Session 4: Dinner Address to the Chief of Army Land Forces Seminar 2018:The Indo-Pacific Doesn’t Exist
The Indo-Pacific Doesn’t Exist
Dinner Address by Prof Allan Gyngell
President - Australian Institute of International Affairs.
‘It’s a great pleasure to be here and an honour to have been invited to deliver these remarks. I suspect that I am an outlier in this room, though.
‘Although I have spent a lot of my professional life happily hanging around with strategic analysts and military and defence types, my background, and what expertise I have, lies in foreign policy. If, as Von Clausewitz says, war is the continuation of politics with other means, then my interest is in the form of politics—that is, foreign policy—that has failed when war begins and must resume fully when it ends.
‘I am also a historian of Australian foreign policy. Our foreign service is much younger than our Defence Force. In a full sense it only began in 1942 when, in the face of the greatest threat the country had ever known, our Parliament finally ratified British legislation called the Statute of Westminster, and established its unarguable sovereign identity in the world, with the right to sign treaties and establish embassies.
‘So the world in which Australian foreign policy has existed has been that of the international order set up in 1945 and maintained by the victors of the Second World War, led by the United States. This order was universalist in its declared values, liberal in its economic objectives and globalising in its aims. But it was underpinned by the power of the United States—which accounted for around half of all global production at the end of the war. Its network of alliances in Europe and Asia provided the stable security framework which supported a period of unprecedented growth.
‘But in my view this post-war order has ended. It’s not changing. It’s not being challenged. It’s over.
‘The reasons are beyond the scope of these remarks and the objectives of this seminar. But they are essentially the result of the shifting balance of global economic and military power. Consequences of the shift are seen all around us in pressures on international organisations and their reduced capacity to make and enforce international rules and norms.
‘It is notable that this Chief of Army Land Forces Seminar is focused on the Indo-Pacific.
‘There is, of course, no such thing as the Indo-Pacific. It doesn’t exist, any more than places we have at various times called the Middle East or the Far East, or even something called Asia itself, exist.
‘These labels are simply ways of describing underlying geographical realities in ways that help us understand our relationship with the world and plan for the future. They are framing devices. And they change over time. One of the signs of the arrival of a new international order is that we begin to see the world described in different ways. New categories are created.
‘After the Second World War words like ‘East’ and ‘West’ gained new and deeper meanings. We distinguished Western Europe from Eastern Europe in a fresh way. We started talking about something called ‘the Third World’.
‘Here in Australia, the region we thought about was the Asia-Pacific. That was the essential framework which shaped our world from 1945 onwards.
‘The region embraced our wartime ally, the United States; the newly- independent countries of South-East Asia; our growing markets in Japan, South Korea and later China; and the island states of the South-West Pacific.
‘The regional institutions we supported and helped build—ASEAN and its dialogue partnerships, APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the Pacific Islands Forum—were all centred on the Asia-Pacific.
‘Around 2009, however, prodded by academics and think tankers, Australian policymakers started referring not to the Asia-Pacific but to the Indo-Pacific. The term slowly leeched into official documents. Beginning with the Gillard Government’s 2012 Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, the concept became the organising principle for the Government’s declaratory policy towards its region. The language received bipartisan endorsement from the Abbott and Turnbull governments. It is now formally established in the Australian foreign policy and strategic lexicon.
‘In some ways, the Indo-Pacific is a reversion to an older Australian way of looking at the world. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, this westward-looking focus was how we thought about our strategic position. Our security, trade and communications all linked back to Britain through the imperial ‘string of pearls’ in Singapore, Colombo, Mumbai, Aden and Suez.
‘There were several reasons for the concept’s return in the second decade of the 21st century.
‘From Australia’s perspective, it makes excellent sense because it embraces the two oceans around our continent and places South-East Asia as the pivotal point between them. It focuses attention on the horizontal trade, energy and security ties that increasingly cross Eurasia and South-East Asia.
‘As well as our Asia-Pacific partners, it also includes India. This reflects significant changes in India’s relevance to Australia. The slow reform of its economy beginning in the 1990s opened up new opportunities for trade and economic engagement. India became one of Australia’s largest sources of immigrants. And from New Delhi’s perspective, the shifting geopolitical landscape generated more reasons for India to ‘look East’.
‘Less remarked upon, the Indo-Pacific also embraces the vital climate system, centring on the Himalayas, which drives the natural environment, the weather and the waters of South and South-East Asia.
‘But in the minds of many of its proponents, the central reason for the re- emergence of an Indo-Pacific framework has been China’s economic and military rise. Many commentators, more explicitly than we see in in official pronouncements, see it as a way of knitting together a maritime offshore balancing coalition to the growing continental power of China. For some, it also represents a potential grouping of (more) democratic states countering an authoritarian China in a ‘free and open’ Indo-Pacific.
‘I’ll come back to China.
‘Australia may have been the first country to embrace the label of the Indo- Pacific in its formal documents, but the concept has obviously proved useful to others as well. The term has now been adopted by many governments, including Japan, France, Indonesia, and the United States, with its new Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu. Although it ‘dislikes the term, China has its own Indo-Pacific strategy in the form of the Maritime Silk Road.
‘So it is important to remember that we all have our own individual Indo- Pacifics. We define its extent differently; we bring separate strategic ambitions to it. India’s Indo-Pacific is different from Japan’s; Australia’s is different from Indonesia’s. That’s one of the reasons it has been hard to develop effective institutional responses to it.
‘Let me turn now to some of the opportunities and challenges we face.
‘Because we are in Australia, I’m going to use the Australian Foreign Policy White Paper’s definition of the Indo-Pacific. This begins in the ‘eastern Indian Ocean’ rather than reaching back across to the borders of Africa (as India’s Indo-Pacific would). It then encompasses South-East Asia and East Asia, the island states of the South-West Pacific, and the United States.
‘The Indo-Pacific will determine the nature of the 21st century world.
‘It includes more than half the world’s population, the world’s three largest economies, and its busiest sea routes. It embraces the biggest countries in the world and the smallest. It is at the intersection of Chinese and Indian cultural traditions with deep Islamic and European admixtures. It straddles sea and land, islands, archipelagos, and sub-continents. If we were academics, we’d call it ‘liminal’. The cyber and space domains are also more critical here than ever.
‘Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the dominant regional political and security dynamic in the Indo-Pacific was the process and consequences of European (and Japanese) decolonisation. This began with the independence of India in 1947 and ended with the independence of East Timor in 1999.
‘Most of the conflicts across the region during those decades had their roots in this historically important transition.
‘Australia’s 20th Century military involvement in Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor—even our UN observer operations in Kashmir—can all be traced to the process of decolonisation. This history is one of the reasons why sovereignty remains such an important issue in the region.
‘But since the time of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998, the central driver of regional developments has been China’s economic rise, the geo-strategic consequences of that rise, and the reaction of other powers to it.
‘We have just marked forty years since the beginning of the reform period in China under Deng Xiaoping. During those years of unprecedented economic growth, China graduated from poverty to become the second largest economy in the world (and the largest by purchasing power parity measurements). Official Australian estimates expect it to be the largest by any measure by the end of the 2020s.
‘Deng advised the Chinese people to ‘hide their capabilities and bide their time’. He and his successors turned China into a status quo power, working to everyone’s benefit, within the existing international system.
‘But that time has passed. Not least, it’s hard to hide when you’re the largest economy in the world. And even Deng only talked about ‘biding time’.
‘Very quickly China has developed the capacity to contest the American military primacy which has been the central feature of the East Asian strategic landscape since 1945.
‘China’s own interests have caused it not just to seek to counter American naval power in the waters around it, but to look westwards as well. It has been concerned about its own Muslim population in Xinjiang and the prospect of growing Islamist pressures there.
‘It wants to build alternative routes for trade and communications to avoid the maritime choke points of South-East Asia. This has generated its ambitious plans to expand its network of infrastructure links across Eurasia through the Belt and Road Initiative.
‘China has made it clear that it wants a place in the international system commensurate with its weight. It is no longer a status quo power.
‘But neither is the other major power in the region, the United States.
‘Certainly the current US administration considers that the benefits it derives from bearing some of the costs of providing global public goods are diminishing. A number of elements in the international status quo, including the open international trading system, some of the principal multi-lateral organisations such as the WTO (World Trade Organisation), and even elements of its own alliance system, are no longer seen as serving American interests, or at least providing it with an adequate return on its investments.
‘The signals being sent by the United States about its future role in the Indo- Pacific are ambiguous. The language used in documents like the National Defense Strategy and statements by Defense Secretary Mattis remain familiar and robust. But some of Washington’s actions, like withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), sending mixed messages to allies in Japan and South Korea, and most recently, President Trump’s decision to ditch a visit to the region for the APEC and the East Asia Summits, are not calculated to reassure. Indeed, that may be the point.
‘Nevertheless, I expect the United States to continue to play a large and important role in the region. Its interests and its own view of its global role (and of itself) will demand it.
‘This means, of course, that the potential for great power conflict will continue, particularly over what Professor Brendan Taylor at the ANU called in a recent book, the ‘Four Flashpoints’ of the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and the east South China Seas.
‘But I expect it to be a different role from the past; more calculated and reciprocal. There was some symbolism in the eulogies last week commemorating the life of Senator John McCain. I don’t think we’ll see his sort of full-throated faith in US liberal interventionism from American political leaders for some time.
‘In fact, no single power will be able to generate the energy needed to shape and sustain a new Indo-Pacific order alone. China cannot do so, nor can the United States. Energy will have to come from a networked grid, not a single power source. That’s going to place far more weight on the individual elements in the region, including Australia, to contribute order-generating energy.
‘The framework and institutions of the emerging Indo-Pacific region will look nothing like those of the Asia-Pacific, built around the hub and spokes of a strong alliance system and inclusive economic forums like APEC. In order to address the Indo-Pacific’s myriad economic, security, environmental and social challenges, we will need a diverse and fluid network of relationships, groups and coalitions.
‘Sometimes the Indo-Pacific arrangements will be designed to cooperate, as with the East Asia Summit; sometimes to compete, as with the emerging infrastructure alternatives to the Belt and Road Initiative. Sometimes China will be central to the institution, as in the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Sometimes ASEAN will be, as with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Sometimes the groupings will engage distrustful neighbours (as in the China-Japan-Korea Trilateral); sometimes they will bring together distant partners. Sometimes the connections binding members will be economic, sometimes normative, sometimes geographic. Only a strategic and economic ecosystem as varied as this will be able to accommodate all our different Indo-Pacifics.
‘So what are the consequences for land forces? We all want clear missions in our lives, military forces understandably more than most. But the 21st century Indo-Pacific is unlikely to offer them.
‘The Chief of the Army, Lieutenant General Burr, has reminded us recently that the geopolitical context, changing threats, disruptive technologies and domain integration all mean that we must prepare for an accelerating environment in the Indo-Pacific. Fast adaptation will be the key.
‘My old friend Ric Smith, a former Secretary of the Defence Department and Ambassador to China and Indonesia, privately describes the government’s requirements for the Australian Army as being like those of a Swiss Army knife: a blade quite capable of striking through when necessary but also giving you the capability to open a bottle or remove the stone from a horse’s hoof. In other words, a resource of commendable versatility and usefulness.
‘In one way or another, land forces will be required to address contingencies ranging from major power war to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
‘The Indo-Pacific includes some of the most vulnerable areas in the world. ‘Climate change has been a sensitive issue in Australian politics recently, but the 2016 Defence White Paper was unambiguous about its importance to the security of the Indo-Pacific. Climate change, it said, will see ‘higher temperatures, increased sea-level rise and will increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events’. There would be high expectations on Australia to be able to respond more often to instability and natural disasters as a result.
‘Such challenges will not just come for the small island states. Some of the most populous areas of the world in South and South-East Asia are also vulnerable. Natural disasters, population movement, infectious diseases and resource scarcity are other consequences.
‘The recent work of the Australian Army in the Philippines has reminded us of the continuing role land forces are likely to play to help counter violent extremism in the region, especially with the return of foreign fighters from the wars of the Middle East.
‘One lesson to be drawn from all this is that whatever the trajectory of the geopolitical developments, the importance of the land forces of the region knowing each other, and understanding their ways of working, will be vital. The region has different military traditions but developing knowledge, understanding and experience in working together will be an important piece of stability-building in the Indo-Pacific.
‘In Australia’s own experience, the success of operations like the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands and East Timor depended on long patterns of contact between our forces and often on relationships between individuals in them, cemented by decades of defence diplomacy.
‘For many years now I have begun talks to students, young public servants and ADF officers by pointing out that almost all Australian governments since 1945 have at some point proclaimed in a speech or official document that Australia has never faced a more fluid, complex and uncertain environment. You can read that sort of language every five years or so.
‘And, of course, the world is always changing. So you can understand that I’ve been reluctant to come to this conclusion, but I’m finally willing to concede that this time the claim is true.
‘The Foreign Policy White Paper got it right when it said that significant forces of change are buffeting the international system ‘in ways without precedent in our modern history’.
‘My point isn’t that we don’t know what will come next—we never do—but that the range of possibilities and consequences seems greater to me than at any point in my professional life.
‘So it’s vitally important that we work to get this right. All the elements of statecraft are going to have to be brought to the task. The sort of thinking this seminar encourages about the role of land forces and the potential for strengthening partnerships and unlocking collective potential in the Indo- Pacific is a really important contribution to that.’
Figure 42. Soldiers from the Army Reserve’s 5th Brigade depart HMAS Canberra for an amphibious lodgment. (Image: DoD)
Figure 43. Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Rick Burr, AO, DSC, MVO (right) hosted speakers including the Minister for Defence, the Hon. Chris Pyne, MP, at the Chief of Army’s Land Forces Seminar, 2019. (Image: DoD)
