Like-mindedness: How the West shapes the geostrategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific

With the Indo-Pacific emerging as a pivotal geostrategic arena against the backdrop of intensified US–China great power competition, IR scholars and regional experts have rushed to explore the military, economic, infrastructural, technological and other key dynamics of this new regional landscape. What has received far less attention, however, is how the Indo-Pacific is being actively shaped by collective identity-constructing practices of coalition-building and boundary-drawing. Indeed, like-mindedness – the idea of sharing basic political values and principles – seems to have become an important criterion for Western countries as they rapidly expand their strategic engagement with, and coalition-building in, the Indo-Pacific region, while also distancing themselves from China, some even depicting it as an outsider.

This report maps and examines not only how and to what extent Western governments, both individually and collectively, employ such identity-based geostrategic practices, but also how China and the ASEAN countries have responded. Notwithstanding considerable diversity among the Western countries, the report demonstrates that they, as a US-led group, have adopted a remarkably strong common stance in the past two years, collectively portraying themselves as a coalition of like-minded states, sharing a broad set of liberal values and principles beyond a commitment to a rules-based order. Moreover, they have consolidated their common stance by promoting a narrative about safeguarding a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ in the face of China’s coercive and assertive behaviour.

Pushing back against this, the Chinese Government has itself adopted a two-pronged identity-based strategy, consisting not merely of a counter-narrative about American hegemony and Cold War mentality, but also of China’s own vision for a regional ‘community with a shared future’ in the Asia-Pacific. Meanwhile, navigating these competing coalition-building practices, the ASEAN countries seem at risk of being increasingly divided as the regional geostrategic landscape is reshaped: if regional identity dynamics further intensify, ASEAN and other countries could be forced to look either to China or to the US-led Western coalition for security assistance, geoeconomic partnership and infrastructural development.