Tag Archive for: Asia–Pacific

ASPI’s decades: Asia–Pacific to Indo-Pacific

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

Among strategists, geography is used in an effort to refine Australia’s strategic thinking and impose hierarchy and order on Defence spending and structure.

Yet in the first decades of the 21st century the geographic calculus was bedevilled by fundamental shifts in power.

As much else changed, so did Australia’s sense of the world around its continent, transformed by a shape-shifting, expanding sense of region.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Australia helped build an ambitious geographic construct, the Asia–Pacific. Then that Asia–Pacific model gave way to an even larger defining geography, the Indo-Pacific.

India’s growing importance had to be acknowledged, China’s systemic effects had to be calculated, Japan’s security evolution embraced, and the traditional concentration on Indonesia and ASEAN had to be affirmed and made central to the expanded understanding.

Just as geography is remade by tectonic forces, geopolitics and geoeconomics remade the policy frame to adjust to China’s rise, India’s arrival and America’s relative decline.

Kevin Rudd’s Labor government that won office in 2007 set to work on a new defence white paper, and when the policy was delivered in May 2009, geography was in the title: Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific century.

ASPI’s Rod Lyon and Andrew Davies wrote that while media reporting of Labor’s policy statement tended to focus on the hardware acquisition (‘And that is not surprising—there is a lot of it.’), just as important was a ‘significant re-positioning of Australia’s declaratory strategic policy’ and ‘a firm geography-based line’ amid the shifting sands of the Asia–Pacific:

That emphasis on geographical determinism is reinforced in the White Paper’s acknowledgement that, while Australia has four major strategic interests—a secure Australia, a secure neighbourhood, a stable Asia–Pacific and a rules-based global order—only the first two of those interests will actually shape the Australian force structure. Given that, one could be forgiven for wondering why the power balance shifts in the wider Asia–Pacific engendered by the rise of China are given so much prominence elsewhere in the document. Indeed, there seems to be something of a disconnect here. If developments in the wider region are not force structure determinants, why the emphasis on a larger fleet of long-range submarines with strategic strike capabilities? The revival of the Defence of Australia strategic orthodoxy suggests a narrowing of Australian strategic policy focus under the Rudd government.

In one sense, the white paper was ‘ground-breaking’, then–ASPI executive director Peter Abigail observed:

It was the first public policy statement by a US ally that attempted to come to terms with the power shifts underway in the Asia–Pacific and raise questions about the durability of US strategic primacy. It lifted what had been academic, commentarial and officials’ discourse into the realm of declared policy and, therefore, attracted quite a bit of attention, particularly in Beijing and Washington.

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Davies and Mark Thomson considered the regional ‘state of flux’ and saw two broad futures—the key unknown was whether economic cooperation or strategic competition would take precedence:

The optimistic possibility is that Asia will evolve into a region in which cooperation trumps strategic competition—something akin to how Europe operates today. The more pessimistic possibility is that strategic competition will grow into mounting tensions and that Asia will face the same bleak prospects that Europe did a century ago.

When Lyon mapped the ‘strategic contours’ of Asia’s rise in 2012, he couldn’t separate those two futures of competition or cooperation. The region faced a strange blend of both— what business calls ‘coopetition’. Lyon noted transformational change, characterised by two interlinked phenomena: ‘the relative decline of US power in Asia, and the “return” of Asian great powers to the international system’.

Within that coopetitive Asia–Pacific, the principal structures of the regional security order—the existing contours of reassurance and deterrence—were starting to fray, Lyon wrote:

[A]s multipolarity grows in Asia, regional perceptions of US primacy are becoming more blurred. That blurring weakens the interlinked systems of reassurance and deterrence that underpin the current order. As Asian coercive power grows—and coercive power is the power to intimidate as well as the power to do actual physical harm—the region as a whole is entering a new era of reassurance worries.

After Julia Gillard deposed Rudd as prime minister and narrowly won the 2010 election, she ordered two white papers: the Australia in the Asian century white paper issued in 2012, and the 2013 defence white paper. The government produced two policy statements that were, if not at odds, certainly engaged in a series of debates about the nature of the region and its future—and even the name and reach of the region.

Gillard asked for the Asian century study for policy, political and even personal reasons; she had to put her own stamp on foreign policy, not least because Rudd was her foreign minister. Thus, the Asian century paper was written in the prime minister’s department by former Treasury secretary Ken Henry.

ASPI Executive Director Peter Jennings worried at the puzzling absence of the US from Henry’s terms of reference, despite the centrality of the US to the strategic picture. That omission certainly concerned the Department of Defence, shaping its approach to its own white paper.

The Henry report blended liberal internationalism with an optimistic view of Asia entering a new phase of deeper and broader engagement, with this opening vision:

Asia’s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the 21st century—the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia’s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment … The Asian century is an Australian opportunity. As the global centre of gravity shifts to our region, the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity. Australia is located in the right place at the right time—in the Asian region in the Asian century.

Defence’s response to the Asian century was to embrace the Indo-Pacific, a concept that hadn’t been mentioned in its 2009 white paper. The 2013 edition used ‘Indo-Pacific’ 58 times while giving minimal linguistic obeisance to the Asian century (10 mentions).

The white paper’s strategic outlook pointed to two defining characteristics of the regional order. First, the ‘critical importance’ of the US–China relationship. Second, ‘a new Indo-Pacific strategic arc’ was emerging, connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans through Southeast Asia.

When the Liberal–National coalition won the 2013 election, four months after the defence white paper’s release, the Asian century white paper was purged from new prime minister Tony Abbott’s website. The Asian century usage faded.

Defence had given Canberra the new construct for the region: the Indo-Pacific was central to the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

The shift from Asia–Pacific to Indo-Pacific was more than a geographic broadening. This was about mood swing and geopolitical forces.

The foreign policy white paper’s chapter on ‘A contested world’, under the heading ‘Power shifts in the Indo-Pacific’, described the contest:

The compounding effect of China’s growth is accelerating shifts in relative economic and strategic weight. In parts of the Indo–Pacific, including in Southeast Asia, China’s power and influence are growing to match, and in some cases exceed, that of the United States. The future balance of power in the Indo–Pacific will largely depend on the actions of the United States, China and major powers such as Japan and India.

The 2020 Asia–Pacific outlook

Render the strategic outlook for 2020 into a core conundrum: How goes the new era of great-power competition? Is it to be security confrontation and economic decoupling?

The crystal ball is clouded by rivalry. China and the US are simultaneously close and apart, enmeshed and divided, locked together in contest while musing about trade and technology cleavage.

The region—using either the Indo-Pacific or Asia–Pacific label—slides towards what Peter Jennings calls ‘a riskier, more dangerous reality’. Australia has ruefully accepted that managing great-power competition is now its ‘first priority’.

Tackling the conundrum is the purpose of the annual survey from the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP). With 20 country committees, plus the EU and Pacific Islands Forum, CSCAP ruminates from many angles in its 2020 regional security outlook.

The outlook’s editor, Ron Huisken, writes that rivalry between the two mega-states is deepening international division and antagonism:

The present clash between the US and China is arrestingly sharp and deep not only because the stakes are so high and the parties so profoundly different—most critically, perhaps, in terms of philosophies on governance—but also because it has been brewing over several decades of increasingly intimate and complex interaction.

A fundamental question, Huisken writes, is the tools and mindsets states can legitimately bring to the competition. The answer will determine if interdependence can be maintained or if there will be a significant degree of disengagement.

So, contest for sure, cleavage perhaps.

Reporting from the US, Siddharth Mohandas writes that the Trump administration has ‘fundamentally shifted the US–China relationship in a more competitive and even confrontational direction’. The US policy focus on China extends far beyond trade to encompass economic, security, technology and ideological issues that ‘are now increasingly at the centre of American foreign policy’.

In Canberra, Australia’s top diplomat foresees an era of enduring differences with China, calling it the ‘new normal’. The same phrase is used by Mohandas in his final sentence: ‘The evidence of the past year is that instability is not a passing phenomenon but the new normal against which all regional capitals must plan.’

From China, Wu Xinbo writes that Beijing senses Washington’s determination to reorient its ‘policy towards a more competitive and confrontational stance’, pushing China’s ‘trust towards the US to a historical low’. Wu judges that the relationship has gone from cool to freezing:

The Asia–Pacific has entered a period of profound changes set off by shifts in the power balance as well by adjustments of strategy and policy settings by regional players. Managing major power competition and dealing with hot spot issues top the regional security agenda, while Sino-US interactions hold the key.

Wu says Beijing and Washington must delineate the boundary of their intensifying competition:

  • Robust economic ties benefiting both countries should ‘not be decoupled or seriously downgraded’. Economic interdependence doesn’t prevent contention (‘actually close economic ties tend to be a major source of frictions’) but can be a buffer by raising the cost of conflict.
  • Both parties need to exercise strategic self-restraint. They should ‘avoid drawing lines and encouraging members of the region to split into rival camps, otherwise the economically most dynamic region will gradually lose its momentum for growth and integration’.
  • The most urgent issue for China–US security relations is crisis avoidance and management. For that, ‘good communication at the strategic level and effective management at the tactical level are indispensable’.

From Japan, Yoshihide Soeya writes that one benefit of the Trump presidency has been to allow Japan and China to sweep ‘contentious and awkward’ issues under the carpet:

This is because they have bigger tensions and issues with the United States, mostly related to economic and trade negotiations. Since these frictions are not likely to be eased anytime soon, the momentum of improvement in relations between Japan and China is also likely to be sustained for some time to come.

Southeast Asia offers variations on the familiar themes of ASEAN centrality and not having to choose sides in the battle of the giants.

Singapore’s William Choong gives a nuanced account of ‘the blessedness of (not) making a choice’. ASEAN members, he writes, want to be equidistant between China and the US, to ‘avoid stark choices’ in the geopolitical joust. Pressure builds, however, as that equidistant space shrinks. Singapore finds itself walking a ‘narrowing plank’ or ‘narrowing tightrope’.

The readout from Laos, from Sulathin Thiladej, is that the decline of the US and the rise of China are eroding or undermining ASEAN’s centrality and coherence:

ASEAN, as a driver for cooperation in the Asia Pacific, is losing momentum as the region’s centre of gravity shifts from Southeast Asia to China. China’s rise has unsettling consequences for ASEAN centrality, creating new tensions and uncertainties that threaten to break ASEAN’s solidarity and coherence.

Vietnam’s Le Dinh Tinh says the US–China relationship has five levels, running from cooperation to adversary. The expanding competition between the world’s two greatest economies has reached level-four intensity (rivalry):

The notion that these great powers are on a collision course has been circulated in the policy communities of both countries. Rather than greater caution, however, we have seen the two sides toughen their positions and resort to measures hitherto unthinkable.

The view from Australia, from the Australian National University’s Brendan Taylor, says Canberra’s recent bout of ‘strategic anxiety’ awakens old arguments about whether Australia can find its security with Asia rather than from Asia. His chapter begins with the title of a book written 40 years ago by the Oz diplomat, Alan Renouf, The frightened country, describing an anxious nation that saw more dangers than opportunities in Asia.

Donald Trump’s alliance antipathy ‘feeds a deep Australian fear of abandonment’, Taylor writes, and Australia’s security outlook is becoming ‘much darker and apprehensive’.

The sense of apprehension is one outlook shared by the whole region. Great-power contest is here, hauling into view the scenario of economic and technological decoupling.

Whispering to the Asia–Pacific

Australia gropes and stutters towards a renewed embrace of international broadcasting—the vital need to ‘speak for ourselves’ in the Asia–Pacific.

The latest lurch towards fresh understanding is the silent release of the review of Australia’s media reach in the Asia–Pacific. Note the irony that a report on broadcasting is soundless on arrival.

Behold a classic orphan inquiry, not wanted by either the government or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, nor particularly desired by the public service. The orphan was created as part of the price to win a Senate vote, and is dumped on the public doorstep without a word of welcome.

The review was completed last December but only released (published on the Department of Communications website) on 17 October. No announcement. No government decisions.

The inquiry matters because it nods towards significant policy failure and the absent-minded trashing of Oz international broadcasting.

The answers offered are hesitant, sometimes implicit. The report is useful for what it does and doesn’t say. The tough stuff is often dealt with by quoting from the 433 submissions. Thus, see the key themes highlighted from submissions as implicit findings or recommendations:

  • Media markets across the Asia–Pacific exhibit significant variation and a ‘highly competitive nature’. Dramatically changing historical patterns of media usage requires ‘narrowcasting’ that tailors content and distribution platforms to target audiences in each country.
  • Successive budget cutbacks have ‘caused reductions in Australia’s supplies of international broadcasting services, particularly to the Pacific’. International services should be revitalised, including the use of ‘alternative models for delivery and governance of Australian government funded international broadcasting services’.
  • ‘The majority of submissions, which focused on the Pacific, advocated the restoration of ABC’s shortwave services in the Pacific region.’
  • Submissions in favour of restoring shortwave services ‘disputed the views that the technology has “limited and diminishing audiences” and disproportionately high costs’.

The inquiry doesn’t advocate restoring shortwave, but nor does it endorse the ABC dumbness. Instead, it offers this:

In the absence of a clear statement of the objectives of Australia’s Asia Pacific broadcasts … and a clear articulation of the full range of alternative options for achieving those objectives, it is not possible to determine whether Australia would derive a net benefit from resuming its shortwave broadcasts to the Asia Pacific.

You might have thought the combined forces of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Department of Communications could have reached towards a clear statement of objectives and a full range of options. But that’d be to misunderstand the lonely nature of the orphan inquiry and Canberra’s sins of omission and commission on international broadcasting.

The decade of vandalism forces the review back to first principles: Australia must identify its ‘strategic policy objectives’ and clarify ‘the role that publicly funded broadcasts should play in achieving those objectives’.

Canberra has lost its way on policy when the key recommendation of a government review is that the government must first define what it wants to do. It is still groping and stuttering towards ‘clarifying the objectives of Australia’s broadcasting to audiences in Asia and the Pacific’.

The new chair of the ABC, Ita Buttrose, a fine editor and journalist, knows that much international ground needs to be retaken. Her 2019 Lowy Institute media lecture was notable for notes of loss and regret.

The ABC continues to produce content in languages other than English, she said, ‘but regrettably, not at the same levels as we have been able to in the past’, and the ABC’s ‘commitments to international broadcasting are not what they once were’.

A great Oz rock group long ago paid tribute to Buttrose with a song titled ‘Ita’, with the closing line: ‘How could I not believe, when Ita tells me too’.

And what Ita says on international broadcasting is this:

Australia’s relationship with our neighbours is more nuanced than ever, and so, naturally, must be our conversations. This type of engagement requires a high degree of expertise, investment, infrastructure, and above all commitment.

Commitment and cash have both ebbed and the conversation has suffered. It’s a sad commentary as the ABC prepares to celebrate next month the 80th anniversary of the creation of Radio Australia (the outbreak of World War II was something of a prompt).

The orphan inquiry tells the story of what has to be rebuilt. The bureaucratic baton is handed to the DFAT soft power review.

A government facing tougher international times must discover a new vision of international broadcasting to communicate Australia’s interests, influence and values.

Sunny Asian century versus dark Indo-Pacific

Asia’s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the 21st century—the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia’s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment…The Asian century is an Australian opportunity. As the global centre of gravity shifts to our region, the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity. Australia is located in the right place at the right time—in the Asian region in the Asian century.

— Australia in the Asian century white paper, 2012

The sunny optimism of the ‘Asian century’ faces the dark forebodings of the ‘Indo-Pacific’.

The two terms describe the same set of players and forces, but arrange them in different orders with different weightings.

Asian century versus Indo-Pacific is crude simplification. Simplicity, though, has its uses. Journalists want headlines. Politicians need slogans and stories. The headline has the single merit of setting up this biggest of questions.

Crudely, Asian century usage blends liberal internationalism with an optimistic view of Asia entering a new phase of deeper and broader engagement, privileging geoeconomics over geopolitics.

The Indo-Pacific gives more weight to geopolitics, shifting the focus from economic bonanza to describe an arena for surging strategic rivalry, now the label for a US strategy. Little wonder ASEAN’s new Indo-Pacific outlook seeks ‘dialogue and cooperation instead of rivalry’. Cooperation is what we desire, rivalry is what we’ve got.

Canberra’s explanation for replacing Asia-Pacific with Indo-Pacific this decade was to broaden the frame of reference and factor in India. There was another compelling reason that was fudged in the telling: come up with a frame big enough to handle (or contain or engage or balance) the giant dragon in the room.

When Australia’s defenceniks started using the term Indo-Pacific six years ago, they emphasised it was merely a useful policy construct—a tool for understanding—but not a force determinant. The US Indo-Pacific strategy means the tool has been weaponised. US President Donald Trump weaponises the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ just as he weaponises globalisation. Lots of stuff around here is loaded with explosives.

Asian century versus Indo-Pacific also describes a Canberra fight: econocrats facing off against the defenceniks. The econocrats bleat that the security agencies are running the show. Or as the ever-vivid former prime minister Paul Keating puts it, ‘the nutters are in charge’.

Asian century had a brief starring moment during Julia Gillard’s time as prime minister, cresting with the white paper in October 2012. Gillard needed some foreign policy not owned by her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, and Asian century was it.

The Asian century language came from Treasury and the quintessential Treasury man of his generation, Ken Henry, got to write the policy (although as Henry’s draft blew out towards 500 pages, the head of the Office of National Assessments, Allan Gyngell, was drafted to slash it to 300 pages and add a pinch of foreign policy coherence).

While Gillard had most of Canberra doing Asian century duty, the Defence department defected to the Indo-Pacific. While it’s only a few minutes’ drive from the Russell Hill defence complex to the other side of the lake where parliament, the PM’s department and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade reside, sometimes the Kings Avenue bridge marks a major conceptual chasm.

Defence hated the Asian century tag because the headline dropped the US from the equation. That’s conceptual/construct poison for a department that sees anchoring America in Asia as a fundamental Oz interest.

The 2013 defence white paper gave minimal linguistic obeisance rather than conceptual obedience to Gillard’s vision: the document used the Indo-Pacific 58 times while mentioning the Asian century white paper 10 times.

When the Liberal–National coalition won the 2013 election, the Asian century usage became Canberra cactus, too prickly to touch. Change the government, change the language. As Henry laments, his paper ‘has had no impact on policy, not even on the tenor of public policy debate in Australia’.

Political cleansing was delivered as policy vandalism when the prime minister’s department deleted the Asian century white paper from its digital record (the polite term is archived).

Savour the irony that the Asian century paper is still available on the Defence site. Defence understands the need to record the history of your victories. And it’s a major win when your department hands Canberra the new construct for the region.

Indo-Pacific has become the uniform usage in Canberra. The 2013 defence white paper marked the jump-off point, with further restatements in the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

Canberra agrees on the language, but the fundamentals of the argument rage. Australia’s economic dependence on China keeps growing, as Greg Earl observes: ‘Short of a Chinese economic catastrophe, this is an integrated bilateral economic relationship that is not going to be wished away.’

Trace the debate through four contributions from one of our finest diplomatic minds, Peter Varghese.

As DFAT secretary, Varghese gave a typically thoughtful speech in 2013, in which he neatly laid out the Oz idea of Asia and the Indo-Pacific strategic framework—a masterful exercise of diplomacy in the Gillard era.

Consider Varghese’s recent report to the government on an India economic strategy to 2035, where 31 mentions of Indo-Pacific are swamped by 150 sightings of Asia.

Varghese’s third contribution (in a report on getting India into APEC) offers these reasons for the Indo-Pacific construct:

  • to return India to Asia’s strategic matrix
  • to find a new strategic equilibrium for a multipolar region while balancing China’s ‘ambitions to be the predominant power in the region’

As Varghese observes: ‘A common understanding of the Indo-Pacific will not however in itself alleviate strategic tensions, or ensure enhanced economic integration.’

And, fourth, Varghese’s ASPI speech on what’s coming at us: ‘Trends are like waves. We can see them on the horizon but we don’t know exactly when they will break and in what pattern they will reach the shore.’

This is a debate with no easy end in sight. Questions of definition and understanding come no harder or heavier.

The long and winding way to the Indo-Pacific

Finally, after much prevarication, pressure and hesitation, ASEAN has decided that it’s time to acknowledge the ‘Indo-Pacific’. At the 34th summit in Bangkok last weekend, ASEAN released its much-anticipated contribution to the Indo-Pacific debate. The ‘ASEAN outlook on the Indo-Pacific’ paper envisages Southeast Asia playing a ‘central and strategic role’ in connecting the Asia–Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

Southeast Asia has served as the main venue for articulating and promoting the idea of the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) espoused, in one form or another, by the US, Japan, India and Australia. Since the November 2017 APEC Summit in Da Nang where US President Donald Trump first used the phrase, the FOIP concept—originally advocated by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over a decade ago—has had a revival. Numerous speeches have since been made in Singapore (including at the Shangri-La Dialogues in 2018 and 2019), Hanoi, Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila by high-level representatives from the US and Australian governments to actively promote the Indo-Pacific concept and its role in defending a rules-based order.

Three main reasons have been offered for ASEAN’s reluctance to embrace the concept. Across Southeast Asia, there’s been confusion about what the Indo-Pacific strategy actually means. The strategy—or, more precisely, strategies—have not been sufficiently explained and the nomenclature and geographic scope of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ lack clarity. As Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan observed, ‘We will never sign on to anything unless we know exactly what it means.’ Southeast Asians have been unwilling to refer to the FOIP or to use the term because they haven’t been sure what it entails.

Another explanation for ASEAN’s reticence was the fear of antagonising China. The Indo-Pacific strategy is largely seen as a response by the US and its allies to China’s rise. Southeast Asians complain about the discomfort they feel at the US’s rhetoric on the FOIP, which they associate with forcing the region to choose between the US and China. This (mis)perception has, unfortunately, hindered any deeper appreciation of the tenets underlying the strategy. The Trump administration’s China policy and tariff war have been also (mis)read as revealing the real strategic basis for the Indo-Pacific concept.

The third explanation takes into consideration the very nature of ASEAN. Coordinating any common position among this diverse group of nations takes time. The diversity and granularity of their views of the Indo-Pacific and of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue are examined in a recent ASPI report.

Whatever is behind ASEAN’s reticence, the problem with avoiding discussion of the Indo-Pacific is that it undermines ASEAN’s own cherished view of its centrality in regional affairs. Despite having that centrality rhetorically acknowledged by all states that promote the Indo-Pacific concept, ASEAN, by not taking part in this key conversation, has failed, until now, to display that centrality.

Last year, John Lee argued that the pressure on ASEAN to take a stand on the Indo-Pacific concept was a good thing. It would force the organisation that struggles to achieve any consensus these days to act together and acknowledge the competing visions of the regional order.

As the ASEAN outlook paper was released, many observers were keen to examine it to see just how convergent it would be with the existing versions of the Indo-Pacific concept, particularly the US one. But that question misses the point. ASEAN simply wants to have its own say rather than adopt any of the existing Indo-Pacific proposals.

Indonesia led the efforts for ASEAN to arrive at a common position on the Indo-Pacific. Jakarta hosted a high-level dialogue on Indo-Pacific cooperation in March to which all ASEAN+6 countries were invited. In fact, the idea of the Indo-Pacific treaty of friendship and cooperation—an extension of ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), signed in 2013 by ASEAN and its dialogue partners—came from former Indonesia foreign minister Marty Natalegawa.

Back then, the treaty idea didn’t receive sufficient support either domestically or regionally, but it can now serve as a convenient base for the revived concept. The outlook paper presents another opportunity to reinforce ASEAN centrality, its fundamental norms set out in the TAC, and a double-down on the existing ASEAN-led architecture.

The ASEAN paper is an attempt to resolve the dual pressure to accept the FOIP from one side and to reject it from another. The position ASEAN has taken will satisfy no major power as it is neither closely aligned with America’s vision of the Indo-Pacific nor openly contradictory to it.

The paper rejects the notion of the Indo-Pacific as one continuous territorial space. Instead, in ASEAN’s eyes, the Indo-Pacific is made up of two distinct regions: the Asia–Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The view does have commonality with the Japanese vision, which emphasises development and connectivity. The ASEAN statement gives special attention to maritime cooperation, connectivity and infrastructure and other economic cooperation.

The outlook should be seen as a pledge to put ASEAN back in the centre—a plea to ASEAN member states to remain united in order to navigate the increasingly zero-sum dynamics in both the Asia–Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Whether it can be achieved or not, it’s still the best bet for Southeast Asia. The statement is the ASEAN way of counselling the great powers to let the region continue to be an area for economic cooperation and dialogue rather than an arena of competition.

Indo-Pacific: from construct to contest

‘Indo-Pacific’ has shifted from a geographic construct to an arena for mounting contest—and the label for a US strategy.

The journey from construct to competition has been short and sharp.

At the start of this decade, ‘Asia–Pacific’ was the dominant geographic descriptor. That geographic understanding stood not too uncomfortably in the vicinity of the idea of the ‘Asian century’, the vision China’s Deng Xiaoping raised with India’s Rajiv Gandhi when they met in 1988. The US preferred ‘America’s Pacific century’, but it seemed more a question of perspective than dangerous difference. Australia easily embraced both the Asia–Pacific and the Asian century.

Any sense of comfort has fallen away as the use of ‘Indo-Pacific’ has zoomed up the charts over the past five years. The descriptors are no longer gently touching or rubbing along easily.

The uneasy jests and questions tell some of the story about the construct competition.

Jest 1: The Indo-Pacific puts two oceans together to squeeze out Asia—or ‘two oceans drowning Asia’. Not much Asia-for-Asians joy there.

Coming at the same crunch from the other side of the Pacific, the cover of the latest Foreign Affairs shows an American bald eagle shedding feathers, with the headline, ‘What happened to the American century?’ Plenty of people are asking versions of the ‘what happened’ question.

Jest 2 concerns ASEAN’s edgy effort to agree on an Indo-Pacific ‘concept’, which is now arriving at the uneasy embrace of an Indo-Pacific ‘outlook’. ASEAN proclaims its centrality, yet the Indo-Pacific outlook shows it’s easier just to stand out and look.

The Shangri-La defence dialogue revealed the Indo-Pacific spectrum, ranging from those who still question the construct to those who now proclaim the strategy.

As I noted last week, ASEAN peers, picks and pokes at the Indo-Pacific because the US proclamation of the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) has electrified the idea. The IP (intellectual property) of the FOIP sparks and surges.

One of the few policy footnotes of the short leadership of acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan is that at the very moment he stood to speak at Shangri-La, the US released its Indo-Pacific strategy report.

Shanahan may be gone, but the FOIP is up and running. See Peter Jennings’ discussion of the strategy report.

The most high-profile questioning of the Indo-Pacific idea at Shangri-La was in Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s keynote speech, worrying about efforts to ‘create rival blocs, deepen fault lines or force countries to take sides’.

The most detailed questioning was in the annual Asia–Pacific regional security assessment, published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

It’s called the Asia–Pacific assessment, but four of the 12 chapters have the term Indo-Pacific in their titles. When I asked about Indo-Pacific versus Asia–Pacific tensions, Dr Tim Huxley, executive director of IISS–Asia and one of the document’s editors, replied that Indo-Pacific is ‘not a neutral term’ and is ‘value-laden and politically charged’. That was a view discussed in the first chapter of the assessment: ‘The United States’ Indo-Pacific Strategy and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’.

The chapter calls the FOIP a work in progress that reflects US President Donald Trump’s ‘erratic and idiosyncratic style of diplomacy’. The IISS judges that the FOIP strategy ‘aims at recalibrating trade and investment relationships; competing with and in some areas confronting China; and reassuring like-minded states as best Washington can, given the circumstances’.

The FOIP is described as an amalgam, based on a compromise between Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda and long-established policies favoured by the Washington bureaucracy.

The IISS suggests that among the Quad countries (the US, Australia, Japan and India), Australia’s response to the FOIP ‘was arguably the most muted’, even though Australia has been using Indo-Pacific language since the 2013 defence white paper.

Australia views the Indo-Pacific as a unified strategic space where it seeks a regional rules-based order. A US–China trade war and a shift to US transactional bilateralism ‘may affect both Australia’s economy and that order’.

The IISS describes a series of challenges facing the evolution of the FOIP:

  • Trump’s ‘capricious and unpredictable method of conducting diplomacy’
  • clear tension between the administration’s proponents of ‘America first’ and the traditional preferences of the US national security bureaucracy
  • China’s response.

In the chapter’s penultimate paragraph, the IISS judges:

The FOIP has put all off-balance, and all stakeholders are hedging as a result, including China. While many in Canberra, New Delhi, Seoul, Tokyo and beyond welcome a more competitive US approach to China, doubts in the region about Washington’s resolve and about the relative erosion of US economic and military power persist. The spectre of a US–China grand bargain, inimical to the interests of others, also lingers, partly because Trump has repeatedly said he hopes the two powers might agree on one. As a result, US allies and partners are exploring ways of collaborating to protect their interests and defend all or some of the rules-based order.

The institute points to how Trump frequently questions alliances and is always looking for a deal. The destination the Indo-Pacific could be heading for, the IISS concludes, is ‘a fundamental reshaping of the region security order, with China playing a more dominant role’.

ASEAN peers, picks and pokes at the Indo-Pacific

The term ‘Indo-Pacific’ reflects and frames surging strategic rivalry in the place we call ‘the region’.

The Indo-Pacific becomes a controversial label attached to a power contest.

As with any construct—political, social, diplomatic, strategic—it’s about who is doing the constructing and why.

The shift from Asia–Pacific to Indo-Pacific is more than a semantic geographic broadening. This is about mood swing as well as geopolitical forces.

Asia–Pacific became the descriptor du jour in the 1980s and 1990s. Viewed today, that was a time of sunny optimism: Cold War ending, US triumphant, globalisation glowing, China surging and Asia ever richer.

The region was at peace and the concept of the Asia–Pacific had a peaceful expectation. The Asia–Pacific was carried on the shoulders of business as well as leaders, with much of the shaping and shifting done by foreign and trade ministers. Diplomatic and trade perspectives plus optimistic regionalism built APEC and the East Asia Summit.

Today, the Indo-Pacific is driven by defence ministers and strategists. Leaders variously embrace the construct, avoid it or hate it. Diplomats divide. Business is bewildered. A darker era renders the Indo-Pacific in sombre hues.

China abhors the Indo-Pacific usage, a distaste shared by Russia.

The Indo-Pacific set includes the United States, Japan, India, Australia, the United Kingdom and France.

Southeast Asia stands uneasily in the middle.

ASEAN is labouring to produce a vision of the Indo-Pacific that can be embraced by all 10 members. Trouble is, the US proclamation of its ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy has electrified the construct, making it dangerous to touch.

How does ASEAN handle the free-and-open current that posits China as the alternating reverse—unfree and closed?

The jest is that ASEAN knows it’s too difficult to get a definitive concept of the Indo-Pacific; far better to stand outside to pick, poke and peer at the outlook. The play on concept versus outlook—being inside the idea or outside pondering it—draws on the language of Indonesia’s concept paper on the ‘Indo-Pacific outlook’. ASEAN can’t give a firm notion so much as express views and state hopes.

The exchange-of-views approach was how ASEAN reported the Indo-Pacific discussion in November when 18 leaders gathered for the East Asia Summit in Singapore:

We had a broad discussion on the various Indo-Pacific concepts. We noted ongoing discussions within ASEAN to develop collective cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region. We highlighted that cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region should embrace key principles such as ASEAN Centrality, openness, transparency, inclusivity, and a rules-based approach, in order to enhance mutual trust, respect and benefit.

ASEAN’s struggle and the difficulty of shifting from Asia–Pacific to Indo-Pacific flavoured speeches at this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue.

Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s keynote speech twice referred to the Asia–Pacific: once in describing the US as the dominant Asia–Pacific power after the end of the Cold War, and the other in talking about the coverage of a new free trade deal for the Asia–Pacific, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (no US role but not a bloc).

The Indo-Pacific got one passing, sceptical mention from Lee. Several countries had ‘proposed various concepts of Indo-Pacific cooperation’, he said, but these ideas were ‘less fully elaborated or implemented’ than China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Cop that! China apparently is further ahead with the BRI build than others are with the Indo-Pacific construct. Talk about alternating currents.

Then Lee offered what I’d call a pointed description of ASEAN’s struggle with the Indo-Pacific:

We support regional cooperation initiatives which are open and inclusive platforms for countries to cooperate constructively and deepen regional integration. These initiatives should strengthen existing cooperation arrangements centred on ASEAN; they should not undermine them, create rival blocs, deepen fault lines or force countries to take sides. They should help bring countries together, rather than split them apart.

The speech by Malaysia’s defence minister, Mohamad Sabu, had three mentions of the Asia–Pacific: in the foundation of regional order, in ‘the realignment and restructuring of middle powers’ foreign and security policies’, and in the prediction that the uncertain relationship between the US and China ‘will remain as an implicit factor in shaping the stability of the Asia–Pacific region, particularly of Southeast Asia countries’. The Indo-Pacific got nary a mention.

By contrast, the Philippines’ defence minister, Delfin Lorenzana, embraced the new construct. He used Indo-Pacific seven times in his speech, with no mention of the Asia–Pacific. ‘The Indo-Pacific’, he explained, ‘is the new pivot of global geopolitics. It is where the future of the international order will likely be decided. This mega-region, however, is also a cauldron of unimaginably complex challenges, which will transcend the capabilities—and strategic imagination—of any single power or any limited grouping of nations.’

Going the other way, the speech by Vietnam’s defence minister, Ngo Xuan Lich, had seven Asia–Pacific mentions and zilch for Indo-Pacific.

Within ASEAN, Indonesia has been doing most of the pushing for an Indo-Pacific concept or outlook. Yet Indonesia’s defence minister, Ryamizard Ryacudu, managed only two Indo-Pacific mentions, with no sightings of Asia–Pacific. Southeast Asia is ‘a strategic maritime fulcrum in the Indo-Pacific’, he said, along with this expression of ASEAN centrality: ‘ASEAN is a concept and also a way, and the key to the stability of the Indo-Pacific region.’

ASEAN is loud about what it doesn’t want: blocs, fault lines and having to take sides.

The struggle is with an Indo-Pacific that shifts from geographic construct to an arena for contest—and the label for a US strategy.

ASEAN frets about rules and order

Yes to a rules-based system in the Indo-Pacific. But who rules, who writes the rules, and how fares the system?

And yes to the reality of a rapidly evolving security order in the Asia–Pacific. But how goes the evolution, what’s the order, and where’s the security? Please mind the speed.

My annual immersion in the Shangri-La Dialogue last weekend offered much to digest on the tone and temperature of the times.

It’s symptomatic of the rules-and-order quandary that even the geographic construct is contested: Indo-Pacific or Asia–Pacific? The region struggles with how it should define itself. More starkly, the region struggles.

The defence ministers kept coming back to the growing sense of flux and danger. It recalled Joseph Nye’s line from the 1990s: ‘Security is like oxygen—you tend not to notice it until you begin to lose it, but once that occurs there is nothing else that you will think about.’

To see how Shangri-La struggled with what the region is losing, draw together the contributions from ASEAN members.

While Southeast Asia always offers a range of perspectives, ASEAN strives to define the mid-point of any contest. The regional grouping that never wants to choose has a sharp eye for the perils of competing options.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong did temperature and tone duty with his keynote address, lamenting the lack of strategic trust between the US and China. Lee opened with these words: ‘Our world is at a turning point. Globalisation is under siege. Tensions between the US and China are growing and, like everyone else, we in Singapore are anxious.’

Before concluding the speech with a call for the wise course of openness, integration and cooperation, Lee’s penultimate thoughts sketched scenarios of a future drawn from history:

At different times in the last two centuries Southeast Asia has seen rivalry between great powers. It has experienced destruction and suffering from war and occupation. It has been divided into opposing camps. It has seen how isolation from the world economy led to stagnation and sometimes conflict. At other times, it has benefited from international cooperation that created an open, stable environment where countries could prosper in peace.

On a long view, we cannot rule out any of these eventualities.

The Philippines’ defence minister, Delfin Lorenzana, said the untethering of networks of economic interdependence raised the risk of confrontation, even of sleepwalking into war:

What we are dealing with is not only a shift in the material balance of forces in our region, but also in our very conception of the emerging regional order—and, respectively, the anchors of peace and prosperity in the twenty-first century. The consequence of such a seismic geopolitical shift is a troubling form of superpower rivalry, which has now extended—to the anxiety of many in the region—even to the realm of trade, investment and cyberspace.

If left unchecked, this new and perilous dynamic could potentially upset globalisation as we know it.

Using a more traditional ASEAN-centric approach, Malaysia’s defence minister, Mohamad Sabu, offered a three-tiered view of the uncertain and complex regional order:

  1. Geopolitical competition between the US and China will shape the stability of the Asia–Pacific.
  2. The intra-ASEAN dynamic faces overlapping border claims, large movements of refugees and a rush of internal conflict. As an example, he said, Malaysia believes the Rohingya issue is no longer merely just a domestic Myanmar concern.
  3. Non-traditional security issues such as maritime violence (sea piracy and robbery), terrorism and cybersecurity will need to be addressed.

In the final speech of the dialogue, Singapore’s defence minister, Ng Eng Hen, said Asia had been transformed over the past two decades. But the tariff and technology barriers of the US–China trade war ‘have altered the trajectory of this region onto an altogether different orbit’.

Ng said an ‘America first’ foreign policy had implications ‘as troubling as they are unpredictable. It is, in essence, a disruptive change, not only for the US and its allies but for the world.’

The prospect is for parallel blocs with deepening economic and security divisions. The ultimate loser’s game, Ng said, would be for the US and China to force individual countries to choose sides on issues of trade, technology, security and comprehensive partnership.

The challenge for both the US and China, amid their bilateral struggle, as dominant powers in Asia, is to offer that inclusive and overarching moral justification for acceptance by all countries, big and small, of their dominance beyond military might. Both countries have cited security as the basis for current positions—the US in trade and China in the South China Sea. But whatever the underlying motivations for either country, if America First or China’s rise is perceived to be lopsided against the national interests of other countries or the collective good, the acceptance of the United States’ or China’s dominance will be diminished. Countries will hedge first in trade ties and later, inevitably, in security alliances.

In the novel Lost horizon, Shangri-La was a mythical utopian place in the mountains. By contrast, the future over the horizon of the Shangri-La Dialogue is more murky than mythic, more scary than utopian.

Oz voice in the Asia–Pacific (part 5): the fading broadcast signal

Australia’s international broadcasting effort in the Asia–Pacific is at its lowest-ever level.

These are the worst of times for Australian international TV, which is 25 years old this year. And these are the hardest of days for Radio Australia, which is set for its 80th birthday next year.

They’re not corpses, but they are on life support.

The cash is only just dripping and a lot of life has departed. The international TV and radio efforts are gasping, limping shadows of their former selves.

In 2010, the ABC spent $36 million on international services (about $42 million in today’s dollars). These days, a guesstimate of the international broadcasting spend is $11 million; the ABC isn’t too explicit about the budget. Such vagueness is symptomatic. Perhaps it’s the reticence born of embarrassment.

Canberra should be straight-out ashamed, because this has been a disgraceful trashing of a significant foreign-policy asset. That’s the central point of this series of columns about the fading of the Oz broadcast voice in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia: the failure of strategic vision that has allowed such a foreign-policy instrument to be so wasted.

Last week’s column made the case for creating an Australian International Broadcasting Corporation (AIBC) to resolve the tension between the domestic and international broadcasting demands of the ABC’s charter. Its purpose would be to use independent journalism to serve Australia’s interests, influence and values in the Asia–Pacific.

The propositions are Canberra-centric, not broadcasting-based, reflecting the consensus of the Oz polity about today’s worrying international trends and, just as importantly, some long-held truths.

Not least of those truths is the one to be found at the heart of seven Australian defence white papers over 40 years: geography matters.

Traditionally, Australia wanted a strong international broadcasting voice in what defence-speak calls our region of primary strategic interest: Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. The broadcasting tradition is looking most modern.

Geography is back.

Or as that old geographer and still forceful strategist Paul Dibb might grizzle, the demands of geography never went away, we’re just feeling ’em with fresh force.

As Dibb observes, ‘Australia’s international security outlook is starting to look very threatening.’ To bolster Australia’s security, he writes, ‘we need to focus more on our region of primary strategic concern … We should aim to reassert our influence in these areas as China moves increasingly to challenge our strategic space.’

Coming at the same worries from a different direction, Anthony Milner says Australia’s foreign-policymakers have to start working on a Plan B, to get busy and get creative to build ‘Australia’s independent influence’ in the region.

Gareth Evans says Australia must look to its interests and influence and good international citizenship, because ‘the assumptions which have sustained and underpinned Australian security and economic policy for decades are in meltdown’. He offers four key elements for Australia’s response: ‘Less America. More self-reliance. More Asia. More global engagement.’

In the foreign-policy game, the word ‘influence’ stands besides ‘interests’, at the calculating, cerebral end of the field; yet influence and interests must always be within shouting distance of values and beliefs, which tend to reside in the heart and hearth of the arena.

The words that describe good journalism—‘reliable’, ‘independent’, ‘factual’—are exactly the same things you’d want in the foreign policy of a country seeking to persuade others, protect interests, project influence and promote values.

Lots of strategic angst begets plenty of anxiety and a quest for answers. Good answers are always scarce. And some of the old answers have much to offer.

Tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

Great journalism is part of what Australia should be doing for the Asia–Pacific. We’ve got a wonderful journalistic tradition—a hack heritage—that should be honoured by being rediscovered and reinvented for the 21st century.

The review of Australia’s media reach in the Asia–Pacific is now considering the future of our broadcasting voice, having finished taking submissions last week. What started as an orphan inquiry—not really wanted by the government and unloved by the ABC—has a chance to do great work, to give the government options for a policy redo. Time to shift from life support to new life.

A fresh vision and lots more cash for Oz broadcasting in the South Pacific are the obvious first steps. Certainly, that’d be consistent with the interests and values elements of the enhanced Biketawa Declaration on security cooperation, to be signed by Australia and the other members of the Pacific Islands Forum.

Australia needs to match the sentiments it’s embracing in the new Biketawa Declaration with plenty of action and ambition.

Maybe the orphan inquiry on international broadcasting will be let off the leash and told to go hard for something that looks like a landmark legacy.

Governments on the brink sometimes think about legacy—be generous, call it good policy—in the lucid moments between parliamentary tremors, political tantrums and electoral turmoil.

Power up Oz journalism in the Asia–Pacific. The times call for a strong and distinctive Australian voice.

Oz voice in the Asia–Pacific (part 2): adjust the TV picture

For 25 years, Australia’s international TV voice has been a political plaything and a broadcasting afterthought, constantly facing chops and changes.

Australian governments have treated our international TV service more as a political game than a policy interest. Canberra’s attention has been spasmodic and fickle.

For the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, international TV has been a constant but quickly changing problem, and too often an afterthought.

The government’s review of Australia’s media reach in the Asia–Pacific needs to peer into the future by taking lessons from history. Past performance may not be a reliable indicator of future performance (as superannuation industry advertising has to testify), but past stuff-ups can foretell future pitfalls. And in Oz international TV, the stumbles have a serial rhyme.

A simple, stark illustration of the history of chop, change and political spasm is to run through the eight changes of identity and ownership over the 25 years of Australia’s international TV service.

  1. First was Australia Television (ATV) in 1993, when the Keating Labor government gave the ABC start-up funding. Unlike the rest of the ABC, though, ATV carried commercials. Canberra wanted it, but didn’t want to pay for it.
  2. Channel 7 was given control in 1998 (twice—once with news, then as a pure shopping channel). The commercial network made a hash of it, didn’t make any money and lost interest. So …
  3. In 2001, it went back to the ABC as ABC Television International.
  4. A year later, it was rebranded as ABC AsiaPacific.
  5. Then came another name change: the Australia Network (2006).
  6. In the 2014 budget, the Coalition cut all funding to the Australia Network. It closed, to be replaced by a drastically cut-down operation.
  7. The Australia Network’s replacement, Australia Plus, started in September 2014.
  8. From 1 July 2018, the network has been renamed ABC Australia.

Neither side of Oz politics emerges with much credit from this zigzag. Canberra’s level of interest has been as changeable as the name of the service.

The moment of creation under Labor 25 years ago illustrates the recurring themes of limited Canberra attention, political crosscurrents, and plenty of vision but little money.

Launching ATV to broadcast to the Asia–Pacific, the Keating government and the ABC boasted of its significance for regional engagement and Oz interests, ranging from media and education to business and foreign policy. Confident talk wasn’t matched by cash or commitment.

The ABC sought to establish an international version of its domestic service, but couldn’t devote proper resources to ATV—not least because the government didn’t want to pay for what it knew Australia needed.

Programming suffered because the ABC had domestic copyright to broadcast programs within Australia, but didn’t own international rights. The Keating government knew ATV was worthwhile, but wouldn’t give anything more than start-up funding for the satellite service. Once established, it would have to pay its own way with advertising.

The refusal to launch ATV as a fully funded public broadcasting service (like the rest of the ABC) was telling. A hybrid design—part ABC, part commercial—was the half-arsed response of a half-hearted government. That half-in, half-out problem continued through the zigzagging history.

Domestic politics too often twists or derails discussion of Oz international TV. The Keating cabinet’s debates about establishing ATV demonstrated the problem, veering off into rant-and-rave sessions about how ABC domestic reporting was hurting the Labor government. Much bile was directed at the managing director of the ABC, David Hill, who’d fought budget cuts to the corporation with a famous campaign proclaiming that the ABC cost each Australian only ‘eight cents a day’.

A couple of times when ATV was on the cabinet agenda, Hill came from Sydney to Canberra to support the idea. The trouble was, as one Foreign Affairs official told me, having the ebullient ABC head sitting in the cabinet anteroom was a disastrous provocation. After navigating past Hill, ministers would have another ABC hate session, then defer the international TV submission to another day.

Themes from the creation story recur over the 25 years:

Political change overturns constant policy: Each change of federal government—Keating to Howard to Rudd to Abbott—has been a chop-change moment for international TV. The foreign policy consensus on Asia–Pacific interests shared by Labor and Liberal governments has never translated into agreement on the worth of our broadcasting service to the regions (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, different audiences and different regions). Thus …

The gap between big interests and little cash: The high rhetoric of Asia–Pacific engagement is negated by the low commitment of dollars to Oz regional broadcasting.

Domestic ABC versus international ABC: All federal governments come to fear/distrust/hate the way the ABC reports on them; that perennial Canberra rant-and-rave problem obscures a clear understanding of what public broadcasting can do for Australia in the region. It’s a problem that has a funny dimension: politicians know the power of the ABC, but they’re not willing to use that power to the full to serve our international interests.

International ABC can’t merely be domestic ABC: The ABC’s domestic programming is vital to the international service, but that’s the start, not the finish. Reaching and holding audiences in Asia and the South Pacific is about talking with, not just talking to. Diverse audiences have different needs. Programming has to be for them, not just rebroadcast from Oz.

Chop and change hurts Australian interests: International broadcasting is expensive and complex because a lot of power and riches are in play. Australia’s constant and growing interests in the Asia–Pacific demand a constant and growing broadcast conversation (using ‘broadcast’ as a catch-all term, because all media technologies are converging).

Times are tough in the foreign policy game and good policy responses are scarce. A strong, consistent voice in our region will serve Australian values as well as interests. Get the zigzag pattern off the screen and adjust the international TV picture.