AUTHOR=Wong Pak Nung 

TITLE=Toward a futurist approach to hedging strategy in Southeast Asia: anticipations and strategic decision-making in a Taiwan contingency

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Political Science

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2025.1598976

DOI=10.3389/fpos.2025.1598976

ISSN=2673-3145

ABSTRACT=Amid China's rise and intensifying China–U.S. competition in the Indo–Pacific region, it is widely consented among international scholars that a key strategy in Southeast Asia's statecraft and geopolitics is the adoption of “hedging” against great powers, to maximize economic gains and mitigate security risks. For more than two decades, academic, strategic, and policy studies of Southeast Asia's hedging strategies have contributed a wealth of diverse scholarship, which increasingly influences the academic, strategic, and policy debates among emerging powers and small- and medium-sized littoral states in the Indo–Pacific region. This article reviews the literature and identifies key theoretical developments and research gaps. In response to the recognized conceptual–methodological gap in effectively addressing, capturing, and mitigating the structural uncertainties and security risks arising from great power rivalry, this article outlines a futurist approach to anticipatory methodology. Using a Taiwan contingency for scenario planning in which the U.S. and China engage in armed conflict over Taiwan, it imagines possible, plausible, probable, and preferable scenarios, corresponding policy options, and identifies the limits and strategic scenarios that South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam would likely consider and encounter. This article concludes that to preserve a suitable external security environment for hedging to maximize economic gains and minimize security risks, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will need to work closely not only with ASEAN member-states but also with partners to anticipate different future scenarios and proactively prevent the worst-case scenario of a Taiwan contingency from occurring. A novel conceptual contribution of “anticipatory hedging” is therefore made to advance the theoretical development of hedging.