Modi’s tour of Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand reveals a broader Asia Pacific strategy.
Amitabh Mattoo is the Director of the Australia India Institute and Professor of International Relations at the University of Melbourne and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Twenty-eight years ago, in May 1998, Australia suspended defence cooperation with India after the nuclear tests at Pokhran. Military exchanges were frozen. Indian officers who were undergoing training at Australian defence colleges were sent home. This week, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Australia, the two countries announced that Canberra would invite an Indian military instructor to serve at the Australian Defence College. This journey from sanctions to strategic partnership is arguably one of the most remarkable bilateral transformations in contemporary history. Yet to view Modi’s visit to Australia simply as another success in India-Australia relations would be to understate its significance. For beyond Canberra, important as that connection is, lies the Asia Pacific, and it is here that Modi’s visit reveals a larger story about the changing balance of power.
Modi’s three-nation tour included Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. Viewed on a map, the itinerary traces India’s expanding strategic horizon across the Asia Pacific. Indonesia anchors India’s outreach to Southeast Asia and sits at the junction of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Australia has become one of India’s most consequential strategic partners in recent years. New Zealand, though much smaller, extends India’s diplomatic reach further into the Pacific. Taken together, the three visits show how New Delhi reads the emerging balance of power and how it intends to shape it.
The context is stark. China is rising. America, under Donald Trump, is unpredictable and in retreat. Economics, technology, energy and even supply chains are becoming instruments of strategic competition. India, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and even New Zealand are each, in their own way, doing what they can to avoid being caught in the crossfire between Chinese hegemony and a new Cold War.
Lost opportunities have long been the story of ties between Canberra and New Delhi. The Cold War, India’s autarkic economy, the White Australia Policy and Canberra’s refusal to sell uranium to India kept the two countries apart for decades. Not any more. Today, there are few countries in Asia with which India has as much in common, both in interests and values, as it does with Australia. Not only are the two English-speaking, federal, multicultural democracies that believe in and respect the rule of law, but they also share a strategic interest in maintaining a balance in the Asia Pacific and ensuring that the region is not dominated by any one hegemonic power. Moreover, Indians are today Australia’s largest source of skilled migrants.
Nothing about the agreements reached during Modi’s visit, including the operationalisation of uranium exports for civilian nuclear energy, expanded defence cooperation, and greater collaboration on maritime security, cyber- and critical technologies, clean energy, skills, investment and critical minerals, is cosmetic. Far from it. Take uranium. Australia once refused to sell uranium to India because New Delhi had not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even after India and Australia signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement a decade ago, Australian uranium exports were held up because of Canberra’s own parliamentary politics. What has been finalised this week is the “administrative arrangement” that will see Australia actively facilitate India’s civil nuclear energy programme. A symbol of estrangement has become an instrument of partnership.
It is easy, and partly correct, to explain this transformation in terms of China and the anxieties Beijing has created. China’s rise has changed the calculations of every serious Asian power. India learned the limits of engagement from the border clashes in Galwan in 2020. Australia has learned the cost of Chinese economic coercion. Japan has lived for years with Chinese pressure across the East China Sea. Indonesia and New Zealand have reasons of their own to know that interdependence without resilience can become a recipe for vulnerability. But China explains the acceleration in ties, not the depth of trust that has come to characterise them.
For India, this is about something more. India is not seeking containment as an end in itself, nor is it outsourcing its China policy to Washington, Canberra or Tokyo. It will compete with Beijing where it must, cooperate where it can and stabilise relations where prudent. This is not ambiguity. It is Indian statecraft informed by millennia of Indian civilisational thought. Strategic autonomy matters. Western critics love to dismiss it as hedging: Opportunism masquerading as doctrine. They misunderstand both India and the moment. Strategic autonomy is not a refusal to choose; it is a refusal to be chosen for.
The emerging Asia Pacific will not be shaped by aircraft carriers and superpower summits alone. It will also be shaped by networks: Maritime partnerships, technology alliances, resilient supply chains, educational exchanges, diaspora ties and habits of strategic consultation. That is why middle powers like Japan, Indonesia and Australia matter. None of these middle powers can dictate terms to the international system. But they can keep it from tipping into instability. They can push back against any hegemon that thinks it can exercise a monopoly on power and preserve the space between unconditional submission and open confrontation.
India is not a middle power in the traditional sense of the term. Its size, population, economy and civilisational confidence put it in a category of its own. But it understands and values middle-power groupings because it has no interest in living in a bipolar world ordered by Washington and Beijing. The Asia Pacific that India wants to help shape is not an American lake or a Chinese sphere of influence. Nor is it a field of permanent confrontation. It is open, multipolar and rules-based, rather than a region coerced into submission.
Twenty-eight years ago, Australia saw India as part of the problem. Today, it increasingly sees India as part of the solution. And that is what makes Modi’s tour of Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand about much more than the sum of these bilateral relationships. Taken together, the visits represent New Delhi’s Asia Pacific moment. This is India refusing to be rushed into joining someone’s bloc. This is India refusing to accept China’s claim to regional primacy. This is India refusing to place its national interests at the mercy of another power’s unpredictability. A decade ago, it was fashionable to talk about India as a balancing power. Today, India intends to be a shaping power.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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