Commentary In the wake of the announcement of the new Australia-U.S.-UK (AUKUS) security pact in the Indo-Pacific region, many commentators have lamented that it will provoke Beijing to adopt more aggressive policies and that Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam will resent being forced to choose sides between China and the United States. These comments tend to come from sources known to have close ties and/or to sympathize with Beijing. It is therefore important to look closely at the whole picture in order to have a sure understanding of the origins and significance of the security alliance. The story really opens in 2014 when China began dredging around reefs and small islands in the South China Sea as the start of a project to create air and naval bases with command over the whole region. This was accompanied by an increasing number of incidents in which Chinese …