Paul Staniland
The competition over Asia’s so-called swing states is heating up. China’s growing economic and political reach has impelled Australia, India, Japan, and the United States to try to gain influence in the countries not yet tightly aligned with either bloc. U.S. President Joe Biden has repeatedly characterized Asia as a battleground between autocracy and democracy. Observers who worry about such a contest point to recent pro-China turns in the Solomon Islands, which in 2019 severed its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan and then signed a security pact with China, and the Maldives, which in 2023 elected a president who criticized his predecessor’s ties to India and vowed to draw closer to China.
Numerous leaders and analysts, including Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher writing in Foreign Affairs, now frame the U.S.-Chinese competition as a new cold war. Yet it is important that the United States and its partners not overemphasize the analogy to the original Cold War or misunderstand the challenges China poses in the competition over Asia’s swing states. There is immense political pressure from Washington to view the whole region through the prism of the United States’ competition with China. But this does not speak to the political interests of many Asian countries—and an approach based on this framing risks undermining America’s strategic and economic appeals to them.
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