Making Good on a Free and Open Indo-Pacific

Beginning in May 2017, the Trump administration in the United States considerably increased the U.S. Navy’s operational tempo in the South China Sea. In the ensuing months, not only did the U.S. Navy's presence in the disputed waterway expand, but so did the frequency of the once closely scrutinized freedom of navigation operations. While these operations took place at a frequency of roughly once per quarter during the final year of the Obama administration, the Trump administration has upped the rate to once roughly every two months.

Amid all this, the administration also recognized China as a revisionist state and a strategic adversary in the 2017 National Security Strategy document. To offer its own branded successor to the Obama administration's “pivot” or “rebalance” strategy, the administration has embraced the concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” This idea inherits quite a bit from an earlier U.S. strategic concept, one that former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter defined at the 2016 Shangri-La Dialogue when he spoke of a "principled security network" in Asia.

As noted earlier in this magazine, many of the participants in this "security network" are somewhat obvious. With the reconvening of the 2007 concept of the quadrilateral comprising Asia's like-minded democratic powers – the United States, Japan, India, and Australia – we have the beginnings of what could be the operationalization of a concert across the region, one brought together around a common set of principles about what Asia's regional order should look like through the 21st century.

That vision is mostly simple and, for the United States and Japan at least, part of the post-World War II status quo. These states seek the preservation of a rules-based order and liberal norms across the region. In plain English, that means that large countries shouldn't be able to bully small countries and violate international norms as they please. Along these lines, these states also profess support for freedom of navigation, freedom of overflight, secure sea lanes, nonproliferation, and stepped up counterterrorism.

But beyond the four big states of the so-called Quad, smaller regional states play an important role in U.S. strategy as well. Vietnam is perhaps the best model of a smaller partner state for the United States in the Indo-Pacific. With efforts beginning in the Obama administration, the United States lifted the arms embargo imposed on Vietnam at the end of the war between those two countries. The move had practical significance for Hanoi and, in Washington, it symbolized Vietnam's emergence as an important partner state in Asia.

The Trump administration continued this momentum. When Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc visited Washington last year, he signed on to a joint statement with Trump that “noted with concern the destabilizing impacts that unlawful restrictions to the freedom of the seas have on peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region.” U.S. Pacific Command chief Admiral Harry Harris, in a recent testimony, described Vietnam as the United States’ “boldest regional partner in standing up to China’s provocative behavior in the South China Sea.”

Ever since a standoff with China in the summer of 2014, when a Chinese state-owned firm moved an oil rig into disputed waters claimed by Vietnam, Hanoi has positioned itself as one of the more forward-leaning claimant states in the South China Sea. It claims the Paracel Islands, which are occupied by China, and large swathes of the Spratly Islands, which are host to China's seven artificial island facilities. (The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan also have claims and holdings in the Spratlys.)

With Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's decision to take his country on a strategic U-turn toward China after winning a highly favorable award from a Hague-based tribunal concerning its disputed maritime claims with China in the South China Sea, Vietnam was left as the sole Southeast Asian state with a high-stakes approach to the disputed waters. Keenly aware of its inability to take on China alone, Hanoi has pursued rapprochement with the United States and gradually modernized its armed forces.

But all of Vietnam's efforts appear to have been for naught. In March 2018, Vietnam – like the Philippines at Scarborough Shoal in 2012 – was successfully coerced by China under the threat of force. According to reliable reporting by the BBC, Vietnamese state-run petroleum firm PetroVietnam instructed Spanish oil giant Repsol to stand down from a planned project to exploit hydrocarbon resources in a portion of the South China Sea disputed by China and Vietnam. The lost revenue will cost Repsol as much as $200 million in sunk costs, but the silence of the United States – and the rest of the Quad – may cost the credibility of the “free and open Indo-Pacific” project a lot more.

Vietnam's decision to instruct Repsol to cease its activities came after months of behind-the-scenes coercive efforts by China, some of which has been previously described by The Diplomat’s Carl Thayer. In the summer of 2017, Repsol executives said that China had threatened a possible military conflict over the proposed project, prompting Vietnam to suspend the project. The March decision was a result of similar coercive action.

The Trump administration has, as of this writing, ignored this episode and Hanoi has mostly kept quiet, likely to avoid stirring up a hornet's nest in its fragile and complex bilateral ties with Beijing. But in the context of building a “free and open Indo-Pacific” and sustaining the rules-based order in East Asia, allowing China to coerce weaker states over resources in disputed waters sets a poor precedent. In fact, it serves to demonstrate that the administration's rhetoric elsewhere may ring hollow.

The symbolism is particularly acute when we note that the U.S. Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson made a historic visit to Vietnam's Da Nang port in March, as the Repsol story broke. The carrier's visit was meant to underline the United States' growing commitment to Vietnam's security, but the silence over the Repsol episode has instead revealed how hollow these words and even the stepped up tempo of freedom of navigation operations can be in the end.

The administration needs a South China Sea strategy that can help it make good on its project to build a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” but it hasn't found it yet. When it does, however, the Trump administration will have to make sure that China – despite its impressive and growing military footprint in the South China Sea – plays by the rules.