A New Phase in Middle-Power Adjustment to U.S.-China Competition?

Ali Wyne, Bonnie S. Glaser

Security, Asia

Washington and Beijing would be remiss to assume that middle powers will be passive spectators to strategic gridlock between the two.

Observers of world order focus inordinately on intensifying strategic competition between the United States and China—with good cause: the two countries collectively accounted for about two-fifths of gross world product and half of global military expenditures last year, and there are few, if any, pressing global challenges that can be met without their sustained cooperation. Less examined, but no less important, is how their competition is affecting geopolitics outside of the “G2” aperture. One of the most crucial questions concerns how so-called “middle powers”—those that Australian National University’s Hugh White classifies as being “able to resist pressure from a major power without the support of another major power”—will undertake to safeguard their national interests if and as relations between Washington and Beijing continue to deteriorate.

White stirred considerable controversy with his 2012 book The China Choice, which called for a “Concert of Asia” that would include the United States and China—both of which would accept strategic parity with one another—as well as India and Japan. It also argued that Canberra would ultimately be compelled to align itself with Washington or Beijing. White’s judgment tapped into a lurking anxiety of other middle powers, especially those that border China, that their days of strategic hedging would, too, be numbered.

One might roughly deconstruct those powers’ approach to U.S.-China relations over the past two decades into three phases.

Phase One: Discerning Little Need to Choose (2001–08):