As Andrew Davies mentioned last week, we’ve just held an Australia-France Defence and Industry Dialogue. We discussed a wide range of security, industry and defence cooperation issues.

There was a lively discussion about the big picture of the regional security outlook, with an emphasis on the increasingly important role of the Indo–Pacific system for global security and trade. But the success or otherwise of these sorts of gatherings isn’t so much the quality of the discussion, but the practical steps that follow. As a participant at the forum, I’d like to outline some specific suggestions for security and defence cooperation. While France mightn’t automatically come to mind as a regional partner, there’s already a lot going on between our two countries, and plenty of future opportunities.

In the South Pacific, France contributes to the islands through aid, disaster relief, and search and rescue. It supports the island countries with surveillance of their EEZ’s, as well as patrolling the high seas. They’ve got operational ports in Noumea (New Caledonia) and Papeete (Tahiti), a small maritime air wing, and a small surface force, coordinated through a headquarters. Read more

Recent contributions to The Strategist have provided valuable insights on the extent and limits of India’s willingness and capacity to assert itself as a nascent great power. Implicit in these discussions lies a deeper issue, specifically the challenge of how best to secure international order in an increasingly contested Indian Ocean Region (IOR). As both the epicentre of the struggle against jihadist extremism and an increasingly critical ‘energy superhighway’ linking East and South Asia to resource hubs in the Persian Gulf, East Africa and Northwestern Australia, the IOR is rapidly growing in strategic significance. But the absence of either a ‘hub and spokes’ style alliance system or a well-developed tradition of multilateral security diplomacy comparable to equivalent structures in the Asia–Pacific significantly complicates efforts to establish a viable regional security architecture. India’s ‘rise’—however halting and incomplete—thus occurs in a radically different regional context from the densely institutionalised web of security and economic cooperation that is presently shaping China’s ascendancy in the Asia–Pacific. For this reason, when trying to make sense of the magnitude and likely consequences of India’s rise, it’s necessary to contemplate the range of possible alternative regional security orders that may co-evolve alongside a stronger and more assertive India:

1) An Indian Ocean Pax Americana: The US Navy’s re-calibration of its ‘two ocean’ orientation (from an Atlantic/Pacific to an Indo-Pacific focus) and the greater interest in the IOR evidenced in the US ‘rebalance’ towards Asia both provide some grounds for envisaging a more overt US leadership role within the local security order. Nevertheless, a combination of limited US interest and likely regional resistance to US hegemonic pretensions—not least from India—make the prospective emergence of an IOR Pax Americana a remote prospect. Undoubtedly, the US Navy will remain the principal security guarantor for regional maritime commerce, and the US will increasingly work to strengthen defence and intelligence cooperation with regional partners. But even the staunchest boosters of American primacy are unlikely to see the value or the viability of attempting to replicate in the IOR the obtrusive, costly and densely institutionalised types of security orders that have underpinned US dominance in Western Europe and East Asia since 1945. Read more