Publication Year: 2022
US-China Strategic Competition and Converging Middle Power Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific
DOI: 10.1080/09700161.2022.2088126
Abstract: The 21st century’s central economic nexus will be centred on the Indo-Pacific region. Simultaneously, the intensifying US-China competition in the Indo-Pacific is deepening. Regional middle powers must negotiate this competition to ensure their interests remain intact. This article applies a realist framework to analyse the strategic alignment of Australia, Japan, and India in response to the great power competition. It examines the strategy each middle power is pursuing to protect their interests and the motivations behind their approaches. It finds a convergence in middle power interests centred on maritime behaviour, adherence to international law, and investment in regional institutions.
Publication Year: 2022
Tailored engagement: Assessing Japan’s strategic culture and its impact on U.S. – China competition
DOI: 10.1080/01495933.2022.2087434
Abstract: The concept of “Strategic Culture” has enjoyed a resurgence in the last two decades as a method for understanding the behavior and decision making of potential adversaries. Strategic culture assessment methodologies offer a way to examine the policy choices of states, while accounting for ethnocentric biases. While these assessments have been used widely for analyzing adversaries, they are underutilized in assessing allies. The emergence of great power competition between the U.S. and China will increase pressure on the U.S.-Japan alliance. Increasing the understanding of Japan’s strategic culture will provide the United States insight into ways to engage with Japan to make strategies to compete with China more effective.
Publication Year: 2022
Commentary: China in the Maritime Pacific
DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2022.105092
Abstract: The Indo-Pacific region faces complex and destabilising maritime security challenges. There are concerns that China’s militarisation of the South China Sea may migrate to other domains, including the Pacific Islands. Yet there is little critical or scholarly analysis of China’s maritime strategy, tactics, and approaches in the South-West Pacific and its implications to the island nations that inhabit that geographic area. This commentary proposes a new research agenda focused on the following question: how has China used ‘maritime geo-economic’ statecraft in the Pacific and how have Pacific Island states responded? This research agenda should consider key elements of China’s maritime geo-economic engagement in the Pacific, the risks of this engagement to Pacific Island states’ economic sovereignty in the maritime domain, and how they have sought to exert agency and seek to protect and preserve their maritime entitlements.
Publication Year: 2022
Republic of Korea, Indo-Pacific and the Emerging Regional Order: Engaging without Endorsing
DOI: 10.1080/09700161.2022.2074774
Abstract: Despite being a key stakeholder in the emerging regional order, South Korea’s approach to the Indo-Pacific has been a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’. It entails a cautious engagement with Indo-Pacific initiatives of different countries under the ambit of ‘New Southern Policy’ without endorsing the concept or articulating the Korean position on the Indo-Pacific regional construct. Explaining the Korea’s strategic outlook, this article argues that its ambiguous approach to the Indo-Pacific’ is determined by the prioritization of maintaining a ‘balanced diplomacy’ in its relations with the US and China in a context of intensified strategic competition between the two.
Publication Year: 2022
NATO’s position and role in the Indo-Pacific
DOI: 10.1080/14702436.2022.2082956
Abstract: NATO can ill-afford to dismiss the security and military implications of China’s increased presence and its relationship with Russia throughout the Euro-Atlantic area and along its periphery. The Alliance’s strategic calculus must include China across all relevant sectors including: security, economics, technology, and elite capture. The strategic concept should acknowledge that the Alliance needs to improve its awareness of China – starting with the psychology of the leadership in Zhongnanhai. There is no uniform vision amongst Chinese leaders vis-à-vis world order but four theories can be used to foster awareness: (1) moral realism, (2) relationalism, (3) symbiotic theory, and (4) Tianxiaism. Understanding the theoretical underpinnings of Chinese worldviews can help leaders of the Alliance mitigate strategic risk throughout the North Atlantic Area. Another way for NATO to reduce risk is to engage other nations in the Indo-Pacific region. The strategic concept should present a realistic approach to partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region that raise awareness, understanding, and trust with the Alliance. The new Strategic Concept should outline how NATO must do work “under-the-hood” to ensure it has a complete picture of China’s influence throughout the Euro-Atlantic area, starting with the creation of a NATO-China Council.
Publication Year: 2022
Security cooperation in the Pacific Islands: architecture, complex, community, or something else?
DOI: 10.1093/irap/lcac005
Abstract: In the 2018 Boe Declaration, Pacific Islands Forum leaders recognized that the region is facing ‘an increasingly complex regional security environment’ and committed to ‘strengthening the existing regional security architecture’. Given uncertainty about the existence and nature of this architecture, we address the question: is there a security architecture in the region, or does security cooperation take a different shape? We find that security cooperation in the Pacific Islands does not constitute a security architecture, as there is no ‘overarching, coherent and comprehensive security structure for a geographically-defined area’. We also find that the region is neither a security complex nor a community, due to the extensive involvement of metropolitan powers and external partners. Instead, we argue that security cooperation in the Pacific Islands is best described as a patchwork of bilateral, minilateral, and multilateral, formal and informal agencies, agreements, and arrangements, across local, national, regional, and international levels.
Publication Year: 2022
Lawships or warships? Coast guards as agents of (in)stability in the Pacific and South and East China Sea
DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2022.105048
Abstract: Do coast guards generally promote good governance in the maritime domain, and are they a means of preventing conflict escalation? Sam Bateman argued that the use of ‘white hulled’ coast guard vessels was fundamentally less provocative than deploying gray-painted warships in contested waters. Thus, the use of ‘lawships’ instead of ‘warships’ could serve to de-escalate tensions. He also saw them as better able to pursue ends of oceans governance than naval vessels, for a range of reasons including the need for specialization. Nonetheless, there has been increasing concern that some coast guards are becoming a tool of ‘gray zone’ tactics: efforts to alter the strategic status quo short of armed conflict. China is often portrayed as using the China Coast Guard in such a manner. By contrast, the Australian Pacific Patrol Boats program – which gifts coast guard patrol assets to partner States – is often portrayed as an unqualified good. This paper examines both case studies in light of the Bateman thesis to conclude that the China Coast Guard may be more of a tool for de-escalation, or at least containment of tensions, than is commonly conceded and that the most obvious benefits of the Australian Pacific Patrol Boats program may have a strategic dimension.
Publication Year: 2022
New champions of preferential trade? Two-level games in China’s and India’s shifting commercial strategies
DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2022.2060278
Abstract: Following decades of relative isolation, China and India have become the world’s largest new traders. In this paper, we focus on their Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). While the two economies initially followed similar paths, with a growing number of PTAs signed in the first decade of the 21st Century, since 2011 India has taken a U-turn and stopped completing them. China, on the other hand, has widened and deepened its trade agreements. We present a novel theoretical framework to analyze international economic negotiations by emerging economies and use it to study the puzzling divergence of the trade policies of China and India. By adapting the two-level game framework to emerging economies, we argue that there are key differences in the political economies of countries like China and India (compared to Western industrialized ones), which requires a more specific focus on the domestic side of the two-level game. We show that accounting for non-legislative domestic ratification processes and for iterative games and experiential learning by domestic actors are crucial in understanding the trade strategies of emerging economies. While much of the literature explains large emerging economies by looking at external systemic factors, we instead suggest that their domestic politics trumps international politics.
Publication Year: 2022
Winning Without Fighting in the Indo-Pacific: A Naval Diplomacy Matter
DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2022.2042148
Abstract: In the essay that won the 2021 Trench Gascoigne Essay Prize (Full-Time Education Category), William Parker assesses the naval military instrument and its utility short of combat in the Indo-Pacific. By analysing the conceptual basis for the Royal Navy’s Indo-Pacific tilt, he argues that operational concepts and naval doctrine must work together in areas where, currently, they are not. He concludes that ensuring the conduct of naval diplomacy as a strategic practice, which serves the habit of statecraft, is crucial in reducing the chance of competitive peace leading to violent war.
Publication Year: 2022
South Korea’s Diplomacy in an Era of US-China Strategic Competition
DOI: 10.1080/13439006.2022.2030537
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine the Republic of Korea’s (ROK, South Korea hereafter) diplomacy mainly during the Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in administrations, focusing on its efforts to develop a “strategic cooperative partnership” with China while emphasizing its alliance with the US amid the intensifying strategic competition between the US and China.
Publication Year: 2022
A Proposal for a Western Pacific Union (WPU)
DOI: 10.1080/13439006.2022.2026642
Abstract: The concept of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) is taking firm hold as a new core vision of Japan’s foreign policy. It has been endorsed at the US-Japan and Group of Seven (G7) summits.
So far, however, there has not been sufficient discussion about specific approaches to promote it. In particular, the discussion on Southeast Asia, the region where the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet, has been insufficient. Should Southeast Asia come under the influence of China, the significance of FOIP would be halved.
This article proposes the establishment of a Western Pacific Union (WPU) at the heart of FOIP as a loose regional association by grouping the Western Pacific countries including Japan, major Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, the Philippines, and Viet Nam), Australia and Pacific Island Countries. The proposed WPU aims to contribute to the regional and world’s peace and prosperity, while not confronting China, by upholding the principles of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.
Publication Year: 2022
The Biden Administration’s First Year in the Indo-Pacific: Balancing, Order-Building and Managing Competition with China
DOI: 10.1080/13439006.2022.2026635
Abstract: The Biden administration’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific is driven by three major endeavors: balancing, order-building, and management of competition with China. The US is currently enhancing its balancing act by leveraging its alliance with Australia epitomized by AUKUS and the Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation launched by AUSMIN. Order-building advanced by the Quad is promoting three functions: regional public goods provision, mutual resilience enhancement, and standard-setting for critical and emerging technologies. The Biden administration is attempting to pursue “responsible competition” with China, but its ultimate goals remain undefined. Based on these observations, the article will conclude by pointing out major tasks that lie ahead for the Biden administration in these areas.
Publication Year: 2022
India’s maritime diplomacy in Southeast Asia: Exploring synergies
DOI: 10.1080/09733159.2021.2018827
Abstract: India–Southeast Asia defence cooperation has not been highlighted much, primarily to not give out wrong signals about India’s power projection outlook. With India steadfastly maintaining that it is a benign nation and not a revisionist power, engagement in the defence domain with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been attempted in five ways. The first includes India’s engagement in ASEAN defence mechanisms, such as ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM) Plus; and the participation of ASEAN nations in the Milan series of biennial meetings and Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS). The second dimension is India’s legitimate interest in the security of the Malacca Strait as a funnel state. The third dimension is developing synergies between the defence industries in Southeast Asia with the Indian defence industrial complex. The fourth angle of engagement is India’s position as the net security provider in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). The fifth critical aspect is developing maritime cooperative mechanism and developing a counter to the Chinese “string of pearls” strategy.
Publication Year: 2022
Managing China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific: Japan’s strategic engagement with India
DOI: 10.1080/09733159.2021.2015135
Abstract: The article explains how Japan’s strategic interests are converging with India against an assertive China in the Indo-Pacific. Japan has been pursuing a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP) policy, which seeks to manage China’s rise by deepening Japan’s strategic coordination and cooperation with its closest partners through the Quad. Though Japan still values its bilateral relationship with the United States (US), its security partnership with India is part of Tokyo’s persistent efforts to support the US-led rules-based international order. In order to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Indo-Pacific region, Japan has been a strong supporter among the Quad to promote non-military cooperation, primarily focusing on infrastructure building, supply chain resilience and technological innovations. The article argues that Japan’s strategic engagement with India is now an integral part of its wider national security posture as Tokyo has come to recognise New Delhi as an important balancer against Beijing. That the US has enhanced its ties with India in recent years has further facilitated Japan–India strategic convergence since it is aligned with American policy towards the Indo-Pacific region in an era of great power competition.
Publication Year: 2021
Middle power hedging in the era of security/economic disconnect: Australia, Japan, and the ‘Special Strategic Partnership’
DOI: 10.1093/irap/lcab023
Abstract: Deepening superpower rivalry between the United States and China has created acute strategic dilemmas for secondary powers in the Indo-Pacific such as Australia and Japan. This predicament is exacerbated by their divergent security and economic interests which cut across the superpower divide; a condition dubbed a ‘security/economic disconnect’. These two intimately related dynamics preclude clear-cut implementation of conventional balancing/bandwagoning alignment choices and have led to mixed hedging strategies to cope with this situation. To address these issues, the article presents a refinement of the hedging concept in International Relations (IR) that emphasizes its multi-dimensional nature, within a broader interpretation of alignment itself. It applies this to the case of the Australia and Japan with reference to their Strategic Partnership, which is both emblematic of hedging responses to systemic uncertainty, and an institutional mechanism through which to operationalize joint hedging policies. This provides insights into how middle power strategic partnerships are managing strategic risks across the security, economic, and other, domains.
