The transatlantic puzzle in the Indo-Pacific
The transatlantic puzzle in the
Indo-Pacific
WRITTEN BY MATHIEU DROIN
9 June 2023
16 September 2021 was supposed to be a celebration of an important milestone for the European Union (EU), with the release of its first-ever Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. But the event was completely overshadowed by the announcement of a secretly negotiated security partnership between three important partners of the EU: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia within a trilateral security pact known as AUKUS.
The simultaneity was the expression of a transatlantic dichotomy: on the one hand, the EU — a heterogeneous bloc of countries — managed to put together a common strategy, which reads as a catch-all cooperation agenda rather than a strategic outlook. On the other hand, a cohesive minilateral grouping makes a bold strategic move with major security implications, without prior agreement on a rollout plan.
This difference in method reveals a difference in interests, stakes, and ownership amongst the transatlantic community. While the concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ originated in Japan, it only really gained international traction once fully embraced and championed by the United States in 2017, as a vehicle to frame a collective effort in its competition with China, with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) including Australia, India, and Japan as its centre of gravity. For the US, the Indo-Pacific is first and foremost a strategic construct with a security and defence backbone.
The brewing Indo-Pacific architecture is inherently “flexilateral” due to the breadth of factors and the rapidly changing stakes that determine its many actors’ positions.
On its end, the EU cannot remain oblivious to the tectonic shifts happening in a region that is key to its own prosperity and the source of 40 per cent of its imports. However, many Europeans remain wary, either of being dragged by their US ally into a “Thucydides trap” with China, or of unwittingly encouraging the US to pursue its pivot away from Europe. Given these different perspectives, the EU’s understanding of the Indo-Pacific remains by and large geoeconomic, driven by trade and cooperation, more than geostrategic. It is no surprise that the EU insists on “ASEAN centrality” in the Indo-Pacific — a grouping that is just as strategically disparate and focused on trade — with whom it held its first summit in December 2022.
In this context, synchronising Indo-Pacific agendas on both sides of the Atlantic is an ordeal. The transatlantic landscape is made up of multiplying, changing clubs of countries. While lacking consistency, this piling up of clubs might well be the only realistic and practicable approach, and the most relevant too.
Disjointed approaches
To be clear, both sides of the Atlantic recognise the need to increase dialogue on the Indo-Pacific, and EU-US engagement is growing steadily, as evidenced by the biannual EU-US high-level consultations on the Indo-Pacific created in 2021, and the recently held first joint naval exercise. But this is far from enough to elaborate a shared vision.
The United States has not yet clearly articulated what it expects from the Europeans. The debate in Washington fluctuates between enjoining Europeans in a common endeavour, with a risk of further overstretching them, but also empowering them as caretakers of their own continent to free-up American assets. The only consensual part is that Washington expects its allies and partners to be strategically aligned, or at least supportive of its objectives. But on the European side, strategic outlooks vary according to the way each country weighs three key variables: the US, China, and the Indo-Pacific per se.
Few European countries are genuinely interested in the Indo-Pacific per se. France is in a standalone position as a resident country of the Indo-Pacific, due to its overseas territories in both the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. This combined with France’s singular approach to the transatlantic relationship has resulted in a peculiar strategic vision, which transposes the concept of ‘strategic autonomy’ to the Indo-Pacific. Paris uses the formula of ‘power of balances’ (puissance d’equilibres) to reject the inevitability of confrontation between the US and China. While decried by some, France’s strategic positioning has proven attractive, especially to regional powers seeking to maintain a safe distance from US policies that could appear too assertive, notably India, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and several Pacific Islands countries.
In addition to France, the Netherlands, another country familiar with the region thanks to its history, has been at the forefront of efforts to raise European awareness on the Indo-Pacific and to call for a collective strategy, with support from Germany when it held the presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of 2020.
Italy is progressively joining this group of European countries interested in the Indo-Pacific per se. Rome has been lately awakening to a more strategic engagement, as shown by its rapprochement with Japan, the pact to design and develop the Tempest programme alongside the United Kingdom, and improving ties with India as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni inaugurated the 2023 edition of the Raisina Dialogue. Denmark, with its structural exposure to the maritime domain and concerns about the safety of sea lines of communication, can also be considered as one of the ‘Indo-Pacific aware’ European countries.
A handful of European countries factor China more prominently in their approach to the region, either for the close and amicable relationship in the singular case of Hungary, or due to bitter experiences of Chinese coercion such as Lithuania. Caught between the rock of its dependence on US security guarantees and the hard place of its dependence on Chinese trade, Germany also emphasises the China factor. The result is that Berlin, as an aspiring European leader, feels compelled to clarify its strategy towards China and the Indo-Pacific, but finds it extremely difficult as it seeks to avoid antagonising both Washington and Beijing. Consequently, the German Indo-Pacific strategy foregrounds trade, cooperation, and climate change, rather than clarifying its strategic positioning, and Berlin struggles to complete its first China strategy, which has been repeatedly delayed.
But for the bulk of European countries, especially from Central and Eastern Europe, the primary factor is the United States. The war in Ukraine has only reinforced that trend: on the one hand, it has confirmed the indispensability of the United States for protecting Europe, and on the other hand the “partnership without limits” heralded by Xi and Putin has confirmed that China and Russia are two faces of the same coin. Countries such as the Czech Republic, a landlocked country that published its Indo-Pacific strategy in October 2022, and Poland are taking increasing ownership of the Indo-Pacific concept, with an eye to engage partners from the region and expand the front against the Russia-China axis, and burnish their credentials as allies towards Washington.
This wide array of positions plays out in the difficulty for supranational organisations such as the EU and NATO to articulate their positions. Some like France would like the EU to convene a concerted strategic approach, without asking permission from the US. But many European countries are not yet ready to go down that path, as the latest EU Indo-Pacific forum in Sweden has shown, with several capitals insisting on extending the invitation to the US, Canada, and the UK.
Concurrently, the US is keen to use NATO as a vehicle to build transatlantic commonalities on the Indo-Pacific along Washington’s lines. It has therefore been pushing hard to increase engagement with Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, without many objections from its allies, except France as President Macron recalled in his speech at the GLOBSEC Forum: “NATO is for the North Atlantic, not for South East Asia”.
The “club sandwich”
But is it a problem after all? European heterogeneity is only rivalled if not surpassed by Indo-Pacific heterogeneity. As different as the strategic outlook between North Macedonia and Sweden may be, it is not as distant as that between Djibouti and Laos.
Even the two Quads, transatlantic (the United States, France, the UK, and Germany) and Indo-Pacific (the United States, Australia, Japan, and India), have very diverse internal outlooks, with interesting similarities in the distribution of roles, between the “aligned Anglo-Saxons” (Australia/United Kingdom), the “US-reliant aspiring powers” (Japan/Germany) and the “strategic autonomists” (India/France).
The brewing Indo-Pacific architecture is inherently “flexilateral” due to the breadth of factors and the rapidly changing stakes that determine its many actors’ positions. Therefore, we will continue to witness a piling up and potential aggregation of clubs, in the vein of the Quad, AUKUS, GCAP, or the Franco-Indian-UAE initiative. Amid this global trend, Europeans regularly find themselves sandwiched between the main Indo-Pacific driving forces: in the west their indispensable American partner, and in the east the Indo-Pacific regional powers who are the key stakeholders.
This amalgamation might be a disturbance for Western capitals used to building common positions, but it also has its virtues. First, key Indo-Pacific players who want to retain their freedom to manoeuvre can cherry-pick from the cooperation menu proposed by courting Western powers. Second, it complicates Beijing’s strategic calculus. China has been striving to assert its interests through bilateral engagement where it always negotiates from a position of strength — clubs are more difficult to handle. Finally, for Europeans who are still on the learning curve, gradual engagement and knowledge is certainly a necessary step toward strategic clarity.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Mathieu Droin is a Visiting Fellow in the Europe, Russia, Eurasia program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in Washington DC. Prior to joining CSIS, he was the Deputy Head of the Strategic Affairs Department at the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs in Paris and has served in French Embassies in Kuwait, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/内閣官房内閣広報室.