INTRODUCTION

At the November 2017 APEC meeting in Da Nang, US President Donald Trump announced a new approach towards Asia with a slogan “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP) that was repeated in the US National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2017. The FOIP slogan had already been used by Japan to name its own strategic approach towards the Indo-Pacific while Australia had used the term Indo-Pacific in its 2016 Defence White Paper and 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper. What, if anything, US FOIP meant in terms of a coherent policy strategy became relatively clear only in late 2018.

As explained below, FOIP seeks to engage like-minded nations in the now-integrated Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific regional complex. The strategy is to construct a collaborative and scalable network of partnerships with FOIP stakeholders that will be able to respond flexibly to meet a wide range of stakeholder needs and regional contingencies in the Indo-Pacific region (IPR).

The shared material interest among FOIP stakeholders is open and unhindered trade and investment flows between the United States and its advanced allies on the one hand and, on the other hand, developing countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia that could drive global growth for the next two generations if they make it through the middle-income trap. To make this a reality, both the advanced West and developing Asia have a vital stake in maintaining open trade and investment relations with each other.

This FOIP strategy marks a new era in US Asia policy. From 1972 to 2017, one could characterize US strategy towards Asia as one of “China engagement”. After informal relations with China began under Nixon based on shared but narrow anti-Soviet interests, the United States worked patiently to broaden friendly cooperative relations with China in order to win its trust and socialize it to the “rules-based order” (RBO).

Today, however, the United States has reluctantly concluded that the China engagement strategy has failed, and that China is a confirmed dissatisfied rising power that seeks to coercively institute its own model of narrowly self-interested regional governance that, if successful, could end the RBO in the IPR.