How coronavirus is accelerating the emergence of a new geopolitical formation. 

New Statesman
Date: 3 May 2020
By: Jeremy Cliffe

What do these news events from the past week have in common? Two US warships sailed by the Spratly and Paracel island chains in the South China Sea. Australia announced that it would support Taiwan’s return to the World Health Organisation (WHO). In Delhi, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi hosted a ministerial meeting on how to lure manufacturing firms from China to India.

The link is summed up in a recently published book, Indo-Pacific Empire. It came out in early March, so was written before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. But it is impressively prescient.

In it Rory Medcalf, Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, highlights an emerging formation on the geopolitical map: the Indo-Pacific, a growing web of alliances centred on the “Quad” of India, Japan, Australia and the US, but also taking in a crescent of maritime states in eastern, south-eastern and southern Asia. Looser and more multipolar than other such formations, it is unified by the quest to balance, dilute and absorb Chinese power. “The Indo-Pacific is both a region and an idea: a metaphor for collective action, self-help combined with mutual help,” writes Medcalf. Two months on from its publication, virtually all of the trends that his book draws together have advanced.

Scepticism towards China is mounting. In an escalating war of words, Australia has called for an investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak. Japan’s economic rescue package included almost 250bn yen (some $2.2bn) to support Japanese firms in moving production out of China. India has tightened investment restrictions in a move clearly aimed at shielding domestic firms from Chinese takeovers; Modi’s meeting illustrating the country's new willingness to style itself as a rival manufacturing hub.    [FULL  STORY]