As the U.S.-China rivalry intensifies, Southeast Asia is becoming the defining “ground zero” of big-power competition. China would not be recognized as a global power without enjoying an edge in Southeast Asia, a region it views as its historic backyard. The United States, on the other hand, would not be able to retain its preeminence in Asia without exerting a significant share of influence in maritime Southeast Asia, especially over the critical central zone that connects the Straits of Malacca and the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea and the rest of the Pacific Ocean. This zone lies at the heart of the Indo-Pacific, a geopolitical construct seen by China as a U.S. tool to mobilize coalitions to contain China’s ascendancy.
To the smaller states in Southeast Asia, the intensifying U.S.-China rivalry presents promises of profits, as well as pressures, pains, and predicaments. The big power politics are primarily but not limited to the U.S.-China rivalry. Southeast Asia is also the center of competition of courtships by an array of second-tier powers in and out of Asia. These include Australia, India, and Japan—which form the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) with the United States—as well as South Korea, the EU, the United Kingdom, and Canada. These players engage Southeast Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with their own aspirations and agendas, some of which converge with the United States’.
Significantly, unlike U.S.-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, when power was contested primarily along military and security spheres, present-day U.S.-China competition and the wider big-power courtships are playing out across the twin chessboards. The big powers are competing not only on the high-politics domains of defense and security, but also across the low-politics realms such as economic cooperation, infrastructure development, digital technology, and supply chains. The Quad and other powers have, individually or collectively, launched various connectivity-building schemes as alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
These intersecting trends define contemporary international relations. They are redrawing the power scope, normative substance, and institutional scale of key pillars of the emerging Asian architecture and world order, such as the U.S.-led alliances, the ASEAN-based regional multilateralism, the China-centered initiatives, and the intra-spoke and middle-power multilayered partnerships across the Indo-Pacific region. These embryonic partnerships and evolving initiatives, some of which involve individual ASEAN states, have been driven chiefly by the growing anxieties and uncertainties surrounding U.S. commitments, Chinese intentions, and the future of big-power relations. The greater the uncertainties, the greater the likelihood of power, normative and institutional realignments across the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Each of these dynamics inevitably generates both centripetal and centrifugal forces to ASEAN unity, ASEAN centrality, and broader long-term international dynamics.
My research examines these interwoven issues from a non-big power perspective. Bringing in the frequently neglected small-state mindsets and Southeast Asian examples, my studies engage the policy and theoretical debates concerning the alignment choices of “middle states” (states sandwiched between the competing powers) under uncertainties. Thus far, my studies have focused on addressing when middle states shift their alignment choices (e.g., from balancing to hedging); what states hedge against; how states hedge; and why some states hedge heavier than others. Hedging is defined as an insurance-seeking behaviour under high-stake and high-uncertainty conditions, which aims at mitigating and offsetting risks while maximizing returns via three approaches via three approaches: active neutrality, inclusive diversification, and prudent offset with an eye to cultivate fallback positions.
At Carnegie China, I plan to further explore a cluster of China-related phenomena and themes that might appear counterintuitive to many mainstream watchers outside of Southeast Asia. These include:
- Why are the majority of ASEAN states (like many countries across Global South), even those concerned about China’s increasingly assertive maritime actions, allergic to alliances (especially those associated with the United States)? Why do some of these states prefer alignment without alliance? How and why do states pursue non-alignment via multialignment?
- Why do the majority of regional states perceive China and the United States through a shades-of-gray spectrum rather than a black-and-white dichotomy? Why do Southeast Asian states (unlike U.S. allies in Northeast Asia) do not see U.S.-led alliance systems as a clear-cut solution to their security? Why do most ASEAN states see the notion of Chinese threat as a self-fulfilling prophecy? Why do states play down some risks but play up other potential dangers?
- If neutral hands are empty hands, as the saying goes, then why then do most weaker states in Asia (and beyond) still insist on neutrality?
- Despite the shrinking space in light of intensifying U.S.-China rivalry, why do most states still insist on nonalignment and hedging? Is hedging an indecisive act? Is hedging a speculative approach? Is hedging an opportunistic behavior?
- Virtually all ASEAN states stresses: don’t make us choose. But aren’t some states already choosing to align more closely with one power in some domains than others?
- What does ASEAN centrality mean in an era of intensifying big-power competitions and growing global uncertainties?
- Not all middle states are middle powers. Middle powers are non-big powers with three-I agency: initiatives, institutionalization, and impact. They are sovereign actors who are capable of proposing their own initiatives and partnering with others to institutionalize those ideas into impactful measures or mechanisms for international cooperation. Why do some middle states possess middle-power agency but others don’t?
These questions are significant for both policy and theoretical reasons. They highlight many blind and bright spots in the evolving and emerging alignment decisions under uncertainties. They help us understand that, in many ways, alignment choices are a matter of a trinity of impossibilities. Of the three policy ends of security, prosperity, and autonomy, only one or two ends can be attained by any single policy approach at the same time. Addressing these difficulty questions enables us to explain how and why weaker states choose to balance the different policy trade-offs. It allows us to appreciate why, in the real world, states can’t have their cake and eat it too. Perhaps most importantly, it enlightens why hedging, not the realist-style balancing, is the most sustainable way of fostering a more balanced balance of power in the twenty-first century.