Uncertainty is nothing new in US-China relations. Indeed, it is a constant feature of all big power relationships. However, recent US-China interactions under Donald Trump and Xi Jinping have heightened uncertainties at multiple fronts, with an intensity that increasingly pushes the US allies and partners around Asia—including those in Southeast Asia—to reassess their fundamental outlooks and options. The escalating trade confrontation between the world’s two largest economies—alongside a series of profound events in late May and the first half of June 2018 (e.g. US disinvitation of China from the RIMPAC naval exercises, the widening cracks in the Western democracies at the tense G7 Summit, the show of “unity” among China, Russia, and key Eurasian countries at the expanded SCO Summit, Trump’s unilateral security promises at his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un)—not only signify a power shift from the West to the East, but also a widening divergence in interests between the world’s two strongest powers. They may well be part of what scholar Khong Yuen Foong describes as the initial “transition tremors” in today’s international system.¹  

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