Shaping A Trilateral As Rome Looks To The Indo-Pacific

Context: In the pushback against China, strategic cooperation between India, Italy and Japan can ensure a free Indo-Pacific.

Forces shaping Indo-Pacific strategic architecture 

     

• India’s Increased engagement with key western nations: Shaping purpose-oriented partnerships such as Quad.
• Recently, Italy seeking to join India and Japan trilateral partnership in Indo-Pacific.
• Common interests and challenges in the region: Comprising maritime security, coordinated pandemic response and consolidating and further developing strong reciprocal trade relationships.
• Geopolitical problems and the need for new engagements partly arises from China’s assertive initiatives and lack of multilateral organisations capable of solving problems effectively.
• Convergence of vision and responsibility: Keeping Indo-Pacific free and open and working for the welfare of its inhabitants falls on like-minded countries within and beyond the region.

Prospects of India-Italy-Japan trilateral initiative

• Opportunity to leverage strong foundation: Relying on historically strong India-Italy bilateral relations and strong Italy-Japan relations, and indeed India-Japan remains the pillar of free and open Indo-Pacific.
• Fundamental convergence: 3 countries share the same values and same rules-based world view.
• Expanding ambits of bilateral cooperation: By bringing in economic, security and political dimensions.
• India taking over the G20 presidency in 2023 could further the momentum for cooperation.
• An impetus towards the reorganisation of global supply chains: Which at present is overly China-centric.
• Security level cooperation: Well-defined India-Japan Indo-Pacific partnership can easily be complemented by Italy, already present in the western Indian Ocean where it is engaged in anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia.

Conclusion: There’s a need to define a common economic and strategic agenda for expanding ambits of engagements in the Indo-Pacific.