US Military Alliances in the Indo-Pacific: Towards a Democratic Alliance?

 

Michael Stricof, OREMA, Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA

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         The United States has conceived of itself as a leading Pacific nation since the middle of the 19th Century. The region’s importance is even greater today, as its explosive economic growth since the 1980s has translated into geopolitical relevance. The rivalry between the United States and China, especially although not exclusively, has made the Indo-Pacific central to American defense policy. Closing technical and military resource gaps coupled with exhaustion from the War on Terror has pushed the country to emphasize alliances and partnerships as unique advantages which the United States can leverage to maintain its influence in this critical region. A strategy founded on aligning the interests of like-minded countries also means that it is looking to expand the number of partners that are also invested in limiting China’s influence and upholding the status quo of Western-founded rules that underpin the current international system.

            This brief paper outlines American investment in the Indo-Pacific and debates the meaning of a democratic alliance and its centrality in American foreign policy. It serves therefore, as a first reflection on American policy in attempts to construct a broad democratic alliance in the Indo-Pacific.

“A Pacific Nation”

            “The United States is a Pacific nation,” US President Joe Biden stated this simply in Hanoi in September 2023. Secretary of Defense James Mattis made an identical comment at the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore in 2017. President Barack Obama also made the claim that the “The United States has been, and always will be, a Pacific nation” in Australia in 2011.[1] The list of examples for this simple claim could go on nearly indefinitely. What American leaders evoke in these repetitive calls is a long history that placed the Pacific Ocean, and access to Asia, at the center of American interests since the middle of the 19th century.

            The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries saw the United States engage with Asia and the Pacific at an unprecedented level, following a strategy that mixed European-style colonialism with a drive for economic openness. In both cases, this was backed up by naval power. In 1853, Commodore Perry’s expedition showcased how gunboat diplomacy could force Asian markets open, bringing 220 years of Japanese isolationism to an end with a display of naval power in Edo Bay. American efforts to expand market access—backed as ever by naval power—accelerated after 1890. In this year, the internal frontier of the continental United States was declared closed, as no territory for further expansion remained inaccessible to white settlers. Simultaneously, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, President of the Naval War College, published The Influence of Seapower Upon History, demonstrating how control over the seas had given the British empire its particular advantages. The lessons were clear, the United States would need to command, or at least be competitive on, the Pacific Ocean so as continue its westward expansion and growth. Under Mahan’s influence, the US Navy adopted a strategy of colonizing islands in the Pacific to serve as coaling and refueling stations, annexing Hawaii for forward defense of the West Coast, and building the Panama Canal to link Atlantic and Pacific navies, among other advantages.

            The US annexed Hawaii in 1897. The following year, the Spanish-American War led to direct colonization of the Philippines on a European model. In 1899, as Europeans scrambled for concessions from China, Secretary of State John Hay sent diplomatic notes to Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia, demanding equal access for all western powers in trading with China—that the door should remain open to China, as opposed to carving the country into spheres of influence and privileged access. This policy was reiterated when the United States joined other powers in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Although often cited as part of American imperialism, the policy of the Open Door was also predicated on a theory of open commerce which opposed traditional imperial domination by a single foreign power. The United States therefore had a mixed record of annexation, colonization and openness in the Asia-Pacific during the last decade of the 19th century. However, all these tactics fit together into a broader strategy of securing American commercial access to East Asia and Pacific islands via naval power. To conclude this period, a major demonstration of American force took place with the voyage of the Great White Fleet around the world from 1907 to 1909, visiting ports in Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, the Philippines and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

            The United States reaffirmed its centrality to the Asia-Pacific during the second half of the 20th Century, in a period of wars and consolidation. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and invasion of the Philippines demonstrated that American security and prosperity were as dependent on developments in the Pacific as those in Europe, while the island-hopping campaign that defined most of the Pacific theater gave the United States new territories while confirming the importance of sea lanes to access this part of the world. At the outset of the Cold War, the Truman administration attempted to limit engagements in Asia via a defensive perimeter stretching from the Aleutian Islands through US bases in Japan and Okinawa to the Philippines. This idea, elaborated by Secretary of State Dean Acheson between 1948 and 1949 sought to ensure the security of Japan, the region’s real industrial powerhouse, without overcommitting to the relatively poor Asian continent where US interests were considered secondary.

            This modern offshore naval strategy was short-lived. From 1950 to 1953, the Korean War drove the United States, along with key regional partners Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines, to direct intervention on the continent. The conflict led the United States to create a permanent military alliance structure around the Asia-Pacific, signing treaties with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS), the Philippines, and Japan in 1951, as well as with South Korea at the end of the conflict in 1953 and the Manila Pact which created the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954. SEATO ceased to exist in 1977, but the Manila treaty remains the foundation of the mutual defense alliance between the US and Thailand. New Zealand is no longer a full member of ANZUS, but the US and Australia remain tied by the mutual defense agreement and the recent AUKUS defense-industrial partnership. Both Australia and New Zealand are part of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing framework. The five mutual defense treaty allies, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, are today core allies around which the United States builds its regional strategy. They are joined by other major partner countries. According to the White House’s 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy white paper, its principal regional partners in the Indo-Pacific are India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Pacific Island countries.

            The security and stability of the Indo-Pacific is central to American defense and economic interests. From securing Japan, a major industrial democracy in the making, during the early Cold War, to maintaining forces in South Korea and arming Taiwan today, the United States sees its role as “the primary security power in the Asia-Pacific region.” Joe Biden, speaking as Vice President in Singapore in 2013 boldly claimed, “Our mere presence in the Pacific is in and of itself the basis upon which the stability of the region is built.” The partnerships discussed above, along with other multilateral frameworks, are at the heart of the current US approach. As President Biden stated at the East Asia Summit in 2021, “We envision an Indo-Pacific that is open, connected, prosperous, resilient, and secure—and we are ready to work together with each of you to achieve it.”[2]

A Democratic Alliance?

            “Fellow democracies have always been our first port of call for cooperation. They always will be.”[3] This statement by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken from September 2023 summarizes both a traditional American preference for working with democracies and a key feature of current US strategy. The United States’s overall international strategy, as outlined by the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy (October 2022), is one of constructing and reinforcing a broad democratic alliance. The strategy begins with an interpretation of the current international environment as bipolar in terms of political institutions and ideologies, with the world divided between democratic and autocratic countries. Within this general framework, a major concern is the movement away from democracy worldwide. Coups and democratic backsliding within the democratic world have meant that by a number of indices, democracy has indeed been declining for the past twenty years. At the same time, autocratic regimes have generally been strengthened, and, according to US officials, increasingly collaborating. Even more worrisome, antidemocratic forces are actively trying to undermine democracy by interfering with elections, supporting autocratic forces and, especially in the case of China, offering an alternative model of economic growth and governance backed by alternative international systems to the Western, post-World War II architecture which supposedly favored democratic development. To respond to this ongoing crisis of democracy, democratic cooperation is essential. Other policy documents, such as the 2018 National Defense Strategy, highlight another key advantage of like-minded allies: their reliability and wealth provide a unique advantage which American competitors, notably China and Russia, cannot match as efficiently as they can develop their economy or military.

            At the same time, the Biden administration has tried to account for the realities of competition and cooperation across numerous domains through the concept of “diplomatic variable geometry,” the idea that in the Indo-Pacific especially (although the idea is universal), the country will construct different coalitions to tackle different problems. This flexibility diminishes the administration’s emphasis on democratic partners. As Secretary Blinken recognized, “on certain priorities, if we go it alone, or only with our democratic friends, we will come up short. Many issues demand a broader set of potential partners, with the added benefit of building stronger relationships with more countries.”[4] For example, containing China might require working with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a group that has emphasized its democratic nature, but fighting climate change naturally requires engaging China and any other country regardless of its system of government.

            The United States has therefore partnered with countries that are simply not democratic, like Vietnam and Singapore. It has also hesitated to call out democratic backsliding among Indo-Pacific allies like the Philippines and especially India, which is perceived as a key counterweight to China. There is also concern about democratic backsliding in the United States itself, which adds further depth to the question of how much of a priority democracy is for US policy in the region.

            There is an alternative way of conceptualizing the democratic alliance strategy: not as an alliance of democracies, but an alliance that operates democratically. As opposed to emphasizing the internal political system of countries that are US allies and partners, the US might seek to show that it makes a better partner than other countries, because working with the US allows for collective decision-making in an alliance of equals, whereas other countries seek to dominate their partners. This is a difficult argument for the United States to make compelling, as much of US history in the Indo-Pacific amounts to hegemony, if not outright empire. Yet, this is an argument that is at the center of contemporary US Indo-Pacific strategy. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed at the 2023 Shangri-La Dialogue, “Our work together helps ensure that all countries in the region—large and small—have a say in its future. It helps ensure that the status quo can’t be disrupted in ways that harm all of our security. And it helps strengthen our ability to find common solutions to common challenges.”[5]

            This argument depends on the idea that countries can trust the United States more than its autocratic competitors. Trust is an idea the US returns to frequently in discussing sensitive questions like new military technologies. Speaking about the military use of artificial intelligence, former Deputy Secretary of Defense and Vice Chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Robert O. Work argued:

We’re in a competition with authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes will use technology that reflect their own governing principles. We already know how China wants to use AI. They want to use it for population surveillance, they want to use it to suppress minorities, they want to use it to cut individual privacy and trample on civil liberties. That’s not going to work for a democratic nation like the United States. And so this is as much a values competition as it is a technological competition.[6]

Although this statement referred to a specific technology, the general argument applies to US diplomatic strategy broadly. In the ongoing battle of narratives, both the democratic nature of the US and its democratic relations with other countries form the base of its argument that it should be a partner of choice. It remains to be seen if this argument will be convincing for Indo-Pacific countries.

 

[1] Peter Baker and Katie Rogers, “Biden Forges Deeper Ties with Vietnam as China’s Ambition Mounts,” New York Times, 10 September 2023, accessed 11 November 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/us/politics/biden-vietnam-hanoi.html; US Department of Defense, “Remarks by Secretary Mattis at Shangri-La Dialogue,” 3 June 2017, accessed 11 November 2023, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/1201780/; NARA, “Remarks By President Obama to the Australian Parliament,” 17 November 2011, accessed 11 November 2023, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/17/remarks-president-obama-australian-parliament.

[2] Joe Biden qtd. in Robert J. McMahon, “‘We Will Remain a Pacific Power’: America’s Self-Proclaimed Destiny in the Asia–Pacific Region,” in Michael Stricof and Isabelle Vagnoux, eds. U.S. Leadership in a World of Uncertainties, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, 29; White House, “FACT SHEET: Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States,” 11 February 2022. Accessed 10 November 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/02/11/fact-sheet-indo-pacific-strategy-of-the-united-states/.

[3] Antony J. Blinken, remarks to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS): “The Power and Purpose of American Diplomacy,” Washington, DC, 13 September 2023, accessed 19 September 2023, https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-remarks-to-the-johns-hopkins-school-of-advanced-international-studies-sais-the-power-and-purpose-of-american-diplomacy-in-a-new-era/.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lloyd J. Austin, “Remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue,” 11 June 2022, US Department of Defense, accessed 15 November 2023, https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/3059852/remarks-at-the-shangri-la-dialogue-by-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-a/.

[6] Robert O. Work, “Press Briefing on Artificial Intelligence,” 9 April 2021, US Department of Defense, accessed 1 December 2023, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2567848/.

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