JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
e-ISSN: 1647-7251
Vol. 15, Nº. 1 (May 2024 – October 2024), pp. 372-379
Notes and Reflections
From Geo-Economics of the “Asia-Pacific” to Geo-Politics of the “Indo-Pacific”
Richard Higgott
to reverse this. The US DoS formalised the idea with the concept of a Free and Open
Indo-Pacific in 2019.
It was seen as a means to consolidate the QUAD (India, Australia,
Japan).His policy has in fact reflected substantial continuity with Trump’s. Biden’s
priorities were always geopolitics and security.
His primary aim has been to build a grand alliance against what he sees as the
systematically competitive growth of Chinese power; to contain, if not rollback, Chinese
global influence was to be capped. US international economic policy (and technology)
was effectively securitised via practices such as sanctions, the Inflation Reduction Act
and Chips Act. In simple terms, when it comes to the Indo Pacific and China, Biden and
his advisers, are what we might call “primacists”—a strategy that reflects a misreading
of the changing nature of power considerations in the contemporary world order.
The Indo Pacific is not a neutral description of region: but one designed to counter a
China dominated regional order. Concern with China, at the heart of US grand strategy,
dominates the views of both its official and quasi-official analytical policy community
within the DC Beltway.
The geopolitical imagining of the Indo-Pacific discourse has the
China threat at its centre. Indeed, the Indo-Pacific, according the 2022 US National
Security Strategy, is the ‘epicentre of 21
st
Century geopolitics’
. Only a small part of the
US analytical community thinks that while China needs to be watched closely, it is not
the existential and geopolitical security threat it is thought to be
.
At the policy level the dominant discourse, especially in think tanks such as AEI, the Cato
Institute, CSIS, AEF, Atlantic Council is now, rivalry driven, virulently geo-political and
anti-China. Even the CFR and Brookings are carrying fewer discussions of the prospects
for cooperation and conflict mitigation as opposed to conflict. At the extreme, in 2019,
that most hawkish of Cold War organisations, the Committee for Present Danger
underwent a resurrection. China was substituted for the Soviet Union in its full title
.
But, at a time when the Trans-Atlantic world is learning what the Economist calls
“homeland economics”, and asking how Indo Pacific geostrategic tensions affect it and
what it can do to contain them, many Asian countries are developing an important
portfolio of economic institutional cooperation. Note, TPP did not collapse with US
withdrawal. It became CPTPP and is clearly a viable, if less significant, organization.
Similarly, RCEP is fulfilling an increasingly relevant regional role as it gears up since its
recent ratification. The AIIB, legitimate criticism of its modus operandi notwithstanding
has become, against US wishes, a key component of regional economic statecraft.
Department of State A Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Advancing a Shared Vision Washington, D.C: 4 Nov.
2019. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Free-and-Open-Indo-Pacific-4 Nov2019.pdf.
See Jentlesen, Bruce (2020). ‘Refocussing US Grand Strategy on Pandemic and Environmental Mass
Destruction’, The Washington Quarterly, 43 (3): pp. 9-12.
The White House, National Security Strategy (2022). October, p. 37.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wpcontent/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-
Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
See Weiss, Jessica Chen (2022). ‘The China Trap: US China Foreign Policy and the Perilous of Logic of Zero-
Sum Competition’, Foreign Affairs, September-October, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/china-trap-
us-foreign-policy-zero-sum-competition , Fravel, M. Taylor et al. (2019). ‘China Is Not an Enemy,’
Washington Post, July 3, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/making-china-a-us-enemy-is-
counterproductive/ and Dan Murphy, ‘Is the United States Overestimating Chinese Power’, The
Conversation, March 1, 2024, https://theconversation.com/is-the-united-states-overestimating-chinas-
power-220014
To be found at: https://presentdangerchina.org.