Report
On 22 October 2025, a seminar titled “Beyond Hedging? Indo-Pacific Realignments under Trump 2.0 and Southeast Asian Responses” was held at the University of Tokyo, featuring Professor Cheng-Chwee Kuik of the National University of Malaysia as the speaker. He is concurrently a Japan Foundation JFSEAP Visiting Fellow, Kyoto University. The event drew approximately 30 in-person participants and about 70 online participants, totaling around 100 attendees.
The seminar was co-hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia and the Security Studies Unit of the Institute for Future Initiatives at the University of Tokyo, and was organized as a part of JSPS Project “The Historical Process of Development of the East Asian International Order: The Connection of Non-Western International Relations Theory and Area Studies”.
Prof. Kuik began his presentation by first classifying the forms of alignment behavior that shape how non-great powers position themselves and choose their courses of action when confronting great powers into two types: “alliance-first”, taken by states that rely on alliance (i.e., military alignment with binding mutual defense commitment) as the cornerstone of their external policies, and “alliance-allergic”, adopted by countries that insist on avoiding alliances and preferring inclusive “alignments without alliance”. The former includes Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, while the latter includes most Southeast Asian countries and many states across the Global South.
According to Professor Kuik, alignments refer to inter-state partnerships with “three Cs”: (1) convergence of interest, (2) institutionalized consultation or coordination and (3) compatibility enhancement. Alliance represents the highest form of alignments. While alliances yield benefits in terms of security and prosperity, they also constrain autonomy. In contrast, countries in the Global South, including Southeast Asian states, tend to favor alignments without alliance, largely due to historical experiences of colonization, domestic political dynamics, and structural factors stemming from great-power competition.
Prof. Kuik then pointed out that, despite their differing preferences, alliance-first and alliance-allergic countries could and should work together even more closely, through “alliance-plus” and “alignment-plus” collaboration (e.g., Japan’s Official Security Assistance program) realignments. Indeed, amid the structural changes marked by the intensifying U.S.–China rivalry and rising uncertainty in the Trump 2.0 era, various forms of realignments are already emerging in the Indo-Pacific region. Examples of “alliance-plus” include the QUAD, AUKUS, and the gradually notable Indo-Pacific Four (IP4). India, a member of Quad (along with alliance-first Japan, Australia, and the United States) has been an alliance-allergic country, and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. Alongside other alliance-allergic states across the Global South, India and the majority of Southeast Asian countries have been forging and exploring multiple inclusive “alignment-plus” partnerships, both among themselves, other Global South countries, and even with alliance-first nations, in effect employing active, adaptive, and inclusive “multi-alignments” as the means to maintain the goal of “non-alignment”. It should be noted that non-alignment does not mean “not taking a position”; rather, it constitutes an active choice of “not taking sides” between the competing superpowers.
Such behavior is generally described as “hedging.” According to Professor Kuik, hedging refers to instinctive insurance-seeking behavior under conditions of high-stakes and high-uncertainty, aimed at mitigating and offsetting risks by adopting contradictory positions or counteracting actions simultaneously. Its constituent features include: (1) active neutrality (e.g., not siding with any superpower on such potential hotspots as Taiwan Strait and South China Sea), (2) inclusive diversification (diversifying security, economy, development cooperation with all players that matter), and (3) adaptive offsets (mixing engagement and containment, deference and defiance toward great powers) with an eye to keeping options open and ensuring fallback maneuverability as power realities become increasingly unpredictable.
Discussant Dr. Tomohiko Satake (Associate Professor at School of International Politics, Economics and Communication, Aoyama Gakuin University) raised three points for discussion: (1) how should we distinguish between balancing and hedging? Referring to the observation that Australia has shifted from hedging to balancing amid China’s growing threat and the uncertainties surrounding the United States, he asked where Japan should be situated, given its economic dependence on China and its security dependence on the United States, (2) with regard to the value of minilateralism, in hedging strategies, he referred to views that such cooperation can impose institutional constraints on great-power behavior and mitigate strategic shocks, and asked how this point should be assessed, and (3) whether ASEAN can hedge collectively to China’s rise given the divergence in member states’ approaches.
The second discussant, Dr. Antoine Roth (Research Fellow at Graduate School of Law, Tohoku University), raised the following points: (1) whether hedging is specific to periods of order transition or also applicable under stable multipolarity, and how it differs from non-alignment; (2) how domestic politics and leaders’ individual preferences should be incorporated into theoretical frameworks; and (3) whether it is appropriate to categorize the diverse behaviors of Southeast Asian countries—each with distinct threat perceptions and national objectives—uniformly as hedging.
In response to the discussants’ comments as well as the questions from the audience, Professor Kuik organized his remarks around three clusters of observations: First, hedging is a new concept in the study of International Relations, but not a new state behavior; indeed, hedging has been an instinctive human behavioral—a recurring logic that prevails under the situations of high stakes and high uncertainty. Second, although leaders’ preferences and perceptions play a role, it is a combination of structural and domestic-level factors that ultimately shape state alignment choices. That is, structural conditions primarily explain whether and when states hedge, whereas domestic reasons explain why and how states hedge differently (i.e., heavy hedging versus light hedging). Third, the diversity of behaviors across Southeast Asia represents varying manifestations of hedging; in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, hedging is adopted not because it is ideal or panacea, but because for states who do not face any immediate clear-cut threat and do not see any credible allied support, hedging is a more-acceptable or less-unacceptable choice than the rigid alternatives such as balancing or bandwagoning.
Lastly, Professor Ryo Sahashi, the moderator, concluded the seminar by noting that Professor Kuik’s explanation of the hedging concept presented a new vocabulary with diverse implications that goes beyond a single theory, and that the discussion had been highly thought-provoking. He concluded the seminar with words of appreciation.