In capitals that once treated the American security umbrella as a fact of nature, a quieter reassessment is underway — not of whether the United States remains powerful, but of whether its power still reliably serves the rules and norms that the international community upholds. As Washington’s foreign policy veers between principled rhetoric and transactional muscle, allies and partners are beginning to plan for a world in which US guarantees can no longer be the single source of leverage. The result is an emerging geopolitical logic built less on permanent blocs than on “modular” alignments, where countries cooperate across issues, hedge across risks and, increasingly, keep the door open to working with China to preserve the very international order that both China and Europe want to maintain.
Two recent episodes — US pressure and coercive measures directed at Venezuela and the ever more blunt talk about Greenland — have landed as warnings far beyond Latin America and the Arctic. They suggest that sovereignty and territorial integrity, principles the West insists must be respected when violated by adversaries, may become negotiable when US interests are at stake. It is precisely this asymmetry that is pushing many middle and smaller powers to ask a question they once avoided: What security framework can we build that does not depend wholly on the US?
That question does not imply an overnight break with Washington, nor does it signal a romantic turn toward China. Rather, it reflects a more pragmatic, less sentimental era of alliance politics. In the decades after the Cold War, many governments treated US leadership as the fixed point around which foreign policy could orbit. Today, they increasingly treat it as one variable among several — sometimes indispensable, sometimes unreliable, often costly.
The practical consequence is a world in which coalitions form and dissolve depending on the issue. Energy security will generate one set of partnerships; supply chains and technology standards another; climate and clean energy a third; maritime security or sanctions enforcement yet another. This is not necessarily a more peaceful world, but it is a more flexible one. Countries that cannot afford ideological purity will pursue overlapping arrangements, seeking resilience through redundancy — multiple markets, multiple security ties, multiple diplomatic channels.
In such a world, China has an obvious opening. It can offer what many states now crave — options. For years, the West has tried to place China in a narrow box — an economic partner on Monday, a systemic rival on Tuesday, a security threat on Wednesday. Yet the West itself continues to demand cooperation with China in areas where cooperation is unavoidable, including trade, debt relief, industrial supply chains and climate technology.
The larger reality is already here: Middle and small powers are building a world of modular alliances, and the West is increasingly aware that security cannot rest on a single pillar
China can make full use of this reality by widening the scope of cooperation beyond commerce and clean energy, even into selective security collaboration with Western countries, on terms that sound familiar to European ears: Defending the international order, upholding sovereignty, insisting on territorial integrity, resisting unilateral regime change, and strengthening multilateral institutions. If the West can finally see China as a stakeholder in rules and institutions rather than a wrecking ball, China can insert itself into more coalitions, cultivate more partners and accumulate international status and leverage. The goal would not be to “replace” the US but to make itself a necessary participant in more arenas, thereby reducing the West’s willingness to treat China as a problem to be cordoned off.
The notion that the West is steadily marching toward full-spectrum economic separation from China is increasingly outdated. Even among close US allies, there is a persistent pull toward engagement. Canada has explored strategic forms of partnership with China in domains where interests overlap, even as security concerns remain. The United Kingdom, after years of cooling relations, periodically flirts with reviving a “golden era”, driven by the realities of growth and finance. French President Emmanuel Macron has spoken in terms that signal European openness to Chinese investment — especially in areas like clean energy and advanced manufacturing — while insisting on European strategic autonomy. The key is that they are balancing against a new set of risks — overdependence on an increasingly unpredictable US.
This is the twist in today’s geopolitics that American strategists sometimes miss. A portion of what is called “de-risking from China” is, in practice, a quiet hedging against Washington. When allies talk about resilience, they do not always mean resilience against China; they also mean resilience against American political volatility — against sanctions that might be applied, against extraterritorial measures that treat allies as afterthoughts, against the possibility that US security commitments could be reinterpreted as business deals. Collaborating with China in certain areas can therefore function, paradoxically, as a way for Western states to reduce their exposure to US leverage.
If this sounds jarring, it is because the West has long equated its own unity with US primacy. But a more autonomous Europe, a more self-reliant Canada, or a more diversified set of Indo-Pacific partnerships does not necessarily mean anti-Americanism. It means a world in which American power must persuade rather than presume.
Washington, however, appears tempted by a different response: Not adapting the existing system, but building new structures more explicitly dominated by the US. The postwar international architecture — messy, compromised, often slow — was still designed in institutions that granted legitimacy and predictability: The United Nations, the World Health Organization and a web of treaties and norms that, at their best, restrained raw coercion. Yet the American impulse to step away from multilateral bodies, or to create parallel institutions when existing ones are no longer in its favor, sends a clear signal: The rules are optional, and they may walk off the field.
Here lies an unexpected area of potential convergence between China and parts of the West: Defending the continuity of the existing international order, at least the parts that enshrine sovereignty, borders and multilateral process. Western governments increasingly recognize that the alternative to imperfect institutions is not moral clarity; it is a world in which might makes right more openly.
A sound strategy for China, then, would be to position itself — not as the architect of a brand-new order, but as a defender of the current architecture’s core norms and institutions. That would mean continuing to engage constructively at the UN, reinforcing global health governance, and presenting its security cooperation as supportive of sovereignty.
The larger reality is already here: Middle and small powers are building a world of modular alliances, and the West is increasingly aware that security cannot rest on a single pillar. In the end, the gravest strategic mistake for Washington would be to assume that everyone else must choose between America and China. Many will choose neither. They will choose, instead, a wider set of relationships designed to survive the uncertainty that America itself has helped create. And this opens a new door for collaboration between China and the medium powers of the West.
The author is a consultant at the Global Hong Kong Institute.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
