But Blinken wasn’t the only senior U.S. national security official in Asia recently. While the Beijing talks grabbed all the headlines, national security adviser Jake Sullivan was in Tokyo, participating in high-level diplomatic meetings with America’s top regional partners. Sullivan’s counterparts from Japan, the Philippines and South Korea all met with U.S. officials and (in various groupings) with each other. These meetings — in the long run — will prove more consequential for dealing with China’s rise than Blinken’s Beijing visit.

The White House’s readout of Sullivan’s trip failed to capture the unprecedented nature of this quiet diplomacy. For the first time, national security advisers from Japan, the Republic of the Philippines and the United States met as a trio. This is an elevation of a new trilateral grouping insiders call JAROPUS, combining the names of the three countries in a similar way to AUKUS, the more formal grouping of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Another meeting in Tokyo that brought the U.S., Japanese and South Korean national security advisers together would have been unthinkable not long ago. But Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol have both taken significant political risks to move past historical grievances and join forces to confront their shared concerns regarding China’s regional aggression. The two leaders are expected to meet together with Biden for the first time in Washington later this year.

The concerns these important Indo-Pacific nations have about China’s strategy are not a product of Washington’s attempts to “contain” China, as Beijing alleges. The biggest driver of these moves is, in fact, Xi himself. He has ramped up China’s regional military expansion, bellicose wolf warrior diplomacy and economic coercion across the region.

“The Chinese have basically now, through a process of confrontation, helped us organize our allies on multiple layers,” U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel told me in an interview. “Xi does not get enough credit for all the work he has done to contain China, and I’m willing to give it to him.”

To be sure, the Indo-Pacific region is huge and diverse, and China’s economic lure remains strong. Even as leaders such as Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., also known as Bongbong, seek more security cooperation with the United States and other allies, they can’t afford to completely alienate Beijing. But these new diplomatic groupings — known informally as “mini-laterals” — are reshaping the security architecture in Asia in significant ways. The Chinese government’s negative reactions show it understands the importance of these developments.

“Many big countries in the region have a perception of being leaned on and coerced. That is the enduring and consistent feature of Chinese diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific,” a senior administration official told me. “They have systematically alienated a number of countries with their activist pursuit of what they think their nationalist goals are.”

In Washington, it is common to view Asia only through the narrow lens of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. This plays into Beijing’s desire to set up a false narrative positing America as the aggressor. But the fact that these other regional leaders are making these moves shows that concerns about China’s actions cannot be attributed to U.S. hawkishness or groupthink. The demand signal is coming from the region itself.

“U.S. allies and partners are increasingly turning to collective security approaches in the Indo-Pacific quite literally because China is digging its own grave,” Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, told me.

The race is on to develop these connections into genuine partnerships that will endure after the current leaders of these democracies depart. Encouragingly, there have been substantial advances in military cooperation, strategic planning and diplomatic coordination — moves surely driven by Beijing’s increasingly threatening stance vis-à-vis Taiwan.

But many regional allies worry the Biden administration’s policy lacks a robust economic component and fear that Americans’ appetite for internationalism is waning. U.S. plans to build out real cooperation in areas such as technology and energy security have yet to be fulfilled. To meet Asian allies’ desire for more American engagement and presence, the U.S. government, Congress and the American people will all have to support a surge of resources to this region.

The objective is not to “contain” China but rather to preserve the sovereignty of regional allies and the order that underpins the region’s prosperity. Beijing wants to split off Asian allies from the United States and each other, but its actions are pushing them together. What remains to be seen is whether Washington can take advantage.