{"id":64640,"date":"2021-05-24T06:00:40","date_gmt":"2021-05-23T20:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=64640"},"modified":"2021-05-23T19:50:07","modified_gmt":"2021-05-23T09:50:07","slug":"aspis-decades-asia-pacific-to-indo-pacific","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/aspis-decades-asia-pacific-to-indo-pacific\/","title":{"rendered":"ASPI\u2019s decades: Asia\u2013Pacific to Indo-Pacific"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI\u2019s work since its creation in August 2001.<\/em><\/p>\n

Among strategists, geography is used in an effort to refine Australia\u2019s strategic thinking and impose hierarchy and order on Defence spending and structure.<\/p>\n

Yet in the first decades of the 21st century the geographic calculus was bedevilled by fundamental shifts in power.<\/p>\n

As much else changed, so did Australia\u2019s sense of the world around its continent, transformed by a shape-shifting, expanding sense of region.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s and 1990s, Australia helped build an ambitious geographic construct, the Asia\u2013Pacific. Then that Asia\u2013Pacific model gave way to an even larger defining geography, the Indo-Pacific.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s growing importance had to be acknowledged, China\u2019s systemic effects had to be calculated, Japan\u2019s security evolution embraced, and the traditional concentration on Indonesia and ASEAN had to be affirmed and made central to the expanded understanding.<\/p>\n

Just as geography is remade by tectonic forces, geopolitics and geoeconomics remade the policy frame to adjust to China\u2019s rise, India\u2019s arrival and America\u2019s relative decline.<\/p>\n

Kevin Rudd\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

ASPI\u2019s Rod Lyon and Andrew Davies wrote that while media reporting of Labor\u2019s policy statement tended to focus on the hardware acquisition (\u2018And that is not surprising\u2014there is a lot of it.\u2019), just as important was a \u2018significant re-positioning of Australia\u2019s declaratory strategic policy\u2019 and \u2018a firm geography-based line\u2019<\/a> amid the shifting sands of the Asia\u2013Pacific:<\/p>\n

That emphasis on geographical determinism is reinforced in the White Paper\u2019s acknowledgement that, while Australia has four major strategic interests\u2014a secure Australia, a secure neighbourhood, a stable Asia\u2013Pacific and a rules-based global order\u2014only 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\u2013Pacific 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In one sense, the white paper was \u2018ground-breaking\u2019,<\/a> then\u2013ASPI executive director Peter Abigail observed:<\/p>\n

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\u2013Pacific and raise questions about the durability of US strategic primacy. It lifted what had been academic, commentarial and officials\u2019 discourse into the realm of declared policy and, therefore, attracted quite a bit of attention, particularly in Beijing and Washington.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Davies and Mark Thomson considered the regional \u2018state of flux\u2019 and saw two broad futures\u2014the key unknown<\/a> was whether economic cooperation or strategic competition would take precedence:<\/p>\n

The optimistic possibility is that Asia will evolve into a region in which cooperation trumps strategic competition\u2014something 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Lyon mapped the \u2018strategic contours\u2019<\/a> of Asia\u2019s rise in 2012, he couldn\u2019t separate those two futures of competition or cooperation. The region faced a strange blend of both\u2014 what business calls \u2018coopetition\u2019. Lyon noted transformational change, characterised by two interlinked phenomena: \u2018the relative decline of US power in Asia, and the \u201creturn\u201d of Asian great powers to the international system\u2019.<\/p>\n

Within that coopetitive Asia\u2013Pacific, the principal structures of the regional security order\u2014the existing contours of reassurance and deterrence\u2014were starting to fray, Lyon wrote:<\/p>\n

[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\u2014and coercive power is the power to intimidate as well as the power to do actual physical harm\u2014the region as a whole is entering a new era of reassurance worries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> white paper issued in 2012, and the 2013 defence white paper<\/a>. <\/em>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\u2014and even the name and reach of the region.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s department by former Treasury secretary Ken Henry.<\/p>\n

ASPI Executive Director Peter Jennings worried at the puzzling\u00a0absence of the US from Henry\u2019s terms of reference,\u00a0despite the centrality of the US<\/a> to the strategic picture. That omission certainly concerned the Department of Defence, shaping its approach to its own white paper.<\/p>\n

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

Asia\u2019s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the 21st century\u2014the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia\u2019s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment \u2026 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\u2014in the Asian region in the Asian century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Defence\u2019s response to the Asian century was to embrace the Indo-Pacific, a concept that hadn\u2019t been mentioned in its 2009 white paper. The\u00a02013 edition<\/a> used \u2018Indo-Pacific\u2019 58 times while giving minimal linguistic obeisance\u00a0to the Asian century (10 mentions).<\/p>\n

The white paper\u2019s strategic outlook pointed to two defining characteristics of the regional order. First, the \u2018critical importance\u2019 of the US\u2013China relationship. Second, \u2018a new Indo-Pacific strategic arc\u2019 was emerging, connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans through Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n

When the Liberal\u2013National coalition won the 2013 election,\u00a0four months after the defence white paper\u2019s release, the Asian century white paper was purged from new prime minister Tony Abbott\u2019s website. The Asian century usage faded.<\/p>\n

Defence had given Canberra the new construct for the region: the Indo-Pacific was central to the 2016 defence white paper<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a02017 foreign policy white paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The shift from Asia\u2013Pacific to Indo-Pacific was more than a geographic broadening. This was about mood swing and geopolitical forces.<\/p>\n

The foreign policy white paper\u2019s chapter on \u2018A contested world\u2019, under the heading \u2018Power shifts in the Indo-Pacific\u2019, described the contest:<\/p>\n

The compounding effect of China\u2019s growth is accelerating shifts in relative economic and strategic weight. In parts of the Indo\u2013Pacific, including in Southeast Asia, China\u2019s 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\u2013Pacific will largely depend on the actions of the United States, China and major powers such as Japan and India.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI\u2019s work since its creation in August 2001. Among strategists, geography is used in an effort to refine Australia\u2019s strategic thinking and impose hierarchy …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":64642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,17,338,56],"class_list":["post-64640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-asia-pacific","tag-australia","tag-defence-policy","tag-indo-pacific","dinkus-20-years-of-aspi"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nASPI\u2019s decades: Asia\u2013Pacific to 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\/aspis-decades-asia-pacific-to-indo-pacific\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ASPI\u2019s decades: Asia\u2013Pacific to Indo-Pacific | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. 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