When America stops leading, Asia starts looking elsewhere

As political scientist Joseph Nye argues, successful leadership requires more than coercion. It relies on soft power, the ability to persuade through example, credibility and shared benefits.

For decades, the US understood this. It led not through coercion but through example. It provided security, opened markets and built institutions that others wanted to join – a model sometimes described as “imperialism by invitation.” That is what made the US-led order legitimate.

Washington is now undermining that legacy with its own hands.

Instead of persuading allies through shared interests and mutual respect, it increasingly relies on pressure, threats and transactional demands.

Allies are publicly shamed for being “ungrateful” and “not paying enough.” Security guarantees are being dangled like bargaining chips, and tariffs are imposed on long-standing friends arbitrarily.

In the process, the US is doing China’s job for it – pushing the region to close ranks and look for common cause within Asia.

Everyone in Asia sees China’s predatory behavior. But the uncomfortable truth is that the US is beginning to resemble a bully – and once that distinction blurs, even close friends begin to hedge.

Allies respond to respect, not demands

When a superpower starts to sound desperate, it stops sounding like a leader. What allies hear is not resolve, but insecurity. It sounds less like a leader upholding the rules-based order and more like a frustrated power signaling that it can no longer provide the leadership that made that order possible in the first place.

The problem is not that the US is asking others to share the burden – it’s that it does so in ways that seem arrogant and wound the national pride of its allies.

As one scholar of great-power management warns, “The status quo powers must exhibit empathy, fairness and a genuine concern not to offend the prestige and national honor of the rising power.”

Washington has forgotten that lesson before – and it paid dearly.

Racism and the road to 1941

While the oil embargoes were the immediate trigger for Japan’s attack on the US in 1941, the deeper cause lay in racism and exclusion.

At the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, the Japanese delegation – officially invited as a great power – was openly ignored.

When America stops leading, Asia starts looking elsewhere

French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau even remarked, “To think that there are blonde women in the world; and we stay closed up here with these Japanese, who are so ugly.”

Japan’s proposal for a racial equality clause at Versailles was flat-out rejected without debate. When the Council of Four was formed, Japan was excluded.

That contempt became institutionalized in the US when the 1924 US Immigration Act declared Asians “ineligible for citizenship,” and it was reinforced thereafter when the Washington Naval Treaty imposed a discriminatory naval tonnage ratio.

Edward House – President Wilson’s closest adviser – privately warned, “Japan is barred from all the undeveloped places of the earth, and if her influence in the East is not recognized as in some degree superior to that of the Western powers, there will be a reckoning.”

Attempt to create a new order

Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote, “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” As diplomacy and appeals for equal treatment failed, Tokyo concluded that only war could create an order in which it would no longer be treated as a subordinate power.

That reckoning came soon enough – in the form of war in 1941. Japanese novelist Sei Itō wrote in December 1941, “Our destiny is such that we cannot realize our qualifications as first-class people of the world unless we have fought with the top-ranking white men.”

As Japanese historian John Dower explains, Japanese leaders framed their campaign by claiming they had already “secured Manchuria against the ambitions of the Soviet Union and freed most of China from Anglo-American exploitation,” and that their next goal was to “liberate East Asia from white invasion and oppression.”

The lesson is not that Japan was justified. The lesson is that when a rising power is repeatedly denied dignity and equality, it eventually seeks to create a new order.

Old prejudices, new forms

A century later, the pattern is recurring. Chinese scholars and researchers have increasingly faced suspicion and visa denials under the “China Initiative.” In many cases, they were investigated not because of what they did but simply because of their ethnicity.

The problem is that this pattern now extends beyond China – affecting even America’s closest allies in Asia.

In 2025, a Korean-born PhD student and longtime US permanent resident was detained for more than a week at San Francisco International Airport – without explanation, despite holding legal status.

Japanese citizens – including ordinary tourists and young women visiting Hawaii – have also reported being denied entry at US airports in recent months, as immigration officials cite vague “suspicion” and apply increasingly discretionary standards.

For South Koreans and Japanese alike, Washington’s indiscriminate harsh treatment of Asians – both friends and foes – seemingly confirms that race still matters, reviving the message of 1924: that Asians will never be fully trusted or accepted.

Asia is losing faith

While race is not the principal driver of today’s tensions in the region, Asia is once again being told – implicitly and explicitly – that it will never be treated as an equal under a US-led order.

Beijing is capitalizing on this perception. “Americans take all visitors from China, South Korea and Japan as Asians. They cannot tell the differences and it’s the same in Europe,” said Wang Yi, the head of the ruling Communist Party’s foreign affairs commission. “No matter how yellow you dye your hair, or how sharp you make your nose, you’ll never turn into a European or American, you’ll never turn into a Westerner.”

Most in South Korea and Japan reject that rhetoric. Yet more and more are starting to ask: Is Beijing wrong – or speaking an inconvenient truth?

A new Asian alignment is beginning to emerge – not because China offers a more attractive vision, but because the US no longer looks like a confident and dependable leader.

Asia starts to hedge

On August 16, a leading Korean newspaper reported an interview with a Japanese political scientist who warned that South Korea and Japan should begin discussing a “security Plan B” without the United States, amid growing concern that a future Trump administration may scale back US involvement in Northeast Asia.

This perception is already shaping regional behavior. In Seoul, even conservative policymakers speak openly about preparing for US disengagement.

In Tokyo, the government has quietly reopened diplomatic channels with Beijing – not out of admiration, but as a hedge.

Regional participation in China-backed initiatives such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) keeps expanding, while enthusiasm for the US-backed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) remains muted.

This is not alignment out of attraction. It is alignment driven by a loss of faith in the existing leader.

Changes needed

None of this is inevitable. Asia is not turning away because it prefers authoritarianism, but because it feels increasingly disrespected by a power that still speaks the language of equal partnership – while treating its allies as subordinates.

If the United States still wants to lead, it must start acting like a leader again – not by coercing but by inspiring. That requires treating Asian partners not as junior clients, but as genuine co-architects of the international order.

Only by treating its partners with respect, restraint and a genuine sense of dignity can Washington regain the moral authority that once made others follow willingly.

Asia remains open to US leadership – but it will no longer follow blindly. The choice is still America’s to make. Time, however, is no longer on its side.

Hanjin Lew is a political commentator specializing in East Asian affairs. Jio Lew contributed research for this article.