Not between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Singapore's Hedging

Abstract

AbstractHedging is typically understood as a middle path straddling balancing/bandwagoning, the military/economic, and United States/China. This conventional understanding of hedging confuses risk and threat. It also makes the hedging concept non-falsifiable and thus analytically dubious, while further reinforcing a false dialectic of other states in the Asia-Pacific as caught between the United States and China. This article proposes to restore the centrality of risk and autonomy back to the concept of hedging. It contends that hedging is a risk management strategy that emphasizes autonomy—to retain control, reduce uncertainty, and remain secure—preventing the costs of alignment by signaling ambiguity in the military, political, and economic sectors. This hedging concept is subsequently applied to a case study of Singapore, demonstrating that the island state is the quintessential hedger. In so doing, this article develops a falsifiable concept of hedging that enables such a strategy to be explicitly identified, and importantly, returns agency back to the other states amid intensifying Sino-US competition.