Beyond the diplomatic choreography of last month’s Xi-Trump summit, what are the structural implications of a less confrontational US-China relationship for the Asia-Pacific?
The subsequent visits by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to India and US Secretary of Defence Peter Hegseth to Singapore in late May shed some light on the question. Both Rubio and Hegseth had accompanied Trump to Beijing.
Perhaps most telling was the switch in the usage of a geographic term by the US administration. In his keynote speech at the Shangri-la Dialogue on May 30, Hegseth referred to the Pacific 17 times. In contrast to his remarks at the same forum last year, when Hegseth used the term “Indo-Pacific” many times, he never once deployed that construct in this year’s speech.
The subtle change makes a world of difference. Whereas Indo-Pacific is a concept associated with containment, Pacific – on its own – projects a vision of coexistence for the two great powers on opposite sides of the ocean. It is a vision of balance of power, where no Asian nation is forced to choose sides.
The Indo-Pacific construct was championed by Japan – particularly under Shinzo Abe when he was prime minister – to build a coalition encircling China. When Japan was the dominant economic power in Asia, there was little need to deviate from the region’s customary designation. But when it felt insecure in the shadow of a rising China, Japan began to draw a larger circle to contain China.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the Indo-Pacific concept go hand in hand. The Quad is the institutional implementation of the idea of the Indo-Pacific. Hegseth’s recent avoidance of the term revealed the Quad’s fate. This was confirmed by the meeting of Quad foreign ministers in New Delhi. The most substantive outcome was a collaboration on critical minerals, an area already covered by a proliferation of overlapping bilateral and multilateral frameworks, whose past failures foretell the new initiative’s future with timelines likely to run into decades.
