Towards a US-led Networked Interregional Architecture for the Indo-Pacific?

The Biden administration’s approach to the Indo-Pacific strategy represents the latest and most ambitious incarnation of the ‘new multilateralism’—an institutional redesign that seeks to respond to unprecedented changes in and challenges to the US-led international order. This article sheds light on the conceptual underpinnings, structural features, and development of the strategy. It shows how ‘entrepreneurial’ Japanese diplomacy, US coalition-building, Transatlantic policy convergences, and the galvanizing effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine have combined to shape the contours of the strategy and endow it with a sense of common purpose. It brings into sharp focus the US strategy’s reliance on the creation, strengthening, and leveraging of informal institutional configurations of power and cooperation. And it highlights some of the factors that might result in this approach ultimately proving to be more of a triumph of structure and process than of concrete substance and accomplishment.