Access the Alignment Index

When historians write about the origins and trajectory of the United States-China geopolitical rivalry in the 21st century, the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia’ in 2011 is likely to be a prime candidate for signaling the beginning of the intensification of the bilateral competition. It was around then that many of Asia’s leaders began to feel increasing direct or indirect pressures from the two great powers to choose or take sides. The common refrain of most in Asia is their countries do not want to choose between the US and China; they want to be friends with both.

At the 2018 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, for example, Singapore’s then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong commented on how "[t]hese strategic trends of big power competition and shifts…are pulling ASEAN members in different directions … I think it is very desirable for us not to have to take sides, but the circumstances may come where ASEAN may have to choose one or the other. I hope it does not happen soon.”His Australian counterpart at the time, Scott Morrison, avowed, "Our relationships with each of these major partners [the US and China] are different, and they're both successful. Australia doesn't have to choose, and we won't choose.”

Lee and Morrison’s different takes on the issue, in particular Lee’s observation about big power competition pulling ASEAN members in different directions, raise three interesting questions:

How have Southeast Asian countries aligned themselves vis-à-vis the two great powers, then and now;
What explains their alignments; and
What the implications are for Southeast Asia and beyond.

Our “Anatomy of Choice: Southeast Asia between the Superpowers” project, five years in the making at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy¹, sought to answer these questions.

To answer the first question — where each country stands along the alignment spectrum — we created the Anatomy of Choice Alignment Index (AOCAI), the website version of which was launched in late October 2025. It is hosted by the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School.

To tap the alignment of the 10 Southeast Asian countries², the Index relied on 20 indicators, grouped under five equally weighted domains: political-diplomatic, military-security, economics-trade, cultural-soft power, and signaling. The Index analyzed how these changed over 30 years.

We invite readers to access the website as we introduce and explain its central features.

We believe that it is the historical or longitudinal aspect of the data over 30 years that makes the Index a unique methodological contribution, one that allows us to come to the main conclusion of the project: Southeast Asia is starting to choose — and the direction of travel is in favor of China.³

Readers can view this conclusion for themselves by examining the Index’s map. Taking Thailand as an example, The Index shows Thailand’s alignment score averaged out over the last 30 years (based on the 20 indicators) at 47, putting it within the “hedging range,” which we defined between 45-55 where zero represents complete alignment with China and 100 with the US. Compare that to Myanmar at 25, indicating very strong alignment with China, or the Philippines at 62, indicating alignment with the US.

Perhaps more interesting and revealing than the static 30-year average score are the alignment scores over time. Again, using Thailand as an example, clicking into the country’s icon on the Index’s map will reveal three concentric circles. The inner circle shows the alignment score (53) for 1995-2004, the middle circle (46) for 2005-2014, and the outer circle (42) for 2015-2024. The shift in Thailand’s alignment scores over three decades, from 53 to 46 to 42, indicate a nation moving from a hedging position between the superpowers to one of greater alignment with China. With the exception of Vietnam, it will be found that the general direction of travel in ASEAN-10 is away from the US and toward China. Some countries, like Thailand and Indonesia, show qualitative changes in their alignment in the last 10 years from postures in preceding periods. Others, like Singapore (48), Malaysia (46), and Brunei (45) — while also showing movement in China’s direction in the last decade — remain within the hedging range, suggesting that they have so far been able to maintain a non-aligned posture.

The AOCAI, as the first Index to use quantitative measures to track the alignment postures of these Southeast Asian countries, allows scholars, policymakers, and corporate analysts to go beyond impressionistic assessments of these alignments. The time span gives the Index a dynamic feature, giving the user a sense of the direction of travel. Users of the website are also likely to find two other features interesting. First, users can change (in the Weighting page) the weightings of the five dimensions (but not the indicators within each dimension) to see how and if they change the scores of individual countries. For example, a user who believes that economics-trade deserves a 30% (instead of the default 20%) weightage can alter it accordingly. Secondly, the user can also (in the Comparison page) compare any pair of countries in terms of how they are aligned with the US and China across the five domains. For example, Singapore and Brunei are quite similar in how they connect with the US and China on most of the domains, whereas things couldn’t be more different when they are respectively compared with Myanmar.

In addition to the above features, policymakers, scholars, and analysts may also find the country summaries (in the Country page) useful in providing short narratives of the country’s alignment moves over different time spans and the domains in which they align with the US and China, as well as the discussion on Methodology and Limitations. The Index and the website, it should be noted, do not ascribe reasons behind the alignment movements. For that, we will be publishing in due course an edited volume that focuses on how domestic politics, perceptions of economic opportunities, estimation of US staying power, and geography help shape the alignments of Southeast Asian countries.

The AOCAI website is a first cut, not the last word, on understanding where Southeast Asian countries are in terms of strategic alignments. It is a resource for the global commons, and we look forward to receiving feedback for improvements that can be made to future editions of the website.