Middle-Power Responses to China’s BRI and America’s Indo-Pacific Strategy

Asia is at a geopolitical crossroads. After China launched its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Japan and the United States responded with the November 2017 promulgation of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) Strategy. Perhaps not surprisingly, these two initiatives share some common features, and two of these - their ambiguity and their competitiveness - seem to be crucial in the foreign policy evaluation process. Competition leads to ambiguity, which makes reactions, and res