Evolving Geopolitics of Indo-Pacific Region

Challenges and Prospects

Subhasish Sarangi

• Publisher: VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789388161800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"The "Indo-Pacific" has emerged as a strategic pivot in the evolving balance of power. The region encompasses about 60 per cent of the world population, three of the ten largest economies, five of the ten most populated countries and three of the ten largest countries. It is home to an enormously populous and diverse mix of ethnicities, cultures, political systems, religions, and economic models. Global trade and energy linkages bind the oceans such that events across the region are strongly interrelated and mutually dependent.Considering the importance of this region, the United Service Institution of India (USI) organised a seminar on 01-02 November 2018 at New Delhi on the theme of, "Evolving Geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific Region: Challenges and Prospects". The seminar brought together varying perspectives on the challenges and prospects in the security and economic domain in the region, and the framework for architectures for collective security and economic integration. The seminar was organised into three separate sessions. The first session covered security challenges and prospects in the Indo-Pacific Region. The second session was devoted to economic challenges and prospects in the Indo Pacific Region and the third session to discussions on frameworks for cooperation. The proceedings were rounded off with a panel discussion on the furtherance of security and economic cooperation in the Indo-Pacific Region.This book is based on the papers presented by various speakers during the seminar."

PART – I

Security Challenges and Prospects
in the Indo-Pacific Region

Troubling Times in East Asia

Dr James A. Boutilier¹

The battle lines have begun to harden in East Asia. China is on the move; squeezing the last breath of democracy out of Hong Kong, applying greater and great diplomatic and psychological pressure on Taiwan, militarizing its newly created “islands” in the South China Sea, fatally compromising the concept of community in Southeast Asia, and striving to undermine the trilateral bonds uniting South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

The Belt and Road Initiative, that grandly ambitious plan advanced in 2013 by President Xi Jinping of China, to develop new Silk Routes across the Indian Ocean and Eurasia and thereby expand Chinese influence, globally, has begun to stall. More and more nations like the Maldives, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have begun to push back; questioning China’s end-game and expressing mounting alarm at the prospect of becoming hopelessly indebted to China as a result of vast infrastructural projects.

At the same time, nations farther afield have begun to adopt a more critical position towards Beijing. Many European states have voiced their concern about the commanding position that China appears to have achieved in the world of European sea ports. Those same nations recognize the legitimate ambitions of an emerging great power like China but they are worried by the way in which China has been able to leverage infrastructural investment in the political realm, pressuring recipient states to support China’s international policies or mute criticism of China’s egregious human rights record.

Attitudes towards China are also hardening demonstrably in the United States. While President Trump has highlighted his friendship with President Xi on numerous occasions, Vice-President Pence’s speech to the Hudson Institute on the Fourth of October, 2018, suggests a significant sea change in American attitudes towards the People’s Republic. Pence enumerated a litany of complaints – intellectual property theft by the Chinese, Chinese espionage activities that included wide-scale hacking operations, China’s failure to uphold international law, currency manipulation, appalling human rights violations, and so forth – that indicated that the United States was no longer prepared to tolerate Chinese conduct. Furthermore, Pence’s speech coincided with the inauguration of a Sino-American trade “war” in which President Trump began to apply punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese exports. The predictability and rationality of these tariffs can be the subject of debate, but, for the moment, the White House seems to have dropped all pretence of working harmoniously with Beijing.

While these are the broadest features of the global dialogue with China, this paper focuses more specifically on northeast, east, and southeast Asia, and, within that context, on the Koreas, Sino-Japanese relations (with a sidebar on Russo-Japanese relations), Sino-Russian relations, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Sino-ASEAN relations. By its very nature, this sort of geographically circumscribed review does damage to extra-regional ties like those developing between Japan and India or between India and Vietnam, for example. Nonetheless, East Asia contains what are arguably some of the most volatile spots in the globe and it is to them that we must turn.

The Koreas

North Korea has long been recognized as one of the most dangerous and destabilizing corners of Asia. For upwards of seventy years the Kim dynasty (the only dynasty in communist experience) has ruled over a penniless and famine-ridden Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea. The Kims constitute a blend of monarchy and mafia; tapping a deep and genuinely felt affection for the monarchical concept in the Korean psyche while operating as if they were the principals in Puzo’s The Godfather. The first two Kims – Kim Il Sung, the founder of the DPRK and his son, Kim Jong Il – ruled over the DPRK in a deeply authoritarian, if not totalitarian manner, building up their conventional forces after the disastrous outcome of the peninsular war that Kim Il Sung had launched in 1950. Kim Jong-il went beyond conventional forces and began to develop a primitive arsenal of missiles and nuclear weapons. However, it was his son, Kim Jong-un, known derisively in Chinese social media (despite censors’ best efforts) as “Kim Fatty the Third”, who, having acceded to prominence in 2012, began to push forward aggressively with the development of intermediate and intercontinental ballistic missiles with miniaturized nuclear warheads to match.

By 2017 it was clear to intelligence analysts in the Trump administration that while the North Korean inventory of missiles was modest, Kim could, in extremis, target the United States and could very easily hit all of North Korea’s neighbours, particularly South Korea (whose capital, Seoul, is only about thirty kilometres from the border with the DPRK) and Japan. In 1992, the celebrated regional publication, The Far Eastern Economic Review, queried its readers, “What is to be done with North Korea?”More than a quarter century later the North Korean problem remains just as intractable. If the United States were to stage a pre-emptive nuclear strike against North Korea, and the leadership concentrated on the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, there would be no way of guaranteeing that all of Kim Jongun’s arsenal of nuclear weapons had been destroyed. In that event, would Kim lash out by launching missiles against Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington? No American president would want to be drawn into another land war on the Korean peninsula Thus, while the complete de-nuclearisation of North Korea has been a long-standing US ambition, realizing that objective is fiendishly difficult. When President Trump and Kim Jong-un met earlier in 2018 in Singapore (a truly singular and remarkable encounter), the former came away convinced that he had persuaded Kim to embark on a programme of complete and verifiable disarmament. Sceptical and wary analysts, long-acquainted with the fits and starts of negotiating with Pyongyang, dismissed this claim as an exercise of fantasy.

Central to the North Korean dilemma is the role of China. China came to Kim Il Sung’s rescue in 1950 when the United Nations forces threatened to overrun the DPRK, and since then Beijing has acted as the grand puppet master, keeping North Korea alive with food and oil. In fact, China accounts for roughly 83 percent of North Korea’s trade and the White House has maintained for many years that China is the key to resolving the North Korean dilemma. If Beijing is sincere, so the argument goes, it will lean on Pyongyang to the degree that Kim Jong-un will dismantle his missiles and nuclear weapons facilities. Nothing could be farther from the truth of the matter. While Beijing has frequently expressed frustration and annoyance with Pyongyang’s provocative behaviour, the last thing that Beijing would ever do is pressure Kim to the point where the North Korean regime might collapse.

What we have seen is that following half a decade in which there was virtually no high-level contact with the Chinese, Kim has met repeatedly with Xi to orchestrate Pyongyang’s response to Washington. Xi may very well have felt that bilateral contact between Kim and Trump raised the possibility that China might lose control over the peninsular narrative, particularly at a time when there was a critical wild card at play. That wild card was the newly-elected president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, who had his own ambitious agenda predicated on building bridges to the North Korean regime. Moon’s overtures to Pyongyang have complicated the Korean calculus particularly at a time when the White House appears to be naïve and unfocused when it comes to the North Korean problem.

Moon and Kim have met several times and Secretary of State, Pompeo, travelled to Pyongyang in October to lay the groundwork for a further bilateral between President Trump and Chairman Kim. What would be accomplished with a second high-level meeting remains to be seen. There is evidence that suggests that North Korea has failed to proceed with dismantling its missile and nuclear reserves. If anything, the North Koreans may have continued to build up their arsenal. They have offered to publicly dismantle key facilities but there is almost no way of knowing whether there may not be secret facilities in the North that will continue to function.

While Trump cancelled one of the major US-ROK military exercises, Pyongyang will no doubt press for greater concessions; an end to all joint exercises and/or a draw down or elimination of US forces on the peninsula. Still further, Pyongyang and Seoul have been actively considering the possibility of concluding a peace treaty to bring the Korean War (1950-1953) to a close. The Chinese would be delighted to see the Americans quit the peninsula, and, having strong-armed President Moon over American high-altitude anti-missile installations, they are probably confident that they can play a bigger and bigger role in post-American peninsular affairs. It is unlikely that Beijing will press for Korean unification (the DPRK is a convenient geostrategic buffer headed by a puppet regime), but the withdrawal of US forces would enable China to draw South Korea deeper into its gravitational field and split the crucial northeast Asian trilateral relationship that links South Korea, Japan and the United States.

The South Koreans do themselves no service by continually resurrecting the highly emotional and contentious “comfort women” issue with Japan, not to mention Seoul’s opposition to the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force’s predilection to fly the rising sun flag from JMSDF warships. This flag is seen as an unnecessarily provocative reminder of Japanese aggression during World War II. While the South Koreans may have legitimate and justifiable concerns, they have, to put it baldly, far bigger fish to fry and alienating Japan plays straight into Beijing’s hands.

Japan

China is playing a long-term double game in the East China Sea where it has laid claim to the so-called Senkaku-Diaoyutai Islands, rocky outcrops controlled by Japan. Whereas the Chinese are completely tone deaf to claims that geographic features in the South China Sea are “disputed,” they continuously reiterate that the Senkaku are the subject of disputed ownership. The Japanese, shrewdly, have not risen to the bait. As long as they fail to acknowledge that ownership is disputed, there are no grounds for rival claims to be subject to arbitration. The Chinese, for their part, have pursued a carborundum approach, trying to wear down Japanese resolve by sending ships (fishing vessels, coast guard ships, and warships) into the waters around the Senkaku repeatedly, and dispatching aircraft to overfly the islets.

The Japanese have responded to the dramatic growth of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the constant nuisance insertion of ships and planes into the Senkaku area by shifting their military centre of gravity from Hokkaido in the north (where they traditionally prepared to repel a Soviet/Russian attack) to the Kyushu and Ryukyu Islands in the south, closer to the Senkaku and key oceanic passages that PLAN warships take as they exit the East China Sea and move into the western Pacific.

Fortunately for the Japanese, they have benefitted from the statesmanlike leadership of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a politician eager to enhance Japan’s capacity for self-defence, to build up the Japanese defence budget, and to play a bolder (largely anti-Chinese) foreign policy role. The Chinese are past masters at picking historical scabs and reminding the world (at the very time that they are conveniently whitewashing or forgetting their own history) about Japanese aggression three quarters of a century ago. Thus, they are quick to exploit any support that Abe may extend to right wing supporters, although, at present, Beijing appears to have embarked on one of its periodic charm offensives, no doubt intended to exploit the foreign policy drift and confusion emanating out of the White House. Accordingly, Abe spent several days in China in late October. His principal ambition, no doubt, was to explore renewed investment and business opportunities there, particularly at a time when China’s economy has begun to slow.

Russia

Long ago the English newspaper The Economist remarked famously that Russia was “Upper Volta with rockets.” The rockets are still there as the recent long-range test of Russian rockets (fired from the Barents Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk) reveals. However, Russia is in trouble. Its economy only equals that of New York State and the western sanctions imposed after President Putin’s 2014 occupation of the Crimean peninsula, have severely undermined the Russian economy. The demographic collapse that originated in the 1990s seems to have slowed but Russia is very much a shadow of its former self and it is Putin who touches his forelock when he visits Beijing. Indeed, without Chinese financial support, Russia’s ambitious Arctic oil and gas ventures, centered on the Yamal peninsula, would probably never be realized. Certainly, the Chinese have shouldered the Russians aside in Central Asia when it comes to Belt and Road projects. While it is hardly a patron-client relationship (China does rely on Russia for crucial oil and gas imports) Russia is the junior partner existing largely on military and energy sales.

The Russo-Japanese relationship remains as intractable as the North Korean dilemma. Despite endless rounds of negotiations, the Russians have refused to hand over any of the little islands that they occupy immediately to the north of the Japanese home island of Hokkaido. These World War II spoils have been disputed for decades and the only thing that has really happened is that the Russians are more entrenched than ever. With the so-called Kuril Islands or Northern Territories dispute unresolved, the Japanese and Russians remain, technically, in a state of war, dating back to 1945. Abe has made overtures to Putin but no resolution of the problem seems anywhere in sight.

Instead, the Japanese have the unenviable task of watching the Sino-Russian relationship continue to grow. But this is a “misery loves company” relationship. Putin and Xi are cut from the same strong-man, paranoid cloth. Finding the world ranged against them more and more unambiguously, they have naturally drifted together. There is a complementarity in their world views, their economic needs, and their anti-American sentiments, despite the bizarre flirtation between Trump and Putin on occasion. Russian covert operations have proven so ham-fisted that it is almost impossible, even for someone as notoriously unpredictable as Trump, to continue his public support of Putin. As a consequence, Putin has had almost no choice but to fall back on China. The fact of the matter remains, however, that the Russians don’t trust the Chinese as far as they could throw them and, despite theatrical military exercises like Vostok 18, in September 2018, the feeling is almost certainly mutual.

South China Sea

Early in October the Chinese propaganda publication, the Global Times, lamented that the tranquillity of the South China Sea was being unnecessarily disturbed by the United States Navy. It is hard to imagine how any commentator could be so exquisitely disingenuous. Yes, the Americans were sending warships through the South China Sea to test Chinese maritime pretensions, but the reasons why those pretentions needed to be pricked was Chinese adventurism in the first place.

A revolutionary dimension of East Asian affairs over the past third of a century is the breath-taking rise of PLAN. What the Chinese have done in that period is almost without precedent; they have built an ocean-going navy which is larger numerically (though not qualitatively, yet) than the largest navy on the face of the earth – the United States Navy. Accordingly, Chinese strategists have focused their attention on defending the long, exposed, and economically dynamic Chinese coastline. Realizing that they are still no match for the USN, the Chinese have fallen back on that classic naval strategy of sea denial. If they cannot control the oceanic approaches to the Chinese coast outright, they can at least deny those waters to their rivals. Seen from this perspective, it makes sense for them to consolidate their control over the South China Sea (SCS). Not only does the SCS surround one of their three major naval bases – the South Fleet HQ at Zhangjian – but a colossal amount of commerce and fossil fuel makes its way through the strategic Strait of Malacca and northward across the SCS to Chinese ports, as well as to South Korea and Japan.

While there may be compelling strategic arguments supporting Chinese ambitions in the SCS, Chinese claims are predicated on bogus historic and cartographic claims and completely disregard the claims of other SCS states. This reality was underscored when the Permanent Court of Arbitration in Den Haag handed down a ruling in July 2016 that completely dismissed Chinese arguments for ownership.

The Chinese had already signed on to the regional Declaration of Conduct (DoC) in 2002. Central to the DoC was a promise not to alter the strategic status quo in the SCS. The Chinese, however, completely disregarded that undertaking and from 2009 onwards embarked on a massive land reclamation programme designed to build up submerged and partially submerged geographic features into artificial “islands.” In the process, President Xi promised President Obama, during their Sunny lands, California, meetin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Participants
• Introduction
• Keynote Address
• Special Address
• Part – I Security Challenges and Prospects in the Indo-Pacific Region
• Part – II Economic Challenges and Prospects in the Indo-Pacific Region
• Part – III Framework for Co-operation in the Indo-Pacific Region
• Part – IV Furtherance of Economic and Security Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific Region