Lth Indo-Pacific term [qui qualifie la région allant des côtes de l’Afrique de l’Est au Pacifique oriental] appeared in the context of the emergence of China, and the security dimension of certain approaches is obvious, whether it is the Quad (the alliance of the United States with Australia, Japan and India) or Aukus (bringing together the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom). As an Indo-Pacific power, France has sovereign interests in the region, namely to defend the more than 1.6 million of our fellow citizens who live in the seven overseas departments, regions and collectivities. distributed between the Indian and Pacific oceans.
But the Indo-Pacific is not limited to these issues alone. Developed since 2018, the French strategy is precisely structured into four “pillars” which reflect the diversity of the challenges: security and defence; economy and connectivity; multilateralism and rule of law; climate change and biodiversity. France intends to contribute to providing solutions to the challenges facing the countries in the area. Presented in September 2021, the European approach joins that of France.
The Indo-Pacific is indeed, by its size, the essential scale to face the global challenges, in particular climatic and environmental. Nearly half of global greenhouse gas emissions are in this region, mainly in China, and these emissions continue to increase. Pacific island states have seen climate change as the main threat to their security since 2018, and coastal erosion has a major impact on population displacements in Vietnam or Bangladesh. The region is the one in which pollution has the greatest impact on biodiversity according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), even though there are unique areas such as the Coral Triangle, in Southeast Asia. East, which includes 76% of all known coral species.
Sino-American rivalry
These challenges are essentially, from the point of view of international cooperation, the preservation of global public goods, even if they are, for each of the countries concerned, first and foremost national issues of development but also of security, sometimes even survival. In this sense, the Indo-Pacific is “testing” traditional international cooperation practices. Moreover, there can be no development aid disconnected from geostrategic realities. The Sino-American rivalry leads many countries to fear an instrumentalization of the aid of these two powers, and to appreciate all the more that of third countries. And some emerging countries, such as India or Indonesia, are themselves aid providers and therefore potential partners.
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