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The Obama administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) aims to provide a comprehensive guide as to how the United States intends to secure its national interests and global position. It’s long overdue given that the previous version dates back to 2010. In the meantime, Russia’s annexed the Crimea and supported Ukrainian separatists, the Islamic State’s created havoc in the Middle East, and Iran’s moved closer to a nuclear weapons breakout capability. From an Australian point of view, what the NSS says about America’s future role and strategy for the Asia–Pacific region is of particular interest. That’s because China’s growing power and its assertiveness in regards to territorial disputes have regional allies and partners wondering about Washington’s staying power in Asia. In fact, how the US deals with the rise of China will do much to determine regional stability and the future of US leadership.

The NSS attempts to reassure Asia–Pacific allies and partners that the US will ‘advance our rebalance to Asia and the Pacific’. It posits that American leadership in this part of the world ‘will remain essential’, a proposition most Australian observers would agree with. When it comes to China, it states that while the US welcomed the ‘rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China’, it would ‘manage competition from a position of strength while insisting that China uphold international rules and norms’. It’s clear that Washington expects Sino-US competition to grow, in part because attempts to reach a mutual understanding about how to organise their relationship have so far proved elusive. The NSS signals to Beijing that the concept of a ‘new type of great power relationship’ promoted by President Xi—and initially accepted by President Obama—isn’t a sustainable basis for the relationship. Both sides have divergent interpretations of what it means, with China using it to justify the creation of ‘spheres of influence’ in the Western Pacific. That’s rattled the nerves of US allies and partners, and threatened to erode US leadership credentials. Read more

Since late 2013, Beijing has been promoting its ‘Maritime Silk Route’ (MSR) initiative as a proposed oceanic complement to its various overland ‘Silk Route’ projects. Details remain sketchy, but the proposal appears to envisage a system of linked ports, infrastructure projects and special economic zones in Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. While much of the public discussion to date has focused on ports and infrastructure, probably of greater significance is the development of new production and distribution chains across the region, with China at its centre. The concept might be seen as akin to Japan’s ‘flying geese’ strategy of the 1970s when Japanese companies outsourced component production to successive tiers of lower-cost states in Southeast Asia.

If implemented, the initiative would bind countries in the Bay of Bengal and the northern Indian Ocean much closer to the Chinese economy. Several states in the region, including the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have indicated an in-principle agreement to participate in the MSR and are keen to encourage Chinese investment in port and transport infrastructure and manufacturing facilities. India has been much more circumspect about the proposal, and the visit of President Xi Jinping to Delhi in September 2014 failed to elicit an endorsement of the project from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Read more

The Bay of Bengal is fast becoming a key area of economic and strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific. It’s the largest bay in the world and forms an important, if neglected, part of southern Asia. Bookended by India on its western side and Thailand to its east, with Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka in between,  this part of the Asian littoral hosts a huge population and is passed by some of the world’s most important trading routes. But the area has long been ignored by Australia. Countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar missed out on the great economic boom experienced by the East Asian tigers during the latter part of the twentieth century and so trade with Australia is relatively meagre. The Bay is not given the strategic attention lavished on East Asia, West Asia or the Middle East. Nor has it seen the hype given to India as an emerging regional power. Indeed, much of the Bay has been of little interest to the world, other than in terms of poverty, natural disasters and political instability.

Few now even perceive the Bay as constituting a ‘region’.  Since the end of World War II, geographers, academics and diplomats preferred to cut the Bay in two, drawing a sharp line between what came to be called ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘South Asia’.  As a result, specialists on Southeast Asia tend to know little about South Asia and vice versa. Those mental maps and divisions may have made more sense in the last century, but they make much less now as deep historical interconnections across the Bay reassert themselves and the area grows in economic and strategic importance. Read more

CSIS has just released its 2015 Global Forecast which examines the crises and opportunities likely to arise in the year ahead. But you’ll have to flick past chapters on Putin’s new Russia and US influence in the Middle East before you get to the section on Asia, which begins with an essay on Asian perceptions of the rebalance (PDF).

What would you do with a cool US$180 million? To put the price of the next generation aircraft in perspective, Defense One editor Patrick Tucker uses cost estimates generated by NASA’s chief scientist to find five things you can buy for the price of an F-35. Focusing on trade-offs in national security, Tucker’s list includes boosting literacy (and he explains why this is military-related) and building a robotic air force.

It’s been a year since the International Court of Justice revised its decision on who—Thailand or Cambodia—owned the disputed Preah Vihear temple but, as Greg Raymond notes, not a lot has happened on implementing the revised judgement. For more on the challenges in intra-ASEAN border issues, keep reading his explanation for the lag here. Also on Cambodia, with the ASEAN Economic Community set to be established in 2015 (but likely to be delayed), read Heng Pheakdey’s piece on how to unlock the country’s economic growth. Read more