{"id":53920,"date":"2020-03-02T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2020-03-01T19:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=53920"},"modified":"2020-05-25T13:26:03","modified_gmt":"2020-05-25T03:26:03","slug":"making-the-indo-pacific","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/making-the-indo-pacific\/","title":{"rendered":"Making the Indo-Pacific"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The Indo-Pacific is an idea with a crucial purpose: avoid war.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lot to ask of a geographic construct that barely existed a decade ago.<\/p>\n

\u2018Indo-Pacific\u2019 has shifted from a way to look at the map to become an arena for mounting contest\u2014and the label for a US strategy (the \u2018free and open Indo-Pacific<\/a>\u2019).<\/p>\n

The journey from construct to competition has been short and sharp.<\/p>\n

\u2018Asia\u2013Pacific\u2019 was the understanding that dominated for roughly 30 years (1980 to 2010). In a swift remaking, Indo-Pacific has become the replacement vision for the US, Japan, India, Australia, the 10 ASEAN states of Southeast Asia, and major European powers.<\/p>\n

The significant absence in that list is China.<\/p>\n

Beijing charges that the Indo-Pacific is a device to contain and constrain China. That\u2019s true. An equal truth, though, is that China reaps what it sows; its behaviour made pushback inevitable.<\/p>\n

The Indo-Pacific is pushback aimed at achieving balance. The Indo-Pacific isn\u2019t just the joining of two oceans\u2014it\u2019s loaded with ambition and driven by power.<\/p>\n

The rise of China and its ambition to dominate Asia, India\u2019s arrival as a major player, the need to stabilise a multipolar system (and avoid war), and the geoeconomics and geostrategy of the two joined oceans, webbed by the shipping lanes that are the Indo-Pacific\u2019s veins, all crowd the new moniker.<\/p>\n

An Australian apostle of the Indo-Pacific, Rory Medcalf, says that in the decade of its arrival and ascendancy, the idea heralded a new era of power rivalry, a world away from the optimism of globalisation:<\/p>\n

The Indo-Pacific had become the global centre of gravity, in wealth and population, but also the heartland of military might and latent conflict. Confrontation was trumping cooperation. From the Gulf of Aden to Papua New Guinea, the board was uncomfortably set for a great game with many layers and many players.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Medcalf\u2019s book on this great gravitational shift, Contest for the Indo-Pacific: why China won\u2019t map the future<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>is being released tomorrow. His hope is that the Indo-Pacific becomes a metaphor for collective action. If diplomacy fails, he writes, it\u2019ll be the theatre of the first general war since 1945.<\/p>\n

One of Medcalf\u2019s many strengths is that he\u2019s an intellectual who writes like a journalist; he started in hackdom, getting a Walkley commendation in 1991 for his reporting for the Northern Star <\/em>newspaper in the New South Wales town of Lismore.<\/p>\n

From journalism, he became a diplomat (postings to New Delhi and Tokyo and truce monitor in Bougainville) and an Australian intelligence analyst, then went on to think-tank duty at the Lowy Institute. Now he\u2019s the professor heading the National Security College at the Australian National University.<\/p>\n

Many moons ago, introducing him as a speaker, I read out his CV and asked if he\u2019d ever had a real job. It\u2019s the jibe of one journalist to another, because all hacks are plagued by the question of what they\u2019ll do when they grow up (happily, after 49 years of hackdom, I\u2019m still to decide). In Medcalf\u2019s case, the jest is a tribute to someone from that nebulous place where diplomats, strategists and analysts try to pin down what\u2019s happening in the world and imagine what\u2019ll happen next. It\u2019s a job you hold in your head, not your hands.<\/p>\n

Medcalf has scored a notable intellectual achievement: helping to bring into being the realm where the hard-edged realists and practical types will do duty seeking balance or fighting the battle.<\/p>\n

The book offers an origin story for today\u2019s Indo-Pacific, and some fine thinkers step from the pages. The first modern academic article to mention the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical term was in 2004, by the Canadian naval scholar James Boutilier (a bon vivant who savours the joys and jousts of strategy).<\/p>\n

In 2005, the term Indo-Pacific was used by the New Zealand strategist Peter Cozens (who also championed Kiwi wine as \u2018liquid sunshine\u2019). Catching an idea arriving with the times, a great Australian journalist in Asia, Michael Richardson (The Age <\/em>and International Herald Tribune<\/em>) wrote an article for the Australian Journal of International Affairs<\/em><\/a> in 2005 about what Australia should aim for as a founding member of the East Asia Summit<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The economic and geopolitical landscape of Asia has changed dramatically in recent years, providing Australia with an unprecedented opportunity to become an integral and significant player in a wider Indo-Pacific region as it charts its future and seeks to manage tensions while shaping a new architecture of cooperation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Medcalf explains why he was an early adopter: \u2018The logic that Australia\u2019s region was changing to a two-ocean system, with China turning south and west and India turning east, accorded both with the evidence and the need to define Australia\u2019s place in the world.\u2019<\/p>\n

He is a thinker who has helped redefine Australia\u2019s region and the scope of that region. The driving geostrategic purpose of the construct is the book\u2019s subtitle, \u2018why China won\u2019t map the future\u2019.<\/p>\n

The China dimension of the Indo-Pacific\u2014the rise, the pushback and the quest for balance\u2014will be the subject of next week\u2019s column.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Indo-Pacific is an idea with a crucial purpose: avoid war. It\u2019s a lot to ask of a geographic construct that barely existed a decade ago. \u2018Indo-Pacific\u2019 has shifted from a way to look at …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":53925,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,52,56,21],"class_list":["post-53920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-asia-pacific","tag-china","tag-indo-pacific","tag-strategy-2"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMaking the Indo-Pacific | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/making-the-indo-pacific\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Making the Indo-Pacific | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Indo-Pacific is an idea with a crucial purpose: avoid war. 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