This article examines how a middle power’s strategic position between competing hegemonic powers shapes the comprehensiveness and character of its pursuit of strategic autonomy within the U.S. alliance system. Drawing on comparative case study analysis of Japan, South Korea, and Australia — three U.S. allies that face the shared challenge of China’s rising military power but occupy distinctly different strategic positions relative to that challenge — the article introduces the concept of “hegemonic squeeze” to describe the condition of being positioned between competing great powers in ways that create simultaneous, multidirectional, and inescapable pressures. While related concepts such as “omni-enmeshment” (Goh, 2005) and “strategic hedging” (Goh, 2007) have addressed aspects of middle power management between great powers in non-allied contexts, this article argues that hegemonic squeeze specifically captures the condition of formal U.S. allies caught between their hegemonic patron and a hegemonic rival — a condition that drives more comprehensive and multidimensional autonomy strategies than those facing unidirectional great power pressure. Japan and South Korea, positioned between the competing influences of the United States and China, pursue simultaneously vertical binding, horizontal binding, hedging, and military modernization as interlocking components of their autonomy strategies (Simón & Klose, 2025; Sims & Chinfulli, 2025). Australia, facing great power pressure in a less immediate and less multidirectional form, pursues a more focused autonomy strategy centered primarily on military self-reliance through AUKUS (PIR Center, 2025). The article concludes by acknowledging an important limitation: whether the number of simultaneous security threats, rather than hegemonic squeeze specifically, independently drives comprehensive autonomy strategies remains an important question for future comparative research.