.S. military.
The Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is opening new sites to the U.S. military under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, including island bases critical in any Taiwan contingency. Last year, New Zealand sailed its first navy vessel through the sensitive Taiwan Strait in seven years, while in February, Canada sent its second frigate through the Strait in less than six months.
It helps that key figures in the Trump administration are emphasizing Asia. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first diplomatic move was to convene a meeting with the foreign ministers of the Quad on the day after Trump’s inauguration. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth received high marks in Tokyo and Manila for the defense cooperation commitments he made during visits in March. Hegseth’s calls for greater defense spending at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in May were politically jarring, but they resonated with debates already happening in Tokyo and Canberra.
While the usual suspects are loudly calling for distance from the United States, it is not clear that they are having any impact on governments. When Trump won the 2024 presidential election, the Australian Green Party immediately called for Canberra to abandon AUKUS, but the Greens were almost wiped out in a nationwide election five months later. Scholars writing about the advent of a “post-American world” are being read on university campuses but not in government. The Chinese ambassador in Canberra misread the room when he called for Beijing and Canberra to join hands against Trump—and was promptly panned by editorial commentary from across the political spectrum.
In short, there is no evidence that the Trump administration is destroying alliances in Asia.
At the same time, however, Trump is making it extremely difficult for allies to plan for strategic competition against China because they are also forced to manage mounting and unpredictable confrontation from Washington. Trump has announced or changed positions on tariffs numerous times, whiplashing capitals that should be focused on the threat from China instead. The on-again, off-again rules on artificial intelligence diffusion and export controls are disincentives for allies like Japan and South Korea to curtail Chinese access to their own critical technologies. Joint research and development projects are in doubt with the White House’s assaults on U.S. universities and the potential cuts in the “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill.
Plans for U.S. military access are proceeding at the official level, but low public trust in the United States could quickly become a problem at the local level. A colony of penguins is currently holding up construction of submarine infrastructure for the U.S. Navy in Western Australia, which is the kind of local political problem that becomes twice as difficult when the public is also reading about crippling U.S. tariffs about to affect their companies and jobs.
And with the NSC Asia office hollowed out and most U.S. Senate-confirmed Asia positions at the Defense Department and State Department still vacant, there are few counterparts to help allies navigate this unpredictability or generate sustainable joint plans.
Then there is the question of whether there might be worse to come. Will the Pentagon’s AUKUS review leave Australia without new submarines and embarrassed in front of China? What would Trump actually do if China attacked Taiwan or if North Korea attacked South Korea? Would he eventually return to his first-term calls for withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea, a move that could shake allies across the region and that the new progressive government in Seoul might not resist? These questions are not impeding alliance cooperation yet, but they are frequently asked on the margins of meetings from Canberra to Seoul. U.S. diplomats and career officials cannot easily answer them without consistent political leadership from Washington.
The good news is that there are few areas that enjoy more bipartisan support in Washington than U.S. alliances in Asia—and those alliances have deep roots on both sides of the Pacific. But surviving the shock and awe of the Trump administration is not a sufficient definition of success. Across diplomatic, military, and economic domains, those alliances must also be upgraded if Washington intends to prevent Beijing’s revisionist aims toward the region. Without allies, the United States cannot win that competition. The Trump madman theory, which postulates that his erratic behavior is a useful tactic to confuse adversaries, may apply to Beijing, but there is absolutely no advantage to chaos when it comes to managing alliances.