Professor Brahma Chellaney on January 24, 2012, published a commentary in Washington Times on how to check China. Excerpts below:
The launch of trilateral strategic consultations among the United States, India and Japan, and their decision to hold joint naval exercises this year, signal efforts to form an entente among the Asia-Pacific region’s three leading democracies. These efforts – in the world’s most economically dynamic region where the specter of a power imbalance looms large – have also been underscored by President Obama’s new strategic guidance for the Pentagon. The new strategy calls for “rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific” and support of India as a “regional economic anchor and provider of security in the broader Indian Ocean region.”
At a time when Asia is in transition and troubled by growing security challenges, the United States, India and Japan are seeking to build a broader strategic understanding to advance their shared interests. Their effort calls to mind the pre-World War I Franco-British-Russian “Triple Entente” to meet the threat posed by the rapid rise of an increasingly assertive Germany.
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The intention of the three democratic powers is to create an “ententecordiale” without transforming it into a formal military alliance. Yet this entente could serve as an important strategic instrument to deter China’s rising power from sliding into arrogance. The three partners also seek to contribute to the construction of a stable, liberal, rules-based regional order.
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Important shifts in American, Japanese and Indian strategic preferences and policies, however, are needed to build meaningful trilateral collaboration. Japan, America’s treaty ally, has established military interoperability only with U.S. forces. After its 2008 security-cooperation declaration with India, Japan must also build interoperability with Indian naval forces, so that, as former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said, “Japan’s navy and the Indian navy are seamlessly interconnected.”
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Whereas Japan is separated from China by a sea and the United States is geographically distant, China has sharply escalated border violations and other incidents in recent years to increase pressure on India, even as the U.S. has maintained tacit neutrality on Sino-Indian disputes.
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Building true military interoperability within the entente will not be easy, owing to the absence of a treaty relationship between the United States and India, and to their forces’ different weapon systems and training. But given that no formal tripartite alliance is sought, limited interoperability may mesh well with this ententecordiale’s political objectives. Indeed, the entente’s political utility is likely to surpass its military value.
Even so, the deepening cooperation between the United States, India and Japan can help to strengthen maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region – the world’s leading trade and energy seaway – and shape a healthy and stable Asian power equilibrium.
Brahma Chellaney is professor at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan (HarperCollins).
