Future of Maritime Activity in the Indian Ocean

22 Maio 2018, 10:00 • Shiv Kumar Singh

The Indian Ocean Region is growing in strategic importance. It is facing the risks of growing strategic competition, particularly between China and India. However, the region tends to be neglected by Australia despite extensive interests in the region and the possibility of threats to Australia's security emerging from the region, including the risks of intrastate conflict, terrorism, smuggling in all its forms, and illegal fishing. Climate change, sea-level rise and natural disasters are other non-traditional security threats evident in the region. The northwest of Australia is particularly exposed to these challenges to maritime security and requires more attention in Australia's security planning. More broadly, there is a range of other initiatives that Australia might take to engage more constructively in the region and help to enhance regional maritime security and oceans management.
Geopolitical differences are becoming very evident in the IOR, particularly between the rising powers of India and China. Both India and China feel that they are being strategically contained by the other. India aspires to dominate the region by enlarging its security perimeter. In the expansive views of some Indian strategic thinkers, this extends ‘from the Strait of Malacca to the Strait of Hormuz and from the coast of Africa to the western shores of Australia’. Indian strategists generally have opposed the presence of great powers in the Indian Ocean, which they privately consider ‘India's lake’.
Meanwhile, China is strongly cultivating its regional economic and strategic links in the IOR, including the establishment of a support network for possible naval operations. In Beijing's view, China's strategic situation would be seriously impaired should India achieve the goal of enlarging its security perimeter and achieving a position of dominance in the IOR. At present, the United States dominates the IOR strategically and militarily. Its principal concerns are maintaining the security of its oil supplies from the Middle East and countering terrorism and Muslim extremism. Potentially, the United States has the leverage to act as a broker between India and China should their bilateral relationship deteriorate. Yet the future will almost certainly see a decline in American influence in the region as the United States struggles to maintain its defense presence in the face of a poorly performing economy, as well as its legitimacy among the peoples of the region, many of whom are Muslim. House the plain truth is ‘the gradual loss of the Indian and western Pacific oceans as veritable American military lakes’.
These trends mean that the strategic environment Australia faces in the IOR is increasingly uncertain. Australia will have an opportunity to do something about this through being co-chair with Malaysia of the maritime security experts working group established by the ASEAN Plus Eight Defense Ministers’ meeting (ADMM + 8). This forum might be steered towards consideration of the situation in the Indian Ocean with possible dialogue between the United States, China and India in a politically neutral forum.The need for Australia's defence and foreign policies to give greater attention to the Indian Ocean is accentuated by the developing strategic uncertainties of that ocean, growing trade in with the IOR, the enormous economic and strategic significance of Australia's mining, oil and gas developments along the northwest coast, and the expansion of the vital national infrastructure in that area.It is likely that surveillance and enforcement in the Indian Ocean will require much greater effort from Australia in the future. The likelihood of increased IUU fishing requiring policing on the high seas, more illegal fishing incursions into Australian waters, larger fishing boats, and the possibility of economic refugees, even coming perhaps directly from Africa helped along by favourable weather, are all considerations. Oil and gas rigs will be located further out to sea on the extended continental shelf in the Indian Ocean. Increased shipping traffic and other maritime activity in the IOR may mean a higher number of search and rescue incidents in Australia's large search and rescue region in the Indian Ocean.