Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice⊠Who understands this will favour Malacca. âTomĂ© Pires1
International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.2 âHans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations
[The Indo-Pacific is] a beautiful constellation of nations, each its own bright star, satellites to noneâŠ. âPresident Donald Trump, Da Nang, Vietnam3
Reflecting on the future of the global order, the late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew warned that the rise of China is so consequential that it wonât only require tactical adjustment by its neighbors, but instead an overhaul in the global security architecture.4 As the former Asian leader bluntly put it, though â[t]he Chinese will [initially] want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S.,â they ultimately have the âintention to be the greatest power in the worldâ eventually.5 According to this paradigm, this century will increasingly replicate the bipolar system in the preceding one, except this time China will be taking the Soviet Unionâs place and, likely, even dislodge the West from atop the global âPeking order.â
Not long after the demise of the Singaporean leader, his prophetic insights are congealing into an indubitable geopolitical reality. Today, China is the worldâs largest exporting nation, largest consumer of basic goods, and increasingly also the leading source of investments, particularly in strategic infrastructure, especially in Asia and across the developing world (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile, economic vigor has translated into strategic assertiveness and military muscle, as China opens up overseas bases, beginning in Djibouti but more stealthily across the Indian Ocean, expands its blue water navy, and coercively transforms adjacent waters into its âblue national soil.â6 Above all, Chinaâs new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, has completely discarded the low-key diplomacy of his predecessors in favor of an all-out bid for global primacy, going so far as promoting a âuniquely Chinese modelâ of development overseas7 and gradually establishing an âAsia for Asiansâ8 order across the Eurasian landmass to the exclusion of Western powers and Japan. Though packaged as ostensibly a trillion-dollar connectivity initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is, above all, about laying the foundation of a âChinese world order.â9
And this is precisely the backdrop against which the contemporary discourse vis-Ă -vis the âIndo-Pacificâ should be understood: In a sense, itâs a fundamentally new geopolitical construct that reflects the strategic sensibilities of great powers as well as the ineluctable geo-economic integration spanning from Canada to Cairo over decades of relentless globalization. The mega-region is also where the next World War could be ignited. The Harvard academic Graham Allison, who carefully studied the Cuban Missile Crisis,10 foresees five possible areas of conflict between the United States and China, namely a war over the South China Sea, Taiwan, North Korea, East China Sea involving Japan, or a prolonged and devastating trade war.11 The Indo-Pacific is both a cauldron of geopolitical competition as well as economic dynamism. Itâs where the future of the world will be determined.
Revenge of History
In the twilight years of the fifteenth century, Portugal and Spain, the first Western superpowers, divided the world into two spheres. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) left vast portions of the Indian Ocean at the mercy of an expansive Portugal, which built naval strongholds from the Persian Gulf to Goa and Malacca Strait, while Imperial Spain dominated the Pacific and much of the Americas.12 The upshot was a new geopolitical fault line, which artificially divided an ancient and coherent Sino-Islamic episteme anchored by monsoon-driven maritime trade stretching from the Western Pacific to East Africa.13 Though far from hegemonic, the Chinese came closest to ruling the high seas before the advent of European imperialism. The dual-ocean voyages of Zheng He, a Muslim admiral from the Ming Dynasty who extensively relied on the expertise of co-religionist seafarers, underscored the inherent inseparability and thick networks of commercial and cultural interdependence across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. By the nineteenth century, there was a renewed recognition of the âIndo-Pacificâ mega-sphere. This was especially the case in the Anglo-American world, including the very British Empire, which oversaw a vast pan-Asiatic dominion from Suez to Singapore, as well as among eminent Anglo-American strategists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford Mackinder. The following century saw the further crystallization of this trend, as Imperial Japan began to build its own Indo-Pacific empire, stretching from the Pacific Islands to the borders of British India, while the German strategist Karl Haushofer deeply influenced Nazi Germanyâs conception of the centrality of the mega-region.14 During the early decades of the Cold War, British and Australian defense agencies routinely discussed the Indo-Pacific Basin.15 So what makes the contemporary discussion of the Indo-Pacific anymore unique? Is this just a reassertion of an old geopolitical reality?
The Indo-Pacific, as itâs conceptualized and understood by regional powers today, is at once about and beyond the China question: Itâs geopolitical as well as geo-economic; synthetic and spontaneous; and ineluctable (structural) as well as policy-driven (agential). On one hand, itâs all about the Asian behemoth, and how other powers and regional actors seek to respond to its rise. Or, to put it in more stark terms, itâs about âconstrainmentâ16 of Chinaâs ambitions in ways that give greater voice to rising powers while discouraging coercively disruptive revisionism. The influential American scholar Michael Mendelbaum has even suggested that a ânew containmentâ strategy, which draws on Cold War tactics against the Soviet Union, âoffers the best chance to defend American interests in the twenty-first century.â17
Naturally, Beijing has not lost sight of this dimension of the Indo-Pacific paradigm. No wonder then, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi derisively characterized it as an âattention-grabbing ideaâ that will âdissipate like ocean foam.â18 Yet, major powers have embraced the new geopolitical concept wholeheartedly.19 The Indo-Pacific now constitutes what historian Yuval Harari termed as an âinter-subjective truth.â20 Beginning with the Manmohan Singh administration, India, the heartland of the Indian Ocean realm, facilitated the establishment of âa stable, secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.â Australia became the first country to officially name its region as the Indo-Pacific, with former Foreign Minister Stephen Smith spearheading the effort. After all, the continent-nation is home to the famed saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), also known as the Indo-Pacific crocodile. Under President Susilo Bambang, Yudhoyono Indonesia, the worldâs largest Muslim-majority nation, began discussing the âIndo-Pasifikââa dynamic region, which, in the words of former Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, has turned into the âengine of global growth.â
During her tenure as arguably the most high-profile American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton ...