""soft balancing" networks are far more difficult to counter. In this model, countries don't openly oppose China, but instead coordinate step by step" [soft balancing]
The article explicitly names soft balancing as the structural mechanism China finds harder to counter than direct US-style rivalry, directly supporting the claim that informal coordination networks are structurally more resilient than formal alliances.
Reasoning from this article
The article generalizes beyond India-Vietnam to a broader pattern: middle powers across the Indo-Pacific are building overlapping, non-alliance partnerships that cumulatively constrain dominant powers. This dynamic is not unique to China-India-Vietnam — it mirrors how ASEAN states, Gulf states, and others hedge against both US and Chinese pressure simultaneously. The structural insight is that the absence of a formal alliance actually makes these networks more durable, since they cannot be dissolved by a single diplomatic rupture or treaty withdrawal.