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US President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

On Dec. 27, 2012, the day after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched his second cabinet, he published an article in Project Syndicate, a commentary website, in which he wrote, “Peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Pacific Ocean are inseparable from peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean.” As the basis for this argument, Abe imagined “a strategy whereby Australia, India, Japan, and the US state of Hawaii form a diamond to safeguard the maritime commons stretching from the Indian Ocean region to the western Pacific.” This is the origin of the phrase “security diamond.”

As US President Donald Trump begins a 12-day trip to Asia begins on Nov. 3, this security diamond is rapidly emerging as the Trump administration’s strategy for containing China. In the meantime, the Japanese government has studiously avoided using the phrase “security diamond” because of its harsh connotations, but the Indo-Pacific Strategy advanced by the Trump administration is uncannily similar to Abe’s security diamond strategy.

The speech that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 18, sums up the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, or in other words, the security diamond. “The US and India – with our shared goals of peace, security, freedom of navigation, and a free and open architecture – must serve as the eastern and western beacons of the Indo-Pacific,” Tillerson said during the speech.

On Oct. 27, Alice Wells, the US State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, announced that the US is considering the idea of holding four-country working-level talks before long. There are repeated reports that there is movement toward security talks between the four countries in Japan, Australia and India as well. Whenever the US government discusses Trump’s trip to Asia, the “free and open Indo-Pacific” never fails to get a mention.

The name “security diamond” was coined at the end of 2012, but the idea’s origin can be traced back to a proposal for four-country security talks that Abe made during an address to the Parliament of India in Aug. 2007. The idea was enthusiastically endorsed by then US Vice President Dick Cheney.

The four-country security talks were supposed to counterbalance China’s “string of pearls” strategy – its attempt to secure strategic bases for expanding into the Indian Ocean by building major port facilities in countries along the ocean, such as Pakistan and Myanmar. But these talks came to nothing when new administrations took the helm in Australia and India. After China announced its “One Belt, One Road” strategy in 2015, Abe resumed work on his security diamond strategy, which sheds some light on the man’s persistence.

It’s ironic that the Trump administration has accepted Abe’s security diamond strategy, considering that Trump has prioritized a pragmatic foreign policy over such values as democracy and human rights. Since the security diamond strategy proposes a “free and open alliance of democratic values” on the assumption that China is undemocratic, it diverges considerably from the Trump administration’s initial foreign policy. Most bizarrely of all, this tallies with scuttlebutt in Washington that Japan is crafting the Trump administration’s Asian strategy.

It’s unclear how much progress will be made on the security diamond strategy. The ultimate goal is a four-country summit, but that won’t be easy. Since India is regarded as having severe corruption and a poor human rights record, there are questions as to whether it’s democratic enough to be treated as a strategic partner. Furthermore, both India and Australia are wary of allowing their foreign policy to tilt in one direction, given their close economic ties with China.

It is necessary, though, to keep a close eye on these developments. Depending on the intensity of China’s reaction, there could be serious ramifications for US-China relations, and South Korea could come under considerable pressure from both countries to side with one or the other.

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

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