The Christian Future in the Asian Century

Prospects & Challenges

The only questions are whether it is India, China, or the United States which will dominate the world by the end of this century, and what sort of India that will be.—William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), 297

The mountains of Kashmir divide the subcontinent from Central and East Asia and form a narrow but direct corridor that feeds into the peninsula. Its name, according to popular folk etymology, means “dessicated land”: it is a mountainous region, 68,000 miles of terrain crossed by the Western Himalayas, the Karakoram, and the Hindu Kush, veined by the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab, forests, grasslands, and unique fauna that have endured in this natural protectorate. Historically, Alexander passed near here; it was more important to the Kushana than to either the Mauryan or the Gupta, and Kanishka (127-151 CE) sponsored the Fourth Buddhist Council here, setting a precedent for its later role as an epicenter of Buddhist and Hindu intellectualism. It was Kashmir Buddhists who took the dharma to the lands of China and Tibet. Kumarajiva came from here, and Xuanzang, the Chinese monk whose “Journey to the West” is the inspiration for the Chinese novel of the same name, passed through here on his way to the University of Nalanda. Kashmir Hinduism was at first broadly represented by initiatory Vaishnavism before transitioning to Shakti-Shaiva Trika, often colloquially called “Kashmir Shaivism.” A Mongol administrator briefly ran Kashmir after it was conquered in 1235, and the Mongols returned the following century, but failed to establish long-term presence. Today, the majority religion in this region is Islam.

Kashmir is the clasp of the once-upon-a-time Indosphere, through which Buddhism exported to Afghanistan, Tibet, Mongolia, and China and thence to Korea and Japan, and through which Sanskrit literature, mathematics, science, and medicine were exported northwestward in the Middle Ages, especially to Baghdad. (Buddhism and Hinduism alike also filtered southeastward to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.) It represents one of the cultural, and not only geographical, hubs of contiguous Asia, and it has been a facilitator, as well as a signal, of religious change in the region. Most recently, it was a flashpoint in the emergent conflict between Pakistan and India, whose dispute over the region reflects its multivalent significance to the two largest faiths on the subcontinent, Islam and Hinduism.

One faith that may have arrived here in antiquity, but which did not leave a lasting presence, and failed to gain traction in the larger competition between varieties of Buddhism, Hinduism, and later Islam, was Christianity—specifically, the Nestorian Christianity of the Church of the East. Nestorians were in India, but further south, on the Western coast that stretches up from Kollam up to Kalyan, having arrived in ever-greater numbers from the time of Augustus down through the Sassanid period, and while Christianity today is the third largest Indian religion, it has never implanted on Indian soil with quite the verve of its seniors: at 2.8 million, the population is vastly dwarfed by India’s 172 million Muslims, and much less by its nearly 1 billion Hindus. Nor are all of these Christians today members of the Church of the East: by a complex history of both internal schism, colonialist infiltration of India by European powers and, with them, Western Catholic and Anglican missionaries, there are a variety of different communions overlapping one another in these regions, all of them laying claim to the erstwhile apostolicity of St. Thomas, Christ’s witness in the subcontinent. Whether Thomas himself ever set foot in the subcontinent or not, Christianity’s entrance by sea rather than through the corridor of Kashmir speaks to its marginal presence (with apologies to any Ahmadiyya readers, who will insist to the contrary that Jesus is in fact buried in Kashmir).

In quest of talking about Christianity in Asia, whether past, present, or future, we could do worse than to begin with India. In many ways, India is representative of the broader Christian story in Asia. Christianity has had real successes in South, Southeast, and East Asia, but it has never been a force of regional importance and influence on anything like the scale of the faiths and philosophies indigenous to the region until the modern period, when globalization and Westernization have meant greater distribution of Western Christianity in some countries on previously unimagined scales. If we begin with India, we must continue with those success stories—China and Korea—and then we must conclude with Japan, at once Christianity’s lost opportunity, one of its hardest mission fields, and one of its greatest challenges of inculturation.

Impending over this demographic novelty in East Asia, and the question of Christianity’s overall religious and cultural compatibility with Asia, is the question of the “Asian Century,” or the current geopolitical shift from a world mainly defined by the centers of power and interests of Europeans and Americans to those of the Asia-Pacific region. The twenty-first century has seen an uptick in soft competition between Washington and Beijing, which under this administration and the two previous has threatened to erupt into war, specifically over Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait. To check this rising threat of Chinese militancy, the previous Biden Administration labored to contain China through strong intelligence, military, and trading cooperatives, particularly with India, Japan, and Australia in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the so-called “Quad” arrangement), in parallel with his efforts to isolate and contain Putin’s Russia through the revival of NATO.¹

In some ways, this activity betrays an implicit understanding, and belief, that China, the world’s other great superpower beyond the United States, is uniquely poised to rise in the next century. But as William Dalrymple says in the excerpt quoted above, India also has a legitimate chance of achieving superpower status over the next century by mixture of demographic and economic factors. The concentration of its power in illiberal hands under Narendra Modi also possibly makes it more likely to be drawn into competition and conflict with China for dominance in the region and globally, where India has recently been more active, often in problematic ways (i.e., politically motivated assassinations). Just as Christianity, like other religions, has seen its fortunes change historically in tandem with the political rise and decline of different powers, we do well to consider Christianity’s Asian future in the context of the Asian Century.

India has long loomed large in Christian consciousness due to the myth of St. Thomas and the slow trickle of Christian communities up its Western coast in late antiquity, in the age just before both the Prophet Muḥammad and the monk Xuanzang. It never pierced the heart of the country the way that its own indigenous faiths and philosophies have—one could construct a whole cultural geology of Modern India sitting atop the ruins of previous Vedic, Śramanic, Buddhist, theistic Hindu, Muslim, and Anglican British rule, and of these, the last, Christian imperium would be the thinnest and most easily forgotten, following the last in, first out rule—and today its minoritarian status rests on uneasy footing in the larger conflicts between Hindus and Muslims exacerbated by the Hindutva philosophy of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).²

From the point of view of evangelization, India is unlikely to Christianize any time soon: Hinduism and Islam are simply too much bigger and stronger than the Christian community, and the Christian community is too internally divided - not to mention actively repressed by the authorities. Indian Christians live lives of de facto dialogue with the larger cultural and religious matrix around them. That dialogue has often had a hard political edge to it, as a large number of Indian Christians trace their roots back to the mass conversions of low-caste Hindus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: away from communities that oppressed and exploited them and into the arms of missionaries and fellow Indian Christians from whom they hoped to gain some combination of political, social, and spiritual salvation.

At the same time, clerics, theologians, and monastics experiment with forms of fully inculturated and syncretistic Christianity, and because they do so on the missional frontiers and fringe peripheries of their communions, they are typically observed with interest rather than censored (a far cry from the response of Rome to such experimentation in previous ages).³ Sometimes, formal theological dialogue and ritual experimentation have been combined in the form of Christian monks and scholars who also function as fully Indian monastics, like Bede Griffiths (1906-1993), Abhishiktananda (1910-1973), or Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010)—all, notably, Western Christians who immigrated to India. Conversely, many modern Hindu saints have engaged with Christianity and with the person of Jesus in formal and focused ways, including especially Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), Swami Vivekananda (1836-1902), Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952), Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), S. Radhakrishnan (1885-1975), and others; here, of interest, two of these four were Indians who traveled outside of India to engage the non-Hindu world with revisionist Hindu philosophies of Neo-Vedanta and Neo-Yoga (Vivekananda and Yogananda, respectively).⁴ Both sorts of engagement have been shaped by a tension between two ideals: religious traditions as particular manifestations of a universal divine versus those same traditions serving as the undergirding for and symbol of national communities. The likes of Bede Griffiths learned this the hard way during the 1980s. He was a universalist, against the idea that the divine or its expressions could be wholly owned by any one or any nation. Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, accused him of appropriating their religious ideas, rituals and clothing (Griffiths dressed in the ochre robes of a sannyasin, gifted him by an Indian bishop).

Outside of India, the Indian Diaspora often finds itself in a majority-Christian world and in majority-Christian countries, where interesting engagements between Christians and Hindus happen on the other foot,⁵ and yet, more and more Westerners since the 1960s express interest in Hindu theology, cosmology, psychology, mythology, yogic, and meditative practice than Diasporic Hindus express interest in Christianity. Still, Jesus often finds a place in this loosely Orientalist spirituality as it exists in the West (once more popular than it is now), often recovered using some of the same conceptual categories as Hindu scholars and saints have deployed: Jesus as yogi,⁶ guru, jivanmukti, saint, avatara, etc.

If India represented the far edge of the late ancient Church of the East’s missional success, then Chang’an was all the more a trip into the unknown for the monk Aluoben, who arrived in Tang China around the year 635. While Christianity was granted imperial recognition, tolerance, and establishment alongside other faiths and philosophies, under “Taizong, [who] was a cultured emperor, who enlightened China and started a new era,” per the Jingjiao Stele,⁷ it never succeeded in dislodging either Buddhism, which enjoyed an apogee of influence under Wu Zetian after Taizong’s death (r. 660 to 705), or the Ruist/Confucian philosophy which reasserted itself after her unceremonious deposition and death.⁸ Indeed, here and in some other far-flung dioceses of the Church of the East, Christianity was so culturally unfamiliar as to sometimes need to share physical space and personnel with otherwise heterodox movements like surviving Manichaeans. This Nestorian community did not survive the Middle Ages, however, suffering decline and death in the fourteenth century along with the holdings of the Church of the East in many other places, including because they “came to be seen as tools of the Mongol conquerors.”⁹ While Modern Christians in China and outside of China see the missionary successes there as in some way the spiritual descendants of the medieval Nestorians, in reality, they are Western and in discontinuity with the premodern Christians of the land.

Where China has known many waves of Christianity across its history, the faith came to Korea only in the 17th century during the Joseon Dynasty, an aftereffect of the Jesuit missions in China. Protestant missions followed in subsequent centuries, and today, around one third (31.3%) of Koreans are Christians—even more than the percentage that identify as Buddhist (just 17%). By contrast, only around 2% of China’s population is Christian, with booms in the late 20th century having now slowed down considerably. China’s population is, of course, significantly larger than Korea’s—almost 1.5 billion people compared to South Korea’s 51 million—and, crucially, both countries are experiencing population decline, South Korea in a way that may prove existentially irreversible. Christianity has had an outsized effect on Korean culture: among other things, it is responsible, for instance, for bringing Hangul into more widespread use over against Chinese (and thus perhaps for saving the only other alphabetic script in the world not derived from the common Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician script of Southwest Asia).

The data is, in other words, inconclusive about how long-term successful Christian mission efforts have been in China and Korea, and about what its long-term prospects might be. Overall, Christianity is in decline in both places, with the swell of Chinese Christian growth in particular having fallen significantly - particularly in rural areas and under pressure from the authorities. Korean Christianity has declined in tandem with growing secularism (about 50% of the country identify as irreligious) and with overall population decline. As elsewhere, religious disaffiliation does not necessarily imply atheism: most adults, for example, in otherwise secularizing countries say they believe in deities and venerate ancestors. Yet as the study linked in the previous sentence shows, “The bulk of [religious] switching” in East Asia “is disaffiliation,” and “[t]he departures are mostly from Buddhism, Christianity, and Daoism,” while only about one-in-ten adults in South Korea and Hong Kong, for instance, converted to Christianity away from a childhood faith. It is difficult, on the face of it, to square the most recent data with the traditional byline of the past three decades that the future Church is Chinese or East Asian: while Christianity is certainly more present here now than it used to be in premodernity, it is not yet the major social force that Western Christians sometimes imagine it to be. Predictions made a few years ago, that Christians would find themselves in the majority in China by 2050, now seem wildly misplaced.

Things are not much better in Southeast Asia: about 8% of Sri Lanka and Vietnam is Christian, but in the other major countries of this corridor, little more than 1% each of their populations is Christian. The true success story in this region is the Philippines, where 91% of the population identifies as Christian, 80% of that being Catholic. And this, too, is a modern phenomenon, the result of early modern Catholic and Protestant missions to the archipelago.

Christianity’s uneven reception in East Asia is nowhere clearer than in Japan. It is possible, but uncertain, that Nestorian missionaries may have made it to Korea and Japan in premodernity, traveling with established overseas trade ships from Korea; but if they did, they left no impression in the archaeological or historical record, and certainly no converts. The real story of Japanese Christianity starts in 1549, with the arrival of the Portuguese and Francis Xavier. These missions had initial success, especially in the conversion of some daimyo (feudal lords) in and around Kyushu. But Japanese Christian communities soon fell under political suspicion. Warlords seeking to unify the country first destroyed the institutional power of Buddhism and then came for Christianity, effectively banning the religion from the early 1600s onwards.

Asia generally, and East Asia especially, is an inherently syncretistic place: the philosophies and religions that thrive, prosper, and survive best are those which are able to incorporate, accommodate, and affirm the religiosity of their neighbors, and to offer a unified perspective that respects ancestral custom alongside novel ideas. And Modern Asia has proved hospitable in this respect to “Western” ideas and practices to the degree that they are compatible with indigenous sentiments, customs, and ideas, just as premodern Asia was hospitable first to Pan-Asian movements like Buddhism and then to influence from further West. From this perspective, religions from the West seeking reception in Asia, like Nestorian Christianity and Islam, typically succeeded or failed on the basis of their ability to inculturate: to what extent could Christianity be a convincingly Indian or Chinese religion? To what extent could Islam be? Could they harness the energy of local, regional, and long-term traditions of wisdom in these lands, and translate their doctrine not only linguistically but also conceptually into the target culture?

This was not always the missional policy of the sixteenth century Catholic Church, which, forged into its early modern shape by Crusades and the Protestant Reformation, was at times inclined to be absolutist not only in matters of doctrine but also culture. Important exceptions to this rule included the Jesuit Roberto di Nobili in India (1577 - 1656). He learned Sanskrit, studied Hindu texts and emulated high-caste Brahmins in his way of life. He sought to separate out religious truth from what he called ‘social customs,’ even arguing that Brahmins were philosophers rather than priests and so could hang on to much of their culture after converting to Christianity. Still, for most people at most times and in most places, religion is not so divorceable from culture as we late moderns in the West tend to imagine it to be, and this is still true in much of Asia today, as the Western concept of “religion” struggles to find purchase in East Asian patterns of “religious” thought.

Religion versus culture - or, perhaps better, religion versus identity or belonging - became a serious problem in Japan, where since the time of Xavier onwards the question was asked of whether a person could truly love and be loyal both to Jesus and to Japan. Christian daimyo fought for the country’s unifying leaders in the late sixteenth century, including in Japan’s disastrous invasions of Korea in the 1590s. But Christians came to be regarded as too distant in their ways of life from other Japanese - too strange, even. When one of their number was crucified by the authorities (the adoption of this method of death represented a particularly grim example of cultural borrowing), other Christians would gather around the cross and sing hymns. This astonished and disgusted Japan’s leaders: not only did these people worship a man who was lawfully tried and executed centuries before, they celebrated the humiliating deaths of their co-religionists. The most serious attempt by Christians to resist formal persecution, the Shimabara Rebellion (1638), was ultimately unsuccessful but spectacularly embarrassing for the shogun at the time - a bunch of peasants holding off samurai armies for months. It reinforced the idea that their strangeness and their suspected links with hostile European powers rendered Christianity a risk too far for a regime in Japan that prized peace and stability. Christianity survived in the form of the Kakure Kirishitan or “Hidden Christians”: Japanese Christians who passed down their tradition from the time of the rebellion to the reopening of Japan to Christian missions in the mid-nineteenth century. By this time, their form of Christianity had melded with Buddhism and Shintoism, to the point that incoming western missionaries struggled to discern a true gospel at work - much though the hidden Christians themselves disputed that verdict.

Modern Japan has been shaped by its forcible reopening by the Perry Expedition, by the Meiji Restoration, by the First and Second World Wars, by the bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, by the postwar constitutional, social, economic, and political changes in Japan’s domestic affairs and foreign presence, and by the globalized capitalism of the US-led international order in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. If yesteryear’s Japan was skeptical of Christianity’s compatibility with Japanese values and political arrangements, modern Japan is simply less concerned with formal “religious” identity (even though a majority of Japanese adults continue to believe in things typically considered under the domain of “religion” in the West). Japan has what we might call a spiritual secularism: on the one hand, many Japanese retain a residual sense of the possibility of gods, spirits, monsters, ghosts, and similar such things, and engage in cultural practices derived from Shinto and Buddhism; on the other hand, most people do not see themselves as and would not register as “actively practicing” in the sense recognized by Western sociologists of religion. Moreover, Japan arguably engages with world faiths, including Christianity, more now than ever before in its past, and yet Japan’s understanding of Christianity and sympathy for its ideas remains relatively small—a mere 2% of Japanese society is Christian.¹⁰ As with China and Korea, this number does not seem destined to grow—after all, Japan also faces steep population decline now and in coming decades, as one of the most widely reported problems facing Japanese society. As the growth of a religion typically requires not only favorable cultural circumstances but also favorable demographic ones, Christianity is likely to remain small within Japanese society. Indeed, even the Kakure Kirishitan, who have survived centuries of marginalized existence within Japan, are now dying out, for no other reason than the common affliction facing modern Japan: there just aren’t enough kids, and those there are are more motivated to move to big cities and integrate with mainstream Japanese, and therefore secular, culture.

We could, in a sense, stop here, having surveyed the premodern and modern failures and successes of Christianity in East Asia, and we would have something complete in itself to consider about the permutations and possibilities of a world religion that is itself Asian, albeit West Asian, seeking reception in the world of the Indosphere and the Sinosphere, among cultures of very different assumptions and persuasions to those of its own cradle. We could also take another route entirely and compare Christianity’s track record with other Western religions that have sought reception here, like Islam, or to indigenous religions to the region, like Hinduism and Buddhism, the former of which is thriving and the latter of which is declining. But we conduct this survey in a geopolitical context that invites us to consider the matter from a different angle, one focused on the geopolitical, social, and economic future of the world, as treated under the persistent mytheme of the “Asian Century.”

The “Asian Century,” described by that term, is a 20th century idea that has had a long afterlife. Indeed, it was the dominant perception on the future of this century’s politics until relatively recently, when the tide of scholarship and foreign policy commentary has seemed to shift the other direction. Michael Auslin, for example, asked whether we were seeing The End of the Asian Century? in a book of that name eight years ago;¹¹ the census data on China three years ago seemed to confirm the notion that the major superpower competition to the US in East Asia was in fact a nation facing stagnation problems. Unless, in other words, the Indo-Pacific solves some of the crises that currently dog it—including mass population decline in regions outside India, intraregional competition between China and Japan, China and India, and India and Pakistan, the threat of Chinese conflict with Western powers like the United States and its regional allies over Taiwan, economic concerns, and the equity of political participation, at least in countries like India where the benefits of a larger population are stymied somewhat by unequal access to education and opportunity—the “Asian Century” may not come to pass, at least not as imagined.

And yet, that being said, the Indo-Pacific does seem destined to be the future center of world attention, despite these problems. China is currently leaving the rest of the world in the dust on coveted technologies like EVs and is charging ahead in research on future tech, some of which the US remains competitive with, like AI, and some of which China is ahead on, like nuclear fusion.

How will these factors shape religion in Asia over the next century? It seems likely that the demographic portion of the population identifying as “non-religious” or disaffiliated will grow as East Asia continues to secularize, but equally likely that the ordinary person in East Asia, just as the majority of the Nones in the United States, will nevertheless continue to hold spiritual beliefs and behaviors of various kinds in their state of non-belonging. Asian religions and philosophies, due to their inherent pluralism and syncretistic compatibility, will likely continue to make their resources available to the average person without requiring terribly strict participation or self-identification. In these ways, traditional forms of Christianity are likely to be socially disadvantaged among newer generations whose social grammar of religion will not be keyed to the boundaries inherent in formal belonging, behavior, and creedal belief. Conversely, though, formal identification with Christianity in multiple, mainly Western forms will continue to be available in these societies for the probably small portion of the population that will find this counter-cultural element in the religion attractive or at least tolerable on the grounds of other perceived benefits.

What kinds of Christianity could survive or even prosper in East Asia over the coming century? We should take a hint from both premodern and modern success stories of Christianity in Asia and suggest that they will be precisely the sort capable of tapping into Asian religious and philosophical pluralism, that can convincingly inculturate so as to be an expression of rather than in competition with local and regional identities. Just as Indian Christians already engage with local Hinduism and Islam on-the-ground, in the day-to-day, and not just in formal interreligious theological dialogue, making use of the cultural resources traditional and respected in different Asian societies rather than militating against them. This may perhaps offend against the missional sensibilities of Christians—including some Asian Christians!—but it is also more realistic: the absolutism that benefited Christianity in the premodern Mediterranean, Europe, and the Early Modern Americas just has not historically worked well in East Asian societies, just as it is not competing well in the modernized, globalized Western world today. Perhaps the lesson common to both observations is that in a multicultural world of engagement across languages, regions, myths, cults, “religions,” and ideas, flexibility is often more credible than rigidity.

1. The Quad has a complicated backstory that does not begin with efforts to contain China, and the concept of the Quad as an alliance whose primary purpose is to contain Beijing is fairly novel. The existence and revival of the Quad since 2017 is largely responsible for the creation of the very concept of the “Indo-Pacific,” in implicit opposition to the prospect of a new Sinosphere.

2. On Hindutva and Hindu-Christian dialogue, see Anantanand Rambachan, Pathways to Hindu-Christian Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 51-68.

3. For premodern and early modern experimentation, see R.S. Sugirtharajah, Jesus in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1-42, which includes both the Church of the East and Western missionaries; for modern experimentation, see Selva J. Raj, “Dialogue ‘On the Ground’: The Complicated Identities and the Complex Negotiations of Catholics and Hindus in South India,” Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 17 (2004), 33-44. Raj’s use of “Dialogue ‘on the ground’” in reference “to the ritual encounter and exchange between Hindu and Catholic laity - often in opposition to and defiance of institutional norms and ecclesial prescriptions - that occurs at the grassroots level in the arena of popular piety and rituals” (43) is a useful distinction to the formal interreligious and theological dialogues run by, say, the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue in the Vatican. It is profoundly true, as Raj argues, that “the dialogue on the ground also demonstrates that an extraordinarily productive locus for efficacious dialogue is the world of rituals rather than the sophisticated world of theological concepts and categories” (43-44), which is the comparatively arcane domain of scholars.

4. See Rambachan, Essays in Hindu Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 94-110 which lays out a “Hindu Christology.”

5. See Andrew Wingate, The Meeting of Opposites? Hindus and Christians in the West (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).

6. See Vishal Sharma, “Jesus as a Yogi in Hinduism,” 156-174 in Interfaith Afterlives of Jesus, vol 2 Jesus in Global Perspective, ed. Gregory C. Jenks (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023);

7. The translation is from Michael Philip Penn et al., Invitation to Syriac Christianity: An Anthology (Oakland, CA: University of California Pres, 2022), 727-737.

8. For a spellbinding account of the tale, read Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), 133-160.

9. Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2008), 210.

10. David here, with two anecdotes: first, I chuckle every year at a meme that circulates online of a crucified Santa Claus in a Tokyo shopfront at Christmastime, with the caption “I’m not sure that Japan gets Christianity”; second, having just concluded my book with Rob De La Noval on Anime, Religion, and Theology, a recurrent theme in our treatment of religion in Japanese anime is that anime’s reuse of traditional Christian imagery, characters, practices, and theology is often filtered through a layer of intensified, sometimes parodic cultural unfamiliarity.

11. Michael Auslin, The End of the Asian Century? War, Stagnation, and the Risks of the World’s Most Dynamic Region (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); see also idem, Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020).