We are living in a world with three leading great powers — all with explicitly revisionist aims when it comes to the international “rules-based order”.

For those accustomed to thinking about global order as being centred on great powers, this is the most significant reinvention of that order since the end of the Cold War.

Since its formation, Russia has invaded its neighbours and taken territory and populations by force. Since 1950, the United States and its allies have worried about China’s stated imperative to reunify Taiwan and assertions of its maritime territorial claims. In 2025, the United States, under the second Donald Trump presidency, has announced an agenda to “take” Greenland and annex Canada. Revisionist powers do not play by agreed rules.

In  radically revising the terms of trade, Trump follows a long line of US leaders since 1945 struggling with the Triffin dilemma – the provider of the international reserve currency cannot sustain currency convertibility alongside control over domestic currency valuation and trade balances. Previous US leaders wielded monetary instruments to control inflation and improve current account deficits. Trump is now using the blunter instruments of raising tariffs and cutting foreign aid, with the ostensible aim of improving US export access and competitiveness.

Trump’s tariffs ring the death knell of the low- or no-tariff global trading system. Trump’s giant shove is likely to stimulate economic initiatives among “the rest” excluding the United States. The ultimate decoupling may turn out to be between the United States and the rest of the world, not just the United States and China.

A revisionist regime in Washington also presents opportunity to think equally unpalatable thoughts about a new US–China economic-security bargain.

Transglobal technologies will continue to break borders, but geography may reassert itself too. A more self-centred United States is much less likely to conduct military campaigns on the other side of the world, while Europe will be forced to deal directly with the Russia threat. East Asia must learn to live with a risen China without an unreliable offshore balancer.

The rest of the world is a large and amorphous bunch. They can, and have been, followers, pawns or sites of great power rivalry and conflict. But they can and have also been innovators, leaders, collective action specialists and out-of-the-box thinkers and shakers. Consider the Non-Aligned Movement, the European and African Unions, the BRICS’ New Development Bank and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to name a few examples.

Regions including East, South and Central Asia, Africa, Latin America and parts of the Middle East are used to value-diverse, dynamic and often dangerous environments. They have had to navigate regional and international orders not of their own making, and make their way without neat categories of perpetual friends or sworn enemies. They may hate it, and dread the costs, but the Global Majority is better prepared psychologically to face the current world of relative revisionism.

At this juncture, being willing to go beyond old assumptions and to ask different questions will help all countries to navigate the new normal of an international system dominated by three  revisionist great powers.

One supposedly worst-case scenario under discussion in Canberra is that Southeast Asia falls into China’s sphere of influence. Australia has limited direct ability to prevent that development, yet it’s a scenario that’s unlikely to eventuate. Fear about the potential “loss” of Southeast Asia is misplaced.

Regional doubts about the United States are not new. The United States has allies and firm friends, but Southeast Asia does not see it the same way as Australia – it’s regarded the United States as neither a necessarily benign nor an altruistic hegemon.

Southeast Asian responses to Chinese power are also not conditioned mainly by what they think about the United States. Southeast Asians largely do not see themselves as living in a world circumscribed by two great powers locked in rivalry. Most engage in hedging, omni-enmeshment and complex balancing, and their conception is of a layered hierarchical regional order.

Because of China’s vital role in economic production and as a growing source of investment and consumption, the region’s main concern now is the consequence of a serious and prolonged economic slowdown in China. This will impose a huge, additional strain upon Southeast Asia’s economic prospects on top of US-created volatility. The Trump tariffs will compel some regional economies to manage an even greater influx of cheaper Chinese products. Yet the major regional worry is not centred on China’s economic strength, which is viewed as good for a region that has experience in managing the asymmetry of power with its neighbouring giant.

A potential Chinese sphere of influence recedes as a central worry in a world filled with revisionist great powers. Precisely because the United States may remain aloof, the region will have to continue to work closely with what they hope will be an economically vibrant China. And because China is part of many of the region’s territorial and other conflicts, Southeast Asia must continue to manage regional conflicts as best it can.

This is not necessarily a recipe for simply giving in to Chinese demands. As a whole, Southeast Asia has not been keen on balancing with the United States, even when that option seemed available. The current situation only exacerbates Southeast Asian imperatives to find their own ways of living with multiple revisionist powers.

Especially for allies deeply integrated with the United States, a defining era is over, and they must fundamentally reimagine their economic and political security. This rethinking and retooling is  politically fraught, involves very costly trade-offs in domestic spending and could take decades.

Republished from East Asia Forum, 1 June 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.