Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue 2019

The Oceans are for Free, Open, Inclusive and Cooperative Rules-based Order.

- Pradeep Chauhan

New Delhi. Over the past decade, the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ — which acknowledges the geopolitical unity of littoral nation- States of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, across a predominantly oceanic regional-expanse — has become intrinsic to global political, economic and strategic discourse. Within geopolitics and its subsets, viz., geoeconomics and geostrategy, the prefix ‘geo’ — as Australia’s Professor Andrew Phillips succinctly informs us — refers to a country’s ‘strategic geography’ (the core spatial assumptions underpinning her grand strategy).

What actually is this relatively unfamiliar animal: ‘Strategic Geography’? And how does it differ from ‘real Geography’? If one were to take a chart or map that depicts ‘real’ geography and then place upon it a set of coordinates defined by specific latitudes and longitudes, and, within the area that has been so bounded or enclosed, if one were to then give special focus — at the national level — in terms of the planning and execution of one’s geopolitical strategies, this enclosed or bounded area would define one’s ‘strategic geography’. Obviously, the strategic geography of one country, say India for instance, can hardly be expected to be the same as that of, say, Maldives, or, for that matter, the USA. As such, every geopolitically defined ‘region’ is an artificial, manmade construct, whose defining-boundaries can be (and often are) different for different geopolitical players. This is as true of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ as it is of any other ‘region’.