Book review: Rory Medcalf,Indo-Pacific Empire: China,America and the Contest for the World’s Pivotal Regions

In recent years, the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical construct has gained extensive attention from academia and policymakers around the world. As the world’s economic and strategic centre shifts eastwards with the rise of China and other middle powers—Japan, India, Australia, South Korea and Indonesia—the region provides not only opportunities but also security challenges. In this fast-paced book, Medcalf traces the conceptual basis of the idea of the Indo-Pacific and tries to make sense of what it means for the actors involved. What’s in a name? he argues.

The book is an attempt to understand whether the Indo-Pacific is an idea, an imagined space or mere wordplay by nation-states. Dividing the book into three sections of past, present and the future of the Indo-Pacific, Medcalf weaves a complex and evolving story of the Indo-Pacific Empire as he calls it, in an easy and comprehensible manner. In the book, he revisits the half-forgotten past of a two-ocean region, before addressing the complexities of the present and eventually, launching on predictions about its future.

His central argument is that the narrative of the Indo-Pacific could help nations face the central international dilemma of the 21st century—how can nations respond to a rising China without resorting to conflict. He asserts that the ‘Indo-Pacific is a multipolar system where the regional order will not be determined by the actions of one or two powers but by the interests and the agencies of many’ (p. 3).

Defining the regions in a certain way can affect the degree of attention any particular region receives from the major powers as well as how the resources are allocated to the countries of the neighbourhood. Terms like the Middle East and Asia-Pacific are geographical constructs invented with self-centred political purposes by states. Medcalf dispels the notion that the Indo-Pacific is a Western concept; rather he argues that the term is an authentic regional approach to security, diplomacy and economics with growing support in Asia and beyond. The Indo-Pacific is like a mental map, Medcalf argues, that suits the current era of maritime connectivity and geopolitics involving multiple players.

The author points out in Chapter 1 of the book, that the term Indo-Pacific might seem conflicting as it sounds like too much yet not enough – the sea without land, Asia without its continent. He forcefully argues that the region is seeing a contest of two ideas between Xi Jinping’s ‘Belt and Road’ and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ in the mental maps of Asia, a struggle to shape perceptions—a battle of narratives. Medcalf calls the Belt and Road Project the Indo-Pacific with ‘Chinese characteristics’ and also states that ‘what makes Indo-Pacific real is China’s own behaviour’ (p. 4) and its efforts to combine ‘soft power’ of persuasion with the ‘sharp power’ of internal political interference to neutralise any opposition (p. 19). The narrative of the Indo-Pacific is a signal that China and the United States are not the only two nations that can shape the regional order, but other middle players such as Indonesia, Japan, Australia and India will play a significant role in affecting the balance of power in the region.

In Chapter 2 of the book, titled ‘Submerged History of Asia’, Medcalf details the historical background of the concept and understanding of the Indo-Pacific. He asserts that looking at the region from the perspective of the two integrated oceans has played a central role in understanding various zones of the world and movements of the people by various disciplines. The author details the first forays by China in the Indian Ocean in the 15th century by Admiral Zheng He of the Ming dynasty and his historic seven voyages. The author questions the long-held view by many that Asia is China-centric and argues that if any place has exerted more influence than others, then that is India. The India of the past was not a unified political entity but it was unquestionably the centre of pre-colonial trading network inviting traders, explorers, and emissaries from all directions to the Indian subcontinent resulting in transfer of knowledge, culture and religion (p. 37).

In Chapters 3 and 4 of the book, Medcalf details the role of colonialism and the following World Wars and Cold War in making and breaking the region to the states as we know them today. After the hopeful Asian Relations Conference in 1947, the region entered a new era of disorder, division and strife with internal, regional and global tensions floundering the efforts by Nehru to build a pan-Asian identity. The end of the Cold War during the 1990s resulted in marked structural shifts in Asia with the ascent of India and China propelling them to look outwards to satisfy their growing energy needs. The author describes the events as they unfolded into the current realities of the region from the creation of ASEAN to the heightening of strategic differences between the US and China and to strengthening India-US relations.

In ‘Games and Giants’ in Chapter 5, Medcalf likens the competition in the region to the ‘Great Game’ in the 19th century between Britain and Russia in which more than just two powers are involved. He calls the five countries, that is, Japan, India, the US, Indonesia and China as the most consequential nations with the US, China and India having claims to be giants in the future. The present game, he argues, is a game of many layers, many players and many different drivers, with a varied geometry of interests, values, and identity behind each state’s actions in the region. ‘The future will not be mapped by the US or China either alone or together; rather it will be charted by the choices of many. Population, economies, military, technologies, geography—multiple countries have agency’ (p. 120).

In Chapter 7, the author argues that a geo-economic contest is taking place between the states. Geo-economics, a concept coined by Edward Luttwak in the 1990s, is the recognition that states are displacing military methods with the methods of commerce for national advantage (p. 182). Medcalf asserts that states are competing through economics rather than force and nations now recognise that economic interdependence gives them leverage over their adversaries but make them vulnerable as well. Other facets of this competition include a race for developing defining technologies such as AI and 5G, and outright commercial coercion-tools used for subduing without bloodshed. In Chapter 8, the author describes what the Chinese military presence across the Indo-Pacific could look like as it modernises its forces and deploys warfighting vessels far from the Chinese coast? He rightly argues that states including China are busy with a base race—developing or accessing ports and deep water facilities—where they seek to outflank the other by creating bases and string of friends in the region (p. 206).

Before arriving at his conclusion, the author compares strategic shocks that the region might have to face in the future, such as a ‘black elephant’—originally coined by Singapore’s former civil service head Peter Ho. The author takes inspiration from the symbolism of ‘black swan’—a synonym for improbable and catastrophic happenings revived into popularity by a scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A black elephant is a likely event (a ‘known unknown’), that everyone sees looming, yet it still comes as a shock and according to Medcalf, there are plenty of black elephants in Indo-Pacific (p. 236). He imagines plausible scenarios for confrontation in the region as the black elephants and black swans including the possibility of conflict between the US and China over Taiwan, role of climate change and technology as the disruptive forces.

In the end, Medcalf believes that the Indo-Pacific region is too vast for any one country to protect for its own interest alone; the way forward is to discourage confrontation, while maintaining a healthy level of competition and moving the dial towards coexistence as the starting point for cooperation.