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From Bandung conference to Indo-Pacific strategy (Part 1 of 2)

As the late minister mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore once said, "If you name an enemy, you will get an enemy."

Phar Kim Beng and Osman Erdoğdu (The Jakarta Post)

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Kuala Lumpur

Mon, March 29, 2021 Published on Mar. 28, 2021 Published on 2021-03-28T22:52:13+07:00

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(left to right) India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Japan's Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Australia's Foreign Minister Marise Payne and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pose for photographs before a Quad Indo-Pacific meeting at the prime minister's office in Tokyo on October 6, 2020 in Tokyo.

W

hen the Bandung Conference was concluded in 1955, president Sukarno of Indonesia, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, president Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, president Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and foreign minister Zhou Enlai of China succeeded in speaking out against the evils of imperialism, colonialism and hegemony.

While only 29 official delegations attended the Bandung Conference, this was the first summit bringing together leaders of Africa and Asia. At the event, PM Nehru and president Nasser struck up a good rapport.

Foreign minister Zhou, subsequently, had a better impression of Southeast Asian countries, and later on the formation of ASEAN. Zhou knew that ASEAN was not necessarily an adversarial organization against everything China stood for, since it was anticolonial in character too.

How then is the Bandung Declaration related to the Indo-Pacific Strategy and the so-called Quad, which held its first virtual summit on March 12, 2021, between the leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the United States?

If one were to go through the Indo-Pacific Strategy of Japan and Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP), one will notice that they have two important features.

First, not unlike the Bandung Declaration, the FOIP and the Quad reflect an aspiration to do what it takes to mutually work with the international community to produce win-win projects in east coast of Africa, Asia and the Pacific

However, as the late minister mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore once said, "If you name an enemy, you will get an enemy." Rather wisely, the March 12 virtual summit made no mention of China at all. Rather, four leaders spoke about providing solutions on climate change, the importance of protecting supply chains and stopping the pandemic together. All generic talking points.