Indian Ocean Politics of the 21st Century – A View from Sri Lanka
Tissa Jayatilaka-December 9, 2017, 6:36 pm
(Continued from last week)
Although no major announcements were made during the Mattis visit, it needs to be noted that in 2016, the United States acknowledged that India was now a major defence partner. India may not become an ally in the way Japan or South Korea or any of the NATO countries are, but even if limited co-operation develops, that will prove a strikingly complex change in the defence relations between the two countries. Such a momentous change will have an impact not on just South Asia alone. It is likely to impact significantly on the strategic dimension of the larger Asia-Pacific region presently dominated by the United States and China.
According to the current affairs magazine ‘India Legal’, the United States decision to supply 22 Sea Guardian drones to enhance India’s naval surveillance in the India Ocean was announced during Prime Minister Modi’s meeting with President Trump in June 2017. These drones are expected to help the Indian Navy to keep a close watch on the Chinese naval ships and submarines in the Indian Ocean. India, it appears, is the first non-NATO country to be given the drones by the United States. ‘India Legal’ quotes former Indian Foreign Secretary Lalit Mansingh as saying:
Yes, Indo-US defence co-operation is very much in focus, especially as for over 20 years, Washington had denied us all military technology. The nuclear deal changed the parameters of relations, and today there is robust co-operation and a US willingness to transfer high-end military technology to India.
Noting that the unspoken part of this defence relationship is China, Mansingh goes on to observe:
The desire to balance China’s growing military and economic power in Asia by encouraging India was there from the time of George W. Bush. If American focus is on balancing the power equation in India, India, too, wants the US as an insurance against China.
Students of international relations are of the view that there is likely to be closer co-operation among China, Pakistan and Russia to meet the challenge of a possible joint defence arrangement among the United States, India, Japan and Australia. We thus see that tensions in the region are most likely to escalate given that the United States and China on the one hand, and India and China on the other are competing for dominance in the IOR. It must be noted, however, that this above-referenced possible joint -defence arrangement is not a new idea. In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, President George W. Bush announced that India, the United States, Japan and Australia would set up an international coalition to coordinate rescue and rehabilitation operations. Suhashini Haidar writing to ‘The Hindu’ refers to this proposed multilateral grouping as ‘the Quadrilateral or Quad’. According to Haidar, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was most enthusiastic ‘voicing his long-standing idea of an "arc of prosperity and freedom" that encompassed India, and brought it (sic) into a tighter framework with Japan, the United States and Australia, which were already close military allies’. Concerns about the Quad in Beijing, Haidar suggests, led to the United States moving away from the idea in 2007, given other priorities in the pipeline at the time such as the strategic efforts underway to move for sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council and the six-nation talks on North Korea. Haidar poses an interesting question in conclusion:
A decade later, the question is: will the Quadrilateral melt away as before, or is it an idea whose time has finally come?
Sri Lanka is a small state and one of its strengths has been the significant diplomatic role it has played on the international scene over the years. Sri Lanka has had a reputation in the diplomatic world for unusual success in explaining and clarifying to the global North the concerns, concepts and complaints of the South. Many Sri Lankan scholars, diplomats and intellectuals have shown the same capacity for generating Northern interest rather than ire. Sri Lanka is indeed unlikely to be able to change the geopolitical realities of the region surrounding us. But through a pragmatic foreign policy based on avoidance of alliances with any one power bloc and maintaining friendship with all, we should be able to play a constructive role as in the past in the emerging new order. Sri Lanka, it will be recalled, played a key role in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and in calling for the possible declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace (IOPZ) beginning in the 1960s and 1970s respectively.
Given the above-referred to constructive role played by Sri Lanka in the diplomatic world, the categorical statement made by Prime Minister Wickremesinghe on behalf of the Government at the Second Indian Ocean Conference hosted by Sri Lanka in September 2017 regards the Sri Lanka Government’s decision to develop its major sea ports, especially the Hambantota port which some claim to be a military base, is to be welcomed and worthy of quotation in full:
I state clearly that Sri Lanka’s government headed by President Sirisena does not enter into military alliances with any country or make our bases available to foreign countries. We will continue military cooperation such as training, supply of equipment and taking part in joint exercises with friendly countries.
Only the Sri Lanka Armed Forces have the responsibility for military activities in our Ports and Airports. We are also working with foreign private investors on the commercial development of our ports.
Sri Lanka should now push for an international code of conduct for military vessels traversing the Indian Ocean. ASEAN and China have agreed to prepare such a code for the South China Sea. The Indian Ocean Code could be along the lines of the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and China regarding the rules of engagement for safety in the air and maritime encounters. Such a code could recognize and seek to deal with the escalation in human smuggling, illicit drug trafficking, and the relatively new phenomenon of maritime terrorism. According to specialist opinion, UNCLOS does not have adequate provisions to address these issues of recent origin. Any code on the freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean must include an effective – and realistic – dispute resolution process.
This code of conduct should ideally be built on a consensual basis with no single state dominating it. In this regard, the United States Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Scott Swift addressing the annual ‘Galle Dialogue 2017 (a defence seminar dealing with the Indian Ocean region hosted by Sri Lanka) in early October said the following as quoted in ‘The Island’:
For the last 70 years, the India-Asia Pacific region achieved unprecedented level of stability and prosperity, due in large part to our collective respect for- - and adherence to - - international norms, standards, rules and laws. These benchmarks were not imposed by one nation upon another. Rather they emerged through compromise and consensus, with all states having an equal voice, regardless of size, military strength or economic power.
The IOR needs a security architecture that is of mutual benefit and one established on a multilateral basis with an effective multilateral governing structure. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe speaking at the inauguration of the Indian Ocean Conference in Singapore in 2016 called for the formulation of an Indian Ocean Order with accepted rules and regulations that would guide interactions between and among states. Importantly he called for this Order to be built on a consensual agreement in which no one state would be allowed to dominate it.
Here are my concluding thoughts. Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), it is apparent that China is desirous of becoming a global power. Although, relatively speaking, the United States is in economic decline it will remain a global power for the foreseeable future, given especially its superior technological and naval capability. If the United States and China as the key international actors, and India and China as the pre-eminent regional players, can maintain a power balance, then the IOR could take off socially and economically and be a boon not only to the Asia-Pacific but to the world. To be sure, as in all equations in this equation that I have outlined, too, there are imponderables. That said, if we could achieve the golden mean between competition and cooperation and somehow avoid the bitter and relentless divisiveness that characterized the Cold War era, our collective future would and could be something to look forward to.
(This is an edited version of a presentation made on Tuesday, 31 October, 2017 at the ‘Roundtable Discussion’ jointly organized by the Mario Einaudi Centre for International Studies and the South Asia Programme of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York)
(Concluded)
