Over the past decade, as China’s might and assertiveness have grown, countries around the Indo-Pacific have increasingly embraced informal partnerships, or minilateral groupings, to deepen international policy action and defense coordination. Two prominent examples of the minilateral model are the Quad, which comprises Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, and AUKUS, which includes Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, deterring China with minilateral groupings is more complex than traditional deterrence theory might suggest. Can minilateral groupings deter coercion and aggression in the Indo-Pacific, and if so, under what conditions? 

A collection of essays in a new Asia Policy roundtable tackles this question. Shorenstein APARC South Asia Research Scholar Arzan Tarapore is a co-editor of the roundtable. Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro is the author of the first essay in the collection.

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The roundtable brings together six leading security experts to explore the nexus between deterrence and minilateralism in Indo-Pacific security politics. The motivation for this endeavor, Tarpore and co-editor Brendan Taylor of the Australian National University explain in the roundtable introductory essay, is to fill the gap in the existing literature, which has largely not addressed the possible convergence between these two increasingly dominant trends in the region.

The roundtable opens with Mastro's essay, in which she identifies the unique characteristics of the China challenge and considers how minilateral groupings can best enhance deterrence in these circumstances. First, she explains why minilaterals, such as the Quad, could address some of the challenges of “deterrence by punishment.” This traditional form of deterrence employs the threat of severe penalties — ranging from economic sanctions to nuclear retaliation — to prevent attacks by an adversary. Here, Mastro says, “economic or political costs may have greater deterrent value against Beijing than military costs, thus creating an opportunity for the Quad.”

Next is the category of “deterrence by denial,” which includes strategies that prevent or limit aggressive actions of an adversary by creating the perception that they will not succeed. Such denial-based strategies are more effective than punishment-based ones in circumstances where China could blunt U.S. attempts at punishment or choose to incur the costs. But the United States, Mastro says, “does not have the regional force posture to deny China its objectives.” 

Mastro then considers a third, less analyzed category, “deterrence by resilience,” where the goal is to encourage the perception that disruptive events such as military operations will not be effective in attaining the adversary’s objectives. Here, “resiliency is about signaling to China that the benefits of a particular action are less than China believes them to be.” By building resiliency, smaller countries can push back against Chinese coercion to abide by China's interests. Countries in minilateral groupings should therefore prioritize this form of deterrence as they consider ways to cooperate, Mastro concludes.

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University and the Ban Ki-moon Foundation For a Better Future announced today the launch of an annual Trans-Pacific Sustainability Dialogue in Asia to accelerate progress on achieving the United Nations-adopted 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The joint project will spur new research and policy partnerships between experts from the United States and Asia to expedite the implementation of the Agenda’s underlying 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by governments and non-state actors. The two-day inaugural Dialogue will be held in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on October 27 and 28, 2022, and will be free and open to the public.

The Dialogue’s co-organizers include the Natural Capital Project (NatCap) of Stanford University, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea, Korea Environmental Industry and Technology Institute (KEITI), Korea Environment Corporation (K-eco), and Korea Water Resources Corporation (K-water). 

The first day will take place at The Plaza Seoul and will be co-hosted by the Korea Environment Institute. It will include a series of public sessions headlined by Ban Ki-moon, the eighth secretary-general of the UN, who will join a lineup of world leaders including Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia and chief executive officer and president of the Asia Society; Iván Duque, former president of the Republic of Colombia; and Gombojav Zandanshatar, chairman of the State Great Hural (Parliament) of Mongolia.

“This Dialogue is very timely and relevant as the climate crisis is deepening in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Sustainable Development Goals are becoming more difficult to achieve in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic,” says Mr. Ban Ki-moon. “Asia-Pacific countries should be more aggressive in the fight against climate change and more audacious in the role they play toward achieving the SDGs,” he noted.

In this spirit, expert discussions on the second day will bring together social science researchers and scientists from across the Asia-Pacific region, alongside policymakers and practitioners, to share local and global nature-positive solutions and new pathways of meaningful SDG acceleration actions. Co-hosted by and held at Ewha Womans University, the panel discussions will explore the making of livable, sustainable cities, such as Busan Metropolitan City, and the threats to them by climate change, disasters, and human security issues. To achieve systems transformation and sustainable development, discussions will turn to the need to value and invest in nature.

“Climate and sustainability solutions span disciplines and sectors and require collaboration with partners worldwide,” says Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea at Stanford and director of APARC. “The launch of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability marks an opportune moment to scale up SDGs implementation by leveraging knowledge and expertise from across Stanford and the Asia-Pacific and engaging the next generation of scholars and experts,” Shin adds. “We are honored to join in this effort with Mr. Ban and his team, with whom APARC has an established relationship.”

Highlighting the role of youth in achieving the SDGs, the Dialogue includes student panels that feature young leaders from Stanford University, Ewha Womans University, Osaka University, and De La Salle University, among other Asian universities. Students’ research, applied work, and entrepreneurial endeavors across the region showcase innovations and transformations in green financing and sustainable investments, gender mainstreaming and climate governance, development cooperation for sustainable governance, and scaling environmental solutions through a business and social justice lens.

The Seoul Trans-Pacific Sustainability Dialogue is the inaugural event in APARC and the Ban Ki-moon Foundation’s joint effort to stimulate ambitious action to deliver the 2030 Agenda and SDGs. The annual Dialogue may rotate among different host cities in Asia to address different themes selected from the SDGs framework spearheaded by Mr. Ban Ki-moon during his term as the UN Secretary-General. 

Visit the event page to register to attend the Trans-Pacific Sustainability Dialogue in person in Seoul, as well as for the full program agenda and speaker list.

The event is also offered online via a live webcast: watch the live-streamed sessions on the event page or via the Ban Ki-moon Foundation’s YouTube channel.

About the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) addresses critical issues affecting the countries of Asia, their regional and global affairs, and U.S.-Asia relations. As Stanford University’s hub for the interdisciplinary study of contemporary Asia, APARC produces policy-relevant research, provides education and training to students, scholars, and practitioners, and strengthens dialogue and cooperation between counterparts in the Asia-Pacific and the United States. Founded in 1983, APARC today is home to a scholar community of distinguished academics and practitioners in government, business, and civil society, who specialize in trends that cut across the entire Asia-Pacific region. For more, visit aparc.stanford.edu.

About the Ban Ki-moon Foundation For a Better Future

The Ban Ki-moon Foundation For a Better Future follows and further develops the achievement and philosophy of Ban Ki-moon, the 8th Secretary General of the United Nations through upholding the values of unification, communication and co-existence, and dedication. It promotes three pillars of the UN including peace and security, development, and human rights and contributes to making a better future devoid of conflict and deficiency. In particular, the Ban Ki-moon Foundation actively collaborates with the UN, international organizations, and stakeholders toward achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and realizing the 2050 carbon net-zero of all state parties of the Paris Climate Accord of 2015. For more, visit http://eng.bf4bf.or.kr/. 

Media Contact

Journalists interested in covering the event should contact Shorenstein APARC’s Communications Manager, Michael Breger at mbreger@stanford.edu. For further information on the Trans-Pacific Sustainability Dialogue, please contact Cheryll Alipio, Shorenstein APARC’s Associate Director for Program and Policy at calipio@stanford.edu.

This commentary was first published in The Hindu.

India and China appear to be mending fences, gingerly. Relations have been icy since China launched multiple incursions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh in mid-2020. After years of inconclusive military talks and halting “disengagement” from sites of confrontation, the rivals made inching progress last week. They completed disengagement in an area known as Patrolling Point 15 (PP15), pulling troops back to create a demilitarized buffer zone, and their leaders met in person at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Samarkand.

The tentative conciliatory steps between two nuclear-armed rivals are important; but they also carry risks, especially for India.

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Despite the latest round of disengagement, the LAC remains deeply unsettled. Observers have pointed out that the buffer zones produced by the crisis inhibit India’s ability to patrol its own territory. And India and China have tacitly agreed to postpone settlement at two other confrontation sites, including a particularly tactically valuable area known as Depsang. The buffer zones and Depsang’s status both suit China’s objectives because they limit India’s military activities near the LAC, which analysts judge had partly motivated China’s initial incursions in 2020.

Similarly, the military threat on the border is not only undiminished, but has actually grown over the course of the crisis. The reinforcements that each side deployed since 2020 have not returned to garrison. Even if future rounds of talks continue “disengagement and de-escalation,” and reduce those forces, returning to the status quo ante is now impossible. Both sides have raced to build permanent military infrastructure near the border, to help them surge forces to the border. Unsurprisingly, China seems to have outpaced India in building these roads, helipads, and communications nodes. 

China still claims Arunachal Pradesh as its own, and just as it has pressed its maritime claims once its growing capabilities permit, its military build-up may portend increasing pressure in coming years. Even without a deliberate attack, the increasing capabilities and mobility on both sides of the border means that a crisis can more quickly escalate to a large military stand-off anywhere on the LAC, and possibly even trigger a conflict.

Strategic implications
 

As vexatious as the tactical picture may be on the border, the strategic implications are more dire. For over two years, the land border has become the overwhelming priority in India’s military competition with China. India has reassigned one of three originally Pakistan-facing Strike Corps to the China front. It has deployed its newest artillery, fighter jets, and drones to the China border. 

At the same time, India has not significantly improved its capabilities or posture in the Indian Ocean region. Granted, a suite of impressive new capabilities — from cruise missile-equipped fighters and U.S.-origin naval helicopters to a brand-new indigenously-built aircraft carrier — are inching towards fruition. But these programmes were all initiated before the border crisis, when the Indian military was incrementally modernising its capabilities for the Indian Ocean.

Whether or not by design, this must delight Beijing. As India and China jostle for security and influence in Asia, the contest in the Indian Ocean will inevitably intensify. Their respective capabilities to project military force across the Ocean, to coerce or defend smaller regional States, and to establish an enduring strategic presence there, will determine the Asian balance of power. With the border crisis, China seems to have successfully fixed India’s gaze to the land border, at the expense of that more consequential competition over the Indian Ocean.

Disengagement at PP15, and especially continued “disengagement and de-escalation,” has the potential to ameliorate this strategic trap. A progressively less urgent threat will tempt New Delhi to de-emphasise military readiness on the border. This could be a golden opportunity for Indian planners to work towards long-term military modernisation and political influence across the Indian Ocean region. But a likelier and riskier outcome is that decision makers will prioritise other, more politically salient issues, like gaining quick wins in the campaign for Atmanirbharta in defence industry — which may come at the expense of modernisation.

Paradoxically, then, a cooling crisis on the border may teach India the wrong lesson: that the short-term expedient of greater readiness is enough to see off the Chinese threat. In fact, and especially for the strategic prize of the Indian Ocean region, the challenge posed by China cannot be met without long-term growth in Indian national capacity. That, in turn, requires coherent strategic assessments and the political will to balance readiness with modernisation.

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to invite applications for a suite of fellowships in contemporary Asia studies to begin fall quarter 2023.

The Center offers postdoctoral fellowships that promote multidisciplinary research on contemporary Japan and contemporary Asia broadly defined, inaugural postdoctoral fellowships and visiting scholar positions as part of the newly launched Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, and a fellowship for experts on Southeast Asia. Learn more about each opportunity and its eligibility and specific application requirements:

Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Japan

Hosted by the Japan Program at APARC, the fellowship supports research on contemporary Japan in a broad range of disciplines including political science, economics, sociology, law, policy studies, and international relations. Appointments are for one year beginning in fall quarter 2023. The application deadline is December 1, 2022.
 

On May 6, APARC’s South Asia Initiative hosted its inaugural conference, on the theme of “A New Agenda for Indian Competitiveness." India faces an intensifying strategic competition with China that will affect not only Indian national security but also the nature of the international system in the Indo-Pacific region. The trajectory of that competition will hinge increasingly on emerging technologies – from artificial intelligence to biotechnology. India’s ability to research, develop, and deploy such technologies will shape not only its military power but also its resilience and self-sufficiency, which the Indian government sees as key national goals in a post-pandemic world. To develop these technologies, India’s national security establishment will need new policy settings — including new relationships with private industry — and new ways of cooperating with key partners, especially the United States.

To that end, the South Asia Initiative’s conference brought together three stakeholder groups that rarely convene in the same forum: academic researchers, government policymakers, and technology industry leaders. The conference’s aim was to create a community of interest among these groups, sensitizing them to the importance of India as a key developer and user of emerging technologies, and conversely, to the importance of those technologies for Indian security and U.S.-India relations.

The conference’s discussions were led and framed by Stanford research scholars and faculty, but they were directed towards addressing policy problems. What role do these technologies play, for example, in military power? How can government and industry best cooperate to foster innovation in defense technology? How can start-up firms navigate this rapidly evolving ecosystem? The conference did not aim to solve any of those problems, but it did seek to start the discussion that might ultimately generate new pathways for U.S.-India cooperation on technology — paths that are better suited to the nature of today’s strategic competition and more rooted in the nature of today’s technology industry.

India’s Defence Secretary, Dr. Ajay Kumar, in the conference’s opening keynote address, laid out some of the challenges facing India. He noted that a handful of large and inefficient Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSUs) account for some 90-95% of Indian defense production, but those DPSUs have a negligible presence in the global market. In large part this is because Indian defense production has comprised of licensed manufacturing or simply assembly and integration of foreign-sourced components, traditionally but decreasingly from Russia. To realize the objective of greater national self-reliance in defense, India recognizes the need to cultivate greater private-sector technology development, and harness the economic potential of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies. India could even seek to leapfrog generations of technology, by focusing on developing the digital technologies that lie at the center of much of contemporary defense innovation. This will only be possible if India encourages greater private-sector research and development, reduces onerous government regulations, and fosters a healthier start-up ecosystem.

Dr. Kumar also reflected on the lessons of the ongoing war in Ukraine. He suggested that it underscored to India the importance of national self-reliance; India now sees its dependence on Russia as a challenge. It also revealed the importance of surprise, not only tactically but in the asymmetric or innovative capabilities a country is able to field against its enemy.

In the conference’s other keynote address, the Under-Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, Jose W. Fernandez addressed the role of technology in broader U.S.-India bilateral relationship. Technology is at the heart of addressing climate change, one of the most pressing strategic challenges facing the United States and India. The two countries are prioritizing the development and protection of cyberspace and telecommunications, as engines of the burgeoning digital economy across the world. From climate to cyberspace, cooperation on technology policies and facilitating private sector cooperation is not only central to the bilateral relationship but also a vital alternative to other actors that seek to use technology for their own, less democratic interests. To address these challenges, India and the United States must strike the right regulatory balance, to support transparent governance, and foster innovation; they must widen their cooperation to include other like-minded countries; and they must facilitate a more balanced flow of educational exchange to strengthen people-to-people links.

Mr. Fernandez further noted that the United States and India work together through various mechanisms. The Quad, for example, is a key multiplier for both U.S. and Indian policy, and India has deepened its cooperation with the Quad. Strategic competition with China requires a common positive vision for the region — an agenda spanning, for example, health, infrastructure, and food security.

The South Asia Initiative’s inaugural conference succeeded in bringing together a new constellation of stakeholders concerned with the role of technology in India’s strategic competitiveness. It initiated a vital conversation on how policymakers and industry can promote defense innovation, in the context of the wider US-India relationship. Critically, for APARC, it also spotlighted some complex issues that merit further scholarly investigation. The South Asia Initiative will incorporate those observations as it continues to develop its lines of research effort in the coming months and years.

The Shorenstein APARC Predoctoral Fellowship supports Stanford students working within a broad range of topics related to contemporary Asia. APARC is now accepting applications for the 2022-23 Predoctoral Fellowship. Up to three fellowships are available to Ph.D. candidates who have completed all fieldwork and are nearing the completion of their dissertation. Applications are due by April 15, 2022.

The Center will give priority to candidates who are prepared to finish their degree by the end of the 2022-23 academic year.

This opportunity is open to current Stanford students only.

APARC offers a stipend of $37,230 for the 2022-23 academic year, plus Stanford's Terminal Graduate Registration (TGR) fee for three quarters. We expect fellows to remain in residence at the Center throughout the year and to participate in Center activities.