The region remains on the global geo-strategic map, having now explicitly entered NATO’s strategic thinking. The killing of Shinzo Abe too has thrown the Indo-Pacific into stark relief against the geopolitical threats posed by Russia and China, since it...
In February 2022, European, African and Asian foreign ministers were meeting in Paris for the first international conference on the Indo-Pacific, when Russian troops rolled over the border into Ukraine.
As recently as five years ago the concept “Indo-Pacific” barely existed in the discourse of international relations. The shocking assassination of former Japanese prime ministerIn 2007, during his first term as prime minister, in his seminal “Confluence of the Two Seas” speech, he told the Indian parliament that the Pacific and the Indian oceans were undergoing a “dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and of prosperity”.
The “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” in Japan’s strategy reflected the central concern expressed in all these strategies that China was trying to control the passage of foreign vessels through large tracts of the South China Sea and the East China Sea. This was most blatant in its landfilling over and between shallow rocky outcrops to create artificial islands and then building military bases on them.
In its new Strategic Concept adopted at its summit in Madrid in June 2022, NATO declared: “The Russian Federation is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” The NATO document added: “The deepening strategic partnership” between China and Russia “and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”
China is often not mentioned explicitly in many documents or discussions about the Indo-Pacific. Yet it remains the hidden dragon in the room. The coyness may reflect the strategic reality that, as NATO put it, Beijing has remained “opaque about its strategy, intentions and military build-up” and so it is difficult to confront it directly.
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