With the Indo-Pacific emerging as a pivotal geostrategic arena against the backdrop of intensified US-China great power competition, IR scholars and regional experts have rushed to explore the military, economic, infrastructural, technological and other key dynamics of this new regional landscape. What has received far less attention, however, is how the Indo-Pacific is being actively shaped by collective identity-constructing practices of coalition-building and boundary-drawing. Indeed, like-mindedness – the idea of sharing basic political values and principles – seems to have become an important criterion for Western countries as they rapidly expand their strategic engagement with, and coalition-building in, the Indo-Pacific region, while also distancing themselves from China, some even depicting it as an outsider.