Foreign Leaders Look Beyond Trump On His Asian Meeting Spree

President Donald Trump will encounter an unfamiliar dynamic when he flies to Asia this week: foreign leaders who see him as weakened by the results of Republicans’ historic losses in this month’s midterm elections.

Trump heads to Manila on Monday for the annual East Asia Summit, then travels to Shenzhen, China, for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit. At those meetings, he’ll be in discussions with a number of countries that have been battered by his aggressive tariffs and costly investment deals.

That includes South Korea, where Trump has threatened to curtail U.S. military exercises because he feels Seoul has been too slow to deliver on a $350 billion investment pledge. India is still bristling from the 50% tariffs Trump imposed after its trade deal with the U.S. fell apart last year. The administration eased the reciprocal tariff on most Indian imports to 18% in February.

Asian leaders “will deal with him cautiously but keep their options open. They may still see a relationship with the U.S. as important, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll follow Trump’s lead,” said an Asian diplomat, granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of their comments.

The difference, say some familiar with discussions in Asian capitals ahead of the summits, is that countries don’t feel quite as afraid of Trump’s wrath.

Fear of tariffs, export restrictions, U.S. troop withdrawals, humiliation in an Oval Office encounter and even — for Canada and Greenland, at least — the threat of U.S. military invasion have eased since his midterm loss. Trump’s Asia trip may provide the first hints of the degree to which foreign leaders see him shuffling toward the exit rather than dominating the world stage.

Asian leaders “are pretty astute observers of power,” said Kurt Tong, former principal deputy assistant secretary for economic and business affairs at the State Department in the Obama administration. He continues to meet regularly with Asian policymakers as part of his role as managing partner at the Washington-based consultancy firm The Asia Group. “They will view the president as somewhat weakened now.”

A second Asian diplomat said foreign leaders “no longer feel as intimidated by him.”

The White House pushed back on suggestions that Asian leaders will see him as diminished following the results of the midterm elections.

“President Trump has effectively restored American strength on the global stage and strengthened relationships with world leaders,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement.

A third Washington-based Asian diplomat said their country has less appetite to enter into new agreements with Trump, for example on trade and investment issues, with the hope that they can wait for a new administration in 2028.

“There’ll be less enthusiasm for making deals with the Trump administration,” the diplomat said. The person said they expected fewer deals between governments and more “business-to-business agreements with Trump using whatever is left of his standing to connect” companies and investors.

Trump has sealed trade deals with most Asian countries, with the notable exceptions of India and Vietnam, but wants U.S. allies and partners to invest in infrastructure and manufacturing projects as part of his America First trade policy. Trump has been pushing Asian countries — including South Korea and Japan — to invest in a multibillion-dollar Alaska pipeline project that would include a terminal for natural gas exports to Asian customers.

Trump will meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Shenzhen, and Beijing is well-aware that the power dynamics in the relationship between the two leaders have shifted in China’s favor.

“The Chinese are already thinking about what comes next, more than about how to manage Trump,” said Jonathan Czin, a former CIA analyst on China, now at the Brookings Institution. “They're going to mollify Trump and string him along” to maintain the current status quo rather than address the fundamental economic and security issues that roil U.S.-China ties.

That said, America’s Asian allies are expected to still pump up Trump in public, rather than risk the presidential backlash that could come from referencing Trump’s domestic woes.

Foreign leaders “won’t want to provoke him or give him motivation to potentially sacrifice what they're collectively interested in by making it obvious that he's irrelevant,” said Yuki Tatsumi, a former special assistant for political affairs at the Japanese embassy in Washington.

The third diplomat said their colleagues from the foreign ministry — recognizing that Trump retains significant executive power that extends to foreign relations regardless of the midterm results — are still pushing to get their senior officials in front of the U.S. president and other senior American officials while they’re in Asia this week.

“We’ve asked for our foreign minister to meet with Secretary of State [Marco] Rubio at APEC and for a meeting between Trump and our head of government to meet on the sidelines of either ASEAN or APEC,” the diplomat said.

Trump can also expect the usual red-carpet treatment from foreign officials in Manila and Shenzhen as he outlines an agenda that includes sealing “commercial deals and strategic investments that strengthen American security and prosperity,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told reporters Friday.

Trump may raise — and likely get — at least measured support for initiatives including greater defense coordination between the U.S. and Southeast Asian countries that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth proposed last month.

Foreign leaders at the meetings in Manila and China “will be tiptoeing around Trump as they look ahead,” said Jane Hardy, a former leader of the Australian embassy's congressional office in Washington. “They will be strategizing how to manage him and his White House while focusing on those congressional players that can help them through the remainder of Trump’s presidency.”

Embassies in Washington are already gearing up to lobby Democrats, soon to be in control of the House and Senate, to support initiatives ranging from limiting Trump’s punitive tariffs and restoring U.S. support for Ukraine, to curbing Trump’s ability to wage war without congressional approval. The hope among U.S. allies, battered by the administration's aggressive trade and foreign policies, is that a Democratic congressional majority will check some of those excesses.

Piper Campbell, former head of the U.S. mission to ASEAN in Jakarta, Indonesia, said Asian policymakers kept asking her “what steps a Democratic Congress might take to put some curbs on the president's foreign policy powers,” while she was in the region following the midterms.

“Southeast Asian embassies in Washington are going to face a busy couple of months because their capitals are asking them what powers the Democrats have in Congress, the early signals of how they intend to use those powers and who’s emerging as the front-runners in the presidential contest,” she added.

Some Asian countries may try to exploit Trump’s midterms loss and the possibility of two years of political trench warfare between the president and a Democrat-majority Congress by slow-walking commitments they’ve made under trade and investment deals with the Trump administration. Trump routinely touts nearly $20 trillion in investment pledges from foreign countries as a signature achievement of his second term.

The administration suspects that South Korea is already doing just that by delaying decisions on what projects Seoul will fund with the $350 billion it pledged last year to invest in the U.S. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said last month that he’d rather negotiate with the next U.S. president than seal a bad trade deal with Trump.

Asian leaders “may be thinking that there are areas where they felt a lot of pressure from Trump, and now they have an ability to very quietly and carefully wait him out,” said Scot Marciel, former principal deputy assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama administration.

Sophie Cai contributed to this report.