America no longer enjoys military primacy in the Indo-Pacific and its capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain. The combined effect of ongoing wars in the Middle East, budget austerity, underinvestment in advanced military capabilities and the scale of America’s liberal order-building agenda has left the US armed forces ill-prepared for great power competition in the Indo-Pacific. America’s 2018 National Defense Strategy aims to address this crisis of strategic insolvency by tasking the Joint Force to prepare for one great power war, rather than multiple smaller conflicts, and urging the military to prioritise requirements for deterrence vis-à-vis China. Chinese counter-intervention systems have undermined America’s ability to project power into the Indo-Pacific, raising the risk that China could use limited force to achieve a fait accompli victory before America can respond; and challenging US security guarantees in the process. For America, denying this kind of aggression places a premium on advanced military assets, enhanced posture arrangements, new operational concepts and other costly changes. While the Pentagon is trying to focus on these challenges, an outdated superpower mindset in the foreign policy establishment is likely to limit Washington’s ability to scale back other global commitments or make the strategic trade-offs required to succeed in the Indo-Pacific. Over the next decade, the US defence budget is unlikely to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy owing to a combination of political, fiscal and internal pressures. The US defence budget has been subjected to nearly a decade of delayed and unpredictable funding. Repeated failures by Congress to pass regular and sustained budgets has hindered the Pentagon’s ability to effectively allocate resources and plan over the long term. Growing partisanship and ideological polarisation — within and between both major parties in Congress — will make consensus on federal spending priorities hard to achieve. Lawmakers are likely to continue reaching political compromises over America’s national defence at the expense of its strategic objectives. America faces growing deficits and rising levels of public debt; and political action to rectify these challenges has so far been sluggish. If current trends persist, a shrinking portion of the federal budget will be available for defence, constraining budget top lines into the future. Above-inflation growth in key accounts within the defence budget — such as operations and maintenance — will leave the Pentagon with fewer resources to grow the military and acquire new weapons systems. Every year it becomes more expensive to maintain the same sized military. America has an atrophying force that is not sufficiently ready, equipped or postured for great power competition in the Indo-Pacific — a challenge it is working hard to address. Twenty years of near-continuous combat and budget instability has eroded the readiness of key elements in the US Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps. Military accidents have risen, aging equipment is being used beyond its lifespan and training has been cut. Some readiness levels across the Joint Force are improving, but structural challenges remain. Military platforms built in the 1980s are becoming harder and more costly to maintain; while many systems designed for great power conflict were curtailed in the 2000s to make way for the force requirements of Middle Eastern wars — leading to stretched capacity and overuse. The military is beginning to field and experiment with next-generation capabilities. But the deferment or cancellation of new weapons programs over the last few decades has created a backlog of simultaneous modernisation priorities that will likely outstrip budget capacity. Many US and allied operating bases in the Indo-Pacific are exposed to possible Chinese missile attack and lack hardened infrastructure. Forward deployed munitions and supplies are not set to wartime requirements and, concerningly, America’s logistics capability has steeply declined. New operational concepts and novel capabilities are being tested in the Indo-Pacific with an eye towards denying and blunting Chinese aggression. Some services, like the Marine Corps, plan extensive reforms away from counterinsurgency and towards sea control and denial. A strategy of collective defence is fast becoming necessary as a way of offsetting shortfalls in America’s regional military power and holding the line against rising Chinese strength. To advance this approach, Australia should: Pursue capability aggregation and collective deterrence with capable regional allies and partners, including the United States and Japan. Reform US-Australia alliance coordination mechanisms to focus on strengthening regional deterrence objectives. Rebalance Australian defence resources from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. Establish new, and expand existing, high-end military exercises with allies and partners to develop and demonstrate new operational concepts for Indo-Pacific contingencies. Acquire robust land-based strike and denial capabilities. Improve regional posture, infrastructure and networked logistics, including in northern Australia. Increase stockpiles and create sovereign capabilities in the storage and production of precision munitions, fuel and other materiel necessary for sustained high-end conflict. Establish an Indo-Pacific Security Workshop to drive US-allied joint operational concept development. Advance joint experimental research and development projects aimed at improving the cost-capability curve.

The Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment examines key regional security issues relevant to the policy-focused discussions of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s premier defence summit convened by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. It is published each year in association with the Dialogue and the issues analysed within its covers are central to discussions at the event. Among the topics explored are: US Indo-Pacific strategy, alliances and security partnerships; Chinese perspectives on regional security; Taiwan’s security and the possibility of conflict; the continuing challenges posed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes; the nuclear dynamics of Sino-American security relations; air and naval operations in the Asia-Pacific; Sino-American technology competition; Japan’s competition and cooperation with China; India’s role in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad); the evolving regional security engagement of European states and the European Union; China’s role as an upstream state in the Mekong sub-region; and the climate crisis and Asia-Pacific security. As this volume goes to press, the war in Ukraine overshadows the international security landscape and many chapters in this volume touch on the conflict’s ramifications for security in the Asia-Pacific. Authors include leading regional analysts and academics at the forefront of research and analysis: Aidan Foster-Carter, James Crabtree, Peter A. Dutton, Brian Eyler, Michael Green, Sheryn Lee, Jeffrey G. Lewis, Tanvi Madan, Jeffrey Mazo, Ben Schreer, Yun Sun, Nicholas Szechenyi, Brendan Taylor, Ashley Townshend and Paul Triolo.

The 30th round of the Australia-United States Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) will soon take place amid immense global disruption and unprecedented domestic pressures accelerated by the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (also known as coronavirus or COVID-19). Our Indo-Pacific neighbourhood should be at the top of the agenda. It is hard to imagine a more urgent time for the Australia-United States alliance to provide strong and collaborative regional leadership — and to bolster the resilience of the Indo-Pacific across all of its dimensions: from health security and economic development to the balance of military power and strategic resilience. It is equally hard to imagine a more difficult environment for our alliance to concentrate its energies on regional policy. With the United States enduring a pandemic-fuelled health crisis, nationwide social unrest, escalating national debt and a general election in November, and with Australia still tentatively emerging from the first wave of the pandemic, both countries have pressing and politically-charged distractions at home. Nonetheless, our shared national interests in fostering a healthy, stable and resilient Indo-Pacific region cannot be postponed and must be wholeheartedly embraced at AUSMIN 2020. Three principles should guide this year’s deliberations. First, helping our Indo-Pacific neighbours to sustainably recover from the pandemic is the most urgent priority and is in all of our interests. With more than 600,000 cases of COVID-19 throughout the region — coupled with a rapidly deteriorating health, economic and developmental outlook that will see regional growth fall to near zero per cent while 24 million people remain in poverty — the scale of the crisis in our region vastly outstrips our current capacity to respond. This places a premium on the need to invest more alliance resources into human security challenges, both at present and preventatively, and to pursue innovative, high-quality solutions to developmental challenges, including through better industry partnerships. As our economic and security interests hinge on the health of stable, resilient and sovereign regional nations, supporting their post-pandemic recovery will assist our own. Second, strengthening the alliance’s contribution to deterring aggression and coercive statecraft in the Indo-Pacific must proceed in spite of the pandemic. In recent years, the strategic landscape has been rapidly deteriorating due to the United States’ declining capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power and China’s increasingly assertive use of coercive statecraft backed by its growing conventional military power. The pandemic is only exacerbating these trends. New economic burdens are limiting the capacity of regional nations to counterbalance Chinese power: putting downward pressure on defence budgets, placing the imperatives of domestic recovery ahead of geopolitical concerns and leaving some more vulnerable to Beijing’s strategic largesse than before. In the United States, the tumultuous health, economic and socio-political consequences of the pandemic are sharpening preferences for self-strengthening at home and will quicken the decline of resources for defence. Beijing, by contrast, is taking advantage of regional distractions to advance its expansive geopolitical agenda from Hong Kong and the Sino-Indian border to Northeast Asia, the South China Sea and the Pacific. This situation calls for the alliance to invest more heavily in supporting its regional partners through collective defence initiatives and to urgently prioritise the Indo-Pacific relative to outdated security concerns in the Middle East. Finally, signalling Australian and American policy preferences for how our respective Indo-Pacific strategies should evolve over the coming years is critical for domestic and regional audiences. This will entail a focus on differences as well as shared interests within the alliance. Although the United States and Australia have many common objectives in strengthening a stable, prosperous and rules-governed regional order, they have quietly diverged in recent years on multilateralism, global institutions, international trade, regional diplomacy and other issues. Differences over China policy are perhaps the most sensitive. Whereas Washington has adopted an increasingly strident public tone in casting China as an ideological threat, Canberra seeks a less politicised approach and has publicly supported engagement alongside a firming of China policy settings. These distinctions do not undermine our alliance solidarity. Indeed, as Australia’s internationalist outlook is more in keeping with regional preferences in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Canberra should lean into it during and after AUSMIN 2020 — using current points of difference with Washington as markers for how Australia would like to work with the United States in the future, and how it will continue to work with the region until then. With this forward-looking agenda in mind, the United States Studies Centre has assembled a list of ten policy recommendations for the upcoming AUSMIN meeting. Drawing on the expertise of our researchers, including from their published and ongoing research projects, these recommendations combine analytical judgements with new policy thinking in an effort to stimulate bilateral discussion around a mix of achievable and moon-shot initiatives. This collection does not purport to be a comprehensive agenda but aims to provide a useful contribution to the policy planning process around bolstering the resilience of our Indo-Pacific region at this critical juncture.

The book offers a vivid analysis of the new geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific in terms of big power rivalry between the US-China and country-wise perspectives situating largely within the late 2000s and culminates with the developments of the COVID-19 period. The great power shift, marked by the rise of China and the relative decline of the US, poses a serious challenge to the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region and the world order in general. Ironically, the play of realism in the region is stymied by broad partnerships of key countries that utilise the liberal approaches of cooperation with both rivals – the US and China. The book captures the mosaic of stakeholders – rivals the US and China along with Russia; other QUAD members Australia, India, and Japan; key ASEAN members, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam; vulnerable states in East Asia, viz. Taiwan and South Korea; and groupings including the ASEAN and QUAD – that constitute the new world politics of the Indo-Pacific. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Indo-Pacific studies, global politics, and international relations.

Across the political spectrum, there is wide agreement that Asia should be at the center of US foreign policy. But this worldview, the "Pivot to Asia" announced by the Obama Administration in 2011, is a dramatic departure from the entire history of American grand strategy. Ten years on, we now have some perspective to evaluate it in depth. In The Lost Decade, Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine take this long view. They conclude that there are few successes to speak of, and that we lack a coherent approach to the Indo-Pacific region. They examine the Pivot through various lenses: situating it historically in the context of America's global foreign policy, revealing the inside story of how it came about, assessing the effort thus far, identifying the ramifications in other regions (namely Europe and the Middle East), and proposing a path forward.

Key judgements 1. The Biden administration’s approach to the Indo-Pacific has so far lacked focus and urgency. Despite its deep regional expertise and the region’s high expectations, it has failed to articulate a comprehensive regional strategy or treat the Indo-Pacific as its decisive priority. 2. The Biden administration’s focus on bringing normalcy back to US regional policy has restored the status quo, but not advanced its standing in the Indo-Pacific. 3. The Biden administration’s approach to competition with China has focused on the domestic and global arenas, rather than on competing for influence within the Indo-Pacific. 4. The Biden administration’s focus on long-term systems competition with China overlooks the urgency of near-term competition in the Indo-Pacific. 5. The Biden administration has placed strategic competition with China at the top of its foreign and security policy agenda. It has sought to balance US-China rivalry with opportunities for cooperation and efforts to stabilise the regional order. 6. The Biden administration views its Indo-Pacific allies as regional and international “force multipliers.” It has largely trained these alliances on global order issues, with few new initiatives at the regional level and insufficient focus on empowering allies to meet their own security needs. 7. The Biden administration sees the United States as being in a “systems competition” between democracy and autocracy. By making ideological competition with China an organising principle for US foreign policy, Washington risks undermining its attractiveness as a partner for politically diverse Indo-Pacific countries. 8. The Biden administration cannot compete against China effectively in the Indo-Pacific without prioritising engagement with Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. It has recognised the need to do more in Southeast Asia, but its success may be limited by its approach to competition with China and lack of an economic strategy. 9. The Biden administration, like its predecessors, lacks an economic strategy for the Indo-Pacific region. This major weakness in regional policy is driven by US protectionist trade preferences at home. Proposed initiatives on digital trade and infrastructure cannot compensate for the absence of a comprehensive trade-based economic approach. 10. The Biden administration views China as a predominantly long-term military challenge. Its efforts to minimise spending on US forward posture in the region suggest it may be less committed to a strategy of deterrence by denial to prevent Chinese aggression. Recommendations for the Biden administration To compete for influence in the Indo-Pacific, the Biden administration should: 1. Clearly identify the Indo-Pacific region as its foreign and defence policy priority and marshal resources accordingly. 2. Articulate clear goals for its relationship with China and its strategic position in the Indo-Pacific region. 3. Avoid emphasising ideological competition with China and instead focus on maximising its influence by responding to regional needs. 4. Signal its commitment to a strategy of deterrence by denial to prevent Chinese aggression and bolster its investments in Western Pacific military posture to reinforce its credibility. 5. Empower its allies to assume greater responsibility for their own defence requirements by reducing legislative and political obstacles to allied self-strengthening. 6. Pay special attention to Southeast Asia as a region of strategic importance, given its geography, size and the fluidity of its alignment dynamics. 7. Clearly signal that it is committed to mutually beneficial economic engagement with the Indo-Pacific and adopt trade and investment strategies that reinforce its role as an indispensable resident economic power.

Reigning the Future is an informative overview of US-China relations in regards to the ever-evolving tech world. With the relationship between these two superpowers at the forefront of international news, author Dennis Wang looks to inform readers through expert interviews and in-depth analyses about the mounting tensions between the two superpowers. Wang discusses the technological rivalry between the United States and China, analyzing great-power political competition and its connections with business and innovation. He believes the modern bilateral relationship between the two countries is one of the most significant challenges of the century and uses his research to prove that point and offers insight into navigating these unique times. Through his personal experiences with companies like Huawei Technologies and China Central Television, as well as his studies at Duke University, Wang provides unique perspectives and in-depth analyses on this topic. Reigning the Future will appeal to everyone from tech students to business leaders and policymakers. Visit reigningthefuture.com (http://reigningthefuture.com/) for more info!