KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – When US President Donald Trump arrives in Malaysia this weekend for a summit of major Southeast Asian leaders, he will deliver a diplomatic coup for Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.
US presidents rarely visit Malaysia. Malaysia, a multi-ethnic nation of 35 million people sandwiched between Thailand and Singapore, has for decades maintained a policy of not taking sides in conflicts between the great powers.
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Trump will be the third US leader to visit the Southeast Asian country, which is hosting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit from Sunday to Tuesday, following visits by former US presidents Barack Obama and Lyndon B. Johnson.
This will be the second time Trump, who is known for his disdain for multilateralism, will attend a meeting of Southeast Asian nations after missing ASEAN summits in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The US president will be joined by a number of prominent leaders from non-ASEAN countries, including Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Those choosing not to attend are Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who Trump is scheduled to meet in South Korea for next week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.
In many ways, President Trump’s visit symbolizes the delicate balance that the Anwar government has sought to maintain as Malaysia endures the headwinds of escalating tensions between the United States and China.
Malaysia is deeply connected to both the US and Chinese economies.
The United States, which has great influence in Malaysia’s high-tech and oil and gas industries, will become Southeast Asia’s largest foreign investor and third-largest trading partner in 2024.
China, Malaysia’s main buyer of electronics and palm oil, took the number one spot in trade and third place in investment in the same year.
But Malaysia’s efforts to walk a fine line between Washington and China are becoming increasingly difficult as the superpowers roll out tit-for-tat tariffs and export restrictions as they clash over regional hot spots such as Taiwan and the South China Sea.
“Ideally, Malaysia would want to engage productively with both China and the United States on a range of issues,” said Thomas Daniel, an analyst at the Kuala Lumpur Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It is in our interest,” Daniel told Al Jazeera.
Anwar sees President Trump’s visit as an opportunity to strengthen economic ties, champion peace and stability in the region, and enhance ASEAN’s standing on the international stage.
Mr. Anwar also pledged to use the rare opportunity to meet President Trump to constructively elevate differences between Washington and Kuala Lumpur, particularly the Palestinian cause.
Professor Awang Azman Awang Pawi from the University of Malaya told Al Jazeera: “The throughline is autonomy: not representing anyone, avoiding entanglements, maximizing options and extracting benefits from both extremes.”
During President Trump’s visit, the US tariffs on Malaysia, currently set at 19%, and China’s controversial export restrictions on rare earths are expected to be major topics of discussion.
Mohd Ramlan Mohd Arshad, a senior lecturer at MARA University of Technology in Shah Alam, near Kuala Lumpur, said the priority for Malaysia was to maintain “rules-based” trade that allows countries to deepen economic ties despite political differences.
Arshad told Al Jazeera that a prolonged economic cold war between the US and China was the “worst thing” that could happen to Malaysia.
Trump, who has made no secret of his Nobel Peace Prize ambitions, is also expected to witness the signing of a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, which had a brief border conflict in July that left at least 38 people dead.
For Anwar, who has led a coalition of multi-ethnic parties with diverse and competing interests since 2022, the balancing act also includes domestic political considerations.
US support for Israel’s war in Gaza has been a source of controversy in Muslim-majority Malaysia, where the plight of Palestinians frequently sparks public protests.
In the run-up to the summit, critics have called for Mr. Anwar to be disinvited over Mr. Trump’s role in supporting a war that a United Nations commission of inquiry last month determined amounted to genocide.
Mr Anwar’s former mentor and nemesis, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, said in a video message last month that “people like Mr Trump should not be welcome in Malaysia, no matter how powerful they are.”
Mr. Anwar defended the invitation, emphasizing his view that diplomacy is “practical work” to advance a country’s interests in an “imperfect world.”
“It requires balance, discipline and the courage to stay the course even when the ground changes,” he told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur earlier this month.
Sharifa Munira Alatas, an independent scholar and researcher who previously taught international relations at the National University of Malaysia, said as a small country Malaysia has always placed pragmatism at the heart of its foreign policy.
“Anwar and Malaysia cannot afford to do anything else,” Alatas told Al Jazeera.
“And given the current highly unpredictable US-China tensions brought about by the Trump 2.0 era, ASEAN will remain actively non-aligned without taking sides.”
Professor Awang Azman of the University of Malaya said that while President Trump’s visit alone would raise the profile of Malaysia and ASEAN, the true test of the summit’s success will be whether concrete results can be achieved on issues such as the Thai-Cambodian conflict and trade.
“Once we have a ceasefire agreement and concrete trade language on paper, it’s not just a photo op,” Awan Azman said.
“If either path ends up deadlocked, the story will return to being more about optics than results, although the trip will still be symbolically important given the rarity of a US president’s visit to Malaysia.”
