The Trump administration has abandoned diplomacy for tariffs and threats, fracturing alliances and leaving Asean caught in the crossfire
The Indo-Pacific cannot afford to become collateral damage in America’s descent from diplomacy into dysfunction – a decline embodied by Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth’s sabre-rattling and Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio’s overreach.
In this environment, diplomacy is no longer the art of restraining power. It has become the art of surviving it.
The Hegseth doctrine – if it can be called one – illustrates a deeper unravelling within Trump’s second administration: the near-total removal of institutional counterweights. The National Security Council is diminished. The State Department’s career corps, once the backbone of US diplomacy, has been hollowed out. What remains is a cabinet of loyalists, not strategists.
