Indo-Pacific Ambitions Might Be a Luxury Europe Can’t Afford
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The departure of an aircraft carrier strike group from its home port is an awe-inspiring sight that still resonates with European societies that cherish memories of military glory. It involves the coordination of dozens of ships and aircraft with the power to devastate almost any adversary that lies in their path. Though British, French, Italian and Spanish aircraft carriers are significantly smaller than the United States’ vast supercarriers or the ships the Chinese navy is building to catch up, they still symbolize the substantial strategic resources that European states can draw on.
In recent years, several European states have sought to project these precious naval assets in the Indo-Pacific region in ways that reflect widely accepted fashions in strategic thinking. The rapid expansion of Chinese military power and the systemically crucial position of Asian states for global manufacturing and services has inevitably drawn European attention. But the underlying logic of this thinking now needs to be viewed more critically after the return of interstate war on European soil.
The concept of an Indo-Pacific region as an integrated geopolitical space reaching from the coast of Mozambique to the shores of Alaska was first developed in the mid-20th century by international relations theorists in India who had witnessed how developments in the Indian Ocean had knock-on effects on China, Japan and the South Pacific during World War II. More recently, the concept was popularized by the recently assassinated former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo as well as strategic planners in the U.S. military. The concept has now become the basis for cooperation among U.S., Japanese, Indian and Australian policymakers in an increasingly formal coalition known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad, to counter China’s growing ambitions.
In response, several European states as well as the European Commission have developed their own Indo-Pacific strategies. Such documents are usually presented as a set of defined economic and geopolitical goals that are designed to shape how interactions with the Indo-Pacific region should be managed in every policy area. This fashion for Indo-Pacific strategies has particularly fueled attempts by the French and British governments to beef up their military presence around the Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific. In both cases, the legacies of an increasingly distant imperial past, in which European powers controlled the fate of societies across Asia, have converged with very 21st-century concerns over European economic survival.
With territories in the Indian Ocean and Pacific such as Reunion, New Caledonia and Mayotte that are fully integrated into France’s institutions—and the European Union system—the French government has concrete reasons to sustain a substantial military presence across the Indo-Pacific. The task of protecting the 1.5 million French citizens living on those islands, as well as the maritime exclusive economic zones surrounding them, has generated a network of naval bases and economic infrastructure that requires constant points of contact and cooperation with India, Australia and other governments in the region.
By contrast, the U.K. does not have a comparable network of bases to fall back on when trying to project power in the Indo-Pacific, having departed from the last substantial territorial legacy of empire with the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Yet the desire among parts of British society to sustain a self-image of great power status after leaving the EU, which many in the U.K. claimed held their country’s global potential back, led to a noisily advertised refocusing of British strategy toward Asia. Largely ignoring that trading states like Germany or the Netherlands have remained central to Asia’s economic development while remaining in the EU, many U.K. policymakers still claim that maintaining a permanent Royal Navy presence at facilities leased from Singapore and regularly sending an aircraft carrier into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea can restore the U.K.’s position as a central actor in Asian geopolitics.
The extent to which policymakers in Britain and France have become practically and emotionally invested in pursuing Indo-Pacific strategies has also led to tensions between the two key security actors, whose cooperation is crucial to any effective defense of collective European interests. The row that burst into the open in September 2021, when it became clear that a U.K. and U.S. offer of nuclear technology had lured Australia away from submarine procurement contracts with the French, showed how the desire of both London and Paris to signal continuing relevance in global affairs has threatened to undermine cooperation between them. Even as the relative decline in the military power of both France and the U.K. makes intensified coordination between the two a necessity if either wants to protect shared interests, a narrow focus on national prestige threatens to undermine the trust that is needed to sustain such close cooperation.
Europeans need to ask themselves tough questions about whether their grand ambitions for a role in the Indo-Pacific are desirable or sustainable given how vulnerable they are to security threats closer to home.
The absurd bickering over that submarine deal and the new AUKUS partnership—comprising Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.—unintentionally revealed how problematic an excessive obsession with Indo-Pacific strategies has become for the U.K. as well as the EU. As a result of disconnected strategies pursued by EU member states trying to revive past glory, a European Commission more focused on trade and a U.K. government experiencing a geopolitical identity crisis, a lot of energy that could be far more effective when coordinated in shared projects is instead being wasted separately.
Moreover, beyond these specifics of implementation, Europeans need to ask themselves tough questions about whether such grand ambitions for a role “East of Suez” are even desirable or sustainable when the war between Russia and Ukraine and the severe instability along the EU’s southern borders have demonstrated how vulnerable Europeans are to security threats closer to home.
For London, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a stark realization that the U.K. military does not have the resources to both bolster NATO efforts to deter Russian expansionism as well as maintain a presence large enough to give British policymakers the influence they crave in the Indo-Pacific. France, by contrast, will always have to maintain a respectable military presence around Reunion and New Caledonia to protect its citizens and economic interests. Yet the pressures the French military faces in supporting EU and NATO operations focused on Russia, even as it struggles to salvage foundering efforts to contain insurgencies across the Sahel, have forced Paris to come to terms with the fact that France’s strategic center of gravity will always be around the EU’s borders.
However much Paris and London use carrier strike groups to signal their Asian ambitions, the assets they can commit beyond the Horn of Africa will always be overshadowed by the much greater military presence of Asian middle powers such as Vietnam or Indonesia around their own home waters, never mind the gargantuan resources that India, China and the U.S. have available in every corner of the Indo-Pacific. By spreading their militaries too thin around the globe, both British and French policymakers risk putting themselves in a position where they struggle to tackle strategic challenges closer to home, while failing to have the impact on the Indo-Pacific they hoped to achieve.
Other European states have demonstrated a more realistic understanding of the extent and limits of their own as well as collective European power. While Italy recognized the importance of the Indo-Pacific in crucial documents defining its security doctrine in 2015 and 2021, these policy directives have always emphasized the extent to which Italy’s geographic position and supply-chain integration with states across Europe and North Africa remain central to its strategic priorities.
All aspects of Rome’s diplomatic and military operations have remained laser-focused on sustaining a powerful position throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, despite the constant infighting that afflicts Italy’s political class. This approach reflects security imperatives that anyone ruling the Italian peninsula has grappled with for over 2,000 years. Such clarity of strategic thought means that while Italian governments try to promote trade and military cooperation with states in the Indo-Pacific when they can, they never lose sight of their primary responsibility to ensure that they can concentrate the military and economic resources needed to shape events in the nearby geopolitical flashpoints that surround Italy.
As the EU evolves into a more state-like form, its institutions can learn lessons from the challenges individual European states have faced in trying to play a role in the world beyond Europe’s neighborhood. As its member states, including France and Italy, gradually deepen military cooperation with one another as well as NATO partners such as the U.K., the EU can reflect on how to pursue efforts to influence developments around the globe without becoming distracted from the need to concentrate resources on tackling strategic challenges around its own borders. Faced with an expansionist China and a wavering U.S., European success in the Indo-Pacific is only possible after the EU and U.K. have secured the defense of Europe itself.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.
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