From Asia Pacific To Indo Pacific

NEW DELHI. China’s assertive maneuvers to dominate the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are changing the global dynamics.

- Nilova Roy Chaudhury

India is certainly concerned as the Chinese are building their biggest naval base at Gwadar in Pakistan, just about 700 km from the Indian coast.

China has already claimed nearly the entire South China Sea, and built artificial islands with military facilities, notwithstanding opposition from all its neighbours except its military dependency of North Korea.

The US, which is the only super power with global naval and military presence, and Japan and Australia, naturally want to align forces with India. So much so that in the new emerging order, the description Asia Pacific has given way to what is now being called the Indo-Pacific in acknowledgement of India’s importance in the global arena.

To recall, the US State Department under Condoleezza Rice, during the George W Bush administration, declared its policy goal “to help India become a major world power in the 21st century.” Ever since, successive administrations have sought to dehyphenate India and Pakistan but, because of Afghanistan, have not been effective in curbing the ‘deep state’ of army and ISI in Islamabad which has kept the region in a spiral of violence.

On October 19 however, in a seminal speech at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank , US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson took India out of the South Asian context into the Asia Pacific arena and the much larger Indo-Pacific sphere.

Describing India and the US as “bookends of stability” on either side of the globe, Tillerson advocated a strong “emerging Delhi-Washington strategic partnership” which has the potential to anchor the rules-based world order for the next century.