U.S. Soft Power Is Spiraling in Asia, With China Filling the Void

Since the Trump administration came into office, it has quickly torn apart the U.S. foreign aid apparatus. Besides freezing many types of aid, the administration has decimated the U.S. Agency for International Development, firing over 1,600 staffers, closing the Agency’s headquarters, and putting most of the Agency’s staff around the world on leave. (A federal judge, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols, recently allowed these actions to continue, refusing to keep a temporary stay on the Agency’s closure.)

These actions have resulted in the shutdowns of thousands of USAID programs worldwide, including many regions where China is increasingly ascendant—equal to or greater than the United States regarding trade with, investment in, and diplomatic ties to states in these regions.  

China has also been inching closer to U.S. soft power in many parts of the world and will now seek to eclipse Washington’s soft power by immediately stepping into the void. Southeast Asia is one example: China already dominates regional trade and has increasingly dominated regional diplomacy. Additionally, it has bolstered its soft power and won more significant concessions from Malaysia and Indonesia on the South China Sea dispute than in the past.

Under Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia has moved significantly closer to China. This shift is partly due to Anwar’s belief in his ability to negotiate effectively with Beijing, partly because of China’s substantial economic influence, and partly because the war in Gaza has made the United States highly unpopular in Malaysia.

Even before the USAID shutdown, polls by the ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute in Singapore showed that China had edged ahead of the United States in popularity in many Southeast Asian states. This may have been in part because of the unpopularity of the Gaza war in much of Southeast Asia.

My anecdotal interactions with a wide range of opinion leaders from the ten ASEAN states and Timor-Leste suggest that much of Southeast Asia was losing faith in the United States even beyond the Gaza war and before the Trump administration began to reduce aid. This loss of faith was in areas once core strengths of U.S. popularity and influence, including trade and economic leadership, interest in political reform, the popularity of U.S. culture and education, the appeal of high-tech consumer goods, and the value of security and strategic support.

They believe the United States will continue to fall behind the region’s trading trends and trade integration. They see the United States, which is experiencing democratic backsliding, preaching democratic reform to some countries like Myanmar and Cambodia while ignoring it in others like Vietnam, which is strategically important to Washington. Additionally, they increasingly view Chinese products, from electric cars to phones, as equal to or better than American ones and believe the United States is losing its technological advantages. This belief is evident in the rapid expansion of Chinese car makers into places like Thailand and Indonesia.

Many Southeast Asian opinion leaders do not understand the wild swings in U.S. policy positions from administration to administration, except a tiny handful who intensely follow U.S. domestic politics. Nor do they comprehend many of the issues that seemed strange to them to dominate U.S. politics (issues related to how courses are taught in U.S. higher education, bathroom rights) but which have little relevance in Southeast Asia and appear to undermine U.S. policymaking. U.S. culture increasingly seems to befuddle, too, with so much online U.S. discourse divorced from issues in their region and, sometimes, divorced from reality. U.S. higher education is becoming difficult to access, and now, under the Trump administration, it will get much more complicated for Southeast Asians and other foreigners—they are turning instead to Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and China. With these losses, only U.S. security protection has remained, and the Trump administration has thus far remained unclear on how it will handle key U.S. allies and partners in the region like Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Now, another pillar of U.S. popularity has been decimated. While USAID and other foreign aid consumed a tiny portion of the total U.S. budget, they were often the leading edge of U.S. soft power, along with U.S. culture. This was not only the case in Southeast Asia but also in Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, and other developing regions where China was already competing with or surpassing the United States in economic and diplomatic influence.

China has not only wasted little time touting the end of much U.S. foreign aid—USAID spent about $40 billion a year—but has also linked it to the overall U.S. global decline. It has also begun to identify places with potential projects in countries where USAID is now gone or all but gone.

China has already increased its foreign aid and outright grants in Southeast Asia in recent years despite its focus on loans for projects as its primary source of aid. For example, China donated more than seven million vaccines to nine ASEAN countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, has funded infrastructure projects like the Phnom Penh‑Sihanoukville Expressway, and granted university scholarships to Malaysian students. And, of course, China has made huge promises of investments, admittedly not grants, to other regions. The Christian Science Monitor notes, “Last fall, Beijing hosted a China-Africa summit at which Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that China would contribute $50 billion in loans and investment to boost economic and infrastructure development in Africa over the next three years.”

Beijing appears to be seeking to move to places where USAID has moved out. Beijing seems to be considering increasing a range of humanitarian aid projects in health, education, and sanitation in mainland Southeast Asia, in some of the region’s poorest states. Beijing picks out particularly notable and newsworthy projects to take over, too; it assumed the cost of a high-profile de-mining project in Cambodia that the United States used to fund, for instance. In strategically important Nepal, Politico reported that China would likely provide the aid to replace the funding that USAID had provided. In Colombia, “non-governmental organizations that received USAID funding say the Chinese government is interested in putting up money to help fill the void.”

These are early days, too. Without a doubt, China will take more and more advantage of the United States’ squandering of its soft power. If, as is possible, the White House’s appointees to run Voice of America and the organization that oversees outlets like Radio Free Asia’s many networks turn these media outlets—U.S. government, backed but with a reputation for absolute independence—into essentially propaganda, it will make it easier for China to continue to get Xinhua accepted as a regular news source in outlets across the world, a process it has been working on for more than a decade. Suppose other donors, like the Gates Foundation or major donors like Japan, cannot fulfill projects USAID abandoned. In that case, China will likely begin providing more outright aid, not loans, to continue some of these initiatives, especially in states of strategic importance to Beijing. In Southeast Asia and many other developing regions, it is China’s time now.