The following presentation was given at an academic seminar of the Council on Foreign Relations on October 6, 2021. A full transcript and video is available here.
Thanks to the Council on Foreign Relations for having me as part of this program. I always welcome and appreciate the opportunity to interact with students whenever the opportunity arises, and with members of the academic community, with faculty of various kinds. It’s been a decade—more than a decade now since I was last in graduate school, but I feel like I never truly left, and still continue to learn from my colleagues in the academic world, and so really look forward to this engagement.
In some ways, this is a timely and important moment to be discussing the power of great power competition in the Indo-Pacific. The idea of great power competition, as many of you will be aware, has been a fixture of international politics really ever since the first stage of globalization after 1492, at least on a global scale. Shortly after that time Spain and Portugal decided to carve up the world between them. And whether or not they could actually implement much of that is another matter.
This was followed, of course, by a series of conflicts between primarily European powers that led eventually by—competing coalitions led by Britain and France through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which waged war as far afield as North America and the Indian Ocean. And my own country, India, and this country, the United States, were both in many ways defined by those conflicts. Great power competition also was a feature in the rise of Germany and Japan and the two world wars in the early twentieth century. And perhaps the last period of really well-acknowledged great power competition was the Cold War between 1945 and 1991 between the United States and the Soviet Union.
But the period that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union may well be thought of as one where such competition between the world’s most powerful political entities went on something of a holiday, a hiatus, it took a break. And we saw something of a debate as to what would be the defining characteristics of that post-Cold War world. The end of history was what Francis Fukuyama, of course, famously proposed. Or Samuel Huntington argued that there would be a clash of civilization, a view that gained particular relevance after the 9/11 attacks. But others argued that this period would be defined by enlargement and engagement of the U.S.-led world order, particularly in Europe. Others said that there would be a new kind of economic and soft power competition, with a more unified European Union. Others thought the global war on terror would be the primary prism by which the world politics would be defined. Others saw the growing irrelevance of the state and the empowerment of corporations and individuals.
And these are the kinds of debates that occupied the study of international politics in the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But at some point over the past thirteen years or so, and we can discuss whether that was after the 2008 global financial crisis or after the rise of Xi Jinping in China, or the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But at some point there was a growing acknowledgement that great power competition, in some form, is back. And let me briefly get into why I think this is the case. And in doing so, I’ll try to address what I see, at least, as some of the defining features of this new competition, centered as it is in the Indo-Pacific region.
Four reasons, at least, for intensifying global competition have to do very much with China itself. And I’ll start with the security aspects of China’s rise. For many years we—there was this sort of mantra attributed to Deng Xiaoping, China’s previous paramount leader, that was variously translated as “hide your time and bide your strength,” or, “hide your brightness.” And this was seen as the sort of defining feature of China during its rise, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. But today China is very actively engaged in security competition, often over territory and occasionally over resources, with at least nine of its neighbors, depending on how you define such competition. This extends to Japan in the East China Sea, with Taiwan over the possibility and terms of reunification. It extends to the South China Sea, with a variety of claimant states there. And it extends to India and Bhutan over territory in the Himalayas.
The significance of the latter two, the South China Sea and the Himalayan competition in particular, I feel are often underappreciated in the United States. In the South China Sea, China has dredged artificial islands, laid claim to the surrounding waters and airspace, and militarized these entities in clear contravention of international law. It has engaged in intimidatory military standoffs with the Philippines and more recently with Malaysia, effectively taking control a few years ago of Scarborough Shoal, one of the disputed reefs. With India, China undertook perhaps it’s biggest military mobilization in four decades last year. The resulting standoff, which is still partially continuing, was marked last year by the deaths of twenty Indian and at least four Chinese soldiers. These were the first Chinese combat casualties outside of U.N. peacekeeping since 1988.
But it’s not just the security competition which defines the emerging great power competition in the Indo-Pacific. In international relations, as most of you would be well-aware, liberal theories posit that the pacifying or cooperating effects of interdependence, ideas, and institutions. But all of these today have become domains of competition. Today’s there’s widespread recognition that China does not offer a level economic and commercial playing field, with restricted market access in many sectors, technological theft, heavy state subsidies and predatory lending. Nor has its governance structures become more open and liberal, with a consolidation of power by Xi Jinping and the extension of a wide-ranging national security law to Hong Kong, in contravention of promises made previously to allow multiple systems of governance within one country. Finally, China has been eroding multilateral institutions and norms, whether with respect to nuclear nonproliferation, cybersecurity, outer space, freedom of navigation and overflight, financing standards, and even the Arctic and Antarctic treaties.
But it’s not just Chinese territorial revisionism, economic mercantilism, institutional degradation, and intensifying authoritarianism that are driving the new great power competition in the Indo-Pacific, although these are arguably the primary drivers. In many other countries, not least the United States and Europe, we’re witnessing in some ways a backlash to globalization and a refocus on job-related growth, national industry policy, a greater scrutiny of migration policies, and so forth. In short, we’re seeing greater nationalism around the world. Moreover, other trends are adding further to competition, as we’ve seen more recently in Afghanistan. China’s role there in facilitating the Taliban’s return to power is perhaps an important indicator of the kinds of instrumental alliances it will seek, including with Russia and Pakistan, which have their own agendas.
Finally, I should mention that technological developments, both civilian and military, are transforming the nature of competition. On the military side, we have seen perhaps a sneak peek of what is to come in the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But technological competition is playing out increasing in domains such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, 5G telecommunications, and quantum computing—all of which have both civilian and military applications, and therefore have significant implications for the future of economic growth and for military conflict.
So these, as I see it, are the key drivers developing—that are shaping and fueling the balancing behavior on the part of many other actors in the Indo-Pacific, beginning, of course, with the United States, which has five treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific. Namely, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia. The United States is also, of course, a resident power in the Indo-Pacific, with both military forces and territory, as well as citizens, in Guam, America Samoa, and Hawaii. Beyond the United States, Japan is the U.S.’s closest ally and, despite a pacifist constitution, has in the last few years assumed many of the features, roles, and responsibilities of a normal military power—again, often in response to—as they see it, to Chinese assertiveness.
Australia, once more conflicted, has experienced China’s use of economic coercion and political interference, resulting in a strong backlash from Canberra, and a reaffirmation of its alliance with the United States, most recently in the form of the AUKUS agreement, along with the United Kingdom. This, of course, is quite significant because it involves, amongst other things, the acquisition of nuclear propulsion for attacks submarines, with the support of the U.S. and U.K.
India too has been slowly improving its security relations with the U.S., Japan, and Australia since about 2000, and especially after about 2014, and has also engaged in balancing behavior—reorganizing its military forces, rebalancing assets towards China-related military contingencies, and deepening defense technology relationships with the United States and its allies. The coming together of these four countries, the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India, under the Quad—whose leaders met for the first time just a few weeks ago—is perhaps the best encapsulation of the emerging balancing relationships in the Indo-Pacific.
Beyond these four countries something of a question mark remains about other actors in the region. These include South Korea, the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, the smaller states of South Asia, East Africa, and the South Pacific. And Europe too is looking at all of these developments that I outlined with keener interest, given their own economic agendas, domestic politics, and, in some cases, European security roles in the Indo-Pacific. In all of these cases, countries will strive to balance relations with China on the one hand and the United States and its partners on the other. But the room for maneuver may be narrowing, and the proposition that economic and security policies can be kept separate will certainly be tested in the years to come.
Finally, I’ll just mention that there’s some key differences between the emerging Indo-Pacific balance and the Cold War of the 20th century. The most important is the continuing economic interdependence and social interchange between the various actors. So, for example, China and the United States are still major trade partners with each other, and still enjoy significant people-to-people exchanges, research collaborations, and personal relationships. These are all much thicker than they were between the U.S. and the USSR during the height of the Cold War. The same story, in some ways, applies, with variations, to other relationships in the region. So it is right to question some of the lazy analogies that are made between what some have described as the new Cold War and the original one.
But the principal catalysts of great power competition that I outlined very briefly are unlikely to dissipate in the near future. And for both students and scholars of international relations, it’s all the more reason to be focused on how the Indo-Pacific balance shapes up in the coming years and decades. Thank you.