As the world’s two most powerful leaders—U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping—prepare to meet in Beijing this week, the spotlight is back on the balance of power in the contested Indo-Pacific. Compared with chaotic events elsewhere, the Indo-Pacific appears relatively stable. To be sure, the region has seen its surges of violence in recent months and years: Myanmar’s deadly civil war continues; India and Pakistan clashed again last year, as did Thailand and Cambodia; and Afghanistan and Pakistan are engaged in a low-level war today. Tensions in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea have not abated.

Still, at least for the time being, the Indo-Pacific’s conflicts pale in comparison to those unfolding in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Gulf. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the Munich Security Conference in February, “Asia is probably the only region that maintains overall peace.” Yet peer behind the scenes and the picture that emerges is far from reassuring when it comes to peace and security over the medium and long term. The danger is of misinterpreting the comparative calm as an acceptable new normal—and whether China sees U.S. failure in Iran as an opportunity to press its own claims in the region.

Across the region, increased threat perceptions are spurring growing militarization. China’s growing power and increased assertiveness are partly driving these trends. The tempo of China’s military actions around Taiwan has not reduced; in fact, they are increasingly frequent, large in scope, and prone to push the limits of what is considered safe. The Middle East crisis has bought no respite.

Last December, China conducted its largest military exercises around Taiwan to date, in what seemed to be closer to an invasion rehearsal than a drill. Then, in January, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) surveillance drone entered the territorial airspace of Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island—the first confirmed PLA violation of Taiwan’s airspace in decades and a deliberate test of a red line that Taipei itself had made clear in 2022, when then-Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said such an incursion would constitute a “first strike.” Taiwan issued a radio warning, and the drone left its airspace after only four minutes, but the point had been made.

Tensions also continue to brew in the South China Sea, especially between China and the Philippines. Following a number of incidents in recent years in which vessels from both sides were damaged and at least one Filipino sailor was severely injured, in March there were two dangerous encounters: near Sabina Shoal and a near-miss between Chinese and Philippine boats near Thitu Island, which Manila saw as a result of Chinese maneuvers that violated international regulations for safe sea encounters.

In April, China also installed a 1,150-foot floating barrier across the entrance to Scarborough Shoal within the Philippines’s exclusive economic zone, blocking Filipino fishers from operating there. Meanwhile, Japanese authorities have recently raised protests over an unidentified new Chinese structure in a disputed area of the East China Sea. Tokyo and Beijing are already at bitter odds after months of contention following Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s statement that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan might threaten Japan’s core security to the degree that would justify military intervention.

China is not the only regional actor flexing its muscles. On the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang is also steadily strengthening its military posture. It has test-fired seven ballistic missiles since the beginning of the year, and last month the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that North Korea has likely completed a new uranium enrichment facility at its Yongbyon complex—its largest nuclear production capacity expansion in years.

In this volatile context, a number of countries in the region are racing to modernize their military capabilities. Across the Indo-Pacific, defense budgets are rising, and doctrines are being updated. But more military hardware operating at a higher tempo in the same crowded waters and skies also makes accidents more likely, and the consequences ever more unpredictable.

A regional security practitioner, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the International Crisis Group recently that the goal is preventing “the incremental from becoming accidental.” The risk of accidental collisions potentially escalating is so high that it should now be the highest priority in preventing conflicts in the region.

But that is hardly an easy task: Beijing is increasingly comfortable using its heft to press neighbors into changing the status quo and to impose de facto control over disputed areas, particularly in the South China Sea. Its capacity to do so has expanded dramatically; U.S. military officials now describe China as a peer (rather than a near-peer) competitor.

Analysts have called Beijing’s posture “advancing without attacking”—a campaign built on salami-slicing in which each step China takes to alter the status quo is too small to provoke a response and the response that never comes becomes the new baseline.

Against this backdrop, the U.S. use of force in Iran, and before that its kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, poses an uncomfortable question for the region: Is Washington tossing aside the international laws that prohibit the nondefensive use of force, and how will this shape China’s behavior? The contexts and motives are not equivalent—China is not Israel, and Taiwan is not Iran. But the analogies do not have to be tight for Beijing’s strategists to find these precedents useful in legitimizing China’s own use of coercive methods.

The precedents the Trump administration is creating by ignoring international law could also open new cans of worms unrelated to China. After Iran throttled the Strait of Hormuz, Indonesian Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa floated the idea of imposing levies on ships transiting the Strait of Malacca. Such an endeavor would require cooperation from Malaysia and Singapore, and the latter’s foreign minister rejected the idea within hours, in the name of international law. But the fact that a sitting cabinet minister of the world’s largest archipelagic state could even suggest such a proposal about one of the world’s most sensitive maritime chokepoints is a stark reminder of the risks of broken norms.

The crumbling of the international legal order is all the more concerning for many in the region given the combination of Beijing’s growing capabilities and assertiveness on the one hand and Washington’s lack of clear commitment to Asia on the other. The Trump administration’s attention to the Indo-Pacific was already in doubt before the Gulf escalation: The region barely featured in the recent National Defense Strategy, largely focused on homeland security and the Western Hemisphere, and Washington has persistently called on its Asian allies and partners to shoulder more responsibility for their own security.

Asian governments now fear the United States will once again get bogged down in the Middle East, instead of pivoting to Asia. Trump already redeployed some U.S. assets in the region to the Gulf. While these small-scale redeployments—missiles defense interceptors from South Korea as well as ships and around 2,500 Marines from Japan—may not be operationally significant, they are corrosive to allied confidence. The South Korean public, in particular, is irate over the transfer of some THAAD components, given the economic punishment that Seoul endured from Beijing when the system was first deployed.

Washington’s Asian allies are also beginning to wonder whether the United States will be able to maintain credible deterrence in the region given how fast it has depleted its munition stockpiles in the Gulf. Pentagon wargaming factoring in this new reality points to an erosion of the U.S. ability to deter, let alone respond to, a Taiwan contingency in the near term, for example.

Also of concern to U.S. allies in the region is that Trump’s engagement with China appears nearly exclusively economic, reflecting a desire to shift focus away from security issues. Given Trump’s record of avoiding contentious strategic issues in his dealing with Xi, including Taiwan, his upcoming Beijing visit is likely to be dominated by trade issues.

From Trump’s perspective, a trade deal with China would be a welcome distraction from the disastrous Iran campaign. What Beijing might ask for this is the subject of speculation and concern, but it is possible that Xi would try to extract a declaratory concession from Trump that would shift U.S. policy toward opposing Taiwan’s independence.

The economic shock is even more impactful. Other than the Gulf itself, Asia may be the region hit hardest by the closure of Hormuz. Asia’s economies are populous, oil-dependent, and—across the agricultural belt running from Vietnam through India—heavily reliant on Middle Eastern fertilizers. The Philippines was the first country in the world to declare a national energy emergency. Thai fishing ships are grounded, Vietnamese rice farmers face freezing production due to fertilizer scarcity and logistical costs, and governments across the region are reintroducing COVID-era work-from-home rules to ration fuel consumption.

Already, Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan has described the Iran conflict as a “dry run” for the price every country in Asia—combatant or not—would pay in a Taiwan contingency.

China has stepped into that vacuum, offering various oil supply arrangements to the Philippines, Laos, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and even Australia. These deals are not yet finalized and may not all materialize, particularly if the Strait of Hormuz reopens relatively soon, given domestic objections over potential strategic repercussions in some of these countries. But the diplomatic geometry has already shifted: Governments that, a year ago, were debating how to reduce dependence on China are now debating how much more dependence they can afford to absorb.

The region’s outlook is dimmer than the Chinese narrative would suggest. Takaichi conceded as much on her recent tour of Vietnam and Australia. In her Hanoi speech marking the 10th anniversary of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific concept—a vision coined by her mentor, the late Shinzo Abe—she acknowledged the slow erosion of the concept and the rules-based international order on which it rests. She offered a renewed vision, updating the framework to support sustainable prosperity and stability in the region through cooperation on technology and artificial intelligence, economic resilience and supply chains, and defense, including maritime security in the South China Sea.

But that prosperity seems increasingly shaky, given China’s flexing of its muscles, the growing militarization of the region, the deterioration of norms against war, and the waning power of the United States. Regional actors may share a preference for the absence of war, but whether this is sufficient to guarantee peace is both an open question and the source of considerable anxiety.