From Contest for the Indo-Pacific (Rory Medcalf, 2020) pp 16-7
The Indo-Pacific has a starkly military dimension. A pivotal moment has been China’s turn to the sea. Its navy is expanding rapidly, in line with a 2015 proclamation by president, Communist Party general secretary, military chief and core leader Xi Jinping that the ‘traditional mentality that land outweighs sea must be abandoned’ when it comes to protecting China interests. Instead, the new Chinese strategy is about offshore waters defence and ‘open-seas protection’: euphemisms for deploying force in distant waters. This is not just rhetoric. A massive shipbuilding program has been underway for years. Aircraft carriers are being commissioned, not primarily to patrol China’s proximate waters or even the South China Sea, but to show force on the open ocean. The Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) showed up in the Indian Ocean with three warships to counter Somali piracy at the start of 2009, and has never left. For the first time since the voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the 1400s, China is an Indian Ocean power. This time, instead of sailing ships, it has destroyers, marines and submarines. These conduct exercises peaceful and warlike, backed by partnerships, port access rights and the Chinese military’s first overseas base. This time China plans to stay.
Of course, China is not alone. To be fair, it has far-flung interests to protect and is hardly the only external power to fly the flag in Indian Ocean waters. Perhaps the real surprise is how long it took Chinese mariners to make their way back. The United States has long operated there, including at its base on the contentious UK possession of Diego Garcia. Japan opened a base at Djibouti before China did. European powers have been forth and back and forth again since the days of Vasco da Gama, the ruthless Portuguese adventurer who pioneered maritime empire-building five centuries ago. This century, almost every ocean-going navy, from Russia to Singapore, has sent forces to protect commerce from Somali-based pirates, a rational for China’s mission.
And the world’s navies are converging not only west of the Malacca Strait, that strategic neck of water connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans. Indian, American and Japanese warships practise together from the Bay of Bengal to the western Pacific. Almost every major navy joins Australia to train in waters north of Darwin. As China militarises artificial islands in the South China Sea, fleets both commercial and military from across the globe exercise their international legal rights by traversing this shared highway at the heart of the Indo-Pacific. The rights and wrongs of the South China Sea disputes are recounted elsewhere, but understandably there are rising fears of war in these contested and congested sea lanes. And, in this connected age, a war there would spread and resound far.
Militaries are modernising and deploying across the Indo-Pacific. The trend is towards what military jargon calls ‘power projection’: in plain language, a capacity to fight far away, across the seas. This means long-range and maritime capabilities: aircraft carriers, amphibious forces, destroyers, submarines, surveillance planes, satellites and missiles, combined with futuristic drone swarms and the unseen hands of cyber and electronic warfare. The costly quest for advantage in undersea warfare is becoming a new peacetime fixation, an obsessive game of hide-and-seek, as China, India, Pakistan and North Korea imitate America, Russia, Britain and France in placing nuclear weapons on submarines.
Nearly all the region’s powers are arming and making ready, but for what? Is it mainly about cooperation, on shared concerns like terrorism, piracy, illegal fishing, disaster relief in an age of climate change, search and rescue, peacekeeping, stabilisation of fragile states, evacuations of citizens from trouble spots? Is it to police the sea lanes, protect shipments of energy and commerce, and uphold international law? Or to deter, coerce, resist and, if need be, fight other nations in new wars, cold or hot? Underlying the military build-up is a gathering atmosphere of suspicion. No nation may plan outright aggression, but intentions are opaque. China does not take America at its word – and America, Japan, India, Australia and Vietnam, among others, are especially sceptical of China’s.
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