Successive Australian governments have reacted with alarm at China’s influence-building activities in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. They have passed foreign interference laws, tightened foreign investment regulations, and regulated university collaborations with institutions overseas.

They have executed a Pacific Step-Up and a plan for greater trade and investment with Southeast Asia.

And they have tightened security partnerships with the United States, aligning closely with the US strategy of balancing, deterring and containing China. Australia’s two major foreign policy initiatives of the past decade – AUKUS and the Quad – are intended to implement these strategies.

But as I noted in my Quarterly Essay earlier this year, there’s a paradox bedevilling Australian foreign policy. Our closest neighbours in Southeast Asia have reacted to China’s growing power and influence in very different ways to how Australia expects they should react.

While polling data and research shows many people in Southeast Asia worry about China’s growing influence and distrust its intentions, their governments have shown no interest in joining a coalition against China.

This represents a profound challenge to the way Australian policymakers understand the world.

In the realist school of foreign policy, a collection of small, relatively weak states facing a rising and threatening great power would be expected to react decisively.

This means Southeast Asian nations should be responding to the rise of China in one of two ways. The first is aligning with Beijing in the expectation that benefits will flow to China’s allies. The alternative is looking to “balance” China’s power by joining a countervailing coalition of nations.

However, Southeast Asian countries have done neither. Instead, they have elected to hedge. They are engaging China while simultaneously building closer links with a range of other powers, namely the US, Japan, India and Russia.

This has resulted in the most significant strategic divergence between Australia and its closest neighbours in how to deal with China’s rise – the most profound challenge to regional........

© The Conversation