Security dynamics are changing rapidly in the Indo-Pacific region.
The region is home not only to the world’s fastest-growing economies, but also to the fastest-increasing military expenditures and naval capabilities, the fiercest competition over natural resources and the most dangerous strategic hot spots.
One might even say that it holds the key to global security.
Illustration: Yusha
The increasing use of the term “Indo-Pacific” region — which refers to all nations bordering the Indian and Pacific oceans — rather than “Asia-Pacific” region, underscores the maritime dimension of today’s tensions.
Asia’s oceans have increasingly become an arena of competition for resources and influence.
It now seems likely that future regional crises will be triggered and/or settled at sea.
The main driver of this shift has been China, which over the past five years has been working to push its borders far out into international waters, by building artificial islands in the South China Sea.
Having militarized these outposts — presented as a fait accompli to the rest of the world — it has now shifted its focus to the Indian Ocean.
Already, China has established its first overseas military base in Djibouti, which has expropriated its main port from a Dubai-based company, possibly to give it to China.
Moreover, China is planning to open a new naval base next to Pakistan’s China-controlled Gwadar port and it has leased several islands in the crisis-ridden Maldives, where it is set to build a marine observatory that would provide subsurface data supporting the deployment of nuclear-powered attack submarines and nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines in the Indian Ocean.
In short, China has transformed the region’s strategic landscape in just five years.
If other powers do not step in to counter further challenges to the territorial and maritime status quo, the next five years could entrench China’s strategic advantages.
The result could be the ascendancy of a China-led illiberal hegemonic regional order, at the expense of the liberal rules-based order that most nations in the region support.
Given the region’s economic weight, this would create significant risks for global markets and international security.
To mitigate the threat, the nations of the Indo-Pacific region must confront three key challenges, beginning with the widening gap between politics and economics.
Despite a lack of political integration and the absence of a common security framework in the Indo-Pacific region, free-trade agreements are proliferating, the latest being the 11-nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
China has emerged as the leading trade partner of most regional economies, but booming trade alone cannot reduce political risks. That requires a framework of shared and enforceable rules and norms.
In particular, all nations should agree to state or clarify their territorial or maritime claims on the basis of international law, and to settle any dispute by peaceful means — never through force or coercion.
Establishing a regional framework that reinforces the rule of law would require progress on overcoming the second challenge: the region’s “history problem.”
Disputes over territory, natural resources, war memorials, air defense zones and textbooks are all linked, in one way or another, with rival historical narratives. The result is competing and mutually reinforcing nationalisms that imperil the region’s future.
The past continues to cast a shadow over the relationship between South Korea and Japan — the US’ closest allies in East Asia.
China, for its part, uses history to justify its efforts to upend the territorial and maritime status quo and emulate the pre-1945 colonial depredations of its rival Japan.
All of China’s border disputes with 11 of its neighbors are based on historical claims, not international law.
This brings us to the third key challenge facing the Indo-Pacific region: changing maritime dynamics.
Amid surging maritime trade flows, regional powers are fighting for access, influence and relative advantage.
Here, the biggest threat lies in China’s unilateral attempts to alter the regional status quo.
What China achieved in the South China Sea has significantly more far-reaching and longer-term strategic implications than, say, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, as it sends the message that defiant unilateralism does not necessarily carry international costs.
Add to that new challenges — from climate change, overfishing and degradation of marine ecosystems to the emergence of maritime non-state actors, such as pirates, terrorists and criminal syndicates — and the regional security environment is becoming increasingly fraught and uncertain.
All of this raises the risks of war, whether accidental or intentional.
As a US National Security Strategy report put it: “A geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order is taking place in the Indo-Pacific region.”
Yet while the major players in the region all agree that an open, rules-based order is vastly preferable to Chinese hegemony, they have so far done too little to promote collaboration.
There is no more time to waste.
Indo-Pacific powers must take stronger action to strengthen regional stability, reiterating their commitment to shared norms, not to mention international law, and creating robust institutions.
For starters, Australia, India, Japan and the US must make progress in institutionalizing their Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, so that they can better coordinate their policies and pursue broader collaboration with other important players, such as Vietnam, Indonesia and South Korea, as well as with smaller nations.
Economically and strategically, the global center of gravity is shifting to the Indo-Pacific region.
If the region’s players do not act now to fortify an open, rules-based order, the security situation will continue to deteriorate — with consequences that are likely to reverberate worldwide.
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers