‘Indo-Pacific’ has now become a catchphrase of the times, a reference point in discussing regional politics and security. It is not clear, however, that there’s widespread agreement in the region on its scope or its role vis-à-vis a rising China in general and its Belt and Road Initiative in particular.

At some point in 2018, the Japanese government stopped calling the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ a strategy and relabelled it as a vision.

In mid-2019, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs summarised the principles of the vision under three domains:

• promotion and establishment of the rule of law, freedom of navigation and free trade
• pursuit of economic prosperity (by improving connectivity in three areas: physical connectivity through quality infrastructure; people-to-people connectivity through education, training and friendship; and institutional connectivity through harmonisation and common rules on matters such as free trade)
• commitment to peace and stability (through capacity-building, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, anti-piracy, counterterrorism, non-proliferation and peacekeeping operations). 

Thus, the Japanese vision has distilled into a virtual rebranding of the long-held Japanese regional policies that have evolved during the three decades since the end of the Cold War. These regional policies have emphasised the principle of multilateralism with a view to creating a rule-based and non-exclusive regional order by promoting relations of functional cooperation with primarily, if not exclusively, ASEAN and its member states.

Japan’s decision to rename the strategy as a vision coincided with the warming up of Japan’s relations with China. This was no accident. The main purpose behind the recasting was to signal Japan’s interest in improving relations with China, an objective that President Xi Jinping shared after consolidating his position in the Chinese power structure.

In October 2018, Shinzo Abe paid an official visit to China for the first time in seven years as Japanese prime minister. Abe said, ‘I want to start a new era for Japan and China with Mr Xi’, and Xi in turn told Abe that the bilateral relationship was now ‘back to a normal track’.

Even setting aside China’s assertive claims in the East and South China Seas, the bilateral relationship between Japan and China remains contentious and awkward.

It appears, however, that these contentious issues are being swept under the rug for the time being by the leaders in Tokyo and Beijing. This is because they have bigger tensions and issues with the United States, mostly related to economic and trade negotiations.

Since these frictions aren’t likely to go away anytime soon, the momentum of improvement in relations between Japan and China is also likely to be sustained for some time.

Somewhat in contrast to Japan–China relations, Japan’s relations with South Korea have been trapped in a downward spiral during the past few years. Quite ironically, the agreement on the issue of the Japanese army’s use of ‘comfort women’ before and during World War II, announced in December 2015 by the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea, turned out to be the trigger for a vicious cycle in the relationship between the Abe administration and that of Moon Jae-in.

President Park Geun-hye was impeached by the Constitutional Court in March 2017 and removed from office. Upon winning the election and ascending to the presidency in May 2017, Moon virtually delegitimised the comfort women agreement. The implementation of the agreement has been suspended and the entire framework is in limbo.

To make things worse, in October 2018, the South Korean Supreme Court ruled that Japan’s Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal had to pay compensation to South Korean workers for forced labour during the war.

The Abe administration contends that the supreme court’s ruling is in violation of the 1965 agreement on the settlement of problems concerning property and claims, which stipulates that such claims between the two governments and their nationals are ‘settled completely and finally’. Tokyo is thus claiming that Seoul is responsible for correcting the inconsistency between the court ruling and the diplomatic agreement.

While the principle of separation of powers is important for any democracy, the Japanese argument goes, the same principle should oblige the executive branch to take independent measures on the basis of the agreements between the two governments.

Irritated by the lack of response from the South Korean side for some time, Japan took steps in July 2019 to remove South Korea from its list of ‘white countries’ that receive preferential treatment to facilitate trade.

South Korea promptly reciprocated this action and then, in August, announced its decision to terminate the General Security of Military Information Act (GSOMIA), thus extending the friction into the domain of security and defence and the endemic tensions with North Korea. Inevitably, this fuelled nationalistic sentiments and rekindled bad memories, compounding the difficulty of recovering the ground lost.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this deepening vicious cycle, a few attempts were made towards the end of 2019 to keep the windows of dialogue open between the leaders.

Then South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon visited Japan in October to attend Emperor Naruhito’s enthronement ceremony. Lee met with Abe and handed over a letter from Moon.

The meeting was the highest-level dialogue since tensions flared up after South Korea’s Supreme Court ruling in October 2018.

Then, on 4 November in Bangkok, despite earlier speculation that Abe might refuse to meet with Moon during the annual ASEAN-related leaders’ meetings, they spoke with each other for about 10 minutes, reportedly in a friendly manner.

On the same day, National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang visited Japan, and announced his plan to introduce a bill to the South Korean National Assembly to establish a fund (out of donations from both Japanese and South Korean firms as well as their citizens) with which to compensate the South Korean victims of forced labour during the colonial period.

Another slightly positive development was that Seoul suspended the decision to terminate GSOMIA a few hours before it was to lapse on 22 November, apparently due to strong pressure from Washington.

Despite these somewhat promising moves, Abe’s fundamental stance that the ball is in the South Korean court appears quite unshakable. It is hard to see where the basis for a solution might be found.

Over recent years, Australian governments have made a conscious decision to recast their shorthand description of the strategic region within which they live. In brief, they’ve moved away from describing that region as the ‘Asia–Pacific’ and towards describing it as the ‘Indo-Pacific’.

At first glance, the change looks innocuous enough; the new term seems more inclusive, embracing a rising India, recognising a shifting pattern of regional interdependencies and underlining our new sense of engagement with the Indian Ocean. But along the way, quite unintentionally, something’s been lost—in particular, our understanding of the US’s place in the region.

The 2013 defence white paper was the first to focus on the Indo-Pacific. (The 2009 version didn’t even mention the term.) As it observed at paragraphs 2.4–2.5:

[A] new Indo-Pacific strategic arc is beginning to emerge, connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans through Southeast Asia. This new strategic construct—explored in both the National Security Strategy and Australia in the Asian Century White Paper—is being forged by a range of factors …

The 2009 Defence White Paper made clear Australia’s enduring interest in the stability of what it called the wider Asia–Pacific region. The Indo-Pacific is a logical extension of this concept, and adjusts Australia’s priority strategic focus to the arc extending from India though [sic] Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia, including the sea lines of communication on which the region depends.

The successful transplantation of the Indo-Pacific into the space formerly occupied by the Asia–Pacific was completed by the 2016 defence white paper, whose 68 references to the term signalled bipartisan acceptance of the change. Other countries in the region were—to varying degrees—gradually drawn to the new terminology. Even the US began to speak of a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ and changed the title of its regional military command in Hawaii from USPACOM to USINDOPACOM in May 2018 when Admiral Philip Davidson succeeded Admiral Harry Harris.

When we thought of our region as the Asia–Pacific, the second part of the term was intended to signal our commitment to the idea that the US played an important economic and strategic role in Asia. To talk of Asia at all was to talk of a region where five trans-Pacific US alliances formed the critical hard-power substructure of the regional security architecture, and where the US was the key market for Asian exports.

The term ‘Asia–Pacific’ was itself a perennial reminder of a key Australian interest—maintaining a deep interconnection between Asia’s vibrancy and America’s role as a stabilising superpower. It was a term that pulled Asia eastwards. Simultaneously, it was a term we deployed in Washington to pull the US westwards.

Doubtless, proponents of ‘Indo-Pacific’ believed that the same sense of interconnection would endure under the new moniker, since the second part remained as before. But it hasn’t. When ‘Asia–Pacific’ was replaced with ‘Indo-Pacific’, the sense of the second word shifted, dragged by the first word towards emphasising a shared oceanic theme. If there was a geographic emphasis to the two oceans, it lay at their confluence. The old picture of Asian and American interconnection morphed into a new one, with Southeast Asia and Australia at its centre.

The importance of US strategic primacy faded. After all, the five US alliances were all in East Asia. There aren’t strong strategic linkages between Indian Ocean countries and the US. The best we can say about the Indo-Pacific construct is that it seems to have empowered the rebirth of the ‘Quad’—but the Quad isn’t an alliance. Indeed, even its own members (the US, Japan, India and Australia) sometimes struggle to say exactly what it is.

Putting it baldly, policymakers started thinking about Australia’s strategic priorities in the terms used by the 2013 defence white paper: as ‘the arc extending from India th[r]ough Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia’. No America in that picture, and little enough Pacific. The ‘arc’ no longer pulls Asia eastwards. Centred on Southeast Asia, it pulls northwards and westwards. Centred on China, it pulls broadly southwestwards—the same general direction as the Belt and Road Initiative.

Moreover, the Indo-Pacific construct artificially inflates the strategic importance of Southeast Asia and Australia. Regardless of what we call our region, the strategically important parts of the world are today what they have been for decades: the power cores to be found in Eurasia and North America, and the power balances to be found around the Eurasian rimlands. Those remain distant from Australia whatever label we choose for the region.

The US has, since World War II, offered a commitment to keep those rimland balances stable. In doing so, Australia’s major ally has minimised the likelihood of major-power conflict of a sort that would have rippled into, and disrupted, even Australia’s continental quiescence.

True, US policy has begun to oscillate more disturbingly of late. And that’s certainly not all down to the relabelling of the Asia–Pacific as the Indo-Pacific. America’s role in the world is shifting. A multipolar world is on the rise and US engagement is becoming more selective.

Still, in earlier days the Asia–Pacific label would have reminded us of an old strategic verity: regardless of particular priorities within the region, we want Asia to look east and the US to look west.

There’s no shortage of books about the growing strategic and economic competition between China and the United States. Adding something distinctive and worthwhile to the literature, therefore, is no easy task. The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the new struggle for global mastery manages to do just that, and demonstrates why Richard Heydarian has rapidly emerged as one of the more interesting and original analysts from a Southeast Asian region that will be profoundly influenced by the actions of extra-regional major powers.

One of Heydarian’s great strengths, and one of the reasons that he stands out from some of his Southeast Asian contemporaries, in my view, is that he doesn’t feel obliged to recite the usual pieties about ASEAN centrality and the like. On the contrary, he is frequently excoriating in his criticism of some of the region’s luminaries, especially Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, about whom he knows a great deal.

Indeed, the general level of detail and the extensive footnoting in this book are remarkable and a potentially useful resource for any student or scholar wanting to develop an understanding of the factors that are driving economic and strategic transformation in the Indo-Pacific region. After providing the reader with a finely grained analysis of regional development, though, Heydarian offers an overall conclusion that’s rather sobering: ‘The future of the region will be less about struggle for mastery than managing one cataclysmic disaster after the other.’

The region’s potentially gloomy future arises in large part, he suggests, from possibly irreconcilable developmental and environmental goals: ‘By imitating the mindless hedonism of the West, the far larger East is accelerating an ecological apocalypse.’ The reader is certainly not left wondering what Heydarian thinks about some of the most important issues confronting the region and the world.

Part of this headline-grabbing style no doubt flows from his prolific contributions to mainstream media outlets, which also explains the accessible and readable nature of this volume. Some potential readers may be relieved to know that there is almost no attempt to place the discussion in theoretical context, although Heydarian frequently draws on and quotes extensively from some of the best-known figures in the international relations field.

The result is a detailed analysis punctuated by shrewd insights about Donald Trump’s regime, Xi Jinping’s impact on China and its foreign policy, the Belt and Road Initiative, and even the role of small and medium powers in the region. There is especially welcome and knowledgeable attention paid to Japan, too, which is frequently overlooked in these sorts of studies. No doubt Canberra’s policymaking elites will be delighted to learn that Heydarian thinks this country has developed a ‘smart and constructive position’ and is ‘crucial to avoiding a Sino-American Cold War in Asia’.

Even if you accept this argument, it will not be an easy task. As the excellent chapter on the BRI makes clear: ‘as China seeks to carve out a new Sino-centric Global Order’, instability is inevitable, not least because of ‘Trump’s seemingly unhinged leadership’. The style is always lively and the judgements made with an enviable degree of certainty and confidence given the complexity of the subject matter.

Whether one agrees with them or not, though, they are always grounded in a plethora of sources, quotes and citations. As readable introductions to the region go, it is certainly one of the better informed and more comprehensive volumes in a crowded field. If there’s one potential criticism to be made of this book, it’s that it draws heavily on previously published work, which results in some repetition and inconsistency at times. While Heydarian claims that China is intent of creating a ‘neo-Tributary system’ via the BRI and other instruments of economic statecraft, for example, he offers qualified praise for the Trump administration’s efforts at pushing back against Chinese expansionism.

These positions are not necessarily incompatible, of course, and we are in the midst of a historically unparalleled competition for global influence between an ambitious Asian power and a familiar hegemon that seems to be struggling to come to terms with new international and domestic realities. Trying to make a definitive judgement about how that’s going to turn out is not for the faint-hearted.

Whatever else one might think about Heydarian, though, he’s certainly not that. Anyone seeking an accessible, knowledgeable and engaging introduction to a region undergoing profound change could do much worse. It’s generally a persuasively argued volume that addresses the big issues and has interesting and original things to say about them. Recommended.

Australia’s international security outlook is starting to look very unpredictable and potentially threatening. Our defence planners must now deal with a world which is markedly different from any they’ve known before. The United States is undermining the international rules-based order and, at the same time, China and Russia are becoming increasingly assertive militarily and aligned in their anti-Western attitudes. All of this is taking place as a crisis of democracy in the West is distracting it from wielding national power more effectively.

We are now in a period of unpredictable strategic transition in which the comfortable assumptions of the past are over. Australia’s strategic outlook has continued to deteriorate and, for the first time since World War II, we face an increased prospect of threat from high-level military capabilities being introduced into our region.

This means we must make major changes to the way we manage strategic risk, a grey area that involves making critical assessments of capability, motive and intent. Past defence judgements relied heavily on the conclusion that the capabilities required for a serious assault on Australia simply didn’t exist in our region.

In contrast, in the years ahead, the level of capability that can be brought to bear against Australia will increase, so judgements relating to warning time will need to rely less on evidence of capability and more on assessments of motive and intent. Such areas for judgement are inherently ambiguous and uncertain.

The potential warning time is now shorter because regional capability levels are higher and will undoubtedly increase in the years ahead. How should Australia respond? Contingencies that are credible in the shorter term could now be characterised by higher levels of intensity and technological sophistication. This means that readiness and sustainability need to be increased. We need higher training levels, a demonstrable and sustainable surge capacity, increased stocks of munitions, more maintenance spares, a robust fuel supply system, and modernised and protected operational bases in the north of Australia.

For the longer term, the key issue is whether there’s a sound basis for the timely expansion of the Australian Defence Force. Matters that need examination include developing an Australian equivalent of an anti-access/area-denial capability (especially for our vulnerable northern and western approaches), improving our capacity for antisubmarine warfare, and reviewing our capacity for sustained strike operations.

The prospect of shortened warning times now needs to be a major factor in our defence planning. Much more thought needs to be given to planning for the expansion of the ADF and its capacity to engage in high-intensity conflict in our own defence in a way that we haven’t previously had to consider. Planning for the defence of Australia needs to take these new realities into account.

We must now refocus on our own region of primary strategic interest, which includes the eastern Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia including the South China Sea, and the South Pacific. The conduct of operations further afield, including in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and Defence’s involvement in counterterrorism, must not be allowed to distract from the effort that needs to go into this planning or from the funding that enhanced capabilities will require.

The transformation of major-power relations in the Asia–Pacific region is having a profound effect on our strategic circumstances. Without increases in our defence preparedness, the options available to the government for the ADF’s involvement in high-intensity, high-tech operations would risk being severely constrained.

The issue for the longer term is whether we’ve built a sound basis from which to expand the ADF, especially our strike, air combat and maritime capabilities. Having such an expanded force would significantly increase the military planning challenges for any potential adversary and the size and military capabilities of the force it would have to commit to attack us directly, or to coerce, intimidate or otherwise employ military power against us.

Attacks on Australia of an intensity and duration sufficient to be a serious threat to our way of life would be possible only if an adversary’s forces had access to bases and facilities in our immediate neighbourhood. This needs to be taken into account in the development of our strike forces so that they have sufficient weight to deny any future adversary such an advantage. Consideration will need to be given to the range, endurance and weapon load of our strike forces and the numbers needed for repeated strike operations.

It’s imperative that planning for the defence of Australia, and for operations in our region of primary strategic concern, resumes the highest priority. Re-establishing our foreign policy and defence presence in this part of the world is crucial.

We need to get rid of the 2016 defence white paper’s ill-advised proposition that the defence of Australia, a secure nearer region and our global defence commitments should be ‘three equally-weighted high-level Strategic Defence Objectives to guide the development of the future force’.

Finally, it needs to be understood that the policy recommended here is a continuation of Australia’s longstanding defence policy that we do not identify any particular country as a threat. Rather, we are responding to the significant improvement in high-tech military capabilities across the board in our region.

This post is adapted by the author from a speech he gave on 10 October 2019 to the Chief of Navy’s Sea Power conference. It reflects joint work with Richard Brabin-Smith, honorary professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.

Seoul and Tokyo aren’t getting on well. What started as quarrels over whether Japan has shown appropriate contrition for its wartime occupation of Korea has mushroomed into a fierce trade dispute and a suspension of intelligence sharing.

The resolution of this dispute between East Asia’s two most powerful democracies is in Australia’s interests. At a speech delivered last week to the Lowy Institute, Prime Minister Scott Morrison recognised this, noting that the ‘Indo-Pacific would be even stronger if Japan and [South Korea] can overcome their recent tensions’. Behind Morrison’s comments is an issue that cuts to the heart of Australian strategic policy in the Indo-Pacific.

Maintaining strong ties with both Japan and South Korea is crucial to Australia’s geoeconomic strategy. Japan is our second largest two-way trading partner and South Korea the fourth largest. Together, they made up just over 16% of our total international trade in 2017–18. We have free trade agreements with both countries, and they’re considered reliable markets for Australian exporters. Ensuring that this remains the case will be vital to building resilience in our economy, which relies to a large degree on trade with China.

The importance of Japan and South Korea to Australia is also geopolitical, as the government’s 2017 foreign policy white paper noted: ‘The Indo-Pacific democracies of Japan, Indonesia, India and the Republic of Korea are of first order importance to Australia, both as major bilateral partners in their own right and as countries that will influence the shape of the regional order.’

Strengthening our ties with liberal democracies such as South Korea and Japan may also be a way of balancing China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in East Asia.

Australia’s objective in the Indo-Pacific, as set out in the white paper, is to support the United States in fostering a region that’s free from authoritarian coercion and open to international trade. That could be done by integrating the Indian and Pacific oceans in a way that allows India to support Japan’s effort to balance China. If these regional powers balanced China effectively, the Indo-Pacific’s maritime commons would be safe for Australian trade and Beijing’s ability to coerce Canberra would be curtailed.

Tokyo’s vision for the Indo-Pacific seems to be in near perfect alignment with Canberra’s. Japan views freedom of navigation and overflight as ‘international public goods’ that it can help provide. Just as Canberra hopes for an Indo-Pacific free from authoritarian coercion, Tokyo regards the ‘peaceful settlement of disputes’ as essential to regional stability.

South Korea could play a vital role in securing the free and open Indo-Pacific that both Canberra and Tokyo desire. Like Japan and Australia, South Korea relies on freedom of navigation for its maritime trade. South Korea is also a liberal democracy that has good reason to worry about being pulled into China’s orbit. Mutual interests ought to be pulling Canberra and Seoul together.

However, Seoul’s behaviour hasn’t been in close alignment with Canberra’s views on balancing China’s power in the Indo-Pacific. Since taking office in 2017, President Moon Jae-in has put two policies at the forefront of South Korea’s regional strategy. First is the ‘new northern policy’, which is designed to reintegrate the Korean peninsula into Eurasia by improving infrastructure networks. Second is the ‘new southern policy’, which is focused on increasing South Korea’s influence by building infrastructure across Southeast Asia. The goal of Moon’s policies is to make South Korea a significant middle power among the coastal countries that ring Eurasia.

Building relationships with the Russian and Chinese states is crucial to Moon’s regional strategy. Last year he met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow in an attempt to improve economic ties with Russia, attract Russian gas exports to Korea and extend trans-Siberian rail links to the city of Busan. Moon has described Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative as being complementary to South Korea’s bid to strengthen regional trade in Southeast Asia. South Korea has hedged at precisely the time Australia needs it to double down on relationships with other democratic powers in the Indo-Pacific.

Seoul’s hedging is geared towards becoming less reliant on Japan. Building off a more amicable relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Moon has proposed the development of an ‘inter-Korean peace economy’ that he believes could allow the Korean peninsula ‘to catch up to Japan’s dominance’. While integrating North and South Korea would undoubtably entail costs, modelling from Goldman Sachs suggests that a unified Korean economy could be larger than Japan’s and those of all other G7 nations bar the United States 30 or 40 years after unification. Should Moon’s strategy succeed in the long term, the likeliest result would be a Japan with less influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Moon’s regional strategy differs from those articulated in Tokyo and Canberra. While both powers say they want to maintain strong trade links with China, Japan and Australia imagine an Indo-Pacific order in which liberal democracies collaborate to balance an increasingly assertive China. Without reconciliation with Tokyo, South Korea could be tempted to imagine a region in which non-aligned powers of the Eurasian rimlands work to balance a historically revisionist Japan.

Australia’s vision for the Indo-Pacific is predicated to some degree on Japan and South Korea maintaining a close diplomatic relationship. If Japan were seen as a friendly power in Seoul, Tokyo could bring South Korea’s regional strategy into closer alignment with its own vision for the Indo-Pacific. Doing so would advance Australia’s vision, though Japan currently lacks the goodwill needed to bring South Korea into the Indo-Pacific orbit. Therefore, Australia needs to think creatively about how to achieve that objective while Seoul’s regional strategy is still in its early stages.

China could create a regional balance that serves its interests by feigning a desire to promote reconciliation between Seoul and Tokyo while working behind the scenes to play Korea off against Japan. To avoid such a scenario, Australia must do more than hope that China doesn’t capitalise on these tensions.

Morrison should work to position Australia as a genuine, neutral friend that can mediate between Seoul and Tokyo. This would require a degree of diplomatic creativity and ambition that Canberra might find uncomfortable. However, the costs of inaction are likely to outweigh the risks of failure. Australia’s diplomacy must live up to the demands of its Indo-Pacific strategy.