Australia's Indo-Pacific Strategy: From Optimism to Hard Balancing

Australia's Indo-Pacific Strategy:From Optimism to Hard Balancing Nick Bisley (bio) Australia was one of the earliest adopters of the Indo-Pacific construct. First emerging in official documents in 2012, the construct by 2017 had become the central geographic concept organizing the country's international engagement. During this time, Canberra's mood toward the region shifted decisively. In the early 2010s, Australia remained optimistic about the region's prospects, even as great-power rivalry resurfaced. Canberra thought that while the geopolitical landscape was going to become more difficult to navigate, stability and prosperity were likely to prevail. Ten years later, the country's elites are much more pessimistic. Although Australia does not have a formal Indo-Pacific strategy, its approach to the region has moved away from hedging its bets concerning regional risks. In response to the growing power and increasingly assertive behavior of the People's Republic of China (PRC), as well as the rising influence of a set of policy thinkers who are very skeptical of the PRC, Australia hardened its rhetorical posture toward that country and has started to reorient its policy around hard balancing. Notwithstanding the policy consensus around this move—it has strong bipartisan support in the Australian Parliament, and the bureaucracy is of one mind in this regard—there remain significant challenges to its implementation. This essay will examine Australia's strategic policy in the Indo-Pacific, analyze the dynamics surrounding this policy, and identify the tensions and challenges that Canberra faces in seeking to put a sharper edge on its approach to a region that is both its economic hope and the source of its greatest fears. The Indo-Pacific In the 1990s, Australia adopted a policy of engagement toward what was then called the Asia-Pacific.1 The region, so conceived, remained fixed as both the focal point of Australian international policy and the [End Page 35] articulation of the nation's strategic geography for around two decades.2 The Asia-Pacific was the region from which the most opportunity emerged. Australia's 28-year uninterrupted economic expansion from 1992 to 2020 was due primarily to its ability to tap into Asia's explosive economic growth.3 Equally, the sources of its insecurity also came from this region—from terrorism to the spread of infectious diseases to growing geopolitical rivalry. In 2012, this began to change. The Australia in the Asian Century white paper recognized for the first time the Indo-Pacific as a fledging mega-region that was emerging due to the increasing ties between countries near the Indian Ocean and those in the Asia-Pacific.4 The concept of the Indo-Pacific region was also explored in Australia's 2013 National Security Strategy and then more fully articulated in the 2013 defense white paper as a "single strategic arc" that was vital to the country's strategic interests.5 These first iterations came from left-of-center governments affiliated with the Australian Labor Party. The idea was then embraced by the two main international policy documents produced by conservative Liberal-National Coalition governments: the Defence White Paper 2016 and 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.6 In 2019, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade even reconfigured its organizational structure around the concept.7 The Indo-Pacific has since become the only geographic term that senior government representatives use to describe the region. The swiftness and ubiquity with which "Indo-Pacific" has supplanted "Asia-Pacific" in Australia is striking. The most basic reason behind this relates to its geography and the way in which the country sees the ties that [End Page 36] bind the Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific as crucial to its interests. Indeed, the Indo-Pacific is not a new term for Australia—it was in common use in the nineteenth century. At that time, the Australian colonies were acutely aware of their continent's "two ocean geography" because many of the key maritime routes to Great Britain departed from Perth and linked to British India, while the centers of population and wealth were on the Pacific coast. Today, as trade and investment connect factories in Asia with global markets, and as commodity inputs, such...