Maritime Governance and South Asia: Trade, Security and Sustainable Development in the Indian Ocean by Jivanta Schottli

Author:Jivanta Schottli [Schottli, Jivanta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Military Science
ISBN: 9789813238244
Google: QVt3tgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39751686
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Published: 2018-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Indian Ocean in US Imagination, Worldview and Grand Strategy

The lack of a deep historical interest for the US in the Indian Ocean and the IOR more generally, has meant that this arena never really caught the American imagination. In contrast, Commodore Mathew Perry had pried open Japanese trade in the mid-19th century and since then, the Pacific Ocean has long animated American thinking on trade and warfare, from US grand strategy to popular culture. There seems to be no parallel in the case of the IOR. Instead, this ocean has remained a “backwaters” in US interests and imagination.

When the Indian Ocean finally made an entrance into US strategic thinking in the 1960s, it was as a hand over from a declining Great Britain. Given the centrality of the Indian Ocean in their empire, the British had extensive understanding of the region. However, the US did not share the historic roots with the region. Consequently, the US inherited the “hardware” from Britain, but not the necessary “software.” In the post-World War II era, US interests peaked briefly when Soviet naval forces were deployed in the Indian Ocean and were seen as possible prelude to greater activity in the energy rich Persian Gulf area. Interests climbed again after the Iranian revolution in 1979, spurring the US to build up its naval capability with rapid deployment forces.2 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Diego Garcia naval base served as a staging area in the Indian Ocean for broader US Cold War security strategies. The base was leased from Britain in 1967 (recently renewed until 2036). With the 1970s energy crisis and increasing reliance of the US and its allies on the region, economic and strategic interests increasingly converged. By the mid-1970s, the US drew up plans to use Diego Garcia as a naval base for permanent presence allowing rapid deployment to the Middle East. Still, the American naval gaze was firmly westward with little attention to the Bay of Bengal or the Malacca Straits, which in contrast had occupied clear strategic prominence in British imperial strategy.

However, any US focus on the Indian Ocean during this period was hardly welcomed by the region’s biggest Indian Ocean power, India. India saw any extra-regional power’s naval presence especially that of the US, as an injection of cold war rivalry into the neighbourhood, as well as a threat to its own regional influence. The deployment of the US naval task force, led by aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal during the height of the Bangladesh war in 1971 in a forceful show of support for Pakistan and a warning to India, was a low point of US–India engagement in the Indian Ocean in the long Cold War era. In the 1980s, India strongly protested the awarding of a contract for renovation of the strategic Trincomalee harbor in Sri Lanka to a US-linked Singapore company.3 There was also a US–India showdown over the building of a Voice of America transmission facility in Sri Lanka, with India worried about the US monitoring its naval and land communications.

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