Leadership Campaign

One view of Asia's future is that it will be characterized and constrained largely by U.S.-China competition. But other countries, unwilling to be trapped in a box of American or Chinese making (much less Cold War style bipolarity), especially in the era of Donald Trump, are increasingly looking for optionality and alternatives. And because @MarkJCarney and others have called for "middle powers" to unite, a lively debate has ensued about what is and isn't realistic for these countries and whether so-called middle power optionality is just pie in the sky. At @EurasiaGroup's fabulous #GZEROSummit in Singapore last month, I explained why the distinction between "form" and "function" is the key to answering these questions. Bluntly put, forming middle power groups that then grope around for purpose isn't especially likely to yield anything at all, much less put Washington or Beijing on the back foot. But as I have argued for years, functional coalitions that pool real capacity to solve real problems has real potential. And if we look at the trade area, where pacts like CPTPP have emerged that do not include BOTH the United States and China, some potential is there for third players to be standard setters and rule makers. And we can perhaps imagine this in the data governance space, the digital space, on some technical standards, on some elements of environmental governance, so so on. I discuss in this video clip here: youtube.com/watch?v=9iUcFYrv…