Trump’s Tariff Diplomacy: Southeast Asia’s Peace Bought at a Steep Price
The smell of cordite this week in Southeast Asia isn’t just from the shells falling near Preah Vihear. It’s the acrid scent of a world order fracturing. We’re not just witnessing a territorial dispute between Thailand and Cambodia; we’re seeing a breakdown of the multilateral guardrails meant to prevent these very escalations, replaced by a stark, transactional vision of power.
Donald Trump, allergic to nuance, appears to have grasped this reality, and acted. He reportedly informed the prime ministers of Thailand and Cambodia that “We’re not going to make a trade deal unless you settle the war.” Bangkok Post reports. Stripped of diplomatic niceties, this embodies a foreign policy that reduces geopolitics to a simple equation: economic coercion equals geopolitical control. It’s less diplomacy, more debt collection — with peace as the collateral.
The fighting, ostensibly about border demarcations drawn from early 20th-century Franco-Siamese treaties, throws into sharp relief the enduring — and often devastating — consequences of lines drawn on maps by colonial powers. These lines, conceived in Parisian boardrooms with little regard for the people living on the ground, were always going to be flashpoints, simmering with resentment and unrealized claims. But what happens when the ghost of colonialism is weaponized, repackaged as American trade policy?
What does it mean when the United States positions itself as the ultimate arbiter of these post-colonial disputes, wielding tariffs like a bludgeon? It signals that ASEAN, the regional body designed to address precisely these conflicts, is failing, or is seen to be failing. But more fundamentally, it exposes the illusion that there ever was a truly robust “international order,” instead revealing a system increasingly defined by bilateral dependencies, each contingent on the priorities — and, crucially, the perceptions — of a single dominant power.
“In the end, Trump will likely frame the situation as a win: he enforced a ceasefire while securing leverage” to impose punitive tariff rates, said Fuadi Pitsuwan, a lecturer in international relations at Thammasat University in Bangkok.
Fuadi Pitsuwan cuts to the quick. Trump doesn’t just want a ceasefire; he wants leverage. He gets to play peacemaker and extract concessions. But consider the long-term implications: By rewarding unilateral action and punishing multilateral cooperation, what incentive remains for these nations to invest in collective security? What good is a regional security pact when a single phone call, a single tariff threat, can override the entire painstakingly built process? Look at the history of ASEAN’s attempts to mediate disputes in the South China Sea; they’ve been largely symbolic, precisely because the organization lacks the teeth to enforce its rulings.
It’s tempting to frame Trump’s intervention as a pragmatic, if unseemly, solution. But the consequences ripple outwards. The shadow of Trump’s tariffs — like the previously imposed 36% levy on Thailand’s exports — creates a potent incentive to break ranks. We’ve seen this dynamic play out before, as far back as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which deepened the Great Depression by triggering a global wave of protectionism. The US is currently negotiating, or has already concluded, trade deals with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, which creates a fragmented ecosystem where bilateral advantage trumps regional unity.
This transactional approach, however satisfying in the short term, actively undermines the very institutions needed for long-term stability. ASEAN, with all its acknowledged flaws, remains a crucial platform for dialogue and preventing escalation. By consistently circumventing this framework, the U. S. risks fostering a system where nations are pitted against each other, compelled to bid against their neighbors for preferential treatment, sacrificing regional solidarity at the altar of short-term economic gain.
The real game here isn’t about border disputes; it’s about the architecture of power, the future of the global order, and how much influence the US can exert over the global system. Trump’s “success” in brokering this ceasefire, therefore, demands a critical eye. What is the true cost of peace bought through coercion? It might just be the slow, insidious erosion of the international order itself, one tariff, one broken agreement, at a time.
