This article tries to reconstruct the development of the Indo-Pacific concept with an eye to the approach developed in the field of critical geopolitics. In an influential article, Gearoid Ó Tuathail argued in 2002 that mapping the geopolitical space is also a drama-turgical process. In this process, new realities inform media images and representations for categorization by actors according to an inventory provided by what he calls the cultural storehouse of common sense. All this results in an alternate “storyline” which essentially renders the new perceptions into a narrative framework. This framework,
1 Tamás Péter Baranyi
PhD, Deputy Director for Strategy at Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade. Email: tamas.baranyi@ifat.hu
in turn, becomes a source of a geopolitical script (like strategic documents), ultimate-ly informing new problem definitions, geopolitical strategies themselves, geopolitical accommodation to new situations, and finally, “problem closure” – i.e., in effect, the successful completion of this accommodation (Ó Tuathail, 2002). To put it simply, Ó Tuathail tried to create a typology of how new phenomena become dramatized in sto-rylines which are embedded in a new mental mapping of the world and become items in the pool of actual foreign policy decisions. Without the need to agree with and accept most findings of critical geopolitics and its normative approach, this typology is very useful for seeing how discursive changes can lead to policy shifts.
From the 1990s onwards, the “China Challenge” has been unfolding in American foreign policy discourse in a multi-faceted way. Americans first became concerned with China’s growing economic prowess, then with its resuscitated regional ambi-tions, and finally with its geopolitical agenda. The first layer thus involved anxiety about China potentially overtaking the United States as the world’s biggest economy.
Scholars even tried to pinpoint a date when the size of China’s economy would sur-pass that of the U.S. economy (China’s economic overtaking was famously described as sorpasso by Niall Ferguson; the wording was quite apt, as the statistical fact did not actually have a large impact on real events – similarly to how it also did not when it was applied to the Italian economy overtaking Britain’s in the late 1980s) (Misen-heimer, 2019). Though the fact of the inevitable rise of the Asian country was not debated, interpretations of it varied: while John J. Mearsheimer talked about a new era of conflict, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick called China a potential “re-sponsible stakeholder” of the international order (Bowie, 2020). John Ikenberry be-lieved that integrating China more deeply into world politics and the economy would provide for the internal liberalization of the country (Nardon, 2017). These hopes are today generally perceived as unfulfilled. The document United States’ Strategic Ap-proach to the People’s Republic of China, published in April 2020, summarized this disappointment in the preface:
Since the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established diplomatic relations in 1979, United States’ policy toward the PRC was largely premised on a hope that deepening engagement would spur fundamental eco-nomic and political opening in the PRC and lead to its emergence as a construc-tive and responsible global stakeholder, with a more open society. […] The CCP has chosen instead to exploit the free and open rules based order and attempt to reshape the international system in its favour. […] The CCP’s expanding use of economic, political, and military power to compel acquiescence from nation states harms vital American interests and undermines the sovereignty and digni-ty of countries and individuals around the world (White House, 2020).
This amounts to nothing less than an admission that the American presumption that more integration creates more democracy has not come true.
China’s regional ambitions started to become apparent slightly later. Even though the Wolfowitz Doctrine (put forward as early as in 2002) that the United States may face the rise of hegemonic powers in the future against which Washington should act, it did not specify China. As recently as in 2005 there was near consensus of the foreign policy elite that China’s rise was indeed peaceful (for an overview, see Dams–
van der Putten, 2015), and Mearsheimer’s thesis was heavily criticized, even as late as in 2014-2015 (cf. Snelder, 2015). However, China’s regional ambitions were never quite secret, as the Asian country openly claims sovereignty over Taiwan, looks to the deeper integration of Hong Kong and Macau into the PRC, and has a set of mari-time boundary disputes as well. However, assertive steps taken by China were often dismissed as posing no serious threat to U.S. interests (Austin, 2015). What causes deeper concern is instead the reasoning that China’s growing assertiveness coupled with economic power could effectively create stepping stones for the superpower sta-tus of the country (Sullivan–Brands, 2020). However, the question whether China’s regional ambitions are in fact threatening occupied only a secondary place in Amer-ican public discourse throughout the 2000s, as enterprises in the Middle East and the War on Terror took precedence. The 2008 global financial crisis and the Obama Administration’s determination to free the U.S. from Middle-Eastern entanglements created the environment in which the China Challenge could be placed at the forefront of American thinking (West, 2017). Obama, who once called himself the “first Pacific President”, embarked on the “pivot to Asia” policy in an attempt to rebalance China’s growing influence. Renewed ties with old allies (Australia, South Korea, Singapore, etc.), the establishment of new ties (Myanmar), the announcement of the Air-Sea Bat-tle Doctrine to counter China, and the forging of the Trans-Pacific Partnership were all elements of policy (Ford, 2017). The overall approach did not reach its goal: the U.S. could not easily quit its wars in the Middle East, and did not manage to counter China, while Beijing started to see the whole American policy approach as a pincer movement. This was the time when the “China Challenge” was replaced by “China Threat” in discourse.
The third step in how China became seen as a threat relates to Beijing’s 2013 for-mulation of the Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI was partly an answer to some of the domestic issues of China, such as overcapacity in its infrastructure-building in-dustry, and served as a showcase for Beijing’s more outward-looking foreign policy.
Still, originally the BRI was intended as a geo-economic concept that would bring a degree of stability and cooperation to the regions neighbouring China. Potential geopolitical aims were only accorded to the BRI sometime later, but American critics were always more vocal than Chinese strategists about the geopolitical dimension of
the BRI. Accordingly, American criticism was not confined to business technical-ities, or the perceived corruption in BRI projects, but also included the criticism of
“buying influence” and effectively building up a sphere of influence (Cavanna, 2019).
As one keen-eyed analysis pointed out, the Americans were aware of this move as a precursor to global power status as it resembled their own (Sullivan–Brands, 2020).
In fact, Anglo-American schools of geopolitics grew out of the perceived threat of
“continental consolidation”: it was feared that Germany or Russia could consolidate huge land masses under their sway in the early twentieth century (Gaddis, 2018).
The phenomenon gave rise, among other things, to the Mackinderian concept of the
“heartland”. Some assessments pointed out that the 2008 financial crisis had rein-stated the importance of greatness of both territory and population in international politics (James, 2011). This combination led to the notion that the Chinese are on the way to “consolidating” the Eurasian landmass. The perceived appropriation of Russia and China (Kaplan, 2019) is but one of the apexes of this outlook. Whether the rise of a “Eurasian” geopolitical concept was critical in the formulation of a new American policy discourse, it is without doubt that the latter gained impetus during the mid-2010s. Xi Jinping’s more decisive leadership, the BRI, and the sudden realization of geopolitical interests reaching beyond China’s economic entrepreneurship were cen-tral to the permanent switch from the “China Challenge” to the “China Threat”. It is thus not untenable to say that the rise of China slowly went from being perceived as an opportunity to a challenge, and then to threat from the 1990s to the late 2000s, and this is the new perception of reality that has given rise to a new geopolitical outlook.
What is still unclear, however, is the extent to which the emergence of the Indo-Pa-cific is indeed an “answer” to Chinese strategic thinking about Eurasia. As will be demonstrated, the Indo-Pacific concept is essentially reactive in nature, and one of its instigators is the Belt and Road Initiative. Evidence in geopolitical speech about the actual threat posed by the Eurasia concept, however, is scarce. Clearly, evidence has been produced to support this idea (Fallon, 2015, Cavanna, 2020, Kaplan, 2018), but strategic documents do not specify the concept. Some scholars even argue that through the BRI China can exert influence on the European Union in concert with its Eurasian scope (Eszterhai–Grimmel, 2020). Stephen Walt likened Chinese strategic attempts to a “Chinese Monroe Doctrine”, aimed at crowding out the Americans from the Asia-Pacific region (Pan, 2015). Given the essentially territorial (i.e. non-maritime) nature of the Monroe Doctrine, and thus its application to the Eurasian landmass, it is not an exaggeration to say that for some members of the American foreign policy elite, the China threat is essentially the “anti-Monroe Doctrine” posture of China in relation to the Eurasian landmass. This position clearly resonates with the thoughts of some of the most notable figures in Anglo-American geopolitics – such as Mackinder’s vision of the “heartland” and the importance Spykman attached to keeping the “rimlands”
safe. On the other hand, the BRI is often cited as a primary instigator but in the “geo-political script” its approach is more often likened to “unfair trade practices” than to Eurasian geopolitical aspirations. The evidence is thus inconclusive as to whether the
“China threat” is a “Eurasian threat” at the same time.