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Indo-Pacific: geographic definition or strategy?

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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivers the keynote address at the IISS Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore on 1 June 2018. (Photo: Reuters/Edgar Su).

In Brief

The prime slot at this year's Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore was reserved for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His keenly anticipated keynote address, alongside that of US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, was expected to throw light on the widely touted but less clearly understood Indo-Pacific strategy. Modi and Mattis laid out their different views of what the Indo-Pacific idea was all about.

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The Shangri-La Dialogue is an annual meeting of defence officials, lawmakers, experts and journalists hosted by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. Modi had been invited to address the meeting once before but had demurred. With India’s relations with all major powers in the region on an even keel, Modi used his speech in Singapore to articulate a nuanced conception of India’s strategic interests in Asia and the Pacific that firmly rejected exclusive alliance structures.

Modi argued for building an open and free system in Asia that upholds the sovereign rights of countries and the rule of law, and promotes prosperity. But he was emphatic in saying that India is not interested in alliances aimed at containing China.

‘India does not see the Indo-Pacific region as a strategy or as a club of limited members. Nor as a grouping that seeks to dominate. And by no means do we consider it as directed against any country. A geographical definition, as such, cannot be’, Modi said.

Modi presents India as a stabilising force in a regional order currently in flux. Neither Modi’s vision nor India’s ‘Act East’ policy is particularly new, as Sourabh Gupta explains in the first of our two lead essays this week. They have an ancestry in India’s post-Cold War outreach to its east. Their philosophical core was set out half a decade ago by India’s then-national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon. New Delhi’s enduring principles of regional order ought to be inclusive, comprising all powers — regional and extra-regional — embedded in the practice of Asia’s security. Its geographic scope ought to be comprehensive, extending from Suez to the Pacific and seamlessly enfold the maritime periphery together with the rising continental core.

There are four ideas in this conception of India’s regional role, according to Gupta. India will be an enabling power, seeking to establish a loose concert of the principles and practices on the core issues of the region’s international relations, so that power is exercised in a spirit of self-restraint by its dominant entities. India will be a law-abiding power, seeking to entrench respect for international law, so that a new regional order can be constructed by a sense of obligation to rules rather than by the creeping assertion of power. India will be a pluralistic power, facilitating the involvement of the widest spectrum of participants in regional endeavours, eschewing exclusivist mini-lateral constructs that smack of bloc-based politics and military alignment. And, India will be a stabilising power, prepared to use its geopolitical weight to craft a ‘balance of interests within the region.

‘The ‘Indo’ and the ‘Pacific’ are not created equal in the ordering of New Delhi’s security interests’, concludes Gupta. ‘East of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, these interests remain decidedly secondary.

Mattis’s vision for the Indo-Pacific was cast in more robust rhetoric. He anchored the idea in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, which identify China as a ‘revisionist power’ and a ‘strategic competitor’. He promised to implement Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy by reinvigorating American investment, working to strengthen the rule of law, increasing attention to the maritime space and deepening alliances.

An American assessment was that while the region ‘welcomes the aspirations of the Indo-Pacific strategy as a sign of broader strategy and regional engagement, the challenge right now is that it’s just aspirational — a set of goals with no real strategy, policy enumeration or implementation plan, let alone resourcing or a budget’.

In our other lead this week, James Curran observed on the ground in Singapore that for ‘every American clarion call to keep the faith at Shangri-La, for every plea to ‘not count us out’, there was an ally expressing concern that American regional leadership is not what it was and that the chilly protectionist and nationalist winds coursing through domestic US politics are unlikely to dissipate any time soon’.

Curran suggests that Washington would have welcomed Modi’s line that US–India ties had ‘overcome the hesitations of history’ and assumed a ‘new significance in the changing world’, but it would not have missed his emphasis that no other of India’s relationships ‘has as many layers as our relations with China’.

‘And Modi gave no oxygen to the much-vaunted Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad)’, writes Curran. ‘Amid a plethora of regional forums that demonstrated India’s ongoing growth towards great-power status, the only bone Modi threw the Quad’s way was that his country sometimes meets in ‘formats of three or more’.

In deference to India’s emerging role, Mattis emphasised the Pentagon’s decision to rename its Hawaii headquarters as the ‘Indo-Pacific Command’. However, Curran suggests it will take more than changing brass plates in Honolulu to overturn ‘the deep patterns in India’s strategic culture and its studied avoidance of countervailing coalitions’.

The re-branding continues. Whether the product is of the right shape or substance to deal with Asia’s new strategic circumstance is another matter altogether.

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

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