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Professor Rory Medcalf has been head of the National Security College (NSC) at the Australian National University since January 2015. He was previously founding director of the international security program at the Lowy Institute from 2007 to 2015. He has worked as a senior strategic analyst with the Office of National Assessments (now Office of National Intelligence), Canberra’s peak intelligence analysis agency, and as an Australian diplomat, with postings in India, Japan, and Papua New Guinea. Medcalf is the author of Contest for the Indo-Pacific (La Trobe University Press, 2020), released internationally as Indo-Pacific Empire: China, America and the Contest for the World’s Pivotal Region (Manchester University Press, 2020). What follows is a lightly edited interview.

Q: You argue that the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions are so interconnected that we should enlarge our “mental map” and start thinking of them as a single mega-region. Help me define the contours of the region as you see it.  

A: That’s a fantastic way to start. Leaders, governments, experts always used explicit or implicit mental maps of those parts of the world they consider important to their interests. The Indo-Pacific joins a long list of, if you like, semi-invented regions that have been useful for setting priorities in foreign policy throughout history. Concepts like Europe, Asia, the Middle East that we take for granted today have been on that list over the centuries, but their boundaries have shifted according to the conventions and issues of the day. 

To me, the Indo-Pacific concept describes the rapid growth of connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, typically through maritime Southeast Asia, over the past 30 years in particular. That coincides with the rise of China, to some extent the rise of India, and the shift in the global center of economic and strategic gravity the region. For the next 10 to 20 years at least, I think that the Indo-Pacific is going to be useful both for understanding the maritime dimension of China’s rise and assertiveness and coordinating other countries’ interests in setting limits to Chinese expansionism. Especially for middle powers like Australia.

What’s the value of defining half of the world with one strategic system when it’s too big to coordinate easily in some kind of multilateral organization? That’s a reasonable question. But isn’t it worth naming regions that are focal points of great power contestation? Particularly when the geographic features of the region are relevant to those powers’ fears and interests. 

Maritime Asia is the obviously the most populous, economically important, and geographically central part of the Indo-Pacific. However, the Indo-Pacific mental map is helpful for thinking about how continental Asia connects to the wider world through the maritime domain. The movement of people and goods through the region creates a fluid system with a clear geographic center in maritime Southeast Asia. The United States, Europe, and many other countries inside and outside of the region have a shared interest in making sure that system is stable and governed by rules.

Let’s take some examples. I think China’s expanding interests in continental Africa have some degree of Indo-Pacific character, because eventually Chinese policymakers will need to think about how to build a security footprint to protect those interests, and how to secure the sea lines of communication to get there and back. When China’s expanding interests come into conflict with the interests of others, such as India, or America, or Japan, that access those places through the Indo-Pacific maritime zone, that becomes, in my definition, an Indo-Pacific issue. But bilateral relationships between African states, for example, are not Indo-Pacific issues because maritime geography is usually not relevant. 

You point out in your new book, Indo-Pacific Empire, that the term “Indo-Pacific” was first used in 1850. The region being “free and open” isn’t new either: there has been freedom of navigation between the Indian and the Pacific oceans for about 168 out of the 171 years since then. The only exception was 1942 to 1945, when Singapore was under Japanese occupation. But no government had an “Indo-Pacific strategy” until 2013. Now, even Germany and the Netherlands have them. What changed?

That’s a reasonable observation. The geography of Singapore and the various straits of Southeast Asia is obviously pivotal. For hundreds of years before Singapore was developed as a city in the 19th century, there were proto-Singapore principalities that controlled maritime commerce between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Ancient South Indian empires traded in the region. So did Chinese dynasties, Arab merchants, and from the 16th century onward, the European colonial powers. Britain drafted an Indo-Pacific strategy in the 1960s, but that is a forgotten footnote of Cold War. But it was not really until the 1990s that the immense scale of economic connectivity across the Pacific, Southeast Asia and into the Indian Ocean rose to global significance. And only more recently has the growth of Chinese power become a global concern. 

What changed in the past 10 years? China became a net importer of oil in 1993, and it began to push a security footprint into the Indian Ocean, through Southeast Asia, from around 2008 to 2009. It took a few years after that for other governments to fully recognize the implications of this. Once the recognition of the two-ocean system had arisen, and once the risks inherent in China’s rise became clearer, the logic became stronger to mentally map the region in the same way other countries were doing. So, there was a domino effect, leading to a rapid increase in the number of explicitly Indo-Pacific strategies: first Australia and Japan, then the United States, India, France, Indonesia, and more. 

The Japanese, the Americans, and others have different conceptions of “free and open Indo-Pacific,” and they are not perfectly aligned. But they don’t need to be absolutely aligned to be useful. The phrase “free and open” refers partly to freedom of navigation. It’s partly also a code for the protection of sovereignty, a rules-based order that respects the rights of smaller and middle powers. To some extent, it’s about free trade, too.

I think the biggest shared concern is Chinese behavior in the South China Sea, which has rapidly become far more assertive and expansive. But, more generally, the way China is joining up its military, civilian economy, technology, propaganda, and other elements of national power across this maritime region, with the Belt and Road as a framework, has spooked many countries. Their concern is not that the region will suddenly stop being free and open, but that China could erode this freedom in a more subtle way than the Japanese did during the Second World War.

You point out that China had its own two-ocean strategy by another name long before most American, Australian and Japanese commentators were using the term “Indo-Pacific.” And yet, Beijing seems highly displeased its neighbors have embraced the Indo-Pacific mental map. Is Beijing right to interpret the concept as a coded or incipient effort by its neighbors to “contain” China?

It depends how you ask the question. China would be correct to recognize that the Indo-Pacific concept is in part a code for reasserting the agency of middle powers, their solidarity with one another, their engagement with the United States, and their defense or reassertion of a rules-based order. China would also be right to recognize that its neighbors increasingly share a concern about the direction that the regime has chosen for itself. 

But China would be wrong to interpret this as a coordinated “containment” strategy, in my view. The Indo-Pacific concept is not something that in the long run China has reason to fear or reject. Twelve or thirteen years ago, when China began its naval presence in the Indian Ocean — in response, it seemed at the time, to Somali piracy — most other countries in the region actually welcomed it. We wanted China to be a net provider of public goods. We still hoped that China would be content to be a “responsible stakeholder” within a broadly liberal international order. 

There was a very clear shift in Chinese policy, starting as early as 2009, and becoming more visible from 2012 onwards. Domestic economic reform began to stall, and we began to see a reassertion of Chinese authoritarianism at home together with a new hyper-confident nationalism and an interest in great power projection abroad. That these things were connected in the strategic thinking of China’s leaders was a wake-up call for the rest of us. It led to a much greater focus on balancing China than on engaging China. 

Insofar as there is a widely shared understanding of what the organizing principles of the Indo-Pacific should be, I think it is about managing Chinese power, but not about excluding or containing Chinese power. I take issue with the way that the Trump administration, especially in its final year, began to use the concept. There must be a place for China in the Indo-Pacific that is prominent, but not dominant. 

Insofar as there is a widely shared understanding of what the organizing principles of the Indo-Pacific should be, I think it is about managing Chinese power, but not about excluding or containing Chinese power.

I got a request for comment last week from a journalist at a major Russian newspaper. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had commented that he would like the British Navy to join the “Quad” [the United States, Japan, India, and Australia] in joint exercises. The way the question was put to me was: is the UK going to join the “new Asian NATO”? There are some assumptions to unpack here, since Asia has never had a NATO equivalent. How would you answer the reporter’s question? 

The quadrilateral security dialogue of Australia, India, Japan, in the United States [“The Quad”] is an important piece of a many-layered Indo-Pacific strategic architecture. It’s not a formal alliance, and there’s no sign that it will become a formal alliance anytime soon. India is traditionally allergic to joining alliances.

The Quad is a work in progress. The pushier and more bullying China becomes against India, the more India will want to strengthen its own defenses comprehensively including in the maritime domain, including by partnering with others more than it historically would have done. That is one reason why the Himalayan border clashes are an Indo-Pacific issue, even though they take place hundreds of miles inland. 

China has directed a lot of attention and anger towards the Quad. But part of the Quad’s mission is to make the region safe for trilateral and bilateral arrangements. The Australia–Japan–India relationship is a separate and important configuration. So is the U.S.–Japan–India relationship. France and Indonesia are involved in their own configurations with Australia and India. The proliferation of regional groupings is due both to Chinese assertiveness and to insecurity about America’s commitment to the region. 

To answer the journalist’s question, I do not believe that the Quad is open to new members at this stage. It’s not a particularly formal arrangement and it’s still working through how much its members will tolerate in terms of joint exercises, intelligence sharing, and coordination on supply chains and technology. 

I think it’s great that the UK is recognizing that it has interests in the Indo-Pacific that it needs to advance and protect. The UK and European powers should be looking for multiple points of entry that can offer them influence in the Indo-Pacific, including infrastructure development assistance, intelligence sharing, diplomatic coordination on international law issues like the South China Sea, human rights, and solidarity against Chinese economic coercion. Providing geoeconomic alternatives to countries that are considering Belt and Road projects will be much more useful, I think, then a whole lot of flags of former colonial powers suddenly reappearing in Indo-Pacific waters — though a bit of naval presence certainly helps as long as it is not a once-off.

From a purely naval perspective, the balance of forces in the region is tilting over time in China’s direction as the People’s Liberation Army Navy modernizes and expands its fleet and as China establishes facts on the ground through island building. At what point is the South China Sea effectively “lost” to China, though Australia and others may never formally acknowledge it?

Some commentators would say we “lost” the South China Sea to China four or five years ago, when the island building was completed. I don’t agree. Much of the South China Sea already consisted of disputed waters. But China’s creeping advance has not stopped other countries from operating in international waters. So all is not lost. 

The counterargument is that China’s island building and deployment of military assets to those islands has created platforms to coerce its small neighbors and threaten passing ships or aircraft. But these facilities would be sitting targets if it ever came to a high-intensity conflict, so they wouldn’t necessarily alter the course of a serious conflict in the South China Sea. I think the top diplomatic objective for others is to continue to uphold and advocate the widely accepted interpretation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and in particular to uphold the ruling of the international tribunal in 2016 that recognized the illegality of a lot of China’s activity and the rightful position of the Philippines. 

Much of the diplomatic activity and the maritime exercises in the South China Sea are about neutralizing the strategic gains that China has made through island-building — not rolling them back but rendering them less useful to China. Although China is issuing constant threats and challenges to American FONOPs — and also Australian Air Force surveillance flights in international airspace — it has not achieved its desired effect of stopping any of their activity. I think that China is to some degree risk averse. It will make noise, but like any other rational actor, it is not keen to initiate conflict. That means the rest of us can hold our ground.

As recently as 2015, the government of Australia’s Northern Territory allowed a Chinese state-linked firm, Landbridge Group, to lease a part of the Darwin port. There’s a great Australian TV show called “Pine Gap” (2018) about a fictionalized not-too-distant-future where an American president barrels towards conflict in the South China Sea and the Australians have to maneuver to keep the Americans from pulling them in. Can you walk me through how Australia’s thinking about how the China threat has changed over time?

The Darwin decision was one catalyst for the wider change in Australia’s outlook toward China. The reality check in Australia-China relations has been playing out for about five years, and it’s accelerated over the past two years because of the harsh and coercive tack China has taken to Australia. There have been other issues, like Covid-19 and 5G, but the shift in Australia’s perception runs deeper. 

The simplified story is that Australia came to rely quite heavily on China as an economic partner, especially in trade. Most of the Australian policy and business community saw China primarily through a lens of opportunity. That was understandable at the time, though there was a lot of willful self-delusion on the part of business communities in many countries. It was at that time great for commerce and great for profits. But there was an insufficient recognition of the risk factors associated with China being an authoritarian state. 

Australia’s reality check began when the media began to report heavily on Chinese interference in Australian politics, while meanwhile our intelligence services were warning our political class of risks to our democratic institutions. In 2016, there was the prominent downfall of an Australian politician who foolishly got too close to a Chinese donor and sought to influence his party’s policy on the South China Sea issue. After that, the public debate shifted rapidly, in a strikingly bipartisan way. And there were more media revelations about other areas of influence and intrusion such as intimidation of our Chinese-Australian community, cyberattacks, and cyber intrusions. 

Under the government of Malcolm Turnbull, Australia tried to set new limits to the relationship rather than simply letting China set the terms. Perhaps we did not all anticipate quite how rapidly or deeply that would alienate Chinese officials. But Australia did not suddenly reject China without cause. Positions Australia has taken on restricting China’s role in 5G, on adding security scrutiny to foreign investments, on introducing laws that criminalize foreign political interference, all resonate with actions that other countries have taken. Australia’s quarrel with China is many nations’ quarrel with China. 

From an American perspective, it is baffling that Beijing burned the proverbial bridge with Australia. As late as 2010 to 2015, under Liberal and Labor governments alike, Australia seemed to be seeking a middle ground between the U.S. and China. If it had succeeded, it might have offered a potential model for other U.S. allies and partners. Beijing’s high-handed treatment of Australia, and its demands for unreciprocated access to Australia’s economy and political system, seem utterly self-defeating. What was Beijing thinking?

That’s a refreshing question. There has been a lot of hand-wringing commentary in Australia about “how we made a mess of relations with China.” I think that both countries are partly responsible for the current situation, but Chinese diplomacy towards Australia has been particularly self-defeating and clumsy. It has sent a clear signal to the world that getting too close to China is risky. I think it reveals the rigidities of Chinese diplomacy. The current leadership structure under the hard-authoritarian turn China has taken in the past eight years has encouraged some self-deluding overconfidence. I think many Chinese officials could never have imagined Australia would push back as hard as we did. The shock of our pushback rattled China, and Beijing did not have an immediate playbook for how to respond.

In this sense, Australia’s story is a wake-up call for the rest of the world. If even minor infringements of China’s perceived self-interest can damage relations so deeply, then other countries would be well advised to protect themselves from getting quite so close to China in the first place. 

Australia was the first Anglophone country to experience up close several kinds of Chinese influence operations and pressure tactics, including for example United Front activities in Australian universities. Do you believe that China was experimenting on Australia to see how much they could get away with, how far they could push the envelope? 

I can’t answer that question with great confidence. The research I’ve seen on United Front activities worldwide suggests that this has been a global push, almost organic, not carefully and centrally planned. But I think there was an implicit belief that as China’s interests and presence in Australia expanded, the CCP could begin to operate there in some sense, because it believed the Chinese diaspora ought to be loyal to Beijing. 

Deliberately or not, Australia has served as a Chinese policy experiment. But it’s an experiment that backfired, badly.

I don’t think China had any master plan with regard to Australia. I don’t suspect that that there was a conscious experiment. Australia was simply one of the first countries to wake up to what was happening. That is a testament to our free investigative media and our intelligence services and our security establishment. 

If China had succeeded in its attempt to control and dominate diasporic communities in Australia and gain a kind of veto power within the political process in Australia on issues relating to China’s interests, then it would have proved its ability to do this successfully anywhere else. In that regard, deliberately or not, Australia has served as a Chinese policy experiment. But it’s an experiment that backfired, badly.

In the United States, there is a rather fatalistic bipartisan consensus that U.S.-China relations can only get worse. It is hard to visualize what détente would even look like. Is there a similar mood in Australia right now? 

There’s a quiet grimness in Australian policy thinking now that we are in this for the long haul. We’ve got to keep building solidarity with others, so that China’s calculations begin to change. I don’t think there’s any perception of a rapidly growing light at the end of the tunnel. 

Our former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, leaving office, talked in those terms. Interestingly, the “long game” metaphor is beginning to seep into American commentary and thinking; I’ve even seen it in some of the writings of officials coming into the new administration. I think that honest policymakers have to communicate to the public that we don’t know how this relationship will play out. But we don’t have a choice. Either we become a different country, and make fundamental compromises to our interests, our values, and ultimately, our national identity as a multicultural liberal democracy, or we simply have to draw a line and be patient. 

For the United States, obviously, the calculations are different. The United States has a hell of a lot more leverage than a single middle power like Australia has. There are thoughtful people going into the administration: Kurt Campbell, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Ely Ratner, and others who think that, with committed comprehensive careful management, it will be possible over time to have an influence on China’s calculations and to set the terms for a new kind of coexistence. Not trust, not cooperation, but a realistic, limited relationship. 

There are still rational and more moderate voices within the Chinese system who may sense a small window to begin adjusting China’s position. Wang Jisi, a respected, relatively moderate Chinese strategic thinker, who’s been often silent during the past decade, is saying that China should try to reset relations with the United States. In saying that, he obviously finds it necessary these days to blame the United States for most of the problems in the relationship. I anticipate that over time, more Chinese commentators could make similar arguments. That’s one reason why we have to be very prudent and careful in our management of the relationship: push back when we need to, to protect our interests, but not be gratuitous in our rhetoric. And, most importantly, build the largest possible coalition. 

China has its own problems. Even as its relative power grows, those problems and tensions will become more acute. We sometimes exaggerate in our own minds our reliance on China. Even though Australia has this reputation for having China as its number-one trade partner, China is not, and never has been — and at this stage perhaps never will be — a leading investor in Australia. The United States and Europe are much important in that domain. To reach a settling point that is sustainable for the “long game,” then more diversification of all kinds will be necessary. 

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