Assessing the Biden Administration’s policy toward the Indo-Pacific

3 December 2021

Well into the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency, assessments of his administration’s foreign policy have already begun to appear. Several commentators have attempted to identify a “Biden Doctrine” to little avail. However, none have yet examined Biden’s policy toward the world’s most critical region: the Indo-Pacific. The administration’s opening months have produced tangible wins and presented a generally coherent theory of success in regional affairs. But the next phases are likely to prove more difficult to tackle — and the potential for heightened aggression from China looms large.

Three pillars

The Biden Administration’s approach toward the Indo-Pacific region can be distilled into three key pillars. The first and most defined pillar is revitalising relationships with allies and close partners. Early outcomes in this area include holding summits with leaders from Japan and South Korea along with a brisk succession of trilateral engagements; elevating the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad); negotiating the Australia-United Kingdom-United States enhanced trilateral partnership (AUKUS), and refreshing defence ties with the Philippines. The Biden team has further sought to foster links between allies in Asia and Europe and build consensus about the challenge China poses. However, these efforts have encountered headwinds with Europe’s angst over the Afghanistan withdrawal and France’s fury over AUKUS.

Biden’s prioritisation of allies and close partners could leave the rest of the region’s states unsure about their role and those of the region’s legacy multilateral institutions, such as ASEAN and the East Asia Summit.

The allies and partners pillar often gets short-changed as simply mending fences following the discord during the Trump Administration. That description underestimates the full ambition, though. The Biden Administration aspires to reforge relationships for the strategic conditions of a new period in regional and global geopolitics. Alliances and partnerships must now account for, among other strategic trends, a post-Afghanistan United States, a world-transforming due to the rapid emergence of new technologies, and an increasingly rapacious China under Xi Jinping. Security pacts must also reflect an era where allied states are stronger than in earlier years and are therefore seeking concomitant autonomy, but where the need for truly cooperative security arrangements to uphold the rules-based international order is at its highest point since the end of the Cold War.

The second pillar of Biden’s regional strategy is constructing and implementing a policy for “strategic competition” with Beijing. This pillar comes second only because the administration’s approach is built on the principle that formulating an effective China policy requires nesting it within a strategy for the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. More specifically, Biden’s China policy derives from his realist-influenced worldview, which considers the balance of power as the central driver of international politics. Secretary of State Antony Blinken channelled Biden’s views when he asserted that “the need to engage China from a position of strength” achieved through a combination of international coalition-building and domestic renewal was the “common denominator” for the administration’s China policy.

Taken together, the Biden team’s strategy aims to generate a preponderance of military, technological, and economic power backed by a democratic governance model that provides opportunities for citizens while protecting their fundamental rights. Seen through this lens, the balance of power calculations link directly to the US-China competition over governance. Biden has characterised relations between Washington and Beijing as “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies”. While theorists might see material power and ideology as two distinct lenses, for Biden they are inextricable in the real-world practice of statecraft.

The administration simultaneously argues that intensifying strategic competition necessitates improving communication channels with Beijing to manage tensions, dispel misperceptions, and forestall crises — what it calls “responsible” competition. The Biden team has worked to establish such channels. But it has tried to do so in ways that prioritise results over bureaucratic formalities while avoiding the trap of soft-pedalling criticisms on human rights and other areas of disagreement with the misplaced hope of enticing Beijing to cooperate beyond where cooperation serves Chinese interests.

The third pillar of Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy centres on cultivating positive relations with the rest of the region, including in Southeast and South Asia, and the Pacific Islands. This pillar seeks to bolster support for a free, open, and prosperous region for its own sake. The guiding principle is engaging these countries on issues and in ways that matter to them without emphasising the aim of countering China. In practice, that means working on vaccines, development finance, climate mitigation and adaptation, and standing up for international law. Despite early hiccups, the administration has notched some diplomatic progress with this group of countries.

Mounting challenges

The Biden Administration has come storming out of the gates on Indo-Pacific policy. But the positive momentum of early months now faces a series of difficult obstacles, some bureaucratic, others operational. One is personnel. Although regional assistant secretaries are in place at the State and Defense Departments, America lacks ambassadors in nearly all key Asian capitals. Meanwhile, special efforts will be required to establish good working relationships with a series of new leaders in Japan and, next year, in South Korea and the Philippines.

Next, the Biden team has much more work to do to reform an often-hidebound Pentagon to meet the military challenge China poses. Progress depends on honing the right mix of force size, composition, posture, and the associated operational concepts. It also demands sustaining sufficient forces to deter China — and, to a lesser extent, North Korea — in the near term, while concurrently investing for a future military that can field a full suite of advanced capabilities such as artificial intelligence and unmanned systems.

Larger strategic questions will continue to stress the policy too. With China rapidly modernising its strategic arsenal and North Korea now credibly (albeit not legitimately) nuclear-armed, the administration will need to craft an agenda for deterrence as well as arms control and strategic stability that accounts for these thorny realities. A series of strategy documents due later this year or early next year promise to flesh out the administration’s thinking on these topics.

More broadly, the Biden team has to infuse responding to the PRC challenge, both in the Indo-Pacific and globally, throughout the US government. And they must do so without making China — and especially people of Chinese or Asian ethnicity — into a bogeyman or losing sight of China’s significant structural weaknesses. These include a rapidly ageing population, water scarcity, a heavy debt load, and a political system increasingly reliant on a single person in Xi. New China-focused offices at State and CIA are good first steps in this regard.

One of the most pressing challenges is whether the administration can formulate a sizeable economic pillar to its regional strategy, even as it steers clear of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Separately, Biden’s prioritisation of allies and close partners could leave the rest of the region’s states unsure about their role and those of the region’s legacy multilateral institutions, such as ASEAN and the East Asia Summit.

Another dilemma is balancing promoting human rights and democracy with improving relationships with countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand where illiberal governments hold the reins of power. Persistent domestic threats to American democracy further exacerbate the problem. And then there is the need to devise and implement complex long-term programs to prevent and adapt to climate change and build high-quality infrastructure.

The final but most daunting test will be deterring and, if necessary, responding to aggression by China. Provocative flights near Taiwan and military jockeying on the border with India are just the latest manifestations of Beijing’s years-long foreign policy shift from careful reassurance to muscular belligerence. Allowing China to continue to seize land and exert extra-legal control over international waters and airspace, whether slowly through salami-slicing tactics or rapidly via lightning operations, will further damage the most important pillar of regional order: the prohibition on territorial acquisition through force.

Risky revisionism

East Asia has benefitted enormously from a “long peace” in the decades since 1979. The region — including China — saw its wealth explode during this era and now sits at the epicentre of global supply chains. Sustaining that progress will be an arduous and fraught endeavour. So far the Biden Administration has done an admirable job of putting the pieces in place to do so. But a great deal of agency rests with Xi and his cloistered inner circle in Zhongnanhai. They appear willing to pay high diplomatic, economic, and reputational costs and risk destabilising the region to fulfil their ambitions for China’s “rejuvenation”.

Therein lies the biggest structural problem for Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy: it is much easier to tear down the free and open regional order than to uphold and improve it. Much depends on whether the Biden Administration, along with like-minded allies and partners, can continue to deliver in the years to come.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Jacob Stokes is a Fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He previously served as an advisor in the White House and the US Congress. Image credit: Flickr/Phil Murphy.