At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this May, Vietnam's To Lam delivered the keynote address to a room that included US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a senior Chinese delegation, seated in the same hall. "Competition must be bound by law, guided by transparency and exercised with restraint," he told them. Nobody in the audience needed the subtext explained: Vietnam intends to keep dealing with both powers, on its own terms, and expects the room to accept that.
That posture is no longer unusual — it is close to the regional default. Indonesia signed a new bilateral security treaty with Australia in February, deepening a partnership that sits comfortably alongside Jakarta's trade and infrastructure ties to China. Indonesia has simultaneously diversified its defense procurement away from any single supplier, buying from France, Turkey and South Korea rather than defaulting to Washington or Beijing. Vietnam runs a similar balance: expanding technology cooperation with the US and its allies while keeping trade and infrastructure links with China intact, treating the two relationships as parallel tracks rather than a binary choice.
"Competition must be bound by law, guided by transparency and exercised with restraint." — To Lam, President of Vietnam, Shangri-La Dialogue, May 2026
Singapore, Japan and South Korea have run versions of this hedge for longer, but the label "middle power" now fits a wider set of governments than it used to. What unites Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia and India is not shared ideology or a shared treaty — it is a shared refusal to let either Washington or Beijing set the terms of their bilateral relationships with the other. Each hedges differently: Japan through security assistance to third countries, India through its own strategic autonomy tradition, Singapore through finance and diplomacy rather than defense commitments. What they share is an unwillingness to be filed under either bloc.
That refusal is a response to conditions, not ideology. Both Washington and Beijing have, in different ways, raised security anxieties across Southeast Asia over the past two years — tariff threats and basing pressure from one side, maritime assertiveness and economic coercion risk from the other — and the practical result has been diversification rather than alignment. Middle powers are hedging not because they distrust both superpowers equally, but because visible dependence on either one now carries a cost most of these governments have decided not to pay.
The open question is how long hedging remains viable if Washington and Beijing keep raising the price of neutrality. Indonesia's treaty with Australia and Vietnam's parallel-track diplomacy work as long as neither superpower forces an explicit choice. Nothing said at Shangri-La this year suggested either one is ready to stop testing where that line actually sits.