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The ‘Indo-Pacific’ and geopolitical
anxieties about China's rise in the Asian
regional order
Chengxin Pan
Published online: 31 Mar 2014.
To cite this article: Chengxin Pan (2014) The ‘Indo-Pacific’ and geopolitical anxieties about China's
rise in the Asian regional order, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 68:4, 453-469, DOI:
10.1080/10357718.2014.884054
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The ‘Indo-Pacific’and geopolitical anxieties about
China’s rise in the Asian regional order
1
CHENGXIN PAN*
The Indo-Pacific seems to have come of age. In a growing body of literature
on this subject, the rise of India and China, as well as the ensuing great-power
competition and deepening economic links across the Asia-Pacific and the
Indian Ocean regions are often seen as mere (albeit new) geopolitical realities,
which the term ‘Indo-Pacific’can best capture. This article, however, ques-
tions the ‘naturalness’of the ‘Indo-Pacific’and illustrates how it is largely a
product of geopolitical imaginations about the perceived ‘rise of China’—
imaginations that are shared among some influential observers and practi-
tioners, particularly in the USA, Australia, Japan and India. Fuelled by their
collective anxieties about China’s growing influence in Asia, the ‘Indo-
Pacific’is not an innocent or neutral description, but is a manufactured
super-region designed to hedge against a perceived Sino-centric regional
order. In doing so, it is complicit in the production of great-power rivalries
and regional security dilemmas. It is thus important that the ‘Indo-Pacific’
construct be subject to critical re-examination and re-imagination.
Keywords: Asian regionalism; Australia; China; geopolitical anxieties; India;
Indo-Pacific; Japan; USA
He who controls the Indo-Pacific controls the future (Munson 2013).
Introduction
Concepts about space and time, such as the ‘Asia-Pacific’and the ‘Asian
Century’, are not articulated lightly in international relations discourses. When
a spatial or temporal term comes into vogue, it comes with political connota-
tions and practical implications. It is in this context that we ought to consider
the spatial term ‘Indo-Pacific’, which has recently made it into the lexicon of
official speeches, think-tank reports and government White Papers, as well as
scholarly works. Whilst many pundits and practitioners are embracing this new
*Chengxin Pan is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Humanities and
Social Sciences at Deakin University. He is the author of Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global
Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise (Edward Elgar, 2012). <chengxin.pan@deakin.
edu.au>
Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2014
Vol. 68, No. 4, 453–469, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2014.884054
© 2014 Australian Institute of International Affairs
Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 18:48 24 June 2014
formulation, others have cast doubt on its usefulness, or even questioned its
actual existence. Yet, despite its sudden stardom in foreign policy circles and
some debate around its policy implications, how the ‘Indo-Pacific’as a political
spatial concept came about has not been well understood.
This article is an attempt to address this gap. It will first briefly touch on the
‘Indo-Pacific’debate and highlight this missing dimension in the debate. Then it
turns to how the USA, Australia, Japan, India and China, among other players,
together produce this regional construct amidst ongoing geopolitical anxieties
about the shape and trajectory of future Asian regional order. While acknow-
ledging China’s role in this process, I argue that, as a discursive construct, the
‘Indo-Pacific’is designed primarily to enable the USA and its regional allies to
‘naturally’strengthen and expand their existing regional alliance networks in
order to hedge against a perceived China-centric regional order in Asia. In order
to arrest the anxiety-fuelled rivalry and security dilemmas that are likely to
accompany this emerging ‘Indo-Pacific’region, the article concludes with a call
for a critical re-imagination of the now increasingly taken-for-granted term.
The ‘Indo-Pacific’debate
For much of the twentieth century, the concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’, coined by
German geopolitician Karl Haushofer in the 1920s, had attracted little attention
(except in the field of marine biology). It was not until the late 2000s that the
‘Indo-Pacific’began to make an impressive comeback, and it is now widely
touted as reflecting new geopolitical realities. Indian strategic analyst C. Raja
Mohan (2012, 212) argues that the seas of the western Pacific and the Indian
Ocean constitute ‘a single integrated geopolitical theater’, which is the ‘Indo-
Pacific’. In Australia, Rory Medcalf (2012, 3) believes that the new term is ‘a
valid and objective description of the greater regional system in which Australia
now finds itself’. Australian Ambassador to Washington Kim Beazley (2012,
52) agrees, maintaining that the Indo-Pacific presents ‘a practical, strategic
reality that has to be addressed’. Crucially, the Australian Defence White Paper
2013 (Commonwealth of Australia 2013, 7) for the first time identifies
Australia’s region as the ‘Indo-Pacific strategic arc’.
In the USA, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2011, 57) referred to the
‘Indo-Pacific’as the new ‘Asia-Pacific’. If this geographical fact was not clear
enough before, we are told that it is because its importance had been ‘obscured’
by recent ‘messy land wars’, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that
the fog of war has largely lifted, the Indo-Pacific has presented itself with ‘a
vivid geographical face’(Kaplan 2010,xi–xii). Thus, Robert Kaplan (2010, xiii;
my emphasis) suggests that his book Monsoon merely tries to ‘describe the
ceaseless currents of historical change [in the greater Indian Ocean region] as
they shape the contours of the new century’. His invocation of a ‘monsoon’
reminds us, among other things, of the region’s timeless natural coherence.
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Others are sceptical of the ‘Indo-Pacific’idea, at least with regard to its
strategic repercussions. Retired Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt (2013, 65)
suggests that it ‘would be premature to make too much’of this notion. Some
Australian scholars argue that the emphasis on the Asian littoral (the Indo-
Pacific) ignores Asia’s vast territorial expanses, or ‘horizontal Asia’(Bubalo and
Cook 2010). Nick Bisley and Andrew Phillips (2012) question the strategic
wisdom of promoting the ‘Indo-Pacific’, given the risk that it may intensify
regional competition. Similarly, Rumley, Doyle, and Chaturvedi (2012) point
out that the concept is US-centric/China-exclusive. Even India’s National
Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon (2013) does not see the ‘Indo-Pacific’as
‘one geopolitical unit’. Otherwise, he argues that we risk ‘prescribing one
medicine for the different security ailments’characteristic of its diverse places.
I agree that the ‘Indo-Pacific’is not a natural geographical space, but rather a
discursive construct that, if put into international practice, could have undesir-
able consequences for regional stability (Chacko 2012b; Gnanagurunathan
2012). But, until now, questions such as how the ‘Indo-Pacific’is discursively
constructed, within what metageographical frameworks, against what types of
regional backdrop and for what purposes have yet to be more thoroughly
examined. This article cannot address all these questions. In the pages that
follow, its main focus is on how the ‘Indo-Pacific’has been enabled by a suite of
geopolitically informed discourses and practices concerning the rise of China in
the Asian regional order.
Imagining/doing the ‘Indo-Pacific’through geopolitical anxieties
National imaginations and geopolitical anxieties
The ‘Indo-Pacific’as a region did not exist prior to its ‘discovery’by astute
observers; rather, it has been imagined into being by them. I will return to this
point in a moment, but one thing about ‘imagination’is worth noting here.
According to David Brin (1989, 67; original emphasis), imagination is a
uniquely human talent that ‘lets us “know”what has never happened, and
even what might truly never happen!’Therefore, by definition, there is always a
gap between what is imagined and what is putatively real—a gap which renders
the imagined object both psychologically exciting and ontologically insecure. In
this sense, anxiety, fear and fantasy are integral to such imagination.
In order to illustrate this point, one need only look at the imagined
community of the nation state. Despite its seemingly organic status, the state
from the beginning suffers chronic anxiety about its precarious ontological
being (raison d’état), hence the incessant concern with national identity,
survival, security, sovereignty, nation-building, living space, territorial integrity,
border control, ‘access’, foreign invasion/takeover, regional order, power
balance and power shift. As Europe was the birthplace of the nation state, it
is not surprising that it was there that classical geopolitics—the dominant
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metageographical framework about the world—was first developed as a
‘science’to help account for and manage nationalist anxieties about ‘survival’
in an ‘anarchical’interstate system. For instance, Halford Mackinder’s ideas
about ‘geographical pivot’and the ‘Euro-Asia heart-land’reflected both the
anxiety and excitement about Britain’s global imperial ambitions (Ó Tuathail
1996). In popular culture, copious invasion novels testify to the prevalence of
such geopolitical anxieties in the public imagination.
Geopolitical anxieties are closely linked to a raft of practices of spatial
security: war, territorial annexation, expansion, alliance formation, military
build-up, the arms race, missile defence, military exercises, forward defence,
strategic talks and so forth. As a result of such practices and their international
interactions, regional boundaries may be redrawn or reinterpreted with new
meanings. In order to better understand how the ‘Indo-Pacific’has come about,
I now turn to the specific geopolitical anxieties and imaginations in the USA,
Australia, Japan, India and China, and examine how their imaginative
geographies and associated security practices together help construct this new
political space. My focus on these countries, I should add, does not imply that
they are unitary or the only actors in the imaginative and constitutive processes.
US geopolitical imaginations of China’s rise
The ‘Indo-Pacific’has its roots first and foremost in US geopolitical imagina-
tions about the world in general and the rise of China in particular. As the
‘imagined community par excellence’(Campbell 1998, 91, 132), geopolitics has
been central to the US self-imagination. US security and survival, for instance, is
often predicated on various spatial practices of geopolitics, with ever expanding
frontiers seen as crucial for its self-renewal as the exceptional and indispensable
nation. Dean Acheson (1950) once asserted that Americans ‘are children of
freedom’and ‘cannot be safe except in an environment of freedom’. In order to
create and maintain this living space for freedom, its value has to be
communicated to ‘the four corners of the earth’. This belief reflects what Hardt
and Negri (2000, 165) call US imperial sovereignty, with ‘its tendency toward
an open, expansive project operating on an unbounded terrain’. While classical
geopolitics gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine to exclude the European powers
from the Americas, the USA’s new imperial imagination, combining both
geopolitics and a certain ‘New World’idealism, provided the impetus for
Americans to turn to ‘new frontiers’in the Pacific and Asia. Running through
the USA’s foreign policy tradition is a strategic article of faith that the USA
ought to ‘dominate the western hemisphere while not permitting another great
power to dominate Europe or Northeast Asia’(Mearsheimer 2001a, 46).
While this strategy helps ease US geopolitical anxieties, its geopolitical
mindset of seeing its mirror image in the behaviour of other powers sustains a
perpetual state of fear, with China now increasingly as its main ‘source’(Pan
2004,2012a). With its vast land mass and fast-growing economy, China is seen
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as a natural candidate to dominate Asia and uproot US primacy in the region.
Drawing from the logic that explains US expansion and ascendancy in the past,
many American observers perceive China’s rise in Asia as following an
essentially similar geopolitical trajectory. As John Mearsheimer (2001b, 401)
argues, like the rise of the USA in the nineteenth century, a rising China ‘would
surely pursue regional hegemony’with its own Monroe Doctrine. It is predicted
that this Chinese Monroe Doctrine would ‘push U.S. forces out of the Asia-
Pacific region’(Walt 2012) and lead to ‘the loss of the Indian and Western
Pacific oceans as veritable American military lakes’(Kaplan 2009a, 45). As the
imaginative catchphrase of ‘Red Star over the Pacific’implies, the days of US
control of the vast ocean seem to be numbered (Yoshihara and Holmes 2010).
Washington’s heightened concerns over its freedom of navigation in the South
China Sea and China’s‘anti-access/area denial’(A2/AD) capabilities, for
instance, epitomise this anxiety. Indeed, ‘access denial has become the prism
through which policymakers in Washington survey the rise of Chinese sea
power’(Yoshihara and Holmes 2010, 6).
US anxieties about China’s rise are not just about the latter’s economic and
military power per se (Zhang 2013). Increasingly, the ‘China threat’is now seen
in the context of the Middle Kingdom’s growing regional ambition. In other
words, the traditional bilateral competition between Washington and Beijing
has taken the form of regionalism rivalry (Zhu 2013)—a contest that China
appears to be winning. For example, after the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis,
China emerged as a ‘responsible economic actor’in the region (Breslin 2008). In
contrast to George W. Bush’s‘shock and awe’unilateralism, Beijing’s‘charm
offensive’in South-East Asia and elsewhere seemed to win it many friends, so
much so that it was widely believed that a Sino-centric East Asian order was on
the horizon (Beeson 2009).
Thus, at the height of the USA’s war on terrorism, the neoconservative
Francis Fukuyama (2005) urged the USA not to forget that ‘the biggest
geopolitical development of this generation’was the rise of China. Meanwhile,
US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick (2005) made it clear that China’s
rise had generated ‘a cauldron of anxiety’in the USA and elsewhere, although
he remained hopeful that China could still be socialised to become a ‘responsible
stakeholder’. Similar hopes were shared by Barack Obama at the beginning of
his presidency when he briefly pursued a policy of strategic reassurance to China
(Wei 2013; Zhao 2012). Yet his departure from ‘balance-of-power’geopolitics
proved to be short-lived, as Obama quickly embraced a more Bush-style,
neoconservative vision of friends and foes, and democracies and autocracies
(Kagan 2010). From this standpoint, the increasing regional clout of an assertive
authoritarian China took on a doubly sinister quality and rebalancing against it
became a strategic imperative. The USA’s fear of losing the ‘contest over
defining an Asian regional identity’(Buzan 2012,2–3) can thus help explain
Obama’s tour of Asian democracies in 2010 and the US-led Trans-Pacific
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Partnership framework, as well as the rising popularity of the ‘Indo-Pacific’
concept.
The ‘Indo-Pacific’construct offers the rationale for the Pentagon’s AirSea
Battle plan, as well as recent US strategic deployment and realignment in this
vast region, sometimes known as its ‘pivot to Asia’(Medcalf, Heinrichs, and
Jones 2011,19–20; O’Hanlon 2012; White 2012,76–77). It serves a dual
purpose of both constraining the rise of a ‘peer competitor’in Asia and
preventing regional integration from being ‘inward looking and exclusive’
(Condoleezza Rice, quoted in Ciorciari 2011, 146). The second purpose reflects
another US geopolitical imperative, which has been brilliantly summed up by
Zbigniew Brzezinski. Imperial geostrategy, as he puts it, needs ‘to prevent
collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep
tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming
together’(Brzezinski 1997, quoted in Beeson 2009, 507). In this sense, the
USA’s motive behind the ‘Indo-Pacific’becomes clearer. There is no better way
of keeping the ‘barbarians’apart than by designing a ‘super-region’like the
‘Indo-Pacific’in order to allow the USA to legitimately claim that ‘we are here
to stay’, all the while thwarting the emergence of indigenous regional groupings
(Buzan 2012).
This is how the Indian Ocean was brought to the fore. Another ‘American
lake’, the Indian Ocean region has become more fluid with the rise of India and
the spectre of India–China rivalry or even cooperation. For example, during
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to India in 2005, his Indian counterpart
Manmohan Singh posited that: ‘Together, India and China could reshape the
world order’(quoted in Prestwitz 2005). But such an order is hardly music to
the ears of US strategists. Invoking the vicious imagery of a monsoon, Kaplan,
whose writings have done much to educate US officials about the greater Indian
Ocean (Green and Shearer 2012, 175), promptly warned that the dawn of the
Indo-Pacific era could not have come at ‘a more turbulent time’. Crowded with
‘highly volatile and populous pivot states’, the region is characterised by ‘weak
institutions, tottering infrastructures, and young and restive populations
tempted by extremism. Yet they are the future’(Kaplan 2010, xii; see also
Munson 2013).
To Kaplan (2010, xiv) and others, ‘America’s own destiny and that of the
West as a whole’are on the line in these troubled waters. Yet, by the same
token, these menacing imageries also open up strategic opportunities for the
USA to ‘pivot’to this part of the world and enlist India as a ‘desirable’partner
(Blank 2007, 1). To US defence contractors, India’s estimated US$80 billion
military modernisation program by 2015 no doubt adds another dimension to
New Delhi’s desirability (Berteau and Green 2012, 38). With more than 60 joint
military exercises with the Pentagon in the past decade, India has conducted
more exercises with the USA than with any other country (Berteau and Green
2012). Despite the USA’s role in initiating those operations (Gilboy and
Heginbotham 2013, 125–126), Clinton (2011, 58) insisted that it was the
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region which was ‘eager for our leadership and our business’. In any case, as
McDevitt (2013, 8) points out, it was India’s emergence as a strategic partner
and the strengthening of US–India security ties that ‘led U.S. government policy
officials to begin thinking about the interconnectedness of the Pacific and Indian
oceans’, not the other way round. Also, by insisting on ‘old-fashioned alliance
management’(i.e. the ‘hub-and-spoke’system) instead of new regional multi-
lateral initiatives (Green and Shearer 2012, 187), the elite conception of the
‘Indo-Pacific’‘fits with a longstanding and very clever antiregional diplomatic
tactic of the US’(Buzan 2012).
Australia and Japan: Asia’s‘odd men out’are in
If the new regional concept has a paradoxically anti-regional flavour, why are
regional powers like Australia and Japan attracted to it? Australia has a split
identity between its history and its geography. As its economic prosperity is
increasingly linked to Asia and particularly China, Australia has been anxious
to become part of the action and capitalise on the ‘Asian Century’opportunity,
and to that end it needs to cast off its ‘odd-man-out’status in Asian regionalism
(Beeson and Yoshimatsu 2007). This partly explains why Canberra wanted to
join the East Asia Summit (EAS), in order to ‘have a say in building any new
regional architecture from the ground up’(Richardson 2005, 360), even if that
meant ‘we’had to ‘hold our nose and sign the damn thing’that is the ASEAN
(Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Treaty of Amity and Cooperation
(Sheridan 2005). But, once inside, Australia was troubled by another anxiety:
the danger of dominance by and dependence on China. Long imagining itself as
a Western colonial ‘outpost’in the East, Australia on its own has never felt
naturally at home in Asia. As former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd reasoned, the
overshadowing of US and British dominance by looming Chinese and Indian
ascendancy would leave Australia vulnerable to a ‘much more complex region’.
In order to ease such anxiety, Canberra predictably sought to strengthen its US
alliance—hence Rudd’s‘Asia-Pacific Community’proposal designed to bring in
the USA to keep China in check (Pan 2012b, 249).
While the Asia-Pacific Community never got off the ground, the continued
rise of China (and India) created the ever aching longing for US reassurance—a
desire that has now been encapsulated in the ‘Indo-Pacific’idea. Among other
things, this regional design seems able to address Australia’s dual anxiety of
being both an ‘odd man out’and an ‘odd man in’, for it at once places Australia
‘at the centre of the action’(Taylor 2013) and allows the addition of two
powerful democratic friends (the USA and India) to its hedging strategy on
China. It is no wonder that many Australians now feel that the ‘Indo-Pacific’
‘makes more sense’and ‘want to talk about’it (Varghese 2012, quoted in Scott
2013b, 4; my emphasis). It sounds like a desire fulfilled.
Canberra’s moment of being the geopolitical centre of action well and truly
arrived in November 2011 when Obama chose the venue of the Australian
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Parliament to declare the USA’s‘pivot to Asia’. During the same visit, the two
allies announced the rotational deployment of 2500 US Marines in Darwin. In
2012, a Pentagon-commissioned report expressed strong US interest in using
Australian facilities at the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean and the Stirling
naval base near Perth for US surveillance operations and increased US Navy
access (Berteau and Green 2012, 33). One of the added advantages of choosing
Stirling was that it remains beyond ‘the growing coverage of Chinese A2AD
capabilities’(Berteau and Green 2012, 33). Not coincidentally, the 2012
Australian Defence Force Posture Review and the 2013 Australian Defence
White Paper made recommendations and promises including upgrading the
Cocos Islands’airfield facilities to support unrestricted P-8 and unmanned aerial
vehicle operations, and exploring opportunities for enhanced cooperation with
the US Navy at Stirling (Commonwealth of Australia 2013, 10; Hawke and
Smith 2012, iv). With the ‘Indo-Pacific’now actively promoted as a single
strategic arc central to Australia’s defence, these enhanced military ties with the
USA would hardly need justification.
Japan’s interest in creating an ‘Indo-Pacific’arc has followed a similar
geopolitical logic. Emphasising its dependence on the ‘security of maritime
navigation from Africa and the Middle East to East Asia’, Japan finds it
necessary to engage closely with India, which shares similar interests (Ministry
of Defense 2010, 9). As early as 2007, while visiting India, Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe (2007) proposed ‘a dynamic coupling’of the Pacific and the Indian
Oceans ‘as seas of freedom and of prosperity’. In 2008, Japan and India signed
the Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation and, in 2010, the two countries
held their first senior-level dialogue on foreign affairs and security.
A fear of China’s rising clout in Asian regionalism can largely account for
Japan’s overture to India and its enthusiasm about the ‘Indo-Pacific’concept.
Takashi Terada (2010) argues that it was this China factor that led Japan’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs to advocate the EAS, an Asian regional concept that
would allow Japan to redraw the geopolitical map of East Asia so as to include
Australia, New Zealand and India as additional counterbalances against China.
In this sense, the ‘Indo-Pacific’—or what Abe termed ‘a broader Asia’—is a
continuation of Japan’s expanded EAS (ASEAN+6) regional initiative. The
reason behind Abe’s new proposal, as Terada (2010, 78) notes, was that the
USA, an essential country to Asia’s new regional architecture, was absent from
the EAS at the time.
India: looking and acting east
As the so-called ‘child of partition’with a deep sense of ‘cartographic anxiety’
(Krishna 1996, 196; see also Chacko 2012a, 144–151), India has long been
uneasy about its geopolitical milieu. In the late 1990s, the US military presence
at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean caused alarm among certain Indian
scholars and officials, but more often than not it is China that is seen as India’s
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archrival. According to a 2013 Lowy Institute poll, 83 percent of Indians view
China as a threat (Medcalf 2013a, 15). The US-based analyst Mohan Malik
(2006) describes a Chinese strategy of containing India and squeezing its
traditional strategic space in the region. In order to put this anxiety in
perspective, Kaplan (2009b) argues that many Indians are now big fans of
Alfred Thayer Mahan. Indian analysts such as Gurpreet Khurana and C. Raja
Mohan see an Indo-Pacific ‘rivalry arc’between India and China. With India’s
sea lines of communication apparently at the mercy of the Chinese, they call for
projecting India’s power into the Pacific to match China’s growing presence in
the Indian Ocean (Yoshihara and Holmes 2010, 15).
To be sure, India’s official positions on the ‘Indo-Pacific’are more cautious.
Also, since the beginning of its ‘Look East’policy, India’s interest in the ‘Indo-
Pacific’formulation has much to do with geoeconomic considerations. None-
theless, given the long-standing mistrust between India and China, a strategic
logic is not far below the surface. For example, the 2007 India’s Maritime
Military Strategy defines the South China Sea as a maritime area of interest for
India (Scott 2013a, 53). Seizing on such common threads of apprehension about
China within the US and Indian strategic communities, Secretary Clinton urged
India, which still has a ‘strategic autonomy’tradition, to ‘not just look east, but
continue to engage and act east as well’(quoted in Gupta 2012). As Mohan
(2012,97–100) has documented, since the 1990s, India has expanded its joint
naval exercises with all South-East Asian countries and extended its military
presence in the western Pacific through multilateral exercises with the US,
Japanese, Australian and Singaporean navies.
Before I turn to China, a brief look at the four countries just discussed reveals
that the ‘Indo-Pacific’is not just a purely realpolitik enterprise. This regional
design, I argue, has a distinctively neoconservative ring to it. These four
‘democracies’in the ‘Indo-Pacific’, needless to say, were the old cast of an
earlier quadrilateral strategic dialogue initiative pursued during the Bush Jr.
administration. The ‘Quad’, as it is known, was initiated by Abe, whose 2007
speech to the Indian Parliament appealed to the values of freedom and
democracy as an organising principle of his ‘broader Asia’proposal. An
experimental meeting of the Quad took place in May 2007, three months after
Abe and US Vice-President Dick Cheney discussed the idea of forming a
quadrilateral grouping among like-minded democracies (Terada 2010, 85). In
line with the neoconservative foreign policy of both military strength and moral
clarity, the defunct ‘Quad’idea never went away. As the USA, Japan, Australia
and India regroup as the core members of the freshly minted ‘Indo-Pacific’,it
may be argued that it is about to be revived under another guise. After attending
the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue with her US and Japanese counterparts in
October 2013, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop (2013) left the door
open for resurrecting the quadrilateral dialogue, as she promised to keep it in
mind when looking to ‘more deeply network our strategic defence and security
alliances and partnerships in the region’. Strategic observers from influential US
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and Australian think tanks recently made a similar call for the ‘return to the
U.S.–Japan–Australia–India “Quad”concept’(Green and Shearer 2012, 184).
China: the new ‘odd man out’
As the ‘Indo-Pacific’takes on a value-based quality, China now emerges
effectively as the new ‘odd man out’of Asia. While the formation of the ‘Indo-
Pacific’may have been premised on China as the geopolitical (and ideological)
‘Other’in the region, this does not mean that China’s role in this process is
innocent. It, too, has been part and parcel of the construction of the ‘Indo-
Pacific’, with its own version of ‘cartographic anxiety’and associated practices
of security. But it is equally true that China’s contribution has been largely
defensive and reactive (Li and Chan 2011, 54).
Although Beijing has long been wary about US hegemony, its main concern is
about internal stability and regime legitimacy. To this end, Beijing’s favourite
mantra remains ‘peace and development’as it assesses its international
environment. Its eagerness to join the World Trade Organization and its
enthusiasm for a free trade agreement with ASEAN demonstrated that its
foreign policy has been driven by agendas of domestic development and
geoeconomics, not regional geopolitics, which in any case is fraught with
obstacles of lingering sovereignty issues and popular nationalism (He 2004).
Yet, by virtue of its rapid rise as an economic powerhouse, China has emerged
as an indispensable force in regional economic and financial integration. In
doing so, it seems to have inadvertently ‘knitt[ed] together the “spokes”of the
US-centred hub-and-spoke security-alliance system’(Ellen Frost, 2007, quoted
in Terada 2010, 76), something that is directly at odds with the above-
mentioned US geopolitical imperative. Although China’s regional strategy is
more than power-balancing (Breslin 2008, 136) and Asian regionalisation is a
process ‘within [US] empire as much as against it’(Parisot 2013, 1162), its
regional economic engagement has nevertheless been widely seen as a bid for
regional primacy.
Geopolitical reasoning is a contagious state of mind. As foreign observers see
China’s rise in stark geopolitical terms, their Chinese counterparts also increas-
ingly look at China’s security environment through a dark geopolitical lens. As
Wang Jisi (2012a, 3) notes, although their country is now much stronger, ‘some
Chinese now feel a sense of greater insecurity, more anxiety, and a deeper victim
complex’. Even the 2013 Chinese Defence White Paper is not immune to this
sense of insecurity (Information Office of the State Council 2013).
Indeed, facing the USA’s well-established ‘string of pearls’/‘first island chain’
strategies, China has found itself surrounded by what Yoshihara and Holmes
(2010, 284) call a ‘Great Wall in reverse’. With 80 percent of its oil flows
passing through the Strait of Malacca, Chinese leaders are allegedly deeply
disturbed by the ‘Malacca Dilemma’(Li and Zhang 2010)—a dilemma that has
been made even more acute by their awareness that both ends of the Strait are
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controlled by US fleets. In response to these real or imagined geostrategic
predicaments on China’s Pacific coasts, some Chinese analysts have turned their
gaze to the Indian Ocean:
With China’s security in the Western Pacific region hamstrung by the US and
Japan, the South China Sea issue has no short-term solution. The Indian Ocean
thus is not only the main passage for China to break through the American
military’s Pacific island chain and tackle the ‘Malacca Dilemma’, but also the ideal
option for China’s seaward strategy as well as the testing ground for building a
blue-water navy (Lou and Zhang 2010, 43).
In a Global Times article, Wang Jisi (2012b) urges China to develop a
‘westward’strategy as China’s own geostrategic rebalancing to counter the
US rebalance to Asia. And based on geopolitical analyses of India’s strategic
thinking and maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean and beyond (Yoshihara
2012), China seems compelled to respond in kind, as Beijing has sought to court
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar, and to build port facilities and
listening posts in some of those countries. It has sent naval vessels on counter-
piracy missions and port calls throughout the Indian Ocean region. Conse-
quently, mirroring the USA’s new two-ocean (Indo-Pacific) navy strategy and
India’s‘Look East’policy, China has launched its own two-ocean navy strategy
in the same waters (Kaplan 2010, 134; Li and Zhang 2010; Wang 2005, 105).
Such actions and counteractions between the USA, Australia, Japan and
India, on the one hand, and China, on the other, both feed on and contribute to
mutual anxieties and a spiralling model of mutual hedging. Alongside the USA’s
‘pivot to Asia’strategy, India and China have begun to ‘stamp their authority
on the same region’through so-called ‘necklace of friendship’diplomacy (India)
and ‘string of pearls’strategy (China). As a result, their ‘widening geopolitical
horizons’(Scott 2008, 1, 19) increasingly overlap, thus giving some operational
substance to the ‘Indo-Pacific’imaginary. Although China has so far remained
cool on the ‘Indo-Pacific’notion, its interests in the Indian Ocean and its
geopolitical anxieties and policy responses have nevertheless contributed to its
emergence as a strategic centre of gravity of sorts. As many Chinese strategic
planners now begin to ‘look at China’s grand strategy across a wide Indo-
Pacific swath’(Zhao 2013), the new region may become more real still.
Conclusion: what’s in a name?
In this article, I have argued that the ‘Indo-Pacific’is primarily a collective
geopolitical construct with a neoconservative bent, but it is worth stressing that
its arrival is not entirely a matter of geopolitical imaginations. Its formation has
been aided also by some liberal and functionalist views of a globalised world,
where geoeconomics, global supply chains and increasing economic interde-
pendence are believed to underpin regional integration (Engardio 2007). In fact,
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even the most enthusiastic geopolitical advocates such as Kaplan (2010, 291)
acknowledge that regional relations are not always about geopolitical man-
oeuvring. On that basis, most proponents of the ‘Indo-Pacific’would deny that
the new regional concept is about containing China. Medcalf (2013b, p. 64), for
example, insists that the Indo-Pacific is ‘a geo-economic reality …not a strategic
project to contain that rise’. Others point out that the US pivot to the Indo-
Pacific is motivated by a range of issues such as energy supplies, failing states,
climate change, piracy, terrorism, Iran and drug trafficking, not just great-power
rivalry (Green and Shearer 2012, 176).
Yet, despite such exceptions and denials, geopolitics has been central to
mainstream ‘Indo-Pacific’discourses. If anti-piracy, disaster relief and fighting
terrorism were the main purposes of the new regional design, then the reported
plan to deploy giant unmanned patrol planes to the Cocos Islands, and aircraft
carriers and nuclear-powered attack submarines near Perth would not make
much sense (Taylor 2012). Even when there was anti-piracy or disaster relief
cooperation, geopolitics still seemed to be at play, as exemplified by China’s
exclusion from the 2004 tsunami core group (from which the short-lived
quadrilateral talks emerged) and the US-led Task Force 151, the main
multilateral anti-piracy group (Green and Shearer 2012, 185). Such geopolitical
practices of security seem to lend credence to a senior US official’s admission
that ‘China is a central element in our effort to encourage India’s emergence as a
world power’and that ‘we don’t need to talk about the containment of China.
It will take care of itself as India rises’(Twining 2007, 83; see also Gilboy and
Heginbotham 2013, 139). And given that the criteria or principles for regional
cooperation often entail ‘democratic values’and ‘a willingness to help shape
and abide by rules and norms for a secure and stable region’(Medcalf 2013b,
p. 66), it is not difficult to see which country is the main intended target for
socialisation and, failing that, exclusion. The fact that such a geopolitical
undertone is not always palpable may be due to ‘the sensitive presentation of
initiatives with an emphasis on broader benefits to the region’(Berteau and
Green 2012, 33). But in her appeal to Congress to maintain State Department
funding, Secretary Clinton felt obliged to talk straight: ‘We are in a competition
for influence with China; let’s put aside the moral, humanitarian, do-good side
of what we believe in, and let’s just talk straight realpolitik’(Dombey 2011).
The geopolitical and neoconservative constructions of the ‘Indo-Pacific’
should raise concerns about its long-term political implications. As this concept
gains traction, we need to look more closely at its conflicting regional agendas
and ask whose interests it serves (Bisley and Phillips 2012). For all its apparent
inclusion of such ‘low-politics’‘do-good’issues as climate change and anti-
piracy, this spatial imagination has been galvanised by the perceived rise of
China and concurrent great-power rivalries for regional hegemony. This
geopolitical obsession not only obscures the extensive regional cooperation
and transnational issues of human security such as poverty, hunger, public
health, small-arms and drug trafficking, environmental degradation and natural
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disasters in the region (Bateman, Chan, and Graham 2011,8–9), but it also
plays on and exacerbates the existing anxieties, mistrust and security dilemmas.
When the USA turned down the United Nations’request to include China in the
joint tsunami disaster relief operations in December 2004, China allegedly
hastened the ‘rollout of its out-of-area “military missions other than war”
activities’(Gupta 2012). And in response to China’s military modernisation,
alongside the pivot to Asia, a long article in the prestigious Journal of Strategic
Studies (Mirski 2013), with a shorter version appearing in the influential
National Interest magazine, now openly advocates a US naval blockade against
China, specifically targeting its oil imports. The likely tit-for-tat cycles of such
fanciful but potentially self-fulfilling game plays do not bode well for the future
regional order. It is in this context that it is imperative to critically examine the
overwhelming geopolitical reading of the regional dynamism. Insofar as all
regions are ‘social constructions created through politics’(Katzenstein 2002,
105), rather than predetermined by certain mysterious, irresistible geographical
forces, the ‘Indo-Pacific’can and should be made for the better through less
geopolitically driven imaginations.
Note
1. I wish to thank Priya Chacko and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on
earlier drafts of this article.
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