Session 2.1

Ambassador P.S. Raghavan (retd)

Towards a sustainable security order in the Indo Pacific

This presentation will outline India's strategic, security and economic interests in the region, its bilateral and multilateral initiatives to further them, and the significance of structures like the Quad and AUKUS. For it to be sustainable, a security architecture in the region cannot be merely an extrapolation of that of the Cold War years. Additionally a security order has to recognize the emerging political and economic dynamics in the region and strive for a cooperative order that accommodates the aspirations and concerns of its countries.

Captain (Dr) Gurpreet Khurana

Unravelling the Indo-Pacific Concept

The presentation aims to trace the origin of Indo-Pacific concept and its geopolitical rationale, in context of the emerging security linkage between the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the geo-strategic imperatives of key States like India. It examines the concept separately as a maritime-configured region, a vision and a strategy; and the approaches of the key stakeholders like the ASEAN, China, EU and the US. The presenter then explores the present and potential challenges for realizing the Indo-Pacific vision, such as in terms of the differing, and even divergent approaches of the key stakeholders of the Indo-Pacific region to the sub-concepts like Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) and Rules-based Order (RBO). In conclusion, the presentation proposes a possible way ahead to overcome the challenges, and use Indo-Pacific concept for regional prosperity, enabled by holistic maritime security. It attempts to create a notional Indo-Pacific architecture. At the Political Level, the architecture encompasses various regional forums like the EAS, the ARF, the IORA, the Quad, and the AUKUS. At the Executive Level, it provides for functional cooperation among national agencies operating in the maritime domain, including the navies and coast-guards.

Prof Ian Hall

Australia's Indo-Pacific Strategy: Partially Free, Economically Open, and Increasingly Contested

Geographically, Australia is an Indo-Pacific state, with long Indian Ocean and Pacific coastlines. But strategically, it has long been predominantly concerned with East Asia, treating the Pacific with benign neglect and largely ignoring India. Over the past fifteen years, however, Australia has shifted towards an Indo-Pacific outlook that takes the security of the Pacific more seriously and that acknowledges the impact of China's push westwards, especially on South Asia. Slowly and sometimes fitfully, Canberra has constructed an Indo-Pacific strategy. This paper explores what that strategy now looks like and how it might - and should - evolve, especially with regard to Australia's immediate neighbourhood - Southeast Asia and the island states of the Southwest Pacific.

Dr Jagannath Panda

EU’s Global Gateway: What It Means to Connectivity Initiatives in Indo-Pacific?

There have been several initiatives introduced to offset and offer alternatives to the BRI. Asian economies like Japan, via the Expanded Partnership for Quality Infrastructure, and India via the Security and Growth for All have sought to build alternatives, and not counters, to the BRI, knowing that they cannot alone match the BRI’s massive investment capital. Although the US launched its   'pivot to Asia' policy in 2011 with infrastructure in mind, it took the US eight years to launch the infrastructure-focused Blue Dot Network initiative with Japan and Australia. The newly resurrected Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) has upped the efforts to challenge (or contain) China, with its recently launched new infrastructure partnership. Such multilateral ventures have experienced steady growth in the past five years in a bid to potentially offset the BRI and match it fiscally. For example, in 2021 itself, West-led democracies have announced three major long-term plans: In a demonstration of shared values among democracies, the Group of Seven (G7) launched the Build Back Better World to fulfill the infrastructure needs in low and middle-income countries, providing alternatives to Chinese investments in specific sectors. In November, the UK launched the Clean Green Initiative - a key part of its contribution to the G7 B3W - to support sustainable infrastructure and green technology in developing countries, committing over £3 billion over the next five years for their “green growth.” With the launch of its Global Gateway strategy in December 2021, the European Union (EU) emerged as the latest player entering the infrastructure connectivity race, focusing on counteracting China’s trillion-dollar BRI. How does Global Gateway fare vis-à-vis the BRI and what are its key objectives?