By Jack Erickson, Spring 2025 Marcellus Policy Fellow

China’s rise during the early 21st century constitutes the most significant development in Asia since the end of World War II. Because of China’s considerable geographic, demographic, and economic size, it will prove difficult to consider American strategy in any part of Asia without respect to China itself. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze Southeast Asia’s importance to the United States in the face of an increasingly assertive and powerful China.

The primary interest of the United States in Southeast Asia is to seek economic returns and ensure access to natural resources essential to both the U.S. economy and national security, and that competition with China in the region should be principally economic. The last several decades have proven the inadequacy of a strategy that overwhelmingly prioritizes the spread of democracy in the region, ceding American influence in the region to China.

This paper makes four principal policy recommendations. The first is for Washington to recalibrate its understanding of the nature of Southeast Asian countries to account for a recent history of repeated democratic failures and a lack of coalition-building. Accordingly, U.S. policy should temper its ideological and strategic expectations as a consequence. The second recommendation is to continue a strategy of freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea so as to frustrate Chinese expansion and capture of natural resources, as well as to build goodwill among littoral Southeast Asian states. The third recommendation is to expand America’s economic footprint through increased investment, especially in emerging sectors and infrastructure. The final recommendation is to prioritize America’s access to critical minerals found in the region to ensure a steady and secure flow of resources essential to national security.