Tension in the Indo Pacific
Context:
- As US-China tensions over the South China Sea were at their height, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to explain his Indo-Pacific policy at the biennial Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in 2018.
- India supports unrestricted travel and open waterways, praising ASEAN diversity and leadership.
- Fumio Kishida, the prime minister of Japan, recently visited India to talk about the country’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
- Kishida’s selection of location had a clear message, as the Ukrainian War and other Eurasia-related concerns were driving a wedge between the West and the Russia-China axis.
Japan’s Indo-Pacific openness and freedom plan aims to lessen China’s sway:
- Days before Kishida’s travel to India, Japanese media reported that Tokyo’s Indo-Pacific strategy intended to lessen China’s influence.
- Although the programme is intended to “curb China’s growing regional aggressiveness,” the strategy’s stated goal is to promote a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a phrase Kishida mentioned at least 35 times in his speech in Delhi.
- The phrase “Indo-Pacific” was originally used by former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in a 2006 speech to the Indian Parliament, who asserted that the two oceans were “bringing about a dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and prosperity.”
- In 2012, he paid more attention to “peace, stability, and freedom of passage.” As a result, the concept of FOIP became more well-known.
- Abe first saw the Indo-Pacific as a region that would be prosperous and stable, but recent developments in the South China Sea have given the vision a more security-focused foundation.
- The current significance of FOIP, in Kishida’s opinion, extends beyond worries about local security and will be a key element of the new world order.
- He claimed that the continuing struggle in the Eurasian region and the Indo-Pacific conflict are closely related and that the world is at a pivotal turning point right now.
- Both are signs of a new world order where traditional superpowers are losing power and dangerous new actors are risking it all. It seems like a new Cold War has started.
In the years following the Second World War, China’s influence grew:
- China is currently the biggest threat to the international order that the Western nations built in the years following World War II.
- The “clash of world orders” was inspired by Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” When the Western countries assert that China wants to topple the liberal international order and replace it with one that is more hegemonic and controlled by itself, they are not entirely wrong.
- “Sovereign inter-state interactions and a relatively open global economy, characterised by practises of inclusive, rule-bound multilateralism” were the fundamental tenets of the post-War world order. This served as the foundation for international organisations like the UN. Over time, Western nations introduced ideas like democracy, liberalism, and human rights to this discussion.
- During the past three decades, this international system has benefited China. Its commitment to respecting the fundamental tenets of this international system was the basis for its admission to the WTO in 2001.
- Yet, China regularly and with impunity violated every fundamental tenet of that system under Xi. For the sake of making historical claims, it disregarded sovereign national borders and questioned the authority of international organisations.
- China is surreptitiously attempting to impose its own version of the global order, influenced by its historical ties and Leninist beliefs, while ostensibly rejecting what it calls the US-led order.
India’s involvement in society after the Cold War:
- India is devoted to opposing China’s preferred authoritarian and oppressive global order.
- As the biggest democracy in the world, there is a justifiable devotion to freedom, human rights, and peace. It contributed greatly to the UN and other relevant organisations’ efforts to defend multilateralism.
- If the Global South is to play a key role in creating the international order of the twenty-first century, it is essential to uphold India’s notion of strategic autonomy in the discussion over the conflict of global regimes.
Conclusion:
- In recent decades, the West has contributed to the development of an open and just international system. Huntington’s warnings from Clash of Civilizations must be kept in mind when defending that order: “The widespread Western belief in the universality of the West’s values and political systems is nave, and that continued insistence on such “universal” norms will only further enrage other civilisations.”
- India also contributes more to the Indo-Pacific region’s efforts to foster trade, connectivity, and freedom of passage in accordance with internal rules without jeopardising state sovereignty.
