India and Japan in the Indo-Pacific: Secondary Powers’ Strategies amid the Intensifying US-China Rivalry

Abstract

With China’s growing presence in the world, strategic rivalry between the US and China intensified after the 2010s. India is one of the representative states that have received significant impacts from the rise of China and the escalating Sino-US hegemonic competition in the emerging Indo-Pacific construct. This study seeks to enrich past research on India’s strategies for Indo-Pacific politics by adopting a comparative method. It analyzes Japan’s Indo-Pacific strategies in parallel to those of India. India and Japan, two prominent powers in Asia, stand in a similar position by promoting the strategic partnership with the US through the Quad amid continuous territorial conflicts with China. The paper examines India and Japan’s strategies and policy motives in response to the Sino-US rivalry with a focus on their relations with Washington. In doing so, it establishes an analytical framework that regards India and Japan as secondary powers that seek to manage great power politics with ideational and institutional means. The paper argues that India and Japan have advanced specific ideational principles of diversity and inclusivity and underscored the importance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ASEAN-led regional architectures. These ideational and institutional engagements are associated with their relative position in the international and regional systems.