Once in a while received wisdom is upturned by a fleeting headline. It happened the other day when the FT reported that “Vietnam seeks US support in China dispute”. The stylised view of the new global order frames it as a contest between the established west and the rising rest. The more interesting story is the one about the rest versus the rest.

The spat between Hanoi and Beijing is the latest in a series of disputes over control of the resource-rich South China Sea. In crude terms, China claims all of it. But the dotted line that marks out this ambition on Chinese maps is hotly contested by just about everyone else. The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have their own territorial and maritime claims. Japan has a separate argument with China about a cluster of islands in the East China Sea.

These clashes, then, are not new. Nor is the animosity between Vietnam and China. The Americans had not been gone five years before the two countries fought a vicious border war during the late 1970s. What’s new is the marked heightening of tension as China has adopted a strikingly assertive neighbourhood policy.