Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – United States President Donald Trump has come and gone from a meeting of Southeast Asia’s leaders, but many questions remain about how the region will fare under his ever-shifting trade policies.
Trump flew into Malaysia on Monday to attend the 47th Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), where his marquee event was overseeing the signing of a ceasefire agreement between Thailand and Cambodia.
On the sidelines of the summit in Kuala Lumpur, he also met with ASEAN’s leaders to discuss US tariff rates, which range from 10 percent for Singapore to 40 percent for Myanmar and Laos.
In the flurry of activity, the White House announced reciprocal trade deals with Malaysia and Cambodia, and framework agreements – the outlines of future trade deals – with Thailand and Vietnam.
While Malaysia received tariff exemptions on some of its key exports in its trade agreement, Trump’s latest round of deal-making left many larger questions unanswered.
Still to be determined is whether Trump will follow through on his threats to impose a 100 percent tariff on semiconductors and a 40 percent tariff on “transshipments” – referring mainly to Chinese exports routed through third countries to avoid pre-existing tariffs.
It is also unclear how the US might define the “country of origin” of goods that cross borders dozens of times before they are finished, if Trump does proceed with measures targeting transshipments.
None of the agreements signed on Sunday mentioned semiconductors – a key export for Malaysia – or specified country-of-origin rules, despite the threat that a broadly-applied tariff on goods with multiple countries of origin would pose to Southeast Asia’s highly integrated supply chains.
There were also no announcements on trade negotiations involving some of the region’s biggest economies, including Indonesia and the Philippines.
Under the deals with Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, all four countries agreed to the same US tariff rates previously announced by the White House – 19 or 20 percent – while making a number of concessions.
Those include commitments by all four countries to reduce non-tariff barriers to US trade, with Cambodia and Thailand pledging to eliminate tariffs on 100 percent and 99 percent of US imports, respectively.
Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam also agreed to buy billions of dollars’ worth of US agricultural exports, US-made aircraft, and offer concessions on digital services, while Kuala Lumpur pledged a further $70bn in capital investment in the US.
Thailand and Malaysia signed separate memorandums of agreement to cooperate on supply chains of rare earths and other critical minerals, such as nickel and cobalt, while facilitating more US investment.
While the terms of the agreements appear to largely benefit the US, they do offer some concessions to the region.
Malaysia’s agreement, the most comprehensive of the deals reached at the summit, stipulates a zero percent tariff on some of its key exports, including palm oil, rubber, and cocoa.
Much of the language around Malaysia lifting trade barriers also rehashes existing trade policies, said Jaideep Singh, an analyst at the Institute of Strategic & International Studies in Kuala Lumpur.
“For many of the commitments to reducing non-tariff barriers set out in the agreement, there is no additional regulatory burden on the Malaysian government,” Singh told Al Jazeera.
Priyanka Kishore, director and principal economist at Asia Decoded in Singapore, said Malaysia also secured “peace of mind” on tariffs.
In his “liberation day” announcement in April, Trump threatened Southeast Asia with some of the highest tariffs in the world, before scaling back the rates for most countries to 20 percent or lower.
Kishore said other ASEAN countries could look to the Malaysia-US deal as they vie for lower tariffs or specific goods exemptions in their ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration.
“It’s very likely Malaysia serves as a template for Vietnam, Thailand… and the rest of the world in terms of what they can look forward to,” Kishore told Al Jazeera.
Trump’s swing through the region also did not touch on industry-specific tariffs, such as those on automobiles, aluminium, steel, and pharmaceuticals.
Jayant Menon, senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said the most important outstanding question after Trump’s visit is how the deals will be enforced.
Menon noted that the US Congress has the power to regulate foreign trade, such as through free trade agreements, while Trump has imposed tariffs by invoking emergency powers.
“The legal status and enforceability of both the trade deals being done, and the framework agreements, is unclear because these are not free trade agreements in the traditional sense,” he told Al Jazeera.
“It will be enforced through the threat of more punitive tariffs if a country doesn’t live up to what has been agreed in these deals or framework agreements.”
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