Recent years have been anything but smooth in China's neighborhood. With regional tensions simmering, the United States has seized the moment to bolster its security ties with key regional players and increase its forward military posture. Some experts suggest that Washington is considering transforming its “hubs and spokes” of regional security architecture into a centralized system akin to an “Asian NATO,” all in a bid to safeguard a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Brantly Womack's latest book, Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order, argues that intense securitization and acute balancing against China, particularly in Southeast Asia, is not a predetermined outcome. The book has attracted academic heavyweights such as Wang Gungwu, Wu Yu-shan, Qin Yaqing, and Evelyn Goh, who provide comments in the form of small chapters. All guest authors have endorsed the work with laudable praise.

The very choice of the term “Pacific Asia” in the book's title, instead of the Japan-U.S. preferred “Indo-Pacific,” is a deliberate statement that exogenously imposed slogans and security concepts lack connection to the thick web of millennia-old regional relations developed between China and its neighbors. Womack draws heavily on Qin Yaqing's relational theory to support