Minilateral security's relevance to US strategy in the Indo-Pacific: challenges and prospects

ABSTRACT

The Indo-Pacific region's security landscape is unfolding in highly uncertain and potentially explosive ways. The postwar American-led network of bilateral alliances – underpinned by concrete guarantees of extended deterrence and containment – is now yielding to a more diverse set of alignments and coalitions to manage an increasingly complex array of regional security issues. Multilateralism and minilateralism have emerged as two increasingly prominent forms of such cooperation. Minilateralism's informality and flexibility appeals to those who are sceptical about multilateralism's traditional focus on norm adherence and community-building even as great power competition in the Indo-Pacific is sharply intensifying. However, minilateralism's track record in the region is underdeveloped. The potential for this policy approach to be applied by the United States and its regional security partners as an enduring and credible means of diplomatic and security collaboration in the region will remain unfulfilled as long as the Trump administration's own geopolitical orientation remains uncertain.

KEYWORDS:

• Asia power web
• minilateral solution
• trilateralism
• ‘bridge-building’
• ‘hub-and-spokes’ alliance politics
• Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG)
• Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD)
• Quadrilateral Initiative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Background on China's major power relations initiative is provided by Chen (2015) and Kiracofe (2017). For a thorough explanation of the grand bargain scenario, see Glaser (2015).

2. Patrick (2015, p. 116) lists other qualities, including ‘trans-governmental rather than just intergovernmental… multi-level and multi-stakeholder rather than state-centric’. For purposes of this analysis, however, minilateralism is applied only as it operates in a state-centric context.

3. This point is raised in an unpublished and undated draft paper written by Jeremy Malcolm which cannot be formally cited here.

4. That said, such cooperation may be mostly functional and conditional rather than enduring and unqualified. Japanese–South Korean intelligence and logistical collaboration intended to deter a North Korean threat, for example, will not necessarily ‘spill over’ to form a passionate and unreserved bond unfettered by long-standing historical tensions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Global Research Network program through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea's National Research Foundation of Korea [grant number NRF-2016S1A2A2911284]. This work was also supported by the ‘Contested Multilateralism 2.0 and Asia Pacific Security’ project, Korea Foundation [reference number 1029000-51].

Notes on contributors

William T. Tow

William T. Tow is professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.