Abstract
Moving beyond the security and status dilemma explanations, this chapter examines the discursive underpinnings of America’s Indo-Pacific strategic vision. It argues that the Indo-Pacific strategy represents America's duscursive anxiety amid the changing regional balance of power and China's assertive rise. This strategy is an approach to manage discursive anxiety and emotional dissatisfaction in the highly contested and changing international order. In order to maintain its hegemonic supremacy, the US since the Donald Trump administration has adopted the Indo-Pacific as a new discourse. The chapter asserts that despite his differences in style, President Joe Biden has continued the Indo-Pacific strategy and China policy. In contrast with Trump, Biden pursues a liberal approach to Indo-Pacific, culminated in value-laden diplomacy. The study concludes with the key characteristics of the Sino-US ice age of bipolar international order as well as the future prospects and pitfalls of the Indo-Pacific region in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Exception is Kai He and Huiyun Feng (2020), who analyze “three waves of Indo-Pacific discourse.” They highlight these waves in terms of an “institutionalization dilemma,” indicating that regional institution-building process remains slow and so far, unsuccessful. Building on neoliberal institutionalism, He and Feng maintain that the future prospects of Indo-Pacific institutionalization largely depend on executive and ideational leadership.
- 2.
I developed this concept in my previous work, see Poonkham (2022).
- 3.
The “Indo-Pacific” was also widely used by Trump’s key policy-makers. For instance, Secretary of Defense James Mattis used the “Indo-Pacific” term for the first time in September 2017: “A peaceful and prosperous future in the Indo-Pacific region is based on a strong rules-based international order and a shared commitment to international law, to peaceful resolution of disputes and respect for territorial integrity. US-India defense cooperation has steadily expanded in recent years, underpinned by a strategic convergence between our two countries based on common objectives and goals in the region” (Mattis 2017). Mattis (2017) made a point that “we value India’s leadership across the Indo-Pacific,” and pointed to the trilateral Malabar exercises between India, Japan, and the US as illustrating this strategic convergence. Likewise, in October 2017, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC. While the speech largely focused on US-India relations, he foreshadowed language that would appear in later, more comprehensive, descriptions of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, stating, “India and the United States must foster greater prosperity and security with the aim of a free and open Indo-Pacific” (Tillerson 2017).
- 4.
Pak Nung Wong (2021, 113–114) narrowly defines techno-geopolitics as “China’s state-led technological pursuits in the selective sectors of 5G, cybersecurity, AI, robotics and biotechnology to craft, establish and maintain a new transnational developmental space for everybody-winds benefits in Europe and Asia.”
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Poonkham, J. (2023). Pax Indo-Pacifica in the Sino-US Ice Age: Geopolitical Anxiety and America’s Struggle for Global Supremacy. In: Sudo, S., Yamahata, C. (eds) ASEAN and Regional Actors in the Indo-Pacific. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4020-2_6
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