American unpredictability is pushing countries to hedge more proactively – and, ironically, soften existing tensions with China
For decades, the defining debate in international relations centred on whether China, as it developed into the world’s second-largest economy, would seek to revise the established world order. Would Beijing demand a greater share of global resources? Would it challenge American primacy?
The non-Chinese speaking world watched anxiously for signs of Chinese revisionism, debating the “Thucydides Trap” – the theory that a rising power and an established hegemon are destined for conflict. Enormous scholarly energy was devoted to forecasting whether integration into global institutions would socialise China into rules-based behaviour.
The irony is striking.
As of January, it is Washington – not Beijing – that is openly demanding territorial acquisition, extracting resources from vulnerable partners, and dismantling the multilateral institutions it built. The administration’s National Security Strategy now talks about the “so-called rules-based international order”.
Washington initially demanded US$500 billion in Ukrainian mineral rights as repayment for military aid, prompting President Volodymyr Zelensky to protest that agreeing would amount to selling out his country.
On January 3, American forces struck Caracas and captured Venezuela’s sitting president Nicolas Maduro – an operation the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemned as violating the UN Charter.
When Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong observed that “the era of rules-based globalisation and free trade is over”, he was not describing a hypothetical Chinese-dominated future. He was describing what Washington had done.
The World Economic Forum in Davos last week underscored the point. US President Donald Trump ruled out military force to seize Greenland but demanded “immediate negotiations” for its acquisition, later announcing a “framework of a future deal” with Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte that suspended threatened tariffs on eight European nations which had opposed his move.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured the mood, declaring “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” – great powers now wield “tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion”. French President Emmanuel Macron offered Europe’s riposte: it “prefers respect to bullies … rule of law to brutality”.
Tables turned
For those who spent years studying the “China threat” literature, the current moment demands intellectual honesty. The Thucydides Trap assumed China was the rising revisionist and the US the status quo defender. For many over the past decades, even uncertain American security commitments have been preferable to the alternative of unchecked Chinese dominance.
Washington’s current behaviour is eroding the very trust that made those commitments credible. As political scientist Steve Chan has argued, the evidence increasingly suggests that Washington has been acting like a revisionist power while Beijing has been acting more like a status quo power.
This is not to suggest Beijing has been a benign actor. China’s growing capabilities create pressure on neighbouring states with which it has territorial and maritime disputes, and regional anxieties about its intentions remain real.
The point is not that China is innocent, but that the framework of “rising revisionist versus status quo defender” no longer maps cleanly onto Sino-US rivalry – and perhaps it never did.
The question observers largely failed to ask was whether any great power, rising or declining, can resist the urge to remake the world in its image when it believes it has both the capability and the necessity to do so.
For Southeast Asia, this creates an acute dilemma.
The rules-based order, while imperfect and unevenly applied, provided genuine benefits. It laid down a framework within which smaller states could invoke principles rather than rely solely on power. That framework is now fraying, leaving smaller states deeply exposed to coercion and with limited recourse to multilateral institutions.
Following the US’ “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariff of April last year, Asean economic ministers vowed a concerted response and no retaliation. Malaysia, as the 2025 chair, spoke of regional unity. In practice, every government prioritised bilateral negotiations with Washington to secure the best deal for itself.
Is this pragmatism or capitulation? Perhaps both. Small states have always understood that survival requires flexibility.
Yet the acceleration of derisking efforts away from America tells another story: Asean’s scoping exercise for a free-trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council, Southeast Asian states’ renewed interest in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and Europe’s pragmatic shift towards greater flexibility on thorny issues like palm oil in its trade ties with Southeast Asia.
American unpredictability is pushing countries to hedge more proactively – and, ironically, soften existing tensions with China. Canada’s recent diplomatic outreach to Beijing amid its own tariff disputes with Washington illustrates the dynamic. So does the Philippines’ surprise announcement of 14-day visa-free entry for Chinese nationals – a remarkable gesture from a country with active South China Sea disputes with Beijing.
Least bad option
Instinctively, the more erratic American behaviour becomes, the more attractive stable economic ties with China appear. Washington’s coercion may be achieving precisely the opposite of its stated intent.
Carney’s Davos speech articulated what many have been reluctant to say: “The old order is not coming back. Nostalgia is not a strategy.” His call for middle powers to “stop pretending, to name reality” resonated because the choice is no longer between American order and Chinese disorder, but between managed multipolarity and chaotic fragmentation.
What, then, should middle and small powers do?
First, they should avoid false choices. The instinct to align firmly with either Washington or Beijing assumes that one offers a stable, rules-respecting alternative. Neither does; at least not now. Strategic hedging remains the least bad option.
Second, they should invest in resilience. Economic diversification, regional integration, and the CPTPP represent opportunities to reduce exposure to any single great power’s whims.
Third, they should defend what can be defended. Asean centrality, imperfect as it is, provides a framework for regional dialogue that no great power can unilaterally control. These institutions may not prevent great power overreach, but they can raise its costs and provide smaller states with a collective voice.
For decades, international relations scholars asked whether China’s rise would be peaceful or revisionist.
Perhaps they should have been asking a different question: in a world where power is shifting and institutions are weakening, can any great power – established or rising, democratic or authoritarian – be trusted to subordinate its interests to the rules it once championed?
The answer, it appears, is no. As a consequence, other countries should plan and act accordingly.
