Ever since US President Donald Trump spoke of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vietnam in 2017, the question has been: what is this, a vision, an initiative or a strategy? With the release of Pentagon’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” on June 1, the dust has finally settled. In the introduction to the paper, then acting defence secretary Patrick M. Shanahan frames “geopolitical rivalry between free and repressive world order visions” as the US’ main security concern and singles out China as a country which “seeks to reorder the region to its advantage”.
