You Can’t Eat Your Cake and Have It Too: The Impossible Trinity in Middle-State Alignment Choices

As US-China rivalry intensifies and uncertainties grow, the alignment choices of the “middle states”—the lesser powers sandwiched between the competing powers—are becoming the central issue for International Relations scholars and policymakers. Over the past decades, while there are growing numbers of scholarly and policy-oriented studies on how and why middle states position and navigate the ways they do, glaring gaps remain in the literature, especially over how best to describe the range of alignment behaviour, and to explain the variations across countries, regions and time. This talk addresses these gaps by presenting building blocks for theorizing the nuanced differences and shifts in middle-state alignment choices. I argue that while such commonly-cited reasons as regime types, economic interests and strategic autonomy are pertinent factors which help explain alignment choices, a more crucial variable is the imperative of “impossible trinity” in international relations. Since trade-offs are inevitable and it is impossible to rely on a single policy to pursue security, prosperity and sovereignty simultaneously, all states opt to align and position themselves in ways that best allow them to balance politically-acceptable trade-offs, as defined and determined by the respective ruling elites’ pathways of legitimation.

Drinks reception at 5pm for 5:30pm start.

About the speaker

Cheng-Chwee Kuik is Professor of International Relations at IKMAS, National University of Malaysia (UKM). He is concurrently a nonresident senior fellow at Johns Hopkins’ Foreign Policy Institute and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie China. Professor Kuik’s research focuses on the external policies of small and secondary states, big powers in the Indo-Pacific, and Asian security. Cheng-Chwee serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Southeast Asia, Australian Journal of International Affairs, and several other international journals. He holds an M.Litt. from the University of St. Andrews and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

View the 2024 ANU China in the World Forum Program.