Inside Out | No one is commenting on this ‘big idea’ Trump put forward at Apec
For now, Trump’s embrace of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ can be dismissed as a piece of petulant theatre
If the sealing of a TPP11 trade deal that now excludes the US was a deliberate stick in the eye to President Donald Trump when leaders gathered at the weekend in Da Nang in Vietnam, so Trump had a stick of his own very much aimed at China – the newly minted concept of the “Indo-Pacific”.
Despite being hosted by Vietnam at the annual leaders meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum, where all talk was of the Asia-Pacific, Trump stuck with firm resolve to using the term “Indo-Pacific”. Though the term has been lurking around for a decade, never before has it been so firmly and defiantly embraced in place of the “Asia-Pacific” phrase we have become comfortable with.
There is a certain irony here. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was originally embraced by the US as a trade deal to keep China firmly in its place. Trump’s very theatrical abandonment of the TPP quickly after he came into office in January blunted that cause. Left for ashes, with Trump and many other Americans thinking the TPP could not possibly proceed without the US at the party, there must be very real US irritation that the residual 11 signatories have gone ahead anyway – with a firm commitment to multi-country cooperation that flies in the face of Trump’s “America first” preference for bilateral deals.
This left Trump alone at the Da Nang party, and without any clear strategy to ensure that China is kept firmly in its place in the Asia-Pacific. But Eureka... along comes the neat new concept of the “Indo-Pacific”.
To be fair, the idea is not new. Wikipedia identifies the Indo-Pacific as “a biogeographic region comprising the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, the western and central Pacific Ocean, and the seas connecting the two in the general area of Indonesia”.
The trouble with this concept from Trump’s point of view is that this ocean region does not include the temperate and polar regions of the Indian and Pacific oceans, nor the Pacific coast of the Americas.