Engagement of European Countries in the Implementation of the US Indo-Pacific Strategy (Part 1)

Abstract

Globalization has contributed to the development of economic relations between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. However, after 2011 they were influenced by the American “pivot to Asia” and the shift of US attention from countering international terrorism to rivalry with the “revisionist” powers — Russia and China. In 2019, with the adoption of the US Indo-Pacific Strategy, China became their main regional rival. The rivalry with him provided for the Americans to unite their Asian allies in a network of managed formal alliances, as well as to connect Great Britain and France to solving strategic tasks. On February 11, 2022, a new Indo-Pacific strategy of the United States appeared. This document emphasized the strategic value and increasing role of Great Britain, France, the EU and NATO in Indo-Pacific and set the task of building bridges between the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic regions. The main role in its solution was assigned to AUKUS, a trilateral military alliance of the United States, Great Britain and Australia, created on September 15, 2021. At about the same time, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the European Union approved their own strategies in Indo-Pacific. They had in common an unwillingness to see China as the main opponent in the context of the US-Chinese rivalry. At the same time, the documents did not indicate that Europe was equidistant from global rivals. On the one hand, being part of the collective West, the EU demonstrated its support to America, on the other, being the most important economic partner of the Celestial Empire, it refused to see it as an existential threat to its security. Against this background, a similar British document published in March 2021 stood out, characterized by a hostile attitude towards China. However, significant differences in the strategies of European countries were offset by their membership in NATO. At the Alliance summit in Madrid in June 2022 the Europeans, together with other allies, proclaimed a strategic course for “systemic rivalry” with the PRC in the context of the interconnection of the security of the Euro-Atlantic and the development of the situation in the Indo-Pacific. With the signing of the NATO-EU joint declaration in Brussels on January 10, 2023, there was a further rapprochement of the two Western structures on an anti-Chinese basis, as well as the complete subordination of Europe to the interests of American global policy.