Trump’s Asia Trade-Deals Week.
Every Deal, Every Capital, Every Dollar Figure.

200 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Conditional path to 750. First major Chinese Boeing order since 2017’s 300-aircraft, $37B deal. The full standalone story is at /economy/trump-china-boeing-200-jets.

Soybeans + oil + LNG. Unspecified volumes; politically priced. Soybeans matter most to U.S. farm-belt growers hit hardest by 2018-19 trade-war retaliation. LNG and oil expand existing U.S. export channels.

Trade truce extended. The October 2025 framework paused both U.S. tariffs and Chinese rare-earth export controls. The May 14 extension keeps that pause running — durational specifics still under negotiation, but the headline is intact.

What did NOT happen: A Boeing widebody order. Pre-summit reporting had Boeing seeking 100 additional widebodies (777-9, 787-10). None landed. This is the unspoken disappointment in Boeing’s -4% intraday stock reaction.

The headline meetings: PM Sanae Takaichi (LDP, sworn in 2025 succeeding Ishiba); Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama; METI Minister Ryosei Akazawa.

The substantive deliverable: a confirmed U.S.-Japan currency-coordination framework. Katayama, post-meeting: “Japan and the U.S. are effectively coordinating on the recent foreign-exchange trend.” Bessent: “constant and robust” coordination on undesirable currency moves.

The MET-I deliverable: a memorandum to strengthen U.S.-Japan ties in energy and critical minerals. The energy piece dovetails with LNG export channels; the critical-minerals piece is the rare-earth-substitution play against Chinese export-control leverage.

The Iran-war piece: per Bloomberg and Japan Times, Bessent’s sessions also covered U.S.-Japan coordination on the Iran-ceasefire-collapse risk — specifically, supply-chain resilience for energy imports if the Strait of Hormuz situation deteriorates. (See the Hormuz tanker-drone story.)

The structural read: This was not a new trade deal. The September 2025 deal — $550B Japanese investment, 100 Boeing aircraft, 15% reciprocal tariff — is the headline. The May 10-12 trip was the implementation, currency-coordination, and pre-Beijing alignment leg. The deliverable was alignment, not announcement.

The base deal: the $350 billion ROK investment commitment from the October 29 / November 14 Trump-Lee Jae-myung summit. $150B specifically for U.S. shipbuilding. $200B for “strategic” investments. Korean Air’s 103-aircraft $36 billion Boeing order is part of that book.

The semiconductor backstop: ROK secured a semiconductor-parity guarantee — the U.S. commits to providing terms on any future Section 232 semiconductor tariffs to Korea that are “no less favorable” than terms in any future agreement covering at least Korea’s trade volume. This is the “Taiwan parity” mechanism, in legal form.

The friction: Trump publicly threatened on January 27, 2026 to raise ROK reciprocal tariffs to 25% on the grounds that the South Korean National Assembly had not yet formalized the October trade agreement. The threat was de-escalated; the framework holds. Bessent’s May Seoul stop reinforces the operational implementation track.

The structural read: Same as Tokyo — the May visit is implementation, not new headline. The headlines are the Q4 2025 deals; the May trip is the operational rail under them.

Vietnam: Framework agreement under the August 2025 reciprocal-tariff regime. Headline tariff: 20%, down from a “Liberation Day” threat of 46%. Vietnam reciprocally eliminates tariffs and provides preferential market access for most U.S. industrial and agricultural products.

Philippines: 19%reciprocal tariff under the same framework. President Marcos clarified after the announcement that the Philippine commitment to “zero tariffs” applies specifically to American automobile imports rather than to all imports — the U.S.-Philippines auto channel is the operative piece.

Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand: framework agreements reached around the October 26 ASEAN summit. Country-specific negotiated reciprocal-tariff bands under the Liberation Day framework. The economic value is the avoidance of higher headline rates, not net new investment commitments at the Japan/Korea scale.

The honest read: the Southeast Asian frameworks are tariff de-escalations and supply-chain partner commitments. They are real but not investment commitments in the same league as the Japan/Korea/China headline package. CFR’s rolling tracker is the most up-to-date reference.

1. Boeing customer SEC filings. A verbal Trump-Xi commitment is not a Boeing customer contract. The market is waiting to see the firm-customer 200-aircraft commitment file as an 8-K disclosure with named Chinese state airlines as counterparties and named delivery slots. Until then, the deal is political; after, the deal is industrial.

2. Japan $550B disbursement schedule. The September 2025 fact sheet sets the headline. The implementation runs through energy, semiconductors, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and shipbuilding investments. The expected returns — per the fact sheet, 90% of investment-derived profits accruing to U.S. interests — depend on which projects fund and on what schedule. Watch the Q3-Q4 2026 capital-spending announcements out of Japan’s big-cap industrial firms.

3. October 2025 trade truce extension specifics. The May 14 extension was announced; the durational and tariff-level specifics were not. The market is treating the truce as durable; if a specific bilateral dispute (rare earths, semiconductors, Taiwan policy) reopens, the truce could collapse and the deal-week wins compress.

4. Iran ceasefire. Trump publicly described the U.S.-Iran ceasefire as having “approximately a 1% chance of living.” If the ceasefire collapses, Strait of Hormuz energy flows deteriorate, supply-chain resilience commitments get tested in real time, and the May Asia-week wins move from “strategic positioning” to “crisis-management infrastructure.” Watch the next 60 days.