West’s Indo-Pacific moves questioned
Efforts led by US aimed at containing China amid false threat perception, experts say
Western nations’ efforts to increase their presence and spending in the Indo-Pacific region are an attempt to contain China and involve themselves in others’ issues, according to experts.
However, previous efforts to increase their influence have not succeeded or have been overtaken by other international events, they added.
Graham Perry, a British arbitration lawyer and China analyst, said the West has failed to face up to the possibility that China might challenge its influence. They have never “understood China and never expected that around 2028, China will become the No 1 economic power,” he said.
“The US will not step aside. Like many imperialist countries in history, they refuse to accept the inevitability of their own decline,” Perry said.
The United States said in unveiling its Indo-Pacific Strategy on Feb 12 that its goal is to bolster security and contain a perceived threat from China.
On Feb 16, the United Kingdom announced that it had agreed to a pact with Australia as it wanted to strengthen security in the region because of concerns about China.
Meanwhile, the European Union said on Feb 22, at the bloc’s first-ever Ministerial Forum for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, that it is generating a more active policy and planning to assert itself in the region.
As tensions rose in Ukraine last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken baffled analysts with a threeday visit to Australia to attend the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which involved the US, Japan, Australia and India.
“You would think that (Europe) would be his focus of attention and not the Asia-Pacific,” Colin Mackerras, an Australian Sinologist and emeritus professor at Griffith University, told China Daily.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a news conference on Feb 14 that the US and others harbor “ill intentions” masquerading as attempts to counter a fabricated threat from China.
“What the US says in its ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’ is different from what it is actually doing,” Wang said. “The US claims to advance ‘freedom and openness’… but is in fact forming an exclusive clique.”
“The US professes to promote regional prosperity, but is stoking opposition and confrontation between regional countries”, resurrecting a “Cold War mentality and bloc politics”, Wang added.
Xu Liping, director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Center for Southeast Asian Studies, said the latest moves by Western powers cover major areas and issues in the Indo-Pacific regions such as the South China Sea and Hong Kong. In terms of the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region, this can involve cybersecurity issues.
All these obviously infringed on China’s sovereignty in these areas, he said.
Following its withdrawal from the EU, Britain is making efforts — including through the AUKUS trilateral security pact between Australia, the UK and the US — to strengthen its “strategic objectives”, Xu said.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Center for a New American Security, said during a recent US congressional hearing that the obsession with China may be affected by other issues demanding Washington’s attention.
“The United States can’t simply return to its previous business of focusing predominantly on China,” she said. “Of course, China is the most significant long-term challenge the US faces, but it’s not the only challenge.”
It is not the first time the US and its allies have shown interest in the
Indo-Pacific region.
A decade ago, Hillary Clinton, then US secretary of state, said the US would direct its full attention to Asia, before Washington became distracted by conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
More recently, former US president Donald Trump declared China an “adversary” and the Indo-Pacific region the US armed forces’ “priority theater”, before losing momentum and credibility when he took his nation out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Ashley Townshend, director of foreign policy and defense at the US Studies Center at the University of Sydney, told the Financial Times: “Asian countries have been here before: amid distractions in Europe and the Middle East, rebalancing to Asia hasn’t happened.”