Rewind: The Indo-Pacific churn
The region, as a relatively new geopolitical construct, is experiencing an evolving architecture through a mushrooming network of both old and new inter-state groupings
By Monish Tourangbam
Tectonic shifts in global power distribution give rise to new geopolitical regions like the Indo-Pacific. The rise of new power centres in the East and old powers in the West managing their relative decline have led to new terms of engagement in alliances and partnerships. Moreover, the world has moved from a bipolar or unipolar order into an emerging multipolar one. However, growing multipolarity prevails alongside a growing crisis of multilateralism, with several conflicts and crises calling for concerted global action to restore peace and stability, plus the mounting challenges to a sustainable future that requires inclusive multilateralism.
The geopolitical, geo-economic and technological transition has produced a complex mix of opportunities and risks, leading to new threat perceptions, responses and counter-responses. The US-China great power competition has grown sharper, more contentious and confrontational, including old-world face-offs over territorial transgressions to new-age showdowns over critical and emerging technologies.
The overwhelming change in the balance of power is acutely shaping the contours of the Indo-Pacific region, which China still refuses to acknowledge, preferring to stick to Asia-Pacific. A major stakeholder like India, with a penchant for strategic autonomy has to navigate this new power dynamic while inspiring a multipolar Indo-Pacific, and inclusive multilateralism in the region. The Indo-Pacific region, as a relatively new geopolitical construct, is experiencing an evolving architecture through a mushrooming network of both old and new inter-state groupings.
India’s strategic outlook in the Indo-Pacific takes it closer to the US and the West as countermeasures against China’s assertive rise
The quest for a “free, open, inclusive and rules-based order” is an ongoing one, wherein India will play a consequential role in concert with like-minded partners, primarily through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), including the US, Japan and Australia. However, India’s strategic outlook in the Indo-Pacific that takes it closer to the US and the West, as countermeasures against China’s assertive rise, also comes along with New Delhi’s engagements with America’s adversaries like Russia and Iran on issues of defence procurement, energy security and connectivity.
Indo-Pacific Frame of Reference
From climate change mitigation plans to maritime governance and security, from health security to resilient infrastructure, from trusted technologies to trade negotiations and inclusive multilateralism, the Indo-Pacific is emerging as the central frame of reference in international affairs. Countries within the Indo-Pacific and beyond are equally reorienting their national strategies around the geopolitics and geo-economics of the region. Besides, regional and sub-regional institutions are pivoting towards the dynamism of this mega-region, at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Southeast Asia lies at the centre of this region and, therefore, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its associated forums are central to how the security and economic architecture of this region are being shaped. Other institutions like the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) are equally consequential in how the architecture of governance assumes concrete features.
Southeast Asia lies at the centre of this region and, therefore, ASEAN and its associated forums are central to how the security and economic architecture of this region are being shaped
Initiatives in the Mekong and the Bay of Bengal sub-regions are also pushing the drive for growth and development in the Indo-Pacific. With countries, big and small reorienting their national objectives towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Indo-Pacific comes across as the region ripe for North-South and South-South cooperation. The region comprises some of the largest developed and emerging economies and a demography that will determine the future of the workforce. It is the region where some of the most critical technologies will be developed, deployed and consumed at a scale unimaginable in other parts of the world. Indo-Pacific is, in fact, a laboratory of the governance mechanism that will find solutions to address the mounting challenges of human-induced as well as natural crises.
For instance, the Quad aims to coalesce intention and capability in directing the transformative power of new technologies, “including digital public infrastructure, to support sustainable development in the Indo-Pacific and deliver economic and social benefits.” Moreover, they intend to provide transparent, quality and greener alternatives to the demand for infrastructure and connectivity in the region, as compared to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, which have received infamy for their loans leading to debt traps, and infrastructure alleged to have more strategic than commercial purpose.
Even the European Union (EU), as an institution, has shown increasing focus and attention to the Indo-Pacific, projecting itself as “the top investor, top development assistance provider and one of the biggest trading partners for the vital Indo-Pacific region.” Priority areas for cooperation, among others, include sustainable and inclusive prosperity, digital governance and partnerships, green transition and connectivity. The economic relationship between countries is evolving that calls for structural reforms in governance. The pandemic highlighted the critical need for diversified global value chains, least affected by political convulsions or natural crises.
The US-initiated Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is a multilateral step in economic partnership in a region that has become overwhelmingly interdependent with the Chinese economy through bilateral ties and multilateral networks such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Economic partnerships now must consider green energy and sustainable infrastructure that minimise carbon footprints. These also entail robust technology collaboration that includes resilient semiconductor supply chains, a skilled workforce and access to critical minerals. For instance, the IPEF rests on four pillars of negotiations related to Trade (Pillar I); Supply Chain Resilience (Pillar II); Clean Economy (Pillar III) and Fair Economy (Pillar IV).
Evolving Security Architecture
The US Indo-Pacific strategy affirms the prevailing view in America’s policymaking community that China’s comprehensive rise is the most prominent strategic challenge to US primacy in the international system, and more particularly in the Indo-Pacific region. The economic, political and military balance that was heavily tilted toward the US and its allies in the post-Cold War era has been rapidly shifting to a much more complex environment. The security and financial order that the US spearheaded after the end of World War II is clearly weakening and the world is going through the birth pangs of a new one.
The US-China great power competition that so clearly drives the Indo-Pacific dynamics has entered official lexicons at both ends, with the Americans calling Beijing’s unilateral activities a threat to a rules-based order, and the Chinese berating Washington’s hegemonic behaviour as disturbing peace and stability.
The overwhelming change in the balance of power is acutely shaping the contours of the Indo-Pacific region, which China still refuses to acknowledge, preferring to stick to Asia-Pacific
Moreover, the growing strategic alliance between China and Russia, aimed at the US, is taking shape with strategic implications for America’s allies and partners in the region. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first foreign trip to Beijing after the inauguration of his fifth presidential term was aimed at solidifying their “no limits” partnership. In the joint statement released with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping, Moscow and Beijing declared “their opposition to the creation of closed associations and bloc structures in the Asia-Pacific region, in particular, military alliances and coalitions directed against any third party”, particularly noting “the negative impact on regional peace and stability of the US ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategy.”
The security architecture of the Indo-Pacific is emerging in a very congested landscape, brewing with areas of contestation, conflicts, competition and imperatives for cooperation. The region is filled with Cold War-era security and economic frameworks, alongside 21st-century bilateral, multilateral and minilateral mechanisms. Clearly, Washington intends to recalibrate its foreign policy and national security toolkit to deter China’s growing material and ideational influence across the Indo-Pacific region in concert with like-minded powers. They are manifested in regional groupings such as the Quad along with later formations such as the Australia, UK and the US (AUKUS) grouping, and the one involving the US, Japan, Australia and the Philippines, generally referred to as the Squad.
More recently, the AUKUS has been envisioning a partnership with Japan as well, mainly aiming to augment cooperation in defence industrial technologies. China views the strategic coalescence around the Indo-Pacific as a means to counter its rise although the US and its partners continue to maintain that they intend to ensure peace and stability through deterrence, and are not aimed at any particular country.
The regional security architecture in the Indo-Pacific has been evolving rapidly with major powers reorienting their respective national security strategies to promote and protect their interests. Even the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the alliance’s deepening partnerships in the region with South Korea, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, and underlined NATO’s commitment to deepen practical cooperation, including areas such as cyber defence, counter-disinformation and emerging technologies.
However, the complex geopolitical reality of the Indo-Pacific also entails major stakeholders, including India, not sharing the same threat perceptions as America’s and in some cases where they do, the ways to deal with them not necessarily align. Therefore, how countries like India adapt to the implementation of America’s new concept of integrated deterrence will be imperative as integrated deterrence “entails working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theatres, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of US national power, and our network of Alliances and partnerships.”
India’s Long Game
India’s multi-aligned engagements, at present, are focused on maximising the gains of partnering with like-minded countries and minimising the risks from adversarial countries in the Indo-Pacific. As India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar contended in his book The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, “this is a time for us to engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw neighbours in, extend the neighbourhood, and expand traditional constituencies of support.” Like-mindedness over the quest for a “free, open, inclusive and rules-based order” brings together India with the US, Japan and Australia through the Quad and several military-to-military interoperability exercises on land, sea and air.
However, India still finds convergence of interests with China and Russia in transnational and regional groupings, like the G20, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) which has now expanded to include new member countries, RIC (Russia, India, China) and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization).
US-China great power competition that so clearly drives the Indo-Pacific dynamics has entered official lexicons at both ends, with US calling Beijing’s unilateral activities a threat to a rules-based order and the Chinese berating Washington’s hegemonic behaviour as disturbing peace and stability
India’s foreign policy choice stands at a precipice in terms of its complex balancing behaviour vis-à-vis a distant power like the US and a proximate power like China. However, China’s territorial transgressions and aggression at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) have evidently produced a more anti-China attitude in the Indian policymaking class, the strategic community as well as the public in India. India’s approach to the Indo-Pacific has undergone a significant shift, especially from the times when Prime Minister NarendraModi went to the Shangri La Dialogue in 2018 and took a soberer tone towards China’s behaviour.
Despite limitations brewing out of a turbulent world filled with security crises in geopolitical hotspots from Europe to Asia and a great power competition turning more confrontational, New Delhi has managed to engage multiple poles of power based on pragmatic convergence of interests. India is a central player as an Indian Ocean power due to its geostrategic location, capabilities, strategic intentions and maritime diplomacy aimed at the overall growth, security and development of the region. Moreover, exponential advances in new technologies will dramatically impact defence, commerce and development across the Indo-Pacific region. New Delhi intends to leverage such developments for its own growth and for the greater good, as manifested in the India-US Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET).
That the global order undergoes significant shifts, and that uncertainty accompanies it, is preordained. For India and its Indo-Pacific partners, the paramount challenge is jointly managing the repercussions of China’s assertive rise while precluding the flaring up of tensions and avoidable conflicts. India’s pursuit of its independent agency, and its own experience in dealing with geopolitics and geo-economics of the Indo-Pacific region is a force enabler to deal with challenges of security and development.
The Indo-Pacific is in a strategic flux, which requires a level of diplomatic dexterity from New Delhi, unlike anything seen before. How India synergises its national security challenges and the call for leadership in the Indo-Pacific region will be a crucible for its foreign policy toolkit. How India maximises its gains and minimises its losses while playing at multiple fronts, bilaterally and multilaterally, will be germane not only for its own growth but also for the quest for a “free, open, inclusive and rules-based order” in the Indo-Pacific region.
Indo-Pacific is Home to
- Three of world’s largest economies — China, India and Japan
- Seven of the world’s largest military forces
- Around 60% of global population
- Accounts for over 65% of global GDP
- Half of global trade passes through the waters of these two oceans
- Source of more than half of all global carbon emissions
(The Author is Director at the Kalinga Institute of Indo-Pacific Studies. He is a regular commentator on International Affairs and India’s Foreign Policy)
