Asian allies fear being dumped by Trump
America’s friends in the Indo-Pacific live in dread of being abandoned like Ukraine
WHO WILL be next? As America abandons Ukraine and ignores European allies, its closest friends in Asia ask whether they too will be shaken down or cast aside. The worries grow deeper as China flexes its muscles. In recent weeks it has conducted naval live-fire exercises off Taiwan, in the Gulf of Tonkin and as far as the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. On February 25th, Taiwan detained a Chinese ship suspected of severing an undersea cable.
Explore more
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “A scary new game”
From the March 8th 2025 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the edition
Why Christianity is taking an Asian turn
Believers have clout in South Korea, the Philippines, Japan and beyond
Indians are losing big on the stockmarket
The middle-class enthusiasm for derivatives is a relatively new phenomenon
Why Narendra Modi has embraced an anti-caste icon
B.R. Ambedkar dedicated his life to challenging Hinduism
The biggest bugs in the new gold rush are Asian
Wall Street is loading up on bullion. So are people in China and India
Where new talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un might go
A crisis is more likely than a genuine breakthrough
Japan faces a reckoning over rice
A crisis over its staple reveals cracks in the country’s food system