SEOUL—At a time when the struggle for supremacy between Washington and Beijing is intensifying, numerous countries—from Australia and New Zealand, to Japan and South Korea, to Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil, and Germany—are finding themselves in an awkward position: having the United States as their security ally and China as their top trading partner.
The U.S. and Chinese governments aren’t explicitly demanding that these nations go all in with one or the other. Not yet, at least. But pressure to pick a side on specific issues—and the various contortions these countries go through to avoid doing so—has now become a recurring feature of international affairs, and could be a prelude to a broader sorting.
As with the antagonists in the Cold War, the United States and China are deterred as nuclear-weapons states from going to war. But they also can’t engage in Cold War–esque proxy wars, because China doesn’t have allies like the Soviet Union did. “The only way they can fight with each other is proxy competition” short of war, Chung Jae-ho, a China scholar at Seoul National University, told me and other reporters who traveled to Seoul as part of the Atlantic Council Korea Journalist Fellowship Program. “That means the U.S. and China come to countries in East Asia and elsewhere, asking the same exclusivity question: ‘Are you with us or against us?’”
Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in South Korea, which is acutely sensitive to the consequences of great-power contests, given that these have over the past century played a role in Japan’s occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and the divi ..
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