The Follies of Hedging Theory: Threat Certainty and the Need for a New Approach

Due to the rise of China, the study of other countries’ responses has attracted attention among international relations experts. Hedging theory, which emerged in the early 2000s, has profoundly influenced the studies of how regional countries respond to China’s rise. This study, however, posits that hedging can no longer explain their increasingly robust balancing against China while simultaneously seeking gains from economic cooperation with China. This study argues that a new approach is needed to make sense of the middle powers’ current strategies toward China. The reason is that hedging rests on the uncertainty of the threat posed by China but regional countries now view the China threat with certainty. Therefore, a new theoretical perspective is required to explain these countries’ simultaneous balancing and cooperation toward China. This paper then presents a new alternative perspective that argues that states can rationally pursue both balancing and cooperation toward rising powers as parallel strategies. This parallel approach is different from both the balance of power theory and hedging theory and yields new insights to how countries actually respond to power shifts through a study of multiple middle powers in the Asia Pacific region.