Asia Has No Hegemon

Susannah Patton and Hervé Lemahieu

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Debates about the balance of power in Asia typically rely on one of three views. Some analysts believe, fatalistically, that China has become an unassailably dominant force in the region. Others place continued faith in U.S. primacy and see China as weak, vulnerable, and ultimately containable. Still others, including U.S. allies such as Australia and Japan, tout the emergence of a multipolar Indo-Pacific that could arrest China’s ambitions for regional hegemony.

An accurate understanding of the balance of power in Asia is critical to the formulation of sound U.S. strategy on China. But none of these prevailing narratives get things quite right. Asia today is uniquely bipolar, dominated by the world’s only two superpowers. Asia is not a European-style concert of powers, a Middle Eastern free-for-all, or a Cold War–era system of opposing blocs. Countries in Asia are for the most part hedging between two giants. The even balance between the United States and China also makes Asia’s power politics the most stable among the major regional theaters.

To construct a more comprehensive and accurate view of the distribution of power in Asia, the Lowy Institute created the Asia Power Index, which goes beyond the traditional shorthand measure of economic size to look at military capability, national resilience, and the expected future distribution of demographic and economic resources, as well as four dimensions of regional influence: economic relationships, cultural influence, defense networks and diplomacy. What it reveals is a durable duopoly: the United States has lost primacy in Asia but remains around ten percent more powerful there than China. Scholars have posited that a power transition is triggered when a rising power’s overall strength approaches 80 percent of that of the established power. By 2018, China had already convincingly breached this threshold. But the dynamic is not that of a rising power eclipsing an established one; it is a dynamic of two powers that will likely continue to coexist as peer competitors applying different means of influence: the United States mainly uses security partnerships; China mainly uses economic relationships.