"To boldly think what no one has thought of before". Challenge conventional, establishment punditry. Explore new ideas about world order and global governance. Welcome to the Multiplex World Cinema. Instead of just one show – a Hollywood blockbuster – watch a variety of new shows with different plots, actors, producers and directors, from all over the world. How will the old and new powers, global and regional bodies, corporations, social movements and shape-shifting villains like Al-Qaeda and COVID19, play in the 21st century? From the author of The End of American World Order (2014, 2018), Constructing Global Order (2018), Whose Ideas Matter? (2009) and other books, and co-author of The Making of Global International Relations (2019), plus hundreds of journal articles & op-eds, including in Financial Times, Washington Post, Times of India, Straits Times, Bangkok Post, The National Interest, & Foreign Affairs. Join me on Twitter @AmitavAcharya
The American-led world order that has prevailed since at least the end of World War II has long been precarious. Under President Trump, it is finally starting to crumble. Mr. Trump is pursuing a sustained assault on allies and adversaries alike. Last week, he announced tariffs on vast categories of goods from even America’s closest trading partners, leaving global markets reeling and effectively ending the decades-long American commitment to international trade. He has repeatedly made his distaste for multilateral institutions clear, including the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and has fundamentally damaged the bedrock of the trans-Atlantic alliance. He has dismantled U.S.A.I.D. and silenced Voice of America. There are good reasons for pessimism about the future — a world in which China, Russia and Mr. Trump’s America carve out spheres of influence and control through leverage and fear. But chaos will not inevitably follow the end of the American order. That fear is partly based on two errors: First, the past seven decades or so have not been as good for everyone on the planet as they have been for the West. And secondly, the very precepts of order are not Western inventions. That’s a reason for optimism. To understand that the American order is not the only possible system — that, for many countries, it is not even a particularly good or fair one — is to allow oneself to hope that its end could augur a more inclusive world. Defenders of the current order argue that it has prevented major wars and maintained a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. And for a select club of countries, it has. Evan Luard, a British politician and scholar of international relations, calculated that, of more than 120 wars that took place between 1945 and 1984, only two occurred in Europe. But the corollary of this, of course, is that during the Cold War more than 98 percent of those wars took place in countries outside of the West. If the first and main promise of the postwar order is peace, many countries might be forgiven for asking: Peace for whom? Not only has the West succeeded in shielding just its members (and some others) from chaos, disorder and injustice, but it has at times contributed to that disorder, as in the U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Equally, the idea of cooperation among nations long predates the rise of the West. Henry Kissinger’s book “World Order” portrays the Concert of Europe consensus that emerged after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 as a model for the preservation of international stability. But great-power diplomacy and cooperation go back to some 3,000 years earlier, when the great powers of the Near East — Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria and Babylonia — developed a system known as Amarna diplomacy, which was based on principles of equality and reciprocity. The Concert of Europe lasted less than a century, until around World War I. The Amarna system kept peace about twice as long. The oldest known written pact of nonaggression and nonintervention was concluded between Egypt and the Hittites around 1269 B.C., and humanitarian rules of warfare, including the protection of civilians and the treatment of defeated soldiers, can be found in the Code of Manu of India from 2,000 years ago. When a warrior “fights with his foes in battle,” it stipulated, let him not strike one “who joins the palms of his hands (in supplication), nor one who (flees) with flying hair, nor one who sits down, nor one who says, ‘I am thine.’” There are additional rules for warriors who have lost their coats of mail, or who are disarmed. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 contain strikingly similar prohibitions against mistreating “members of armed forces who have laid down their arms.” The comfort in acknowledging the roots of these concepts in antiquity is in the reciprocal promise that they can still exist in a world that is not dominated by America. Order has always been a shared endeavor, and many nations of the global south are eager to participate in a world in which there are fewer double standards and more fairness. In the postwar period, many of these states gained independence and became active participants in international politics and in the multilateral institutions that America is now undermining. And when non-Western powers pursue their own agenda through groups that exclude Western nations, they are not necessarily motivated by resentment. For example, the BRICS group of emerging economies has expanded its membership significantly in the last year, but most of its new and founding members are not anti-American; they seek to use the bloc to reform and expand, rather than subvert, global cooperation and promote a more equitable system. The old order is not dead yet. America remains the most powerful country in the world thanks to a combination of unparalleled military strength, the dominance of the dollar and a formidable technological base. It will remain a — perhaps the — global superpower. But the world which it has built is unlikely to survive deep into this century. A world shaped not just by the U.S., China or a handful of great powers, but by a global multiplex of countries, would not be a paradise, but then nor has been this one. A fairer world is possible.
Amitav Acharya is a professor of international relations at American University and the author of
The most enduring consequence of Donald Trump’s second coming could be the end of the idea of the West, at least in its contemporary, geopolitical and geo-economic sense, caused by an irrevocable fracture of the relationship of mutual trust and benefit between the US and its closest allies, Canada and the NATO/EU members. From the outset, America’s European allies saw Trump’s return to office with trepidation.
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A poll conducted by the European Council for Foreign Relations, asking “Do you think the election of Donald Trump as US president is a good or a bad thing for your country?” showed that of all parts of the world, the EU members that were part of the poll (Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain) dominated the “bad thing” response, with 38 per cent replying bad, 22 per cent good, and 40 per cent “neither” or “don’t know.” Among respondents in the UK, which remains America’s closest ally, the “bad” response was more than 3 and half times the “good.” Only South Koreans were more negative about Trump’s return, with six times more saying Trump is bad for them than good. These responses among America’s friends is in contrast to Russia and China, where “good” outnumbered “bad” by substantial margins; 49 to 8 per cent for Russia and 46 to 18 per cent for China.
Since then, transatlantic relations have worsened considerably. The divide within the West is no longer over defense spending only – or the demand that European do more for their own security rather than rely on the US – or over trade issues, such as Europe’s subsidies, but much broader: it extends clashes over values and institutions. As Vance’s fiery rhetoric insults and half-truths at Munich made clear, the Trump and his lieutenants see European culture as having gone astray, degraded by tolerance for immigration, departure from religious orthodoxy, and seeking to do good for the whole world instead of focusing on family and country.
In his crosshairs is a key pillar of transatlantic solidarity – NATO. For Trump, America’s European allies are national-security free riders and abusers of trade privileges given to them by the US. Before his re-election, Trump threatened to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want to” to NATO members who don’t meet the defense spending targets set by NATO. But the animosity is broader than an argument about defense spending. In a video to promote his campaign’s “Agenda 47” platform in March 2024 Trump also pledged: “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”
On the crucial issue of the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump administration does not want to give Europe a seat at the table in negotiations to settle Ukraine’s future, and that insists that Ukraine can hope neither to regain its lands seized by Russia nor expect NATO membership. Add to this Trump’s suggestion that Russia should be invited back to the G7 from which it had been ousted since 2014 over its takeover of Crimea. In short, it looks like the West will not survive Trump 2.
Add to these the Trump administration’s tariff aggression against Canada and the EU, and his threat to take Greenland from Denmark (which, like Canada, is a founding member of NATO) in “one way or the other.” Wither, then, goes the West? Over the ages, the West has been a Christian notion, an imperial notion, and a white racial notion, but it really became a “thing” during the Cold War, during which the West came to be synonymous with the United States and its European NATO allies, plus Japan and a few former European colonies, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. This “West,” united by liberal-democratic values, had a very concrete purpose, collectively to prevent the takeover of the world by the East, meaning the Soviet Union and its socialist allies, joined together in the Warsaw Pact.
But once that purpose was achieved and the Cold War ended in victory, the West didn’t go out of business—indeed it was strengthened. No one put in more eloquently than Francis Fukuyama in his famous 1989 essay in The National Interest: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” Fukuyama repeated this claim after the shocking terrorist attacks of 9/11, affirming that history was still moving toward the “liberal-democratic West,” but he added a caveat, acknowledging that the threat to liberal democracy hadn’t withered away. If the US and its Western allies failed to counter Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan, “then that really is the end of the end of history.”
Ironically perhaps, the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually gave the idea of the West a new validating purpose and unity, and it added two powerful new members, Sweden and Finland. The war provided what the commentator Lili Loofbourow called “a category of identification that hasn’t enjoyed real, popular international relevance in a good long while.” But now, three years into the Russian invasion, it is clear that the revival of the West is not happening. The reverse is. Trump may indeed be on the verge of accomplishing what the former Soviet Union in all its power could not: bring about an inglorious end to the idea of the West. Even if Trump statements are negotiating positions, and even if he does not carry through on his threat to sanction European allies and Canada, his rhetoric has already shaken confidence about American reliability in the Rest of the West.
The main result of the transatlantic rift is Europe’s fairly rapid move towards defense self-reliance, which has until now appeared half-hearted to say the least. Now European have committed to more investment on defence, even an “Army of Europe,” a more far-fetched idea mooted by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his public humiliation by Trump and Vance in the White House in February. Europe is mobilizing hundreds of billions of dollars of Euros to help Ukraine and rebuild its military capacity. This does not mean the end of NATO although that is not as unimaginable as it seemed less than three years ago.. But there would be a psychological shift, a broad European reassessment of its interests in a post-Pax Americana world, that renders NATO a shadow of its former self, a geopolitical rump. Can the humpty-dumpty be put back together again?
Moreover, Trump’s threats could lead not just a divide between Europe and America, but also divisions among the Europeans themselves. While few EU or NATO leaders are as openly welcoming of Trump as Hungary’s Victor Orban, others among NATO’s newer members such as Poland and the Baltics states and those in the EU’s southeastern flank, which have most to lose from US abandonment, will simply put up with Trump, including his demands for higher defense spending, but they will do so out of fear and coercion rather than from a sense of shared interests Some in that situation would be tempted to make deals with Russia on their own to reduce the threat they perceive from Moscow. As the ECFR put it, “It may no longer be possible to speak of ‘the West’ as a single geopolitical actor.”
Consequences for World Order
What about the world at large? It is quite clear now that “make America great again” (MAGA) does not mean Trump wants to restore the world order of the post-WWII period. Trump objects to the core principle behind that order, as developed by international relations scholars from Charles Kindleberger to John Ikenberry: the notion of hegemonic stability, whereby a leading state accepts some sacrifices (such as a trade deficit) to provide global public goods such as free trade and security. This was at the heart of the US-led liberal international order which in Trump’s view has led the United States to be “ripped off by virtually every country in the world.”
Many scholars and leaders see multipolarity as the likely outcome of the collapse of the US-led liberal international order, that is a system wherein several great powers view each other as more or less equals and cooperate through some mechanism like the European concert of powers that emerged after the defeat of Napoleon. But it is not clear that Trump would want or tolerate such an arrangement. Trump wants to coerce rather than cooperate with other great powers, such as China or the European Union, while developing some sort of a sphere of influence, an expanded Monroe Doctrine that would coerce not only central America, but also Western allies such as Canada and Denmark, to submit to America’s will. This sort of order, if it emerges, will be highly contested and unstable.
However, the rest of the world is not going to follow Trump in ditching multilateralism. It is possible that other major powers, not just China and Russia but also moderate nations like France, India, Saudi Arabia and Canada will step up engagement with existing multilateral mechanisms. Even the BRICS, regarded as rivals to the West, are becoming less so with new moderate members such as Egypt, the UAE, and Indonesia, in additional to original member India.
One might see the emergence of cooperation and affiliations that cut across the West and the Rest divide. The EU – the largest provider of international aid in the world, which enjoys more trust around the world than any other multi-national entity (according to surveys in Europe and Southeast Asia) could become a key player here, partnering with emerging countries. It is noteworthy that the EU’s attitudes towards China increasingly diverge from that of the US, and EU members have stepped up cooperation with China, Turkey and India. America’s non-European US allies such as Australia, Canada and Japan, could feel the same way.
To be sure, faced with the amplitude of the Trumpian challenge, the nations that still call themselves Western will be tempted simply to wait him out and go back to business as usual when he is gone. But this will be a mistake. Unlike Trump 1, Trump 2 seems intent not only on disengaging from the international order, but also disrupting it, and doing so in ways that may not be reversible. And this actually creates an opportunity for building a new order that may better reflect the distribution of power in the world today and that could still provide plenty of opportunity for cooperation, which leaves the door open to the US joining in after Trump’s exit.
Hence, some international cooperation could take the form of “world minus X”, whereby countries – including US allies – cooperate on specific issues while the US stays out. This is by no means novel or inconsequential. This is how the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea have functioned. The refusal of the US to join these multi-lateral organizations has not rendered them insignificant. Regional cooperation mechanisms not involving US allies will also play a role here. ASEAN has developed the “ASEAN Minus X” formula whereby initiatives move ahead despite the non-participation of one or more members. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in Asia-Pacific does not include the US, but its allies, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, are actively engaged. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) brings together China with India, Britain, Germany and Italy, without the US being present, despite exaggerated concerns over Chinese manipulation of the Bank.
Ending West-versus-the Rest
Trump’s disruption of the West may help to get rid of the West-versus-the Rest mindset. And this need not be a bad thing for world order. For a majority of people in the world, the term West has a dark history and meaning. What was originally a geographic or cultural notion, acquired an imperialist and racist meaning through the 19th and 20thcenturies as a result of European colonization which the US, itself a product of colonization of indigenous people and slavery, helped to prolong or even strengthen. The West sees itself as liberal, tolerant, democratic and progressive, and this self-image has some truth, but for the states and societies in the rest of the world the concept “the West” carries notions of cultural, political, moral, intellectual and racial superiority. As this fact of global history becomes more known, the idea of the West becomes more divisive than unifying.
Confronting Trump 2, the nations that still call themselves Western may be tempted him out and go back to business as usual. But this will be a mistake. Trump may be a catalyst of Western disunity, but he is not the reason, for the West’s decline. And his destruction of the old liberal order creates an opportunity to create an inclusive world.
A major lesson of history is that the West never had the monopoly of creating or managing world order: meaning institutions and norms that underpin the basic stability of the world, or a big part of it, at a given period of time. No world order in history (including the British empire or the US-led Liberal Order) has been truly global; none has been permanent, and none has been free from conflict. It’s not that and institutions and values the West cherished are wrong, what is wrong is to regard them as uniquely Western. As my study of 5000 years history shows, the core elements of world order – independence of state, diplomacy, peace treaties, economic interdependence, the notion of collective goods, freedom of the seas, protecting the environment, humanitarian values, and much more – emerged in early foundational forms from multiple locations, before the rise of West. It’s time to acknowledge these and promote them so as to get rid of West vs rest mindset, which has been a force for distrust and division in the world.
Hopes of imminent defeat of regime may be optimistic but resistance is making gains
Amitav Acharya
Nikkei Asia, January 9, 2025,
When Myanmar’s military under Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing seized power on Feb. 1, 2021, abruptly ending the country’s decade-long democratic experiment, no one expected a quick resolution to the ensuing conflict and humanitarian disaster. But the fallout — including death, destruction and economic damage –has exceeded even the worst fears. Will 2025 be any different?
The regime has been fighting various armed resistance groups. These have included ethnic armed organizations, consisting of minority groups that have been fighting for autonomy since the country’s independence in 1948; the People’s Defense Forces (PDF) that were et up in opposition to the military takeover in 2021 under the banner of the rebel National Unity Government; and local defense forces (LDF) that were also established in 2021 by activists. In October 2023, there was a dramatic turn in the conflict when a coordinated offensive by three opposition armed groups, comprising the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army, launched an offensive campaign known as Operation 1027 after the date it started. The so-called Three Brotherhood Alliance inflicted significant losses on the military. This led to hopes that the stalemate on the battlefield had been broken, with the advantage shifting decisively to the armed opposition groups seeking to oust the regime.
While Myanmar is no stranger to internal strife, this is the first time that the Burmese military is fighting not only ethnic groups, but also armed pro- democracy groups among the Bamar majority in the country’s heartlands. The proliferation of resistance groups has also led to unprecedented levels of cooperation. The crisis monitoring group, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), estimates that the PDF and LDF have captured some 80 towns and 200 military bases across Myanmar.
But hopes that the victories of the opposition would lead to a quick and total defeat of the military have proven too optimistic. Part of the reason is that those areas where the opposition scored its most sensational victories were particularly favorable to them, but they constituted only a small — if significant — part of the conflict areas. While the loss of some border posts might underscore the regime’s vulnerabilities, they did not prove decisive.
The opposition groups are also plagued by infighting. While they often display substantial cooperation, there are also plenty of military clashes. Ironically, victory on the ground has exacerbated tensions among the opposition units as they compete for territory and administrative control over areas seized from the military. ACLED recorded more than 300 cases of such armed clashes in 2024.
China has played a crucial role in limiting the regime’s losses. Closing border posts to Kachin and northern Shan state rebels, it has put pressure on them to strike a ceasefire with the regime. While China’s primary motive is to ensure security along its border with Myanmar, the result of its actions is to give the generals some breathing space.
The regime has also benefited from diplomatic intervention by Thailand, which stepped up efforts in late December to find a political settlement. Bangkok last year hosted the first of “informal consultations” between Myanmar’s military and representatives from neighboring countries: China, India, Bangladesh, Laos and Thailand. It has also been holding meetings with other ASEAN members on a ministerial level.
Thailand’s move is not surprising. Bangkok had already shown impatience with ASEAN’s muddled approach that had been marred by giving Laos, which just finished its one-year term as ASEAN chair and handed over to Malaysia, the exclusive prerogative in appointing ASEAN’s chief interlocutor with the Myanmar regime. In addition, the Thai military enjoys a special relationship with the Myanmar military.
Sharing a 2,400-kilometer border with Myanmar and hosting hundreds of thousands of Myanmar refugees in border regions and many more inside Thailand, Bangkok can claim to have a special interest in seeking a quick resolution of the Myanmar conflict.
Thailand played a similar role in ending the Cambodia conflict in the 1980s. But there are notable differences this time. While the earlier efforts involved all the warring Cambodian factions, the NUG, Myanmar’s government-in-exile, has not yet been invited to the Thai-led informal consultations. It is not clear if and when the NUG will participate in these talks.
Whatever its motive, the Thai initiative is viewed as providing a lifeline to Min Aung Hlaing, who has faced battlefield defeats, defections from his forces and internal dissension. His battered regime faced another major setback in late December, when the Arakan Army, a member of the Brotherhood Alliance, captured the headquarters of the military’s western military command center in Rakhine state, a humiliating defeat and the second such command to fall after the Alliance’s capture of the northeast command headquarters in Lashio in August 2024.
The regime promised elections soon after it seized power in 2021. But it has delayed conducting them, citing instability in parts of the country. China is applying pressure for them to be held. The election issue was understood to have featured in discussions when Min Aung Hlaing made his first visit to China in early November.
Myanmar’s foreign minister has reportedly suggested that officials from neighboring countries would be invited to observe elections when they take place. But there is much skepticism that the regime would hold free, fair and inclusive elections. The NUG almost certainly will not attempt to participate as it is now an outlawed group and might urge people to boycott the elections under conditions that it deems unfair.
The NUG has scrapped the 2008 constitution that allowed the military to occupy 25% of parliamentary seats. Drafting a new constitution to eliminate or reduce the military’s privileges will take time and may be politically impossible. There is always the danger that fighting could severely disrupt the electoral process unless all sides in the Myanmar conflict agree to any new arrangement.
The success of the Thai approach and a diplomatic solution will also depend on how other ASEAN members respond to it. Malaysia, Indonesia and Singaporehave shown a deep distrust of Myanmar’s regime. But this might change as ASEAN member states feel more desire to move on from Myanmar issues. Malaysia, as ASEAN chair in 2025, will have an especially critical role. While Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has been fiercely critical of the Naypyidaw regime, he once advocated for “constructive intervention” with Malaysia’s then- military rulers in the 1990s when he was Malaysia’s deputy prime minister. Western nations would reject any election that did not involve the NUG and the other major opposition parties. But even a rigged election could help the regime gain legitimacy as long as ASEAN members and other regional powers such as China and India accept the result.
The West, distracted by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, might pass the buck to ASEAN to solve the Myanmar issue. Although ASEAN so far has failed to make much diplomatic headway in ending the conflict, the Thai-led initiative might give a new opening to ASEAN in addressing the Myanmar crisis. But time is running out as Myanmar’s economy is close to collapse. With half the country’s townships affected by the fighting and millions of people displaced, poverty levels have doubled since 2021. A string of natural disasters, including two major typhoons in 2023 and 2024, have delayed a recovery from the COVID pandemic.
According to the World Bank, Myanmar’s economy is expected to contract by 1%, in the fiscal year ending March 2025. With a third of the population in dire need of humanitarian assistance, it warned of severe long term consequences, including “the risk of a lost generation.”
The coming year could be a decisive one in Myanmar’s political situation and might determine whether an end to the fighting is possible or whether the country is condemned to permanent Balkanization.
Regions are not permanent entities — their names and boundaries change. The concept of the Asian region has evolved over time due to strategic, economic and cultural drivers, leading to its classification into different concepts such as ‘Asia Pacific’, ‘East Asia’ and ‘Indo-Pacific’, shaped by economists, culturalists and strategists respectively. Most recently, the Indo-Pacific idea has emerged, with a more culturally and politically diverse range than East Asia. But the Indo-Pacific idea’s future depends on it becoming more inclusive, multilateral and non-hegemonic, moving towards a framework that allows regional benefit without dominance by any one country.
‘Asia’ was built by nationalists, the ‘Asia Pacific’ by economists, ‘East Asia’ by culturalists and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ by strategists. To endure, the Indo-Pacific architecture would have to become more inclusive, multilateral and non-hegemonic. The idea of ‘Asia’ in the modern era was anchored on pan-Asianism. Earlier, Western imperial powers, Britain in particular, had called the region ‘Far East’. But Asian leaders wondered: ‘far from where? east of what?’ and coopted Asianism as a new identity.
While Japanese imperialists used the term to exclude Western powers, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, former Chinese president Sun Yat-sen and Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzo promoted it as a cultural and anti-imperialist construct.
India’s efforts to lead pan-Asianism by convening two Asian Relations Conferences in 1947 and 1949 in New Delhi and establish a permanent political organisation — Asian Relations Organization — petered out after the 1962 China–India war.
Since then, the Asia Pacific idea has taken off. This occurred with the creation of a number of economic forums, such as the Pacific Basin Economic Council (1967), Pacific Trade and Development Conference (1968) and Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (1980). Economists, businesspeople and academic and think tank policy experts played the key roles in these forums. In 1989, governments stepped up by establishing APEC. In 1994, the ASEAN Regional Forum — the first Asia Pacific multilateral security group — was established in Bangkok. But neither APEC or the ASEAN Regional Forum were founded on shared culture and identity.
That changed with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when the Asia Pacific idea was challenged by a turn towards East Asian regionalism. This was prompted in large part by resentment against the United States for its unwillingness to help crisis-hit Southeast Asia and its heavy-handed rejection of Japan’s Asian Monetary Fund initiative.
East Asian cooperation took on a culturalist undertone when analysts called it ‘East Asia minus the Caucasians’ — or for that matter, the Indians. The 2001 report of the East Asia Vision Group, set up by then South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, described East Asia as ‘a distinctive and crucial region’ and called for ‘fostering the identity of an East Asian community’ based on ‘shared challenges, common aspirations and a parallel destiny’. Interestingly, these were almost the exact words in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s idea of a ‘Community of Shared Destiny’.
Another East Asia group emerged in 1997, when Japan, China, South Korea and ASEAN set up ASEAN + 3 to foster financial cooperation, leading to the Chiang Mai Initiative in 2000 — a bilateral and multilateral currency swap system.
Yet when the East Asia Summit held its first meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, India, Australia and New Zealand were allowed to join despite China’s objections, as Indonesia, Japan and Singapore sought to balance China with the participation of other powers. The United States and Russia joined the group in 2011. Here, security attempted to trump identity.
Unsurprisingly, the East Asia Summit was stymied by US–China rivalry. At this juncture, the Indo-Pacific idea came into vogue. The term was not new, a 2007 paper on India–Japan security cooperation by a retired Indian naval officer, Gurpreet Khurana, gave it contemporary policy prominence. But the term was initially sidelined in US policy, which under president Barack Obama was promoting ‘rebalancing’ or ‘pivoting’. But his successor president Donald Trump dumped the ‘pivot’ and embraced the Indo-Pacific. President Joe Biden has continued this embrace.
Regions are not named purely based on geography, but are often shaped by strategic, economic and cultural drivers. Thus regions are not permanent entities and their names and boundaries change. India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Pakistan — now considered South Asian states — were members of a group called the Conference of South East Asian Prime Ministers, which officially sponsored the 1955 Bandung Conference, along with Indonesia and Burma (now Myanmar) in the 1950s.
The Indo-Pacific is a particularly fragile idea. If it is not just two huge oceans, it is a region that encompasses more cultural diversity than Southeast Asia or East Asia but has economic links within the region are also weaker than those in the Asia Pacific or East Asia.
India is not well integrated into East Asia nor the trans-Pacific production networks that were crucial to the Asia Pacific idea. New Delhi is not an APEC member and pulled out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations out of concern of competition with China as well as deep internal vested interests that resisted opening up the economy. India’s interest in the Indo-Pacific idea owes to security considerations, especially to counter China, geopolitical flattery and to achieve a geopolitical prominence that it cannot enjoy in the Asia Pacific or East Asia constructs.
While the Asia Pacific and East Asia are anchored on multilaterals — such as APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit — the Indo-Pacific rests on minilaterals, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, promoted by the United States, is another minilateral. The Indo-Pacific idea lacks the support of a vibrant track II community, like the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council or the Council on Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific.
ASEAN has been relegated from being in the ‘driver’s seat’ in the Asia Pacific to the ‘passenger’s seat’ in the Indo-Pacific. The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific is a limited response out to avoid being sidelined by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.
The Indo-Pacific suffers from an aspirational gap — between the US idea of ‘free’ and ‘open’, terms meant to isolate China and China’s ‘inclusive’ vision of Indonesia and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. This leads to vastly competing visions of the Indo-Pacific idea.
These considerations are cause for caution. The historical Indian Ocean region before the arrival of European imperial powers was a thriving commercial and cultural region that no one country dominated but everyone benefited from. The future of the Indo-Pacific idea could learn from that experience.
Amitav Acharya is a Distinguished Professor at American University, Washington DC, and co-author of Divergent Worlds: What the Ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us About the Future of International Order with Manjeet Pardesi. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300214987/divergent-worlds/
Multiplex World: Once & Future World Order 