This article, by Professor Rory Medcalf AM, appeared in The Straits Times on 1 May 2023.

As recently as a decade ago, the idea of a single super-region encompassing the Indian and Pacific oceans seemed unfamiliar and academic. No longer: today, the Indo-Pacific is an essential and widely accepted diplomatic framework for managing profound challenges to regional and global issues.

What began as a practical reimagining of the world map — one that recognizes the region as this century’s centre of gravity in economics, population and contestation — is crystalizing into a set of common principles. Specifically, most countries now accept that a stable, prosperous and peaceful Indo-Pacific must also be free and open.

That is in no small part thanks to Japan. In 2016, its then-prime minister Shinzo Abe introduced the term “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” to the world, building on ideas that he had championed for a decade.

It has caught on because it is useful: at a time when the transgressions and triumphalism of a rising China often dominate global discourse, FOIP facilitates the balancing of Beijing’s power through an array of new partnerships.

Although some have called FOIP a plot to exclude or contain China, it is actually about incorporating a powerful China into a regional order where the rights of others are respected, while enabling others to counterbalance that power when they are not.

China, in other words, can and should be prominent in the region—but not dominant.

We have reached the “end of the beginning” of the Indo-Pacific era. Now it is time to translate its vision into practical ideas and institutions, while identifying how to more tangibly connect Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific approach with the interests and outlooks of other nations. And we must do so across a broad landscape that includes not only defence and security but also economics, development, sustainability, and technology.

This is the future direction for the Indo-Pacific sketched out by Japan’s current prime minister Fumio Kishida in India in March. Japan will soon host this year’s summit of G7 leaders in Hiroshima, giving it opportunity to show leadership by placing Indo-Pacific security in its deserved place at top of the global agenda. This includes a welcome focus on development and connectivity across two oceans reaching to Africa, looking generations into the future.

Several recent developments show that there is momentum behind the Indo-Pacific.

European, British and Canadian participation is notable in that it represents a growing realization across the North Atlantic—driven in part by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the global response it has generated—that the world’s security challenges are interlinked and indivisible.

The Quad provides a frame of trusted partnership among four leading nations, Australia, India, Japan and the United States. It has defied the doubters and is here to stay. In May, Australia will host the third annual Quad summit meeting, with an agenda focused on public goods, technology standards and regional resilience. This is hardly hawk talk, and true to the origins of the Quad in disaster relief following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

South Korea’s introduction of an Indo-Pacific strategy confirms that the Yoon administration recognizes a welcome convergence of interests with Quad countries and other partners in regional development, stability and the rejection of Chinese coercion.

An important challenge will be to bring more countries from the Global South into an inclusive Indo-Pacific policy conversation, particularly Southeast Asian and Pacific Island states. These need to include options across a broad landscape of economics, development, sustainability, technology, as well as more traditional notions of defence and security.

In Southeast Asia and the Pacific island nations, there is a determination to avoid entanglement in the binary of a strategic contest between China and the United States. A reimagining of FOIP in terms of inclusivity, as being pursued by Japan under Mr Kishida, could help those many countries focus on development, resilience and sovereignty without accentuating confrontation with Beijing.

Indeed, a “blind taste test” between the principles espoused by Quad countries and those laid out in the 2019 Asean Outlook on the Indo-Pacific would reveal compelling convergence: both prize respect for territorial integrity, the sovereign equality of nations, non-aggression, and international law.

At the same time, there is no denying that deterrence must play a role in the strategic balance that prevents conflict in the region.

Along with Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy and commitment to defence modernization, the deal between Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom to develop an Australian fleet of nuclear-powered submarines represents a major turning point for Indo-Pacific security.

The initiative — part of a broader three-way security arrangement known as AUKUS—will dramatically enhance Australia’s deterrent capabilities as a partner in the region, reinforce America’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific, and bring about a new level of engagement by the United Kingdom.

Deterrence must be tempered with dialogue. In the end, all countries have an interest in regular, comprehensive dialogue to keep crises under control, reduce the temptation to adventurism, and avoid miscalculations.

We need an approach that focuses on principles and interests shared across many national and institutional visions. In other words, the Indo-Pacific cannot be defined by a narrow insistence that all partner nations share identical conceptions of liberal democracy and national security.

The Indo-Pacific is a region defined by connectivity as well as contestation. Creating a stable strategic equilibrium will require making that connectivity deep, inclusive and durable.