End of the Asia-Pacific: Geoeconomics, belt and road and the Indo-Pacific

Abstract

Construction of the United States-led Indo-Pacific (IPAC) and the China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an exercise in power to reshape the geopolitics of Asia-Pacific. Under the IPAC metageography, China is potentially excluded while the US's security border is extended to the Indian Ocean. BRI, on the other hand, has been advanced as an alternative model of economic globalization and diplomacy that is characterized by open and fluid borders. In this paper, we draw on a geoeconomic lens using oil/gas and the solar energy trade to shed light on Asia-Pacific's changing metageography. Power is constituted through relational coupling and decoupling as China and the US are locked in geoeconomic competition that expands but also contracts imaginaries of the region. The findings suggest that neither China nor the US holds a relational advantage in all energy sectors; each country however leads in sub-sectors. China, BRI and Asian IPAC are all significant importers of US oil and gas while China's solar trade has accelerated regional integration that includes the US. The paper concludes that China's exclusion from IPAC is not consistent with the geoeconomic realities of energy trade. BRI on the other hand has staked its success as an anti-colonial space.