China, explained.
HMAS Toowoomba in January during a regional deployment to South and Southeast Asia (Abdus Chowdhury/Defence Imagery)
Seoul disputes, Canberra proceeds, Manila hedges: how Washington’s alliance network is differentiating under pressure.
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Three Indo-Pacific allies, one week, and three different calculations on displayThree Indo-Pacific allies, one week, and three different calculations on display
The third week of February offers three different snapshots of how Washington’s Indo-Pacific partners are navigating the same strategic environment. Episodes involving South Korea, Australia and the Philippines illustrated how the alliance network has been differentiating under pressure.
The first came after about 10 US Air Force F-16s based in South Korea conducted an exercise in the Yellow Sea near China’s Air Defence Identification Zone, prompting Chinese fighters to scramble in a brief aerial standoff.
Days later, the Royal Australian Navy frigate HMAS Toowoomba transited the Taiwan Strait, tracked throughout by PLA forces.
And by the week’s end, Manila had announced plans for joint coast guard patrols with China in the very waters where it had just exercised with the US and Australia.
The Seoul episode did not end with the standoff. South Korea’s Defence Minister Ahn Gyu-back lodged a complaint with USFK Commander General Xavier Brunson over an exercise Seoul had not been fully briefed on, prompting USFK to end the exercise two days early. Brunson subsequently expressed “regret” that Seoul’s senior commanders were not briefed in time – Korean media reported this as an apology. Hours later, USFK issued a statement: “We don’t make apologies for maintaining readiness.” Seoul’s Ministry of Defence confirmed the calls while declining to characterise their content, saying only that reports were “to some extent true”. That Washington and Seoul could not publicly agree on what their senior commanders had said to each other captured the nature of the friction in relations.
Washington's partners are not abandoning their alliances. They are recalibrating them, each according to its own exposure, economic dependencies, and reading of US intent.
Australia’s experience was entirely different. Officials confirmed the Toowoomba’s Taiwan Strait passage as “a routine transit”, with Commanding Officer Commander Alicia Harrison noting that “all interactions were safe and professional”. The transit followed a multilateral maritime exercise with Philippine and US naval forces off Subic Bay. In the same week, US and Japanese forces conducted the annual Resilient Shield ballistic missile defence exercise across command centres from Yokosuka to Okinawa – integration proceeding without friction. The contrast with Seoul was clear: Washington’s maritime alliance partners operated seamlessly, while its peninsular ally was managing a public dispute over notification and command authority.
These divergent responses reflect structural differences, not temperament. Australia’s deep defence links with the United States embed Canberra within a framework where freedom of navigation transits carry clear and accepted alliance logic. Seoul’s exposure is different in kind. The January 2026 US National Defence Strategy made explicit what planners had long signalled: South Korea should take “primary responsibility” for deterring North Korea while Washington updates its posture toward wider China contingencies. The announcement of Freedom Shield 2026 – combined exercises set for 9–19 March – confirms Seoul continues to perform its alliance commitments. The Yellow Sea dispute confirms it is simultaneously registering their limits.
President Lee Jae-myung has given this disposition a formal name. At his New Year press conference in January, he placed “strategic autonomy” at the centre of South Korea’s foreign policy, warning that alliances should produce neither “entanglement” nor “abandonment.” Security cooperation with Washington is “unavoidable”, he acknowledged, but “coming into conflict with China would not serve South Korea’s national interests in any way”. His January state visit to Beijing – the first by a South Korean leader in six years – gave that language institutional weight.
Having completed a multilateral exercise with Australian and US forces on 15–16 February, and participated days later in the first-ever trilateral US-Japan-Philippines maritime patrol near the Bashi Channel. These waters that sit directly astride any Taiwan contingency. The Philippines then announced a memorandum of agreement with the Chinese Coast Guard for joint patrols in the South China Sea, expected to be signed in March.
This appears to be a calculated hedge. Manila faces acute physical exposure to Chinese pressure in disputed waters, economic dependencies that constrain confrontation, and a domestic coalition that requires visible engagement with Beijing. Simultaneously maintaining exercises with Washington and a cooperative framework with Beijing is the operational definition of flexibility under great-power competition.
All three responses reflect, in part, how each capital is reading US behaviour. When Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby chose Seoul for his first international trip in January – emphasising China contingencies over North Korean deterrence – Seoul registered the implication: USFK was being reoriented around a mission it had not agreed to absorb. An administration that has pressured Canada, raised the prospect of acquiring Greenland, and imposed tariffs on allied economies while demanding burden-sharing has made the reliability of American commitments a live question across the region.
For China, this picture is strategically useful but demands restraint. Past pressure on Seoul – over THAAD missile deployments, trade friction, inter-Korean relations – has historically reinforced South Korean alignment with Washington rather than loosening it. The current dynamic is different. Alliance friction is being generated by US unilateralism. Beijing’s interest lies in not disrupting that process.
What the third week of February reveals is not alliance collapse but alliance differentiation – Seoul performing its commitments while privately disputing their terms, Canberra proceeding confidently inside a regional architecture it has fully endorsed, Manila hedging in both directions simultaneously. Washington’s partners are not abandoning their alliances. They are recalibrating them, each according to its own exposure, economic dependencies, and reading of US intent. That recalibration, conducted across three capitals in a single fortnight, may prove to be the most consequential regional development of the year so far.
About the author
Sophie Wushuang Yi
Dr Sophie Wushuang Yi is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. She is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Grandview Institution in Beijing and the Wang Gungwu Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
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