The U.S. Is Pushing Southeast Asia Toward China. The Iran War Made It Worse.
A new survey of Southeast Asian opinion leaders shows they prefer China to the United States as a partner, while the region’s biggest geopolitical concern is U.S. global leadership.
By experts and staff
Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The United States may have struck a fragile ceasefire deal with Iran, but the war has inflicted damage on U.S. relationships in Asia that were already strained after more than a year of President Donald Trump’s unpredictable approach to foreign policy. A new survey of leaders in Southeast Asian countries highlights the weakness of U.S. influence in the region, even among allies and partners.
The annual State of Southeast Asia survey report produced by the Singapore-based think tank ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute is hotly anticipated by regional experts, policymakers, and other opinion leaders. It surveys a range of Southeast Asian elites from academia, think tanks, research institutes, the private sector, governments, and civil society. Though it is not a complete public poll, the survey is generally considered the best gauge of Southeast Asian sentiment on a wide range of issues, including external powers’ influence in the region.
China in 2024 surpassed the United States for the first time to become the preferred partner for a majority of states in Southeast Asia, according to the survey in which participants were asked to choose between the two. (Japan, the longtime most popular state in Southeast Asia, has been preferred for years as a partner by Southeast Asian elites but cannot compare with the United States or China in terms of defense support.) The 2026 survey report [PDF] released this week showed that China was the preferred partner once again. Most survey respondents also perceive China as the most influential economic power in Southeast Asia (which is surely true); about fifteen percent say the United States is the most influential economic power.
In a new development not shown in prior ISEAS surveys, more than half of respondents now said that U.S. global leadership had become their biggest geopolitical concern. This displaced China’s “aggressive behavior in the South China Sea,” which had been the region’s top concern in 2025. (“New U.S. leadership” was the third-highest concern among respondents last year.)
“This perception demonstrates regional anxiety about inconsistencies in policy and the credibility of long-term commitments under Trump’s leadership,” the survey reported. Even in Singapore, a longtime U.S. partner, this fear was so pronounced that more than three-quarters of Singaporean respondents listed concern about U.S. leadership as their biggest worry. Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand—a country with close trading ties, a U.S. partner, and a treaty ally, respectively—now also have massive concerns about U.S. economic influence in the region.
For anyone who has been following U.S.-Southeast Asia relations over the past eighteen months, and especially since the onset of the Iran war, these results should not be surprising. Even before Trump took office, U.S. popularity had plummeted in parts of Southeast Asia—particularly Malaysia and Indonesia—because of the United States’ handling of the Gaza war. Indeed, even Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who has close personal ties with many U.S. opinion leaders (including myself and others at CFR) and was once affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, had become publicly critical of the United States, probably reflecting broader Malaysian views.
The region has only become angrier with Washington in the last year, following the Trump administration hitting Southeast Asian exporters—and even close Indo-Pacific allies such as Australia—with tough tariffs (many of which have now been nullified by the Supreme Court). The tariffs, whose size seemed to fluctuate depending on factors hard for regional states to understand, made negotiations with Washington difficult, hurt the regional business environment, and demonstrated inconsistent support for regional partners.
The 2026 survey was conducted before the Iran war, and it reveals regional sentiments only heightened by that conflict. Malaysia’s Anwar has strongly condemned the strikes on Iran, a sentiment shared by many other Southeast Asian opinion leaders, particularly in Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. For other Southeast Asian leaders and populaces, the fury at Washington stems in greater part from the fact that the war has left Asia, more than any other region, in a dire energy crisis.
As the region most dependent on Persian Gulf oil and liquified natural gas (LNG), Asia is struggling to avoid running out of fuel, a real possibility in the coming weeks in poorer states like Bangladesh. For much of South and Southeast Asia, LNG was supposed to be the fuel that helped reduce dependence on oil, but the region is realizing that LNG, too, can be held up in the Strait of Hormuz or simply because of damage to critical operations in Qatar.
Several Asian states are panicking and blaming the United States, which did not consult with them or major allies like Australia or Japan, before the war. Countries have imposed austerity measures, tried to cushion the blow with subsidies, shortened workweeks, and, in the Philippines, declared a national emergency. States are reopening shuttered coal plants, planning for nuclear energy expansion, and clearly worrying that public anger could mount into widespread unrest.
China is benefiting from Southeast and South Asian anger and shock at the Iran war, even though Beijing itself, which long promised greater regional energy cooperation, is actually doing little to help its neighbors right now. Facing slower domestic growth and major economic challenges, China has made sure to shore up its own energy supply, which is already in better shape than its neighbors’ because of its investments in renewables, its ability to still access some Iranian oil, and its sizable petroleum reserve. Beijing has banned petroleum exports, as well as fertilizer exports.
Countries across South and Southeast Asia, including Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Thailand, have begged China to reconsider but have mostly been met with vague or no responses. “China may offer some ceremonial assistance, but it’s highly unlikely, if not wholly improbable, that it will share any substantive amount of its food, energy or other reserves with other countries,” Eric Olander, cofounder of the China-Global South Project, said in a Reuters report. Yet with so much disappointment and fury in Southeast Asia toward the White House, China’s own lack of assistance has mostly gotten a pass.
This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.