The atmosphere around the newly-installed Donald Trump presidency is profoundly surreal and an administration which is less than two months old already contains the paranoia and dissembling which characterized the final days of Richard Nixon’s tenure as the leader of the free world.

But what is the reality of this for Asia, assuming Trump serves out at least four years of his allotted term? The answer appears to be the opposite of what Trump intends.

It seems that his early action in shredding the Trans-Pacific Partnership together with his likely intentions towards US-Asian trade are far more likely to “make Asia great” rather than the former in that coupling.

China, which was never a party to the TPP, must be laughing its socks off. Although Asia stands to lose around US$295 billion per year in annual trade thanks to the US’s withdrawal from the TPP (no one expects the agreement to survive absent of America’s participation), China stands waiting in the wings to pick up the slack.

It may be that China’s proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) framework is a deal which links 16 countries to that country bilaterally in a rather ramshackle manner. But it appears the only route to take for those countries which signed up to the TPP, including Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Brunei, in the wake of the US sinking the deal.

Donald Trump has handed China a stunning opportunity to take the lead in intra-Asian trade, and together with the country’s One Belt One Road project which aims to reproduce the ancient Silk Road trading route between China and the West, involving massive infrastructure investment, the momentum has never been more in China’s favour.

Add to that the asinine climate change denials by the Trump administration, its espousal of fossil fuel-generated power, the sweeping progress made towards Green finance in China, and the circle of that country’s growing hegemony in Asia looks close to closure.

None of this has yet been built into US stock prices, where record levels on the major indices prevail. I find it challenging to try to parse this equity market price action but it seems to be based on a combination of promised deregulation in the banking industry (US bank stocks have soared since Trump’s election victory), massive spending on infrastructure, and bullish rhetoric which has yet to be backed by concrete policy initiatives.

The irony there is that in order to create the jobs in the US that he promised, Trump will have to engage in trade with Asia like never before, unless he attempts to impose a tariff war with the region, which will only end in tears from America’s perspective.

This is because trade between Asia and the US has been in secular decline for decades, while intra-Asian trade is booming. The US needs Asia far more than Asia needs the US; the imposition of tariffs by the US can easily be met by import substitution across a range of US agricultural and industrial output.

I imagine that once this reality sinks in, over-inflated US stocks will collapse. I cannot call the timing on this, but it seems to me that the obvious switch is out of the Trump rally and into Asian equities. The most obvious and symbolic trade would be out of the US fossil fuel sector and into the Asian renewables sector. There’s a degree of poetry in that trade.