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Sri Lanka Navy Journal 60

POWER RIVALRY IN THE INDO PACIFIC REGION

Lieutenant Commander (S) Vidura Manjula, LLMC, MBA (LM), SMAC (Pakistan),
BCom (DS)
Manager - NSC (S) & AVCO (S) - SLNS Nipuna

“The Indo-Pacific Ocean and its bordering states have been of growing
significance in world geopolitics and global geostrategy. It is a region of great
diversity and contrasts in terms of politics, population, economy and environment,
where foreign powers and local states' interests deeply intermingle. The SLOCS
which connects the Atlantic and the increasing appetite for energy resource
for the booming Asian economy, security in the Indian and pacific Oceans are a
matter of concern and require a collective security architecture which covers
entire Indo–Pacific region with the involvement of all stake holder states.”

Introduction

st
ithin the shifting of global economic and geopolitical landscape of the 21
Wcentury, the Indo-Pacific comprising an amalgamation of the Asia Pacific
and the Indo-Pacific Region has been identified as a newly expanded theater of
power competition. Developments within the Indo-Pacific Region and its sourly
surrounding waters have subsequently held the attention of policy and strategic
analysis. The Indo-Pacific Region is central to the issue of energy security. Its
Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) are critically located as the transit energy
supplies from the Gulf States to the economic powerhouses in South and East
Asia with China projected to become the world’s largest oil importing country
and India to be the largest importer of Coal by 2020. A reorientation of energy
trade from the Atlantic basin to the Indo-Pacific is imminent with implication for
a cooperative effort to ensure energy security.

Since the end of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Indo-Pacific Ocean and
its bordering states have been of growing significance in world geopolitics
and global geostrategy. It is a region of great diversity and contrasts in terms
of politics, population, economy and environment, as well as being a complex
geopolitical framework, where foreign powers and local states' interests deeply
intermingle. Since the end of the Cold War, the region has been in a period of
great instability and regional rearrangement that is still ongoing today. Taking
into account the significance of its strategic energy resources, the importance of
its strategic shipping lanes, the ‘Rise of China and India’ as dominant economic
powerhouses and regional and global military powers, the turbulences of the
Islamic world, East and South China Sea territorial claims and disputes, the
deep and broader involvement of the United States (and its allies) in the region,
as well as China's increasingly presence with ambitious "One Belt One Road"
(OBOR) project in the Indo-Pacific Ocean Region with aggressive Chinese funded