Mandalas of Multialignment: Hedging Bets in Southeast Asia Grand Strategy Spheres, Foreign and Security Policy Webs, and Global Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

This book generates a new connective approach to analyzing Southeast Asia alignment shifts in grand strategy and foreign and security policy. Drawing on cases across nearly a century – including the Philippines and U.S.-China competition, Vietnam’s multidirectionality after the USSR’s collapse and Thailand’s WWII Japan alliance – it constructs a new Mandalas of Multialignment approach and develops an original Balance of Alignment model rooted in neoclassical realism to explain how states manage alignment challenges. Looking ahead, the book charts out how Southeast Asian states can weave their own alignment webs beyond binaries of great power competition and across spheres of their own influences through a new Connective Alignment Management process.