Why many in Malaysia are wary of Trump’s visit

An open letter to US President Donald Trump:

Dear President Donald Trump,

I suppose you might be perplexed that there are many in Malaysia who are not quite enamoured that you, the President of the United States, are visiting Malaysia on 26 October to grace the Asean summit.

Let me break this down for you, if I may.

The first reason for the lacklustre support for your visit is that many in Malaysia believe the genocide in Gaza would not have taken place without US support.

You, Mr President, could have stopped the carnage as soon as you got into office in January this year by pausing the supply of armaments and munitions to Israel.

That would have forced them to start negotiations.

However, you didn’t, and as a result, another 20,000–30,000 Palestinians have been killed since January 2025. There are many Malaysians who believe the US is complicit in this crime against humanity.

Quite apart from the endless supply of weapons and ammunition, since October 2023, the US has used the Security Council veto at least six times to shield Israel from censure. 

Of course, we are relieved you finally pressured Israel to agree to a ceasefire. But we believe that this should have come much earlier. We really hope that you will stop weapon supplies to Israel if they resume attacking the Palestinian communities in Gaza or the West Bank. 

The second reason many in Malaysia are not quite happy with your visit to Malaysia is that the US has never quite recognised the right of other countries to exercise their sovereign right to develop their societies as they wish.

From Cuba to Venezuela, Iran, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, we have witnessed how the US has unilaterally imposed painful economic sanctions or funded armed insurrections just because these countries had a different vision of how to develop their societies.

We, in Malaysia, may not agree with all aspects of the vision and policies of these countries.

But we believe every country, however small, has the right to determine its own course of development.

Economic sanctions and military intervention should only be decided by a supermajority in the United Nations and not by the US, together with its “Coalition of the Willing”.

The third reason we are not quite happy with the visit of a US president to our country is that we are anxious that the US’s bellicose interactions with China will spark a military conflict in the South China Sea.

Malaysia, together with our Asean neighbours, have long proclaimed this region as a “Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality”.

Zopfan has been our policy for this region, and most countries in Asean have requested that nuclear weapons not be brought into this region.

So far, we have been blessed and have avoided major wars.

We do have issues with China over the ‘Nine Dash Line’, but we believe that these can and should be resolved by negotiations over time. 

We are really concerned that the US’s constant needling of China might, as a result of a miscalculation, degenerate into military action.

The world is witnessing this in Eastern Europe, where the inexorable expansion of Nato towards Russia from the 1990s right up till 2020 led to a situation where the Russian leadership, believing it faced an existential threat, decided to respond militarily.

The US and the Nato leadership played a big role in the genesis of the Ukraine war. 

But this should be remembered – the brunt of this conflict has been borne by the ordinary people of Europe. Thousands have died in Ukraine, and many others maimed.

Economic hardships have escalated in Germany and other EU countries where the supply of cheap gas via the Nord Stream pipeline was ‘mysteriously’ sabotaged.

The resulting economic hardship and the austerity that has been forced upon the people of the EU has resulted in the unravelling of the social contract and in the rise of right-wing chauvinistic parties that are tearing apart Western societies.

No, Mr President, we certainly do not want that kind of scenario to unfold in our region of the world. 

We would like to emphasise, Mr President, that our unhappiness with US policy is largely with the US political elite.

We are in full sympathy with ordinary people of the US who, in our opinion, have been poorly represented, misled and divided by their own political leaders.

The ‘free trade’ policies pushed by the US political elite, together with World Bank and the World Trade Organization, over the past 30 years has led to the outmigration of well-paying manufacturing jobs to Asia and a marked drop in living standards of the working people in the US.

Many former working-class people voted for you believing in your Maga (Make America Great Again) promise, but again they have been misled. You have cut corporate taxes while slashing medical and food stamp benefits to millions of poorer American people.

Your tariffs against friends and foes are raising the cost of basic goods in the US.

The people of the US are now more divided – and acrimoniously so – than ever before!

We feel sorry for the ordinary people in the US, and we wish them the collective wisdom to identify political leaders who truly represent their interests. 

We hope you and your advisers will examine the reasons why so many Malaysians aren’t quite enthused over your visit to Kuala Lumpur, and take appropriate steps to curtail over-muscular foreign policy initiatives, stop citing US ‘exceptionalism’ as a basis for your international policies and behave as a more responsible member of the family of nations.

If you fail to do so, the decline of US prestige and influence will surely gather pace.

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