Falling in and falling out: Indo-Pacific in the midst of US–China tensions in the post-COVID world: introduction to the special issue

Abstract

This special issue explores great power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific by moving the analytical focus away from the great powers and onto those they seek to influence. It asks what strategies states and international organisations employ to maintain their economic and security interests, how they push back on competing great power demands and avoid stark choices or being dragged into the United States (US)–China strategic competition. Articles in this special issue present a complex picture of competing domestic interest groups and positions and show how maintaining autonomy and an independent foreign policy in the age of US–China strategic competition has become a more precarious challenge. Nearly half a century ago, ‘the week that changed the world’ vastly improved the strategic position of countries in Asia. The meeting between Richard Nixon and an ageing Mao Zedong helped turn a tense and confrontational Cold War stand-off towards open commerce and relative strategic stability. In hindsight, this shift was a prerequisite for China’s opening to the world creating the environment for countries across the region allied or partnered with the US to develop their then limited political, economic and social relations. Strategic stability and open economics spurred unprecedented economic growth and rising prosperity. Fast-forward nearly 50 years and countries across the region now have deep linkages with China, especially commercially, that in most instances and across many sectors outweigh those with the US. This marks the closure of that period of strategic stability. China’s economic growth is being translated into political and strategic influence and a more assertive foreign policy (Yan 2014), eliciting a strong US response. Political observers in the US have slowly but surely noted China’s rise as its economic growth rate began to pick up in the early 1990s (Bernstein and Munro 1997). Without explicitly targeting China, American policymakers began to tweak its Asia policy by adjusting the US–Japan alliance as well as the level of security and military cooperation with South Korea and Southeast Asian states. The ‘China challenge’ began to be debated in earnest as the Obama administration announced a US ‘pivot to Asia’. Since then, a general bi-partisan agreement has emerged that US policy failed to prevent the emergence of an authoritarian peer competitor but little if any consensus on what strategies would achieve better results has been reached (Harding 2015). As China’s power and influence across each domain increased, US policymakers and academics increasingly viewed Chinese actions as a challenge to US interests, particularly in Asia.