China’s rise and growing challenge to U.S. power has triggered debates about how the competition between rising and established Great Powers may impinge upon secondary states. According to IR wisdom, most secondary states choose to either ally with the established Great Power to balance the rising one, or to bandwagon with the rising Great Power. However, scholars have recently argued that some secondary states “hedge”, that is, they maintain an equidistant position between the competing Great Powers. By employing hedging, these secondary states try to mitigate the security risks associated with alignment. Given the pivotal role that some hedging states can have in the context of Great Power competition, both Great Powers are incentivised to develop a strategic response towards them, with the aim to leverage or neutralise these players notwithstanding their hedging strategies. Quite surprisingly, however, the question of how concretely rising and established Great Powers respond to secondary state hedging has been largely left unaddressed. Aiming at filling this important gap, this paper will zoom in on two cases: the hedging response strategies of Germany and Great Britain in relation to the Netherlands before WWI, and those of China and the United States in relation to Singapore today.