The Indo-Pacific order is characterised by “coopetition”. Put simply, “coopetition” is a portmanteau of “cooperation” and “competition”. The term has been used in Business Studies to describe a paradoxical relationship in which two companies simultaneously cooperate and compete against each other. However, I argue that the term is equally applicable to contemporary patterns of international relations in the Indo-Pacific, even as “ruptures” appear in the United States (US)-led post-World War II international order under President Donald Trump.
Over the past twenty years, strategic competition between the US and China has intensified to the point that some analysts believe it constitutes a “Second Cold War”. Since 2009, China has asserted its territorial claims in its maritime periphery, and in response, the US has strengthened its “Hub and Spoke” alliances to meet the challenge of Beijing’s increased assertiveness. China’s declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea in 2013 and its militarisation of disputed islets in the South China Sea have served as major critical junctures that have worsened relations between China and the US and its Hub and Spoke allies over the past decade.
Whether accurate or not, discussions of a “Second Cold War” must acknowledge that the region has become more interconnected as competition has intensified. Japan’s post-war recovery, the rise of the four “Asian Tigers” of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, and China’s emergence as the world’s manufacturing hub have led Indo-Pacific states to trade and invest increasingly with one another. This has created an extremely dense network of supply chains that regional states depend on to bolster their defence, promote internal stability, and achieve national prosperity. The penetration of new technologies into citizens’ daily lives has blurred the boundaries between domestic and foreign affairs, leading to the emergence of new actors and threats that warrant greater cooperation between regional states than before.
Cultural differences also exert a distinctive yet understated influence on the Indo-Pacific’s “coopetitive” dynamics. The Indo-Pacific is home to the most diverse range of states in any region of the world. Four main civilisational undercurrents shape the contemporary societies of the region’s states: the Sinitic, Indic, Islamic, and Judeo-Christian. These historical imprints not only shape how citizens and elites conduct their social relations but also their politics. The legacy of colonialism and the spread of liberal democracy in the Indo-Pacific from the 1980s have further shaped states’ political systems and their views of their neighbours. Despite substantial soft-power advantages, this diversity makes the formation of a collective security system and even a multilateral consensus highly challenging.
The Indo-Pacific’s unique distribution of power, economic interests, and political systems creates dilemmas for states as the US and China compete more intensely. Although most of the US’s Hub and Spoke allies remain aligned with Washington in the military realm, many of them are highly dependent on trade and investment with China, leaving them either willfully or reluctantly aligned with Beijing’s interests in the economic domain. The Trump administration’s authoritarian turn in the US has left the Indo-Pacific’s core democracies—Japan, Australia, and South Korea—increasingly misaligned with their military ally in the political realm. This creates a confusing dynamic in which states are unsure who their friends are, and, even more concerning, who their enemies might be.
Coopetition has incentivised Indo-Pacific states to pursue flexible and ambiguous security alignments that eschew explicit defence commitments. This is why, as US-China competition intensifies, minilateral groupings and “strategic partnerships” have proliferated more widely than new alliances. These loose security alignments allow states to cooperate on shared interests and threats while promoting distinctive “regional visions”, such as a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” or a “Community of Common Destiny”, which their proponents see as helping to preserve or build order where regional multilateral institutions have struggled. The ambiguity that minilaterals and strategic partnerships offer enables states to avoid provoking their preferred partners across the military, economic, and political realms, which could worsen existing tensions and harm their prosperity.
As President Trump dismantles the post-war international order and populist movements entrench themselves in democracies, the challenge for Indo-Pacific states will be to prevent coopetition from devolving into economic decoupling and open conflict. This is where states will need to cooperate to manage tensions and create adequate guardrails. However, this may prove exceedingly difficult in the absence of any defined regional leader. Therefore, the responsibility now shifts to the middle and small powers to convince the great powers that the cooperative side of the coopetition portmanteau is worth preserving.
Dr Jack Butcher is an Adjunct Lecturer of International Security at Adelaide University and an inaugural Japan-Australia Dialogue and Exchange (JADE) fellow with the United States Studies Centre and the Japan Foundation.