China’s rise has been mesmerising. Like all great powers, China seeks to establish and enforce what Princeton University professor Robert Gilpin calls “basic rules and rights that influence its own behaviour and that of the lesser states in the system.”

It has created a foreign policy dilemma for many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, increasingly seen as the epicentre of global geopolitics. It is here that the strategic, economic, and security interests of the world’s two largest powers the United States and China are increasingly intersecting.

The fierce competition between the two has led to new alignments. The region is smarting under President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. His visit to Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea has only partly calmed trade tensions. On its part, by de

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