Power in the Pacific
China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the US-led Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) represent competing visions for regional order, with middle powers playing a crucial role. China seeks to undermine liberal democracy through ‘authoritarian collaboration’, while the United States counters with alliances like the Quad and AUKUS. US President Trump’s foreign policy unpredictability, including potential withdrawal from Indo-Pacific commitments, adds uncertainty. Meanwhile, China is expanding its influence through military exercises and economic agreements in the Pacific. The evolving contest for dominance may reshape regional alignments, with middle powers increasingly hedging between the two powers.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) represent rival order-building visions to reshape the region in line with China and the United States’ strategic visions. While a transition to a China-centric order is yet to occur, a contestation between two international orders is taking place in the Indo-Pacific and middle powers have a pivotal role to play.
The BRI can be understood as an order-building project that aims to weaken, oppose and exclude the growth and consolidation of liberal democracy and ‘terrorism’ from China’s near-abroad. A possible means for China to unsettle US-led liberal rules and arrangements is authoritarian collaboration, whereby China props up illiberal regimes in the Indo-Pacific, like Myanmar, to shield them from the spread of liberal democracy. But economic corridor projects championed under the BRI have had limited success in legitimising and stabilising host autocratic regimes.
The liberal international order has meanwhile been aimed to ‘create an ordered environment in which liberal democracies can cooperate for mutual gains…and protect their way of life’ by weakening, opposing and excluding autocracies’ material and ideational influence. The first Trump administration’s FOIP strategy aimed to prevent China from establishing ‘new, illiberal spheres of influence’ in the Indo-Pacific. The Biden administration continued this exclusion approach, with added emphasis on minilateral collaboration with US allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, namely the Quad, AUKUS and trilateral cooperation between Japan, South Korea and the United States.
While the China–US great power rivalry is often likened to a new Cold War, a crucial difference is that in the ‘old’ Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States, middle powers had little room to manoeuvre and had to take sides. Even India, a champion of the Non-Aligned Movement, eventually signed the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the USSR in 1971 when US–India relations were deteriorating over the Bangladesh Liberation War.
The present China–US order contestation has by contrast provided fertile ground for the rise of middle powers. While India and South Korea are democracies, they adopt a hedging policy by eschewing clear-cut alignment with China or the United States.
President Trump’s policy towards Russia, Ukraine and Europe provides clues as to whether the second Trump administration is committed to the principles of the FOIP and countering China. China hawks in the Trump administration, like Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, advocate a ‘reverse Nixon’ policy to justify the administration’s rapprochement with Russia.
Laying aside whether this policy is flawed, they argue that a swift settlement of the war in Ukraine, even by embracing Putin, would drive a wedge between Russia and China, isolating China. By leaving European security to Europe, the United States can concentrate on competing with China.
But Trump’s isolationist foreign policy may instead lead him to withdraw from both Europe and the Indo-Pacific if he believes that US allies in both regions are free-riding on US security guarantees. There are also signs that Trump’s focus is more on the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Mexico, Panama and Greenland, than on China and East Asia.
In February 2025, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) conducted live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand and a circumnavigation of Australia. These unprecedented exercises can be perceived as an effort to test how the United States would respond to Chinese attempts to ‘intrude’ into Australia and New Zealand’s traditional spheres of influence.
These naval exercises come alongside the signing of the Action Plan 2025–2030 for the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Cook Islands and China in mid-February 2025. They must also be considered in relation to the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and Nauru in January 2024 and the 2022 China–Solomon Islands security agreement.
The question remains whether China’s PLAN will normalise its expanded presence in Oceania and whether the United States will allow China’s power projection to go unhindered. PLAN will also cooperate with Chinese mining companies on critical mineral exploration and exploitation in the South Pacific, which the China–Cook Islands Action Plan covers and Nauru supports.
The trajectory of order contestation in the Indo-Pacific will be shaped by Trump’s transactional approach to international politics. Trump has yet to openly express his views about the Quad and AUKUS. In late February 2025, when asked whether he would discuss AUKUS with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he oddly responded, ‘what does that mean?’
Trump may make a ‘big beautiful’ deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping and scale down US military commitment to the Indo-Pacific, indirectly abetting China’s expansion of its sphere of influence. Like 19th century geopolitics, China, Russia and the United States may come to a tacit agreement to carve up the world into spheres of influence.
As President Trump is seen to practice ‘protection racket’ diplomacy and break off the trans-Atlantic alliance, hedging will likely become the dominant strategy of US middle-power allies in the Indo-Pacific like Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. None of them are exempt from the ‘reciprocal tariffs’ unveiled by Trump on 2 April 2025. A high tariff of 24 per cent and 25 per cent will be imposed on imports from Japan and South Korea respectively while Russia, Belarus and North Korea are spared from tariffs.
In the face of Trump’s planned announcement of US tariffs, in late March 2025, the trade ministers of China, Japan and South Korea held their first trilateral meeting in five years and agreed to speed up negotiations over a trilateral free trade agreement. During the Trump presidency, middle powers can play a crucial role in order contestation in the Indo-Pacific.
This article was written by Lai-Ha Chan and Pak K Lee, a Research Fellow at the Global Europe Centre in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. Their latest book is China-US Great-Power Rivalry: The Competitive Dynamics of Order-Building in the Indo-Pacific (Routledge, 2024).
Lai-Ha Chan is a Senior Lecturer in the Social and Political Sciences Program at UTS and and a Research Associate at the Australia–China Relations Institute.
