In every serious chancellery from New Delhi to Riyadh to Canberra, the same strategy is now being executed. Faced with a Washington that has walked away from the principles it underwrote for eight decades — territorial integrity, open sea lanes, convertible currencies, even the rhetorical fiction of human rights as a condition of membership — middle powers are diversifying. They are signing partnerships with everyone who will sign back. They are buying weapons from rivals and from friends in the same quarter. They are running parallel payment systems, parallel summits, parallel diplomatic vocabularies. The strategy has a name in finance, and the name is hedging. It is the rational response when your principal counterparty has become your principal source of risk.

The trouble is that everyone is hedging, and they are hedging into each other. India holds simultaneous positions in BRICS and the Quad. Saudi Arabia hosts Chinese-brokered diplomacy with Iran while signing a $142 billion defence package with Washington and accepting designation as a major non-NATO ally. Vietnam has elevated its relationships with Seoul, Washington, Tokyo and Canberra to comprehensive strategic partnerships within the space of fifteen months. The Gulf states run experiments with Chinese payment rails while keeping their sovereign wealth parked in New York. Europe rehearses a strategic autonomy that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, while still routing its critical defence supply chains through Virginia and Texas. Each of these moves, taken alone, is sensible diversification. Taken together, they form a system in which the hedges are written on each other — and that is the system that will be tested in the next crisis.

A case arrived on 11 April that is almost too neat for an essay. Saudi Arabia announced that roughly 13,000 Pakistani troops and up to eighteen Pakistan Air Force fighter jets had taken up station at King Abdulaziz Air Base in the Eastern Province, under the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed between Islamabad and Riyadh last September — a treaty whose operative clause states that an attack on one is to be treated as an attack on both. They arrived as the latest round of US–Iran ceasefire talks was collapsing........

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