The Indo-Pacific Axis

Peace and Prosperity or Conflict?

Satish Chandra, Baladas Ghoshal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138589421
• eBook ISBN: 9780429958571
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The term 'Indo-Pacific' is being used increasingly in the global strategic/geo-political discourse in recent years. The rise of China as an economic giant and a rising military power has led to the consequent shift of international politics and relations to Asia as the fulcrum. It has turned the whole region of Indo-Pacific as one security complex. Countries that are part of the region but also countries that are adjacent or outside the region, but also the countries adjoining the oceans look for a mechanism in accordance with a rule-based order. International law that would protect the rights of the nations to pursue global commons was emphasized.
This timely volume presents a collection of articles by leading scholars on the subject from the region. It addresses the faultlines of both traditional and non-traditional security issues. Military modernization, especially of the naval forces of a number of powers, national ambitions of power projection, and plans to build ports in strategic locations are exacerbating insecurity and greater arms race.
It also poses the question, whether the Indo-Pacific region will become a theatre of tension and instability, or a contributor to peace and prosperity for the larger populations that reside herein?

Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

CHAPTER 1

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India’s Approach to the Indo-Pacific

ANIL WADHWA

The Indo-Pacific region is home to nearly three billion people, with a combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of almost $20 trillion. It has three of the four largest economies in the world, viz., China, India and Japan, all regional powers in their own right. It is also the most significant region for the world’s seaborne trade, including one most relevant for food and energy security. It is today widely acknowledged that the centre of gravity of the world is, slowly but surely, moving to this region in the twenty-first century, as it demonstrates great dynamism in the economic, demographic, political as well as strategic spheres.

Globalization, and the consequent compression of geographic spaces, had led some scholars to use the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ to capture contemporary realities. Others, such as the former Australian prime minister and the former Indonesian foreign minister, went a step further, with the latter even proposing an Indo-Pacific treaty. While we may not accept or adopt every new geo-political terminology that is floated, it is evident that the future of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean regions is inter-linked in many ways. Moreover, a stable, secure and prosperous extended neighbourhood on our eastern, western and southern borders is crucial for our own progress and prosperity.

The Indian government under Prime Minister Modi has infused new energy into India’s engagement with the Asia-Pacific region. High-level visits, both incoming and outgoing, to Japan, Australia, Fiji, Myanmar and from Vietnam, Singapore and China, in a short span of nine months, are testimony to the new government’s emphasis on ‘Act East’. The Prime Minister has announced a US $1 billion special facility fund for connectivity projects with ASEAN and initiatives are underway in fields ranging from space technology and defence to culture and education, to add further substance to our strategic partnership with the ASEAN.

The changes in Fiji, the presidential elections in Indonesia, the renewed US interest in the Asia-Pacific region with its ‘pivot’ policy, and Japan’s active search for an enhanced role in the region, all present opportunities for India. The upswing in high-level interaction with China and the opening up of possibilities for greater economic cooperation including through Chinese investments in India, are also significant. India’s trade with the entire region is growing rapidly and Indian professionals are increasingly active from East Africa to Japan.

In a historical sense, this is a rediscovery of India’s role in the Asia-Pacific. As the Indian economy embarks on a high growth path over the next decade and joins the elite club of the top three economies in the world, this rediscovery would solidify new patterns of engagement, both bilateral and regional. India’s economic dynamism will also contribute to strengthening peace and security in the region. There will be security challenges, both traditional and non-traditional, and there could be frictions between the major powers as power shifts and as new capabilities emerge. Terrorism, insecurity in supply and maritime domains, and the possibility of space weaponization are some of the concerns that could impede efforts to build greater peace and prosperity from the Indian Ocean across the Pacific Rim. This demands vigilance and a proactive approach from all responsible players in the region. Amongst others, a significant challenge for countries of the region in the coming years will be managing rapid social, political and economic changes, often without adequate economic and social tools that could enable them to adapt quickly. Given that the region is home to a large young population, this requires to be addressed on priority basis, lest it translates into a serious challenge. The fact that some governments of the region are weak to begin with, makes them vulnerable to terrorism and other non-traditional trans-national threats.

The region was fortunate in the immediate post-Cold War years to have developed the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), a dialogue-based and ASEAN-centred security forum. The more compact East Asia Summit (EAS) comprising the ASEAN and its six dialogue partners as well as the US and Russia, is now the premier leaders-led forum for building strategic trust as also habits of working together to address common challenges. In our view, this architecture needs to be continuously updated in an open, inclusive and pragmatic manner, within the footprint of the EAS. Here too, India has made a contribution to the ongoing debate, with a paper on the regional security architecture being presented at the last EAS workshop. The various regional forums that cover this vast expanse and especially the ARF, engage member-states which include key players from both within and outside the region, on a wide range of issues. These forums have taken an inclusive approach and therefore, to a fair extent, marginalize polar interests.

India’s approach necessarily respects the diversity of the region and focuses, as I mentioned earlier, on evolving an open, inclusive and transparent regional architecture, co-terminus with the EAS footprint. It also meets the expectations of many states in the region who do not wish to be forced prematurely into any framework.

Finally, let me touch upon the maritime dimension, which, in many respects, is at the centre of both security and economic debates within the region. The freedom of navigation and access to resources in accordance with international law, including UNCLOS, and the peaceful settlement of disputes, are important principles that we stand by. To conclude, the Indian and the Pacific oceans are the common heritage of a huge chunk of humanity, who aspire to a better life. It is our challenge as practitioners and analysts of statecraft and state behaviour to devise rules of engagement and imagine new cooperative pathways to ensure that the aspirations of this vast proportion of humanity for a better, peaceful, prosperous, stable and sustainable future are met.

CHAPTER 2

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The Arc of Peace and Prosperity in the Indo-Pacific Region

SUDHIR T. DEVARE

I feel privileged to have the opportunity to speak to the distinguished audience at this Conference on the theme: ‘Arc of Peace and Prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region’. The selection of this topic could not have been more timely as the region is going through considerable volatility and a sense of uncertainty, marked by interstate territory and maritime disputes, wide-scale radicalism and religious fundamentalism, military build-ups and consequent rivalry and tension.

The evolution of the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ fits very well in the current geo-political reality in which the issues of conflict, peace or cooperation impacting on the various regions of Asia have direct or indirect bearing on each other. In fact, there has always been a strategic continuum between the Indian and Pacific oceans from the ancient past. Trade, communications, pilgrimage or cultural exchanges had bound the civilizations of these two oceans together. Today, there is an extraordinary phenomenon of six to seven major powers including four countries possessing nuclear weapons and two nuclear-capable states being located within the region. At the same time there is a growing sense of inter-dependence, especially in the economic field. And the need is generally being recognized to adopt an integrated approach to understand, and resolve issues confronting countries bordering the two oceans. The term Indo-Pacific in the geo-political discourse is therefore not seen as an imagination or a fantasy, but a realistic and practical proposition.

What does the Indo-Pacific constitute or how can it be defined? Though there is no clear geographical delimitation of the region, the Indo-Pacific as an alternate but extended construct of the Asia-Pacific region, is being accepted to include the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean which are connected through the choke points located in Southeast Asia. Conceptually, this composite area thus presents an enormously vast region extending from the Northeast Pacific (including Japan, China and Korea), to Australia in the south, eastern seaboard of Africa in the west, and including the Persian Gulf as well as South Asia. Individual countries in this region may look at this concept differently. While China and Japan may not give to it the ‘equivalence’ they attach to the Asia-Pacific, it is evident that for China, the Maritime Silk Road through the Indian Ocean – especially the energy supply route from the Persian Gulf – acquires prime importance. The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, had in 2007, spoken in favour of the ‘confluence of two oceans’ when he addressed the Indian parliament. The term was widely used in Indonesia whose former foreign minister, Natalegawa, had proposed an Indo-Pacific Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. Indonesia – an archipelagic state – which straddles the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, holds a key place in the context of the Indo-Pacific, not least because the three straits connecting the two oceans go through Indonesia. In Australia, a White Paper issued in 2013 finds strategic importance to its policy in the naval deployments in the Indian Ocean. For Australia, this is also a way to improve its engagement with India. In the case of India, the term gives greater relevance in the wider Asia-Pacific world offering a further elaboration to its Look East or the currently adopted ‘Act East’ policy. Incidentally, even American leaders have often been referring to this term during their engagement with Southeast Asia, including with Myanmar. The US initiative of the ‘Pivot to Asia’ or ‘Rebalancing’ also clearly appears centred on the concept of integrity of the two oceans for security and development.

Today the Indo-Pacific constitutes a critical water body of great strategic significance, an area through which trillions of dollars of global trade including the principal sources of energy, namely, oil and gas, move. It has some of the busiest ports of the world, and is also the region where several inter-state maritime disputes have created sharp tensions in recent years. The region also continues to witness large-scale violence as a result of terrorism or religious fundamentalism. Both traditional and non-traditional threats to security seem to abound in the Indo-Pacific. Unfortunately it is also home to 80 per cent of all natural disasters wherein the need for cooperation amongst regional powers cannot be over-emphasized.

As can be seen from the above scenario, the region has a huge concentration of major military or economic powers – a phenomenon rarely seen in history. With the centre of gravity of economic power steadily shifting from the west to the east, the situation is expected to accentuate further. The implications of these developments on global politics can be anything but significant. Adding genuine ballast to Indo-Pacific relations – bilaterally or multilaterally – is thus a primary challenge.

For securing peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific which is in the common interest of not only the countries of the region but also of wider global trade, energy flows and movement of resources, it is imperative that disputes – whether maritime or territorial – are not allowed to go out of hand and are managed through peaceful negotiations. For this, the international law on the delimitation of maritime boundaries would need to be respected and observed by the concerned parties. In the Law of the Sea, freedom of navigation in international waters is a fundamental right of nations and that needs to be unequivocally affirmed by states, individually and collectively. In the Joint Vision Statement issued by India and the United States on the occasion of President Obama’s visit in January 2015, it was clearly stated that

India and the United States affirm the importance of safeguarding maritime security, and ensuring freedom of navigation and over-flight, throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea. They called upon parties to avoid threat or use of force and pursue resolution of territorial and maritime disputes through peaceful means, in accordance with universally recognized principles of international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Same was the case during Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Japan in 2016.

In the East China Sea, there is an on-going dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diayou Islands in which China had declared an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) duly objected to by many countries. In the South China Sea, China and five claimant states, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei and Taiwan are locked for the past several years, over the ownership of the various groups of islands, and the issue has now acquired a serious dimension because of a number of incidents involving violence and intimidation. As long as there is no mutually accepted code of conduct between China and the five claimant states in that sea, there will remain a possibility of disruption of the freedom of navigation in this vitally important region. It is noteworthy that China has recently built an oil pipeline from Kyakpyu in the Bay of Bengal to Kunming in China, bypassing the Malacca Strait, thus circumventing the fear of disruption on account of any political disturbance. Importantly, while there was all-round cooperation among several Indo-Pacific states against piracy to ensure freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aden, it remains an issue of contention elsewhere in the region.

Resort to arbitration over disputes with respect to ownership of islands or demarcation of maritime boundary amongst states could be one way of resolving differences. In the dispute between China and the Philippines over an island in the South China Sea, the latter had gone to the International Court of Arbitration, while China has refused to be a party to the process. The International Court of Justice submitted a detailed report, supporting in full the case of Philippines.

Interestingly, in the maritime boundary disputes between India, Myanmar and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal, the three parties agreed to refer the matter to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), and accepted the arbitration award, howsoever unfavourable it was to any of the involved countries.

Both traditional and non-traditional security issues will continue to confront states in the Indo-Pacific. Military modernization, especially of the naval forces of a number of powers, national ambitions of power projection, and plans to build ports in strategic locations, euphemistically described as the ‘string of pearls’, will only exacerbate insecurity and lead to a greater arms race. Right from the 1970s, there has been an initiative at the United Nations by Sri Lanka and other littoral states to declare the Indian Ocean as a zone of peace, free from great power rivalry. There is need to pursue a similar initiative today lest the Indo-Pacific region become a theatre of tension and instability, rather than a contributor to peace and prosperity for the large populations that reside herein.

There are several non-traditional security threats, such as natural disasters like tsunamis, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, floods, piracy, extremist radicalism including religious fundamentalism, maritime terrorism, pandemics, environmental degradation, or the threat of climate change and its consequential implications, most of which are of a recurring nature and of great concern to the communities of the Indo-Pacific region. In dealing with these issues of human security, the Indo-Pacific region would necessarily need to have greater dialogue and cooperation amongst countries. The regional instrumentalities which have developed over the past two decades in the Asia-Pacific – thanks mainly to the initiative of ASEAN – can prove useful in establishing and sustaining productive dialogues in the region. Forums such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus (ADMM Plus); ASEAN + 1 summits and the East Asia Summit (EAS) have good potential to contribute substantially in this regard. Such cooperation is already being worked upon.

Regionalism in the Indo-Pacific can play an important and useful role in the dynamic and very promising economic space of the region. There is already a process of economic integration underway in this geographic space with a web of interlocking economic agreements taking shape. A number of bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have been put in place. The ASEAN Economic Community is on its way to becoming a reality soon. With its FTAs with six major economies of the region, a huge common market is expected to be soon realized. Negotiations on a region-wide agreement in the form of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), under the auspices of the EAS, is the next ambitious goal. There is also the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a mega economic and trade deal. APEC is another important economic agreement. All three forums include a number of Indo-Pacific participants. Besides there are sub-regional initiatives such as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMST-EC), and the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IORA). How all these efforts can be optimized and coordinated for achieving peace and prosperity is a challenge that needs our attention.

There are a number of other highly visible initiatives, such as the US Pivot to Asia or ‘Rebalancing’ plan; China’s Silk Route and Maritime Silk Route programmes; India’s Act East Policy; Indonesia’s new emphasis on building maritime capacities; Japan’s initiative to engage with India; and Australia’s increasing orientation towards the Indian Ocean. These plans and initiatives have undoubtedly the potential to be competitive and contentious, but with dialogue and understanding, they too have the potential to act as useful instruments in promoting greater cooperation and mutual development.

Today, the Indo-Pacific region stands at a cross-roads, and the interplay of the above forces will determine the destiny of two-thirds of hu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. India’s Approach to the Indo-Pacific
• 2. The Arc of Peace and Prosperity in the Indo-Pacific Region
• 3. Indo-Pacific Region: An Indian Perspective
• 4. India and Australia: Creating New Strategic Geometries in the Indo-Pacific
• 5. Geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific and Disputes in the South China Sea
• 6. Maritime Security in the Indo-Pacific
• 7. The US and Indian Ocean Region: Implications for India
• 8. The US Pivot to Asia: Implications for the Indo-Pacific
• 9. Japan and the Changing Geopolitics of the Indian Ocean: An Indian Perspective
• 10. Locating China in the Evolving Discourses on the Indo-Pacific Geopolitics
• 11. India’s Role in Ensuring Stability and Security in the South China Sea
• 12. Understanding the Indo-Pacific: Why Indonesia will be Critical?
• 13. Cultural and Economic Expansion on the Maritime Route
• List of Contributors
• Index