The original Indo-Pacific idea has transmogrified into other variants, though it has a lineage that is clear in the US-led regional military security order.

In Japan, the talk is of a ‘free and open’ Indo-Pacific that promotes its South Asian and African economic diplomacy as a counterweight against China, under the surface connecting tightly with United States’ maritime security strategy. But it’s talk, with piecemeal, contradictory action, especially as doubt about America’s strategic reliability under President Trump has grown. In the United States, the Indo-Pacific idea was introduced into US security rhetoric by Hillary Clinton and her Assistant Secretary for East Asia Kurt Campbell under the first Obama administration and entrenched in the language of the US Pacific Command. In Australia, the idea was suckered from its roots in the US alliance relationship and given a boost in a conference held by the US Naval War College and the Lowy Institute in Sydney in early 2011. It was written into documents issued under Australian governments since Julia Gillard’s prime ministership and embraced fulsomely in the Foreign Policy White Paper launched by the Turnbull government as a basis for reorganisation of the operations of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the thrust of Australia’s foreign policy. But there is little evidence that it has yet worked as a critical mode for foreign policy coordination and strategic action.

The putative locus of the Indo-Pacific idea is in the stillborn Quad, which aims to tie the four corners of the Indo-Pacific together in high level security dialogue among the four ‘like-minded’ democracies — Australia, Japan, India and the United States (absent Indonesia). It remains an officials-level forum on the margins, sure in its distrust of China but unsure of whether and how to build a coalition to counter it. The idea of Indonesia as the maritime fulcrum of the Indo-Pacific came more recently, built on the geographical reality that that country lies at the intersection of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, although it implies an optimistic assessment of its tenuous Indian Ocean ties.

At a generous stretch, the Indo-Pacific idea acknowledges the shifting weight of economic and political power westwards in Asia towards India, at the same time as it linguistically under-weights the centrality of China and continental Asia to its continuing economic and political momentum. At its core, it is the military–security element of America’s response to the complex problems we now all face in managing the rise of China’s power, through developing a strategy that seeks to engage India as a military counterweight to China. It is a conception that underestimates the complex economic and political interdependence with mainland Asia that Mr Modi in New Delhi, Mr Xi in Beijing and Mr Trump in Washington and everybody else in the region have to deal with day by day.

In this week’s lead essay, Jagannath Panda throws doubt on the the idea that this strategy makes sense for India. ‘The US vision for the regional security order is based on an anti-China shift in US security strategy’, says Panda bluntly. That contradicts ‘India’s vision for a regional order which is “inclusive”. Though China is viewed by India as an adversary in some respects, New Delhi also sees Beijing as an important partner in bilateral and global affairs’.

This is the view that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi championed at this year’s Shangri-La dialogue, Panda points out. Modi gave no credence there to the notion that the ‘Indo-Pacific Region is a strategy or is a club of limited members’. Including both China and Russia as regional partners provides clear indication that India’s vision of regional order does not have strategic consonance with that of the United States.

Panda notes that India’s absence from the US-led Indo-Pacific Business Forum in Washington a couple of months ago was a telling sign of New Delhi’s unwillingness to be locked too tightly into a political–security embrace with Washington. ‘This forum was convened along with Japan and Australia to encourage investment in infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific. The United States announced $US113 million for investment in areas such as digital connectivity, energy and infrastructure’ says Panda. This was meant to push the US ‘strategic partnership’ approach to the region in the hope of balancing China’s ‘strategic dependence’ approach that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it’s said, offers to the world. ‘Given India’s own objections to China’s Belt and Road Initiative’, Panda says, ‘it may have seemed appropriate for India and “like-minded” countries to come together in this forum. But India’s absence confirms its hesitance to accept US-led schemes to counter China’.

Panda also points out that the ‘strategic partnership between India and the United States is deepening. The civil nuclear agreement signed in October 2008 marked a new beginning. And both the 2016 Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and the 2018 Communication, Compatibility, Security Agreement have strengthened the relationship further. The US decision to rename the Pacific Command the Indo-Pacific Command also gave a symbolic nod to India’s centrality in the region’. India is similarly building its bilateral ties with Japan and Australia separately, each at their own pace.

India’s message is clear: it sees itself as no pawn in the game the United States seems to be shaping up to play against China or compliant partner in a US-led political–security order that would put at risk the development of its important relationships with China and others in the region.

The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.