President Donald Trump touches down in Malaysia Sunday seeking to bolster economic ties with the region amid a high-stakes trade war with China. Missing from the agenda: finalizing the splashy trade deals he announced this summer with three of Southeast Asia’s biggest economies.

The president in July touted agreements with Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines as the White House raced to secure as many trade deals as possible before a self-imposed deadline to raise tariffs. But beyond the celebratory social media posts, the White House provided little detail on the terms to lower U.S. duties. The three countries openly disputed some of the things Trump claimed they’d agreed to. And aside from a fact sheet on the Indonesian agreement, the administration has not released further updates in the ensuing months.

Trump is not expected to announce any new progress on the negotiations in Kuala Lumpur, as talks with the three governments drag on, according to three people with knowledge of the talks, although he is poised to unveil new preliminary deals with neighboring Cambodia and Malaysia.

The struggle to finalize terms with Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines highlights the fragile nature of the handshake agreements the White House rolled out en masse this summer, which didn’t address thorny areas of dispute. That’s particularly true when it comes to the issues that involve China, including Beijing’s use of Southeast Asian countries as a transit point to duck U.S. tariffs. The failure to resolve those issues puts Trump in a weaker position going into a make-or-break meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, currently planned for Oct. 30.

“These are very complex issues,” said Daniel Kritenbrink, who served as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam in the first Trump administration. “I’m not surprised it’s taken as much time as it has, because it’s really hard to wave a magic wand and solve these issues.”

“You can agree in principle on a top line tariff rate pretty quickly, but then to actually come up with an implementation plan… that’s a much more complex piece of business,” Kritenbrink added.

Chief among those issues are U.S. demands to prevent China from skirting tariffs by sending goods through other countries. Trump has already imposed a 40 percent tariff on these so-called transshipped goods — items shipped through another country in order to avoid high duties. But it’s also looking to impose new “rules of origin,” in an attempt to limit China’s practice of dodging tariffs by moving Chinese-made parts to a second country for assembly.

Southeast Asian countries “have said over and over and over again, they don’t want to choose between the U.S. and China,” said Barbara Weisel, a former U.S. trade negotiator now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But they understand that through these reciprocal trade agreements, they could well find themselves having to choose, and directly in the crossfire of the U.S.-China trade war and at the mercy of both.”

That’s particularly the case for Vietnam, which has seen explosive growth in its exports to the United States since 2017, partly as a result of the tariffs that Trump imposed on China during his first term. In response, importers shifted large amount of production to Vietnam, and, the U.S. government alleges, so did China.

Still, the administration may be able to come away with some trade victories on the trip, which starts with the ASEAN Summit, a biannual meeting of the regional group’s 10 nations.

A senior administration official told reporters Friday that Trump will sign a “series of economic agreements” that “will further reshape the global economic order and secure more investments that will create high paying jobs and advance the reindustrialization of America.”

“This will include forward-looking and tough trade deals that will benefit American workers, exporters, farmers, small businesses and digital innovators. He will also enter into critical mineral agreements that will rapidly unlock the region’s resources to create reliable industrial supply chains to support a resilient and prosperous world economy,” said the official, who was granted anonymity per the terms of the call.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has been actively negotiating with Cambodia and said earlier this month that the two had made significant progress in achieving a more fair and reciprocal trade relationship and securing commitments that break down longstanding trade barriers and tariffs.”

Cambodia is a relatively small trading partner with a lopsided trading relationship with the United States. Last year, U.S. companies exported just $319 million worth of goods to the country, while Cambodian suppliers exported $12.3 billion worth of textiles, agricultural goods and other products to the United States.

But Trump is also expected to announce a more significant breakthrough with Malaysia, one of the United States’ largest trading partners in the region, according to two people familiar. Kritenbrink said those talks have also made progress, and the two countries could be poised to announce a trade agreement while Trump is in Kuala Lumpur.

U.S. two-way trade with all the ASEAN countries totaled about $475 billion last year, compared to $582 billion with China. Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore accounted for about 80 percent of that commerce, followed by Indonesia and the Philippines.

Still, China is the biggest trading partner for ASEAN as a whole, highlighting the difficult choice the Trump administration is forcing the countries to make. Two-way trade totaled $984 billion in 2024, according to the Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency.

For months, the White House implied that there would be a first mover advantage for any country that struck a trade agreement ahead of Trump’s shifting deadline for the imposing global “reciprocal” tariffs he unveiled in April.

But despite being among the first to strike a framework deal with the administration this summer, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam were stunned to see Trump issue virtually the same 19 to 20 percent tariff on most of Southeast Asia in August, including countries that did not offer nearly the same concessions.

For Vietnam, the trouble started almost immediately after news of the trade deal hit Trump’s Truth Social page. Blindsided by both a tariff and transshipment rate that Vietnamese officials said was higher than expected, the government never formally accepted the agreement. That’s left both sides stuck in talks that are still centered on the baseline tariff rates both countries plan to impose.

Negotiators haven’t yet begun discussions on transshipment — a complicated topic for Vietnam, which has become a growing manufacturing hub in the wake of Trump’s first term trade war with China.

The administration has taken a two-pronged approach to transshipment. The first involves pushing countries to crack down on illegal efforts to dodge tariffs by moving products through third countries before they arrive in the U.S. But they also want to step up scrutiny of the origins of component parts used in countries’ exports — what’s known as “rules of origin” — to determine how high a tariff those goods should face.

“When the President says ‘transshipment,’ I think he’s also focused, maybe primarily on foreign content, especially Chinese content,” Kritenbrink said. “That’s a much harder, trickier piece of business, both to control and to actually monitor and measure as well.”

It remains unclear how restrictive the United States intends to be in either negotiating, or unilaterally imposing, new rules of origin, or how expansive its definition of transhipment will be, Weisel said.

Countries in the region are also resisting U.S. requests to include “economic security” provisions in the trade agreements, which could require them to restrict exports of certain high-tech goods to the world’s second-largest economy and to limit Chinese investment in certain sectors of their economy.

The ASEAN nations are “concerned about the reaction from China if they implement measures,” Weisel said, particularly after Xi warned Southeast Asian countries this year not to cooperate with the U.S. against China.

A third big stumbling block as the United States pushes to wrap up individual negotiations with ASEAN countries is the rising number of U.S. national security trade investigations under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, any of which could lead to new tariffs on ASEAN goods after they have finalized a reciprocal trade deal with the United States.

“It would be politically very difficult for them to have accepted a bilateral deal now, only to face in coming months a new 232 that significantly impacts their exports,” Weisel said.

The multiple hangups — coupled with the sheer amount of trade deals U.S. negotiators are attempting to balance — leaves it unlikely that any formalized deals will happen this trip, let alone this year.

“Unfortunately, the reality continues to reflect that reaching “final” reciprocal tariff deals with most ASEAN nations is not likely to happen in 2025,” said one industry official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.

Phelim Kine and Ari Hawkins contributed to this report.