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Hedging and grand strategy in Southeast Asian foreign policy

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David Martin Jones at King's College London
David Martin Jones
Nicole Jenne at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Nicole Jenne
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Abstract

This article examines recent interest in hedging as a feature of international politics in the Asia Pacific. Focusing on the small states of Southeast Asia, we argue that dominant understandings of hedging are misguided for two reasons. Despite significant advances in the literature, hedging has remained a vague concept rendering it a residual category of foreign policy behavior. Moreover, current accounts of hedging tend to overstate the strategic intentions of ostensible hedgers. This article proposes that a better understanding of Southeast Asia's foreign policy behavior needs to dissociate hedging from neorealist concepts of international politics. Instead, we locate the concept in the context of classical realism and the diplomatic practice of second-tier states. Exploring Southeast Asia's engagement with more powerful actors from this perspective reveals the strategic limitations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the dilemma that Southeast Asian Nations and the dilemma that Southeast Asian states face from a rising China challenging the status quo in the western Pacific.
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Hedging and grand strategy
in Southeast Asian foreign
policy
David Martin Jones
1
, and Nicole Jenne *
2
1
Visiting Professor, War Studies, Kings College, University of
London, UK;
2
Associate Professor, Pontificia Universidad
Cato´lica de Chile
*E-mail: njenne@uc.cl
Accepted 10 February 2021
Abstract
This article examines recent interest in hedging as a feature of interna-
tional politics in the Asia Pacific. Focusing on the small states of
Southeast Asia, we argue that dominant understandings of hedging
are misguided for two reasons. Despite significant advances in the
literature, hedging has remained a vague concept rendering it a residual
category of foreign policy behavior. Moreover, current accounts of
hedging tend to overstate the strategic intentions of ostensible hedgers.
This article proposes that a better understanding of Southeast Asia’s
foreign policy behavior needs to dissociate hedging from neorealist
concepts of international politics. Instead, we locate the concept in the
context of classical realism and the diplomatic practice of second-tier
states. Exploring Southeast Asia’s engagement with more powerful
actors from this perspective reveals the strategic limitations of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the dilemma that Southeast
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Vol. 00 No. 0
#The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press in association with the Japan
Association of International Relations; All rights reserved.
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International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Volume 00, (2021) 1–31
doi: 10.1093/irap/lcab003
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/irap/advance-article/doi/10.1093/irap/lcab003/6146754 by guest on 23 February 2021
... They have long pursued hedging policies that try to juggle their ties with China and the US [29]. Hedging now is one of the most influential concepts to emerge from scholarship on the international relations of the Asia-Pacific in the 21st century [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. Analysts have mainly focused on the meanings, behavior types, and mechanisms of hedging strategies utilized by countries in the Asia-Pacific region. ...
... Nevertheless, there is still no consensus as to how hedging should be defined and applied. David Martin has criticized the dominant understandings of hedging, arguing that the term remains a vague concept [19,41]. Furthermore, the hedging strategies adopted during different periods vary by country. ...
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... Beyond the emphasis on realist pragmatism, others have highlighted hedging as a strategy to maintain geopolitical balance while simultaneously serving the national interest of small powers ( Jackson 2014 ;Jones & Jenne 2021 ). Scholars highlight this alternative alignment strategy, which combines elements of balancing and bandwagoning or incorporates multiple policy options, as a means to address risks arising from the external security environment or domestic political uncertainties ( Kuik 2008 ;Kei 2018 ). ...
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Philippine foreign policy under Rodrigo Duterte is notorious for its abrupt pivot to China and the unraveling of the country's longstanding alliance with the United States. His pronouncements have vividly reflected these to rationalize significant foreign policy recalibrations. It is from this understanding that this article seeks to explore the specific discourses that he has promoted in relation to China and the United States in pursuit of a coherent foreign policy logic for his administration. This article introduces victimhood as a framework to analyze Duterte's salient policy discourses and explores how these discourses influenced his administration's foreign policy behavior and informed his unique populist leadership. By invoking a discourse of suffering from past and present injustices, along with perceived insecurities arising from shifting power dynamics between the two major powers, Duterte constructed and internalized a victim identity for the Philippines, which has profoundly influenced the country's external relations during his tenure.
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... However, regardless of Ciorciari and Haacke's (2019, 368) description of being 'almost ubiquitous' in the literature, hedging continues to be a poorly understood, inadequately theorised, and often overlooked notion in IR (Hoo 2016;Kuik 2021). Even after two decades of conceptual and theoretical engagement with hedging, many scholars are frustrated over its vague, loose, contested and misinterpreted nature in policy and academic spheres (Jones and Jenne 2022;Kuik 2021;Lim and Cooper 2015;Shambaugh 2020). ...
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China's approach to middle powers’ hedging strategies in Asia-Pacific
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Shrinking room for hedging: system-unit dynamics and behavior of smaller powers
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