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CHAPTER 1
OF NAMES, MAPS AND POWER
On 11 November 2016, as the globe reeled from Donald Trumpâs election as US president, two unlikely friends found themselves conversing aboard a shinkansen â a Japanese bullet train â between Tokyo and Kobe, speeding from sea to sea. Their journey is not yet diplomatic folklore, but it should be.
Aboard the Indo-Pacific express
Abe ShinzĹ, the Japanese prime minister, and Narendra Modi, his Indian counterpart, shared a reputation as strong leaders, driven and charismatic nationalists with a democratic mandate to rouse their sometimes slow-motion countries. Yet they hailed from different sides of the tracks. Modi was proudly from a modest merchant household in Gujarat. Hagiography has it he served chai by a railway station as a child. Abe was the scion of a patrician and conservative political family tied to Japanâs imperialist past. Stereotypes separated their nations: Japan calm with wealth, technological perfectionism and its declining, ageing populace; India a colourful din of disorder, underdevelopment and a demographic of youth and growth. Even if these were cliches, Tokyo and Delhi surely remained in different worlds, with divergent problems and priorities. Through the modern era in which Modi-ji and Abe-san had grown up, their countries had little contact.
Yet the smiles and bear hugs of the ModiâAbe train ride that day in 2016 reflected a change in world affairs, less shocking but no less profound than what had just occurred in America. Deep shifts were accelerating in the structures of geopolitics â of power relations among states â influenced by the interplay of economics, strategy and geography over the previous two decades. The exact conversations between the leaders of Asiaâs second-and third-largest economies during the theatre of the train ride and the rest of that three-day summit are a state secret for those governments. From their published joint statement, all fifty-eight paragraphs, it is plain these were substantial talks.1 While most eyes were understandably fixed on the American presidential drama, Japan and India were already shaping the future. For the sake of tact, the word China did not appear anywhere in the document, but it did not need to; it was a pervasive subtext.
Japanese prime minister Abe ShinzĹ and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi launch their Indo-Pacific partnership, November 2016
Two things stood out. Once indifferent to each other, Japan and India were now agreeing to work closely together across the total range of issues: defence, diplomacy, economics, education, development, technology, energy, environment, culture and more. And they were naming a particular place for this cooperation: a wide arc of the world their leaders now chose to call the Indo-Pacific. For many people, that name was new. Even for seasoned watchers of diplomacy, its usage here was intriguing and significant. It was not a familiar term in current affairs, not the well-known Asia-Pacific or even Asia, but precisely the Indo-Pacific.
What was going on? Was this merely a choice of words to flatter India, or something more? Already another country, Australia, had formally renamed its region this way, and within a few years the trend had caught on. Today, an Indo-Pacific fever seems to have taken hold in governments from Washington to Jakarta, Delhi to Tokyo, Canberra to Paris to Hanoi to London. The term finds receptive audiences in almost every significant capital â except Beijing.
The purpose of this book is twofold: to make sense of the Indo-Pacific, past, present and future; and to explain how this region can cope with Chinaâs assertive power.2 Where did this way of imagining much of the world come from? What does it mean for todayâs realities, the fates and fortunes of nations? And why does it matter for what comes next? At one level, the Indo-Pacific counts simply as an idea, describing and imagining a region that has become the global centre of strategic and economic gravity, just as the North Atlantic was for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. But there is a practical point too. Words shape the world. An imagined space on a map both reflects and influences real and palpable things like military deployments, patterns of prosperity, and calculations of risk among the worldâs most powerful states.
Whatâs in a name?
The use of the term Indo-Pacific is no mere wordplay. It reflects something real: a changing approach by many nations to security, economics and diplomacy. Far from being an obscure account of words and maps, the narrative of the Indo-Pacific helps nations face one of the great international dilemmas of the 21st century: how can other countries respond to a strong and often coercive China without resorting to capitulation or conflict? This is a problem facing Japan and India, which have both in recent years confronted China on their borders in situations that could have led to war, and one day still could. But in more subtle ways it is a challenge for every other country too.
At a descriptive level, the Indo-Pacific is just a neutral name for a new and expansive map centred on maritime Asia. This conveys that the Pacific and Indian oceans are connecting through trade, infrastructure and diplomacy, now that the worldâs two most populous states, China and India, are rising together. Their economies, along with many others, rely on the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean to ship oil from the Middle East and Africa, and myriad other cargoes in both directions, along the worldâs vital commercial artery.
But the Indo-Pacific is also about drawing strength from vast space, and from solidarity among its many and diverse nations. The term recognises that both economic ties and strategic competition now encompass an expansive two-ocean region, due in large part to Chinaâs ascent, and that other countries must protect their interests through new partnerships across the blurring of old geographic boundaries.
Some voices warn that the Indo-Pacific is actually code for geopolitical agendas: Americaâs bid to thwart China, Indiaâs play for greatness, Japanâs plan to regain influence, Indonesiaâs search for leverage, Australiaâs alliance-building, Europeâs excuse to gatecrash the Asian century. Its more strident discontents claim it is nothing less than a terminological fabrication of âOrwellianâ proportions, âas meaningless as the Atlanto-Pacificâ.3 Certainly China feels risk and discomfort in the term. It hears Indo-Pacific as the rationale for, among other things, a strategy to contain its power through a âquadrilateralâ alliance of democracies â the United States, Japan, India, Australia. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi has gone to the trouble of publicly rejecting the Indo-Pacific as an âattention-grabbing ideaâ that âwill dissipate like ocean foamâ.4
Yet reality begs to differ. The irony is that what most makes the Indo-Pacific real is Chinaâs own behaviour â its expanding economic, political and military presence in the Indian Ocean, South Asia, the South Pacific, Africa and beyond. The signature foreign policy of Chinese leader Xi Jinping is the âBelt and Roadâ, a colossal scheme that takes a lot of explaining: part infrastructure-and-lending spree, part strategic powerplay, part marketing campaign. The âBeltâ refers to Chinese ambitions on land. The âRoadâ, however, is short for âMaritime Silk Roadâ â which means the Indo-Pacific with Chinese characteristics. In this emerging empire, business brings risk as well as opportunity, warships and submarines stalk the sea lanes, soldiers and spies mix with merchants, and full-spectrum competition between China and other major powers overshadows their professed cooperation.
Whatâs in a name? At first blush, the label Indo-Pacific may seem confected and jarring. It sounds like too much yet not enough, two adjectives without a noun, the sea without the land, Asia without its continent, a conflation of two oceans, each vast enough to be a region in its own right. For many years, people and governments have readily recognised terms like Asia or Asia-Pacific, so why add a new geographical descriptor? And what difference to peopleâs lives â to their peace, autonomy, dignity and material wellbeing â does a new name for their part of the world make anyway?
Mental maps and material facts
In statecraft, mental maps matter.5 Relations between states, competition or cooperation, involve a landscape of the mind. This defines each countryâs natural âregionâ â what is on the map, what is off the map and why. It equates to what academics call a strategic system or a regional security complex: a part of the world where the behaviour of one or more powerful states has a strong and inescapable impact on the interests of other countries.6 The importance of mental maps is as old as map-making itself.
What a nation imagines on the map is a marker of what that nation considers important. This in turn shapes the decisions of leaders, the destiny of nations, strategy itself. Maps are about power. How leaders define regions can affect their allocation of resources and attention; the ranking of friends and foes; who is invited and who is overlooked at the top tables of diplomacy; what gets talked about, what gets done, and what gets forgotten. A sense of shared geography or âregionalismâ can shape international cooperation and institutions, privileging some nations and diminishing others. For instance, the late-20th-century notion of the Asia-Pacific and an East Asian hemisphere excluded India at the very time Asiaâs second-most populous country was opening up and looking east. This was not just unfair; it was untenable. The Indo-Pacific fixes that, although it is important to correct the assumption that this way of seeing the world is all about India: it is principally about recognising and responding to Chinaâs widening strategic horizons.
There is no one right or permanent way of framing the world â nations choose maps that help them simplify things, make sense of a complex reality and above all serve their interests at a given time. For the moment, a Chinese description of much of the world as simply âthe Belt and Roadâ has become common parlance, though the meaning and purpose of this term is changeable, opaque and entwined with Chinaâs interests. For a long time, people have been accustomed to labels such as the Asia-Pacific, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, Europe, the North Atlantic, Eurasia and so on. Of an earlier set of politically loaded labels for Asia, the Far East and Near East are less recognised today, but the Middle East has endured.
These are all geographic constructs â invented terms that powerful states have at some time consecrated, with a self-centred political purpose.7 Even Asia is not originally an Asian framework, but a term Europeans concocted and adjusted for their own reasons. Its imagined boundaries keep shifting. Asia began in ancient times as an Athenian label for everything east of Greece. In the 1820s, only half in jest, Austrian imperial statesman Metternich put the EuropeâAsia boundary somewhere between Vienna and Budapest. In 2014, China hosted a conference that called for Asians alone to determine Asiaâs future, but with an interesting catch: its member states included the likes of Russia and Egypt, friends of China that are not categorically Asian, yet not Indonesia and Japan, unquestionably Asian countries but also powers that could make life difficult for China in the future.8
Like previous mental maps, the Indo-Pacific is in some ways artificial and contingent. But it suits the times: a 21st century of maritime connectivity and a geopolitics that is many-sided or, as the diplomats say, multipolar. A decade ago, the Indo-Pacific was almost unheard of in the discourse of international relations. Today we are seeing a contest of ideas in the mental maps of Asia being simplified down to the big two: Chinaâs Belt and Road versus the Indo-Pacific, championed in various forms by such countries as Japan, India, Australia, Indonesia, France and, as it gathers its wits, the United States. Other nations are seeking to understand both concepts and identify how they can leverage, adjust, resist or evade them.
The term Indo-Pacific has thus become code for certain decisions of consequence. In part, it is a message to a rising China that it cannot expect others to accept its self-image as the centre of the region and the world. But it is also a message to America. It is a signal that China and America are not the only two nations that count, a reminder of the need to avoid the psychological trap of what veteran Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan calls âfalse binariesâ â such as the insistence that everything boils down to choosing between China as the future and America as the past.9
Of course, simple binary choices are a tempting way to make sense of some of the more mind-numbing headline statistics about the sheer size of the Chinese and American economies. In isolation, such data tells a compelling story: that China has either already overtaken America as the worldâs largest economy, or soon will, and not much else matters.10 But it is illuminating to play with some other numbers â statistics that embed the two leading powers in a system of many substantial nations, the region we now call the Indo-Pacific.
This complex reality includes many âmiddle playersâ: significant countries that are neither China nor the United States. It is a core contention of this book that, working together, the regionâs middle players can affect the balance of power, even assuming a diminished role for America. Consider, for instance, the possibility of a different quadrilateral: Japan, India, Indonesia and Australia. All four have serious differences with China and reasonable (and generally growing) convergences with each other when it comes to their national security. They happen to be champions of an emerging Indo-Pacific worldview. And they are hardly passive or lightweight nations. In 2018, the four had a combined population of 1.75 billion, a combined gross domestic product, or GDP (measured by purchasing power parity, or PPP, terms), of US$21 trillion, and combined defence expenditure of US$147 billion. By contrast, the United States has a population of 327.4 million, a GDP of US$20.49 trillion and defence spending of US$649 billion. For its part, Chinaâs population is 1.39 billion, its economy US$25 trillion and its defence budget US$250 billion.11 (This assumes, of course, that official Chinese statistics about economic growth and population size are not inflated, and there is reason for doubt.12)
Project the numbers forward a generation, to mid-century, and the picture of middle players as potent balancers becomes starker still. In 2050, the four middle players are expected to have a combined population of 2.108 billion and a combined GDP (PPP) of an astounding $63.97 trillion. By then, America is estimated to have 379 million people and a GDP (PPP) of $34 trillion. China will have 1.402 billion people and a GDP of $58.45 trillion. Even just the big three of these Indo-Pacific partners â India, Japan and Indonesia â would together eclipse China in population and exceed it economically. By then their combined defence budgets could also be larger than that of the mighty Peopleâs Liberation Army (PLA). Include one or more other rising regional powers with their own China frictions, such as a Vietnam that may have about 120 million people and a top-twenty global economy, and the numbers are stronger still. Even the combination of just two or three of these countries would give China pause. And all of this, for the sake of the argument, excludes any strategic role whatsoever for the United States west of Hawaii. If added to the enduring heft of the United States, the alignment of just a few middle players would outweigh the Chinese giant. Moreover, size is not everything, and their maritime geography lends freedom of manoeuvre, a strategic advantage.
Of course, at one level this is all mere speculative extrapolation (albeit from existing numbers and assumed trends). But so is the widely propagated assertion that this unfolding century belongs to Beijing, that China will in every sense map the future. It is one thing to say that various coalitions of Indo-Pacific powers could balance China, provided they all stick together. In r...
