The new US Indo-Pacific Strategy document released in February has two interesting components, one overt and one covert. The document overtly declares the US is an “Indo-Pacific power.” Covertly, its aim is to “tighten the noose around China.” Arguably, minus the military might, China’s nearly a decade-long “Belt and Road Initiative” cannot be perceived as a grand national strategy aimed at controlling Eurasia or the Asia Pacific or any region for that matter. Yet the BRI is mythologized into such a geostrategic game-changer that it has rattled the US and its allies in the Asia Pacific. The BRI, at best, is nothing more than a mere geopolitical overland and maritime “chessboard” based on trade and investment.
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It is widely known across the US “think tank-land” and in the strategic affairs community that the US initiative to tighten the noose around China was first initiated under the Bush administration just months before the 9.11 terror strike in New York. Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who was the foreign policy adviser to the then Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, had first promoted the notion of “encircling” China with hostile powers in an article in January 2000. Rice had warned of Beijing’s efforts to alter Asia’s balance of power in its own favour. Rice had recommended a robust US military presence in the region and a deepening of cooperation with Japan and South Korea on one hand, and paying a closer attention to India’s role in the regional balance on the other.
Since then the recommendation that the US maintain military presence in the region, has remained the bipartisan consensus in all successive US administrations. The new February 2022 US Indo-Pacific Strategy document specifically states: “The passage of time has underscored the strategic necessity of the United States’ consistent role. At the end of the Cold War, the United States considered but rejected the idea of withdrawing our military presence, understanding that the region held strategic value that would only grow in the 21st century. Since then, administrations of both political parties have shared a commitment to the region. The George W. Bush Administration understood Asia’s growing importance and engaged closely with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, and India. The Obama Administration significantly accelerated American prioritization of Asia, investing new diplomatic, economic, and military resources there. And the Trump Administration also recognized the Indo-Pacific as the world’s centre of gravity.”
Further, the US Indo-Pacific Strategy document has reaffirmed President Biden’s resolve to “counter” China. This is further reflected in the Indo-Pacific Strategy budget for the year 2023 proposed by the White House to the Congress on March 29. The USD 1.8 billion proposed budget is to “promote integrated deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.” In other words, it is aimed at consolidating the existing alliances and to forge new partnerships with relevant powers in the region to counter China. Interestingly, along with the proposed Indo-Pacific budget, an additional USD 400 million has been added to the kitty specifically marked “to counter the malign Chinese behaviour.”
Justifying the Indo-Pacific Strategy proposed budget and the special China “kitty,” the White House has said: “The President has prioritized strategic competition with China and worked with allies and partners to resist coercion and deter aggression from Beijing and Moscow, and has ended America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan while removing all US troops.” This is tantamount to almost reiterating verbatim what has been outlined in the February document. Or, as several analysts have pointed out, the February document and the USD 773 billion annual defence budget for 2023 – of which the proposed Indo-Pacific Strategy budget outlay and the China “kitty” are a part – are nothing but the Biden administration’s open declaration to “stop” China.
Moreover, as expected, the US Congress bipartisan political elite has readily shown green signal to the historic 2023 defence budget. Emphasising on the need for the US to stop a rising China, or as some are already calling “a risen China,” Senators Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Chairman and ranking Member respectively of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had issued the following statement on the passage of US new Indo-Pacific Strategy: “Even as we work with our allies and partners to face critical challenges around the world, the United States must not lose focus on the Indo-Pacific region. The administration’s newly released Indo-Pacific strategy, and its engagements with U.S. allies and partners in the region this past week, are important steps in this regard. Competition from China demands a strong and collaborative response from the United States and our allies to keep the region free and open.”
On the other hand, as against increasing bullying of China’s “malign behaviour” by the White House, the Congress and President Biden respectively, it is hardly surprising China’s top diplomats have come out strongly which is described in the Western press as “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Last month, at his press conference on the sidelines of the annual meeting of “Two Sessions,” the foreign minister and state councillor Wang Yi had lamented new US Indo-Pacific Strategy saying: “The real goal for the Indo-pacific strategy is to establish an Indo-Pacific version of NATO, seeking to create an Asian NATO to suppress Beijing.” Then just days before the White House released the proposed defence budget for the next year, China’s vice foreign minister Le Yucheng, dubbed the Indo-Pacific Strategy as “dangerous.”
Like in the last year’s National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) – subsequently signed into law by President Biden on December 27th, 2022 – there is no mention of words such as “encirclement,” “containment” in the new Indo-Pacific strategy document. However, the February 2022 document confirms fears of China regarding the expansion of NATO into the Asia Pacific, as advocated by Wang Yi. “Allies and partners outside of the region are increasingly committing new attention to the Indo-Pacific, particularly the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). We will harness this opportunity to align our approaches and will implement our initiatives in coordination to multiply our effectiveness. Along the way, we will build bridges between the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic, and, increasingly, with other regions, by leading on shared agendas that drive collective action,” the February document announced. [My emphasis]
Furthermore, among the five objectives outlined in the section on “Our Indo-Pacific Strategy” in the February document, the first objective is called Advance A Free and Open Indo-Pacific. It is too well-known to experts and top officials alike in China who is the target of “A Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” Reacting sharply to the “anti-China” intent and aim of the new Indo-Pacific strategy document, and equating the document to “the notion of surrounding China with a chain of hostile powers” as early policy in the early days of President George W. Bush, Professor Li Haidong of the Institute of International Relations of China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing said: “The US is using the same approach employed to contain Russia in Europe after the Cold War to contain China in the Asia-Pacific region. To that end, the United States was ‘building a NATO-like alliance in the region, with AUKUS at its core, and the US-Japan and US-South Korea alliances’ surrounding it.”
Finally, whether or not the US policy of containing China would succeed as the US claims it became victorious in the Cold War in containing Russia against Europe, only the time will prove. Also, in a significant move, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo has just days ago asked President Biden to declare the communist People’s Republic as the US “adversary.” However, what is certain is the two rival and hostile great powers – the US and China – have openly declared they are in a contest for supremacy. If the bipartisan US Congress has given its mandate to President Biden to strongly and in a collaborative way “stop” a rising China. On the other hand, the Communist Party of China has awarded a third (and possibly the fourth term too) five-year term To President Xi Jinping to thwart off any foreign attempt to “bully, oppress, or subjugate China.” Recall what Xi declared on July 1st in his 1ooth CPC anniversary speech: “Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
