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executive summary: This essay provides an overview of this special issue, which seeks to better understand middle-power thinking and strategies in coping with the escalating competition between the U.S. and China. main argument Competition is now the primary format of U.S.-China relations, spanning key dimensions of international politics. The pressures radiating from this structural shift have led Indo-Pacific states to calibrate their policies to this new geostrategic circumstance. This special issue focuses on the responses of a category of regional states understood as middle powers. How have regional middle powers adapted to the intensifying U.S.-China rivalry? What are the considerations and drivers that inform their coping strategies? To address these salient, policy-relevant questions, this special issue spotlights six Indo-Pacific middle powers—namely, Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Pakistan—and unpacks their logic and ways of navigating the complexities of the Sino-U.S. rivalry. The insights derived in this issue contribute to broader policy thinking on the evolving choices of middle powers and are instructive for the strategic policies of other regional states in an era of great-power competition. policy implications • Amid the growing U.S.-China contest, regional middle powers perceive a narrowing strategic space for maneuverability. • This reduced strategic space does not equate to decreasing strategic autonomy, however. Regional middle powers retain considerable agency to mold their own paths and that of the broader strategic environment, including developing options to mitigate any fallout from the Sino-U.S. rivalry. • A considerable degree of this middle-power agency is animated by elite calculations of the respective domestic interests at stake. • Strategic ambiguity toward China and the U.S. remains the dominant policy preference of most middle powers probed in this issue.

This research conducted a comprehensive analysis of Washington’s strategic application of coercive diplomacy toward Beijing, focusing on three principal dimensions: political, economic, and military. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of coercive diplomacy, the Truman Doctrine, and “Trump’s Transactional Diplomacy,” the study employed a hybrid methodology combining content and event data analysis to examine diplomatic behaviors, political statements, tariff policies, technological measures, and military maneuvers enacted by the Trump 2.0 administration. First, Washington utilized coercive measures to reaffirm its global superiority over China. Domestic self-reliance initiatives, such as the AI Action Plan, aimed to demonstrate that U.S. endogenous capabilities remained competitive with China’s manufacturing infrastructure. Second, the strategic deployment of its alliance system underscored America’s intent to assert leadership over a globally integrated network of political, economic, and defense partnerships, contrasting with China’s comparatively modest coalition. Third, coercive diplomacy extended beyond Sino-American dynamics; the Trump administration applied similar pressure tactics toward strategic partners worldwide, often leveraging economic dominance through tariff threats. Strategically, coercive diplomacy toward China appeared poised to become a long-term doctrine, as countering Beijing represented one of the few bipartisan convergences in U.S. politics. In response, China was expected to reinforce domestic resilience and alliance-building to prepare for sustained confrontation. This rivalry was likely to trigger the most extensive multidimensional competition in modern history. Developing nations must adopt proactive, neutral diplomacy to strengthen internal capacities, while they should avoid positioning themselves as adversaries to either superpower.

How can polarity be used as a pertinent conceptual asset to inform the description of the distribution of military capabilities amongst the most powerful states in the international system today, especially in consideration of U.S.-China competition? Using the military power approach to polarity, this article analyses the literature that emerged in the 2010s to critically examine this concept. In order to enhance the analytical value of polarity and propose verifiable indicators of it, this study draws on Thompson’s lead-sector model as well as Posen’s and Lee and Thompson’s research on the military foundations of polarity. When doing so, we distinguish latent enabling capabilities (as a secondary dimension of polarity) and the actual military power that primarily characterises polarity as a label. When following this operationalisation of polarity, we show that the international system is still unipolar because the U.S. has unmatched global power projection capabilities and first-rate economic and technological might to sustain its military forces. In other words, the current distribution of military capabilities in the system reflects that the contemporary international system is still U.S.-led and unipolar and that China’s rise is still too confined by regional dynamics to constitute a preface of a military-hegemonic rivalry at a global level.

This essay examines how Vietnam is adapting to U.S.-China rivalry and argues that Vietnam's room for strategic maneuverability is diminishing as it faces growing internal and external pressure for policy adjustments.

There are two kinds of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula: hostility between the U.S. and North Korea; hostility between the two Koreas. The nature of North Korea's nuclear crisis is a mixture of those two hostilities. The crisis was exacerbated by misinterpretation and wishful thinking regarding its intentions. Another reason for North Korea's nuclear crisis is the failure of the international community to speak with one voice on how to resolve it. Every country is different in its threat perceptions, national interests, and strategic calculations. In the grand scheme of things, however, the North Korea problem seems to be a strategic conflict between the U.S. and China. South Korea's internal friction prevented any policy from being implemented effectively. It is not only unfair but unrealistic to handle the two hostilities separately. Any efforts to denuclearize North Korea should not undermine the security of South Korea. For example, the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula may be even worse for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula than a nuclear North Korea, if it keeps the current political system and there is no fundamental change in inter-Korean relations. Like the front and rear wheels in an automobile, the U.S.-North Korean dialogue and inter-Korean dialogue began to operate as two driving forces for a breakthrough in the nuclear crisis. The wheels should be aligned with a strong U.S.-R.O.K. alliance. Then a multilateral format like the Six-Party Talks can resume for a sustainable peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

This essay explores the strategies that Thailand has used to navigate the great-power competition between the U.S. and China as well as the factors that are driving contemporary Thailand's foreign policy orientation and dilemmas.

This essay draws on insights from hedging theory to examine how Pakistan, as a middle power, can navigate key strategic and domestic factors in its policies in response to the growing great-power competition between the U.S. and China.

This essay investigates Indonesia's strategic thinking toward the Indo-Pacific region amid changing great-power politics and examines both the principal drivers shaping Indonesia's strategic choices and the challenges facing Indonesian diplomacy in the region.

As the U.S.-China relationship tilts toward competition and confrontation, scholars and policymakers have focused on the strategic choices faced by the citizens of small and medium-sized countries caught between the two great powers. However, methodological deficiencies remain in how public preferences for these strategic choices are measured. This paper attempts to fill this gap by developing a new means of measuring public opinion regarding strategic choices. Using survey data collected in Taiwan in March 2023, we demonstrate how this measure is constructed and why it aligns more closely with the theoretical concept of strategic choices. Our findings indicate that preferences for different strategies in Taiwan follow a U-shaped distribution that is centered either on hedging with the United States or with China. Multivariate analyses show that factors such as the threat of China, the U.S. security commitment to Taiwan, skepticism toward the United States, confidence in Taiwan's military, and partisanship are all correlated with public preferences for different strategies. This paper helps us understand these preferences among citizens in small and medium-sized countries and contributes to the literature on public opinion, international relations theory, and policymaking.

This essay argues that Australia's choices in the U.S.-China rivalry have been significantly shaped by the different role conceptions of the country's prime ministers, producing outcomes at odds with structural expectations for middle-power behavior.