New Delhi:With a UK parliamentary committee recommending that Japan and South Korea should be allowed to join the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) trilateral security pact that seeks to ensure peace and security in the Indo-Pacific in the face of Chinese hegemony in the region, questions arise as to how many groupings can work in the same space with the same aim.
According to a report in London’s The Guardian, the influential UK parliament’s foreign affairs select committee has recommended that Japan and South Korea may be allowed to join the AUKUS security partnership to develop critical technology. Under the AUKUS pact, the US and the UK will assist Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines. The pact also includes cooperation on advanced cyber mechanisms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomy, quantum technologies, undersea capabilities, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic, electronic warfare, innovation and information sharing.
This UK parliamentary committee’s recommendation comes after the US, South Korea and Japan held their first-ever standalone trilateral summit at Camp David in the US earlier this month. According to a statement issued by the US Defense Department, US President Joe Biden praised the political courage of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio for their efforts to work together. He said that South Korea and Japan are capable and indispensable allies and that America's commitment to both countries is ironclad.
Without naming China, the three nations agreed to elevate defence collaboration. This includes launching annual multi-domain military exercises to bring trilateral defence cooperation to “unprecedented levels”, Biden said. In December last year, South Korea unveiled a new Indo-Pacific strategy that observers say aligns with the strategies of India, the US, Japan and Australia, who are part of Quad that is working for a free and open Indo-Pacific in the face of China’s hegemony in the region.
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In its new strategy, South Korea pledged to bolster the regional rules-based order to protect freedom, democracy, and human rights. The document expands on President Yoon’s previous promises to accept greater responsibility for defending democratic principles and is consistent with the national security strategies of the US and its allies. However, it held back from unambiguously defining the Chinese threat in the region to the same extent that Washington, New Delhi, Tokyo, and Canberra have.
“South Korea definitely worries about what China is doing in the Indo-Pacific,” an expert on the Indo-Pacific had told ETV Bharat ahead of the trilateral summit. “But it stays in the background as it does not want to be seen as countering China. South Korea wants its role to be seen in the economic areas rather than to be seen as being in the camp of the US.”
The US, Japan and Australia are already part of the Quad that also includes India that is working for a free and open Indo-Pacific in the face of Beijing’s attempts to increase its influence in the region. The Indo-Pacific is a region that extends from the east coast of Japan to the east coast of Africa. China, in fact, released earlier this week what it called its new “standard map” that showed India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Akshai Chin, along with the disputed regions of South China Sea and Taiwan, as part of its territories. This drew strong official condemnation from India, the Philippines and Malaysia.
But the fact of the matter is why the UK needs Japan and South Korea in the AUKUS when in fact Tokyo is already an active member of the Quad that also includes India. Will there not be any conflict of interest? “One fails to understand why a British parliamentary committee is proposing this,” Chintamani Mahapatra, founder and honorary chairman of the Bhubaneswar-based Kalinga Institute of Indo-Pacific Studies, told ETV Bharat. “The initial interest should have come from Japan and South Korea.”
So, are there too many players jostling for space in the Indo-Pacific? “There is little doubt that there are several stakeholders and players in the Indo-Pacific,” Mahapatra said. “Some would like to work towards preventing Chinese hegemony, some would not like to see either a G2 (India-US) regional order or US-China confrontation, while some like North Korea would remain in the Chinese camp.”
He explained that In the event of Japan and South Korea joining AUKUS, China will cry foul and Moscow would back Beijing. Then there is again the Five Eyes group that includes the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand that is engaged in intelligence gathering in the Indo-Pacific region. These countries are parties to the multilateral AUKUS Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence. Informally, Five Eyes can also refer to the group of intelligence agencies of these countries.
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Come to think of it. The Five Eyes, the Quad and the AUKUS have many common member states. India is member of only the Quad. Will not be there any conflict of interest here?
“Five Eyes group is the by-product of the Cold War and continues to exist,” Mahapatra explained. “The Quad was in hibernation for 10 years and was revived in 2017. It is in formative years of its evolution. The AUKUS is more recent and its primary focus is collaboration in the manufacture of nuclear submarines. Interestingly, most of the members of the above groupings except India have an alliance relationship with the US. The underlying goal is the protection of respective security interests in the region, but the unspoken and unwritten goal is not to allow any country to establish hegemony in the region. Now the challenger is clearly China.”
But, can the AUKUS trilateral security pact, the Quad group, and the Five Eyes intelligence gathering group effectively cooperate and coordinate their efforts to ensure peace, stability, and a free and open Indo-Pacific, or do their overlapping interests risk creating tensions? “There may be informal sharing of information among these groups. But their respective goals are different and there is least likelihood of any coordinated efforts,” Mahapatra made it clear.
