The Australian Defence White Paper released by the Labor Government of Julia Gillard in May 2013 included a notable departure from previous such policy documents: a categorical shift towards identifying Australia’s region of strategic interest as something called the Indo-Pacific. The concept is referred to dozens of times within its pages. The document asserts that a new ‘Indo Pacific strategic arc’ is beginning to emerge, ‘connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans through Southeast Asia’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2013, 7). Strikingly, the concept has since been endorsed by the conservative coalition governments of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, with Defence Minister Kevin Andrews signalling that the 2015 Defence White Paper would ‘underline the importance of the Indo-Pacific region to Australia’s national security and economic prosperity’ (Andrews 2015). This Australian policy tilt was to some degree foreshadowed by the 2009 Defence White Paper released by the earlier Rudd Labor government, with its references to a ‘wider Asia-Pacific region’ (Commonwealth 2009, 52). Such perspectives have shifted far from the white paper of the Howard government in 2000, which took little note of the Indian Ocean.
The 2013 White Paper (Commonwealth of Australia 2013, 7) explained the Indo-Pacific construct as being forged by multiple factors including India’s emergence as an important strategic diplomatic and economic actor to that country’s east, and ‘growing trade, investment and energy flows across this broader region’ which in turn strengthened ‘economic and security interdependencies’ and brought increased focus to the Indian Ocean. Although Indo-Pacific terminology has become increasingly common in government speeches in a range of countries, the 2013 Defence White Paper marked the first time any government in Asia or beyond had defined its region officially as the Indo-Pacific. Strikingly, this formulation, introduced under the Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, has continued under the conservative Liberal/National coalition governments of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull (Bishop 2014a, 2014b; Johnston 2014; Andrews 2015). The Indo-Pacific framework is becoming bipartisan defence and foreign policy orthodoxy. It is officially Australia’s new map.
This development warrants examination from several angles. First, what is meant by the Indo-Pacific and does it make sense as a coherent region or strategic system? Second, where does the Indo-Pacific idea come from? Third, where does the Australian policy community’s embrace of the Indo-Pacific idea fit with developments in the wider region? Finally, how seriously should we take Australia’s Indo-Pacific tilt, and what are the implications for Australia’s defence and wider foreign policy settings?
Defining the Indo-Pacific
What precisely is the Indo-Pacific? At its simplest, the Indo-Pacific means recognising that the accelerating economic and security connections between the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean region are creating a single strategic system. At its heart, a strategic system can be understood as a set of geopolitical power relationships among nations where major changes in one part of the system affect what happens in the other parts. Historically, distance has often had a bearing on these relationships of security interdependence: thus Barry Buzan has described Asian regional security complexes and subcomplexes during the Cold War and beyond (Buzan 2003). Even then, Buzan’s work to some extent foreshadowed the Indo-Pacific in his idea of an ‘Asian supercomplex’, although his assessment was based more on security interactions than the growth of economic connections that has so driven the emergence of the Indo-Pacific over the past decade.
The Indo-Pacific system is defined in part by the geographically expanding interests and reach of China and India, and the continued strategic role and presence of the United States in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This recognises the arc of trade routes, energy flows, diplomatic bonds and strategic connections between the two oceans. These links in turn emerge especially from the rise of China and India as outward-looking economic and military powers, the expansion of their economic interests and their strategic and diplomatic imperatives into what each might once have considered its primary maritime zone of interest (Mohan 2012). In particular, the concept underscores the fact that the Indian Ocean has replaced the Atlantic as the globe’s busiest and most strategically significant trade corridor, carrying two-thirds of the world’s oil shipments and a third of the world’s bulk cargo (Commonwealth of Australia 2012, 74). Taken together, these developments are making the Indo-Pacific the world’s economic and strategic centre of gravity.
The Indo-Pacific is not simply a new name for the Asia-Pacific, nor is it a radically redefined regional concept that downplays the centrality of Asia. This is a region with Asia at its core, and might most accurately be termed Indo-Pacific Asia (Medcalf 2013). Indeed, the 2013 Defence White Paper rightly defines Southeast Asia as the ‘geographic centre’ and the key part of the Indo-Pacific for Australia’s defence force to be engaged in (Commonwealth of Australia 2013, 8). Nor is it accurate to suggest that the Indo-Pacific somehow excludes China from the regional order. Quite the contrary: it is the expansion of China’s interests, diplomacy and strategic reach into the Indian Ocean that most of all defines the Indo-Pacific. With 80 percent of its oil imports being transported across the Indian Ocean, with a million of its citizens now said to be living or working in Africa (Kushner 2013) – where it is also a principal foreign investor – and with signs of an ongoing naval presence in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, it is China, not India, that is the quintessential Indo-Pacific power.
From an Australian perspective, the term has distinct merits. Indo-Pacific is an objective description of Australia’s two-ocean geography as well as the region in which China is rising. Given that China, India and Japan – as well as other nations in Asia – are becoming so acutely dependent on energy imports across the Indian Ocean from the Middle East and Africa, and given that Australia in turn relies so heavily on seaborne commerce with those powers, it is difficult to find another simple formulation that so satisfactorily describes Australia’s region. This is especially the case as Australia’s economic, security and societal links with India continue to grow, a relatively new phenomenon. Another virtue of the Indo-Pacific concept is that it breaks down the artificial idea of East Asia and South Asia as separate strategic settings. Although a late twentieth-century generation of Australian policy makers and diplomats was reared on this notion, it was in reality a brief interruption to a long-term pattern of economic, strategic and cultural connections between the Asian subregions. Finally, the Indo-Pacific idea recognises that Australia is an integral part of its region, not peripheral to it. At last, here is a definition of Asia that automatically includes Australia.
For all of that, does the Indo-Pacific make sense as a coherent region or strategic system? Of course, the Indo-Pacific concept can easily be criticised on the grounds that it refers to an exceptionally big region. Much of what happens in one part of the region will not necessarily be of critical importance to other parts. Moreover, when it comes to solving security problems, the scale of the region would seem to preclude a cohesive institution. These are fair, if obvious, points, but neither of them need be disproved in order to uphold the validity of the Indo-Pacific concept.
The Indo-Pacific is best understood as a super-region with hard-to-define outer limits and distinct subregions yet with an unquestionably Asian core. Admittedly, its outer geographic boundaries are fluid: are East African littoral states, for instance, strictly Indo-Pacific? More important than lines on a map, however, are the clear organising principles that are beginning to knit this region together, most notably the economic and strategic interactions of great and rising powers. Thus geographically peripheral countries, from Madagascar to the Marshall Islands, may count as Indo-Pacific players to the extent that they feature in the intersecting interests of the key Indo-Pacific powers: China, India and the United States.
Of course the idea that the entire Indo-Pacific is becoming one connected region has its limits. The subregions remain home to Asia’s hottest near-term security challenges. Thus the tensions on the Korean Peninsula are principally a North Asian concern, as is China-Japan strife in the East China Sea, not to mention the China-Taiwan problem, while rivalry between India-Pakistan is principally a South Asia concern. What needs to be grasped, however, is that this is a multilayered and complex Asian system where subregional contests exist alongside wider regional and global dynamics. If Asia is becoming the global centre of economic gravity, then any conflict here involving a major power will have world impact. In any case, tensions can no longer be quarantined in neat neighbourhoods. The United States and China will almost certainly be crucial to the path and management of any future India-Pakistan crisis. Tensions and territorial disputes in the South China Sea are not narrowly a matter for East Asia, let alone China. They are being watched as a series of test cases for how a powerful China may behave; trading nations have stakes in its shipping lanes; and the United States, India, Australia and others have a deep interest in what it means for a stable, rules-based order. Indeed, Australia has interests at stake in any major security crisis involving one or more of its key Indo-Pacific trading partners: China, Japan, India, South Korea and the United States. Above all, the nations projected to be the weightiest global powers in this century – China and India alongside the United States – are the big Indo-Pacific three. A major disruption anywhere in the region will have large repercussions for their interests, and the future of the Indo-Pacific will be shaped or shaken by whether their relations are principally cooperative, competitive or confrontational.
Lost and found: the provenance of the Indo-Pacific idea
One reason we can be confident the Indo-Pacific is no mere flavour of the moment is that it is not new. It has been a far more enduring way of understanding the map of Asia than the late twentieth-century separation of East Asia and South Asia. Economic and cultural interactions between Asia’s subregions go back millennia, as the spread of Buddhism from India to East Asia attests. At a more material level, the idea that the Indian Ocean mattered to East Asia had a false start in the early fifteenth century when a Chinese emperor grounded the treasure fleet of his eunuch admiral Zheng He after seeing little merit in his seven voyages west. European adventurers, on the other hand, soon came to see merit aplenty. In colonial times, European maps titled ‘Asia’ encompassed a swathe from the Indian Ocean rim, through Southeast Asia to China, Korea and Japan. They might as well have been labelled Indo-Pacific. By the nineteenth century, this breadth was reflected in British imperial practice: the trade arteries and military sinews of that Indian empire reached China and Australia via Singapore, and went west to Africa and Suez, as Indian strategist Raja Mohan (2012) has shown. He also points to precursors of the Indo-Pacific in the geopolitics of a century ago, arguing that American sea power theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan and British geographer Halford Mackinder, each in his way, saw Asia as an integrated region (Mohan 2012).
Indo-Pacific definitions of Asia came to further prominence, but also took a wrong turn: the writings of another early twentieth-century advocate, German geographer Karl Haushofer, later provided a rationale for Axis aggression in World War II (Rumley, Doyle and Chaturvedi 2012, 10–11). Inspired by Mackinder, Haushofer drew on his travels in Japan, China, Korea and India to come up with his own geographical determinism. In 1924 he envisaged a world of four ‘pan-regions’, claiming that each warranted a dominant power (Haushofer 1924). The Indo-Pacific was becoming an accepted term in ethnography and marine science. Applying it to geopolitics, Haushofer saw the strategic and economic unity of this pan-region as making it the preserve of Japan, to be shared perhaps with Russia. Today’s Indo-Pacific conceptions are precisely the opposite of Haushofer’s. They are about finding ways to manage the intersection of multiple powers’ interests in a vast common domain, rather than some imperial carve-up or life-and-death struggle.
Ideas about the Indo-Pacific retained a quiet currency even as the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions became estranged in the late 1940s, not least due to early Cold War dynamics and the economic inwardness of newly independent India and communist China. In 1945 K. M. Panikkar (1945) reflected on the war just ending to conclude that events in the Pacific would be crucial to his country’s long-term quest for security and power. Australian defence documents still assessed the nation’s security outlook in terms of risks and challenges across the ‘Indo-Pacific Basin’ well into the 1960s (Defence Studies Project 1965, 1966). And at least one Southeast Asian country was pursuing Indo-Pacific diplomacy from its very creation, even if it did not use the words. It can be argued that much of India’s post-1993 ‘Look East’ policy had its origins in Lee Kuan Yew’s earlier efforts to enmesh a then reluctant India as a security partner for Singapore, to offset other influences (Datta-Ra...
