ABSTRACT
The Indo-Pacific shares many of the developments that have characterized the ending of the liberal international order in the West. Despite having greatly enlarged China’s sphere of maritime influence, its leaders have refrained from adopting the new geopolitical concept of the Indo-Pacific in the belief that it was a cover for an anti-China strategy. The 2010s may be regarded as the period of American nemesis, the ascent of China as a global power and the replacement of order by uncertainty. The regional reaction to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was clouded by considerable uncertainty. From the perspective of the Asia-Pacific, the experience of the process leading to the end of the Cold War differed from that of Europe. Independently of American unipolar power, a different product of the end of the Cold War was that states found that their room for maneuver both at home and abroad had increased.
