The UK and the Indo-Pacific: The Need to Lean into the Tilt

Speaking at the 2019 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, French Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly could not resist taking the mickey out of her UK counterpart. She boasted that she had gone to the high-level defence ministerial forum with her entourage, plus a carrier strike group (CSG) comprising the Charles de Gaulle carrier, escorted by destroyers, tankers, Rafale fighters and helicopters. The UK, she said with a mischievous grin, ‘would be kind enough not to reciprocate’.

Parly’s dig at the UK might have been light-hearted, but the issue of European deployments and engagement in the broader Indo-Pacific is serious business, given the growing geopolitical weight of the region. Consider the numbers: the region includes five of the world’s biggest-spending military powers (China, India, Japan, Russia and the US); four formidable democratic powers (the members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue); three powers in an extensive trilateral arrangement (Australia, the UK and the US); two of the biggest global powers (China and the US); and a dynamic regional institution (ASEAN).

Granted, many key European powers - such as France, Germany and the EU - have tabled elaborate documents detailing their plans for the Indo-Pacific, and in particular, Southeast Asia. But to many Southeast Asian observers concerned about delicate regional hotspots – such as the South China Sea, the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and the Taiwan Strait – the key question is how much military power European countries can bring to bear to bolster deterrence and regional stability. Ultimately, these Indo-Pacific strategies must be complemented by tangible exercises of hard power, particularly given the tough regional environment. As the oft-quoted retort by Stalin goes: ‘How many divisions does the Pope have?’

To their credit, countries like Germany and France have stepped up. The former will send its latest F125-class frigate with a support ship to the region this year (in addition to deployments by the Air Force). As for the latter, French Rafales deployed on the Charles De Gaulle conducted a power projection exercise from the Indian Ocean to Singapore in 2023. 

In this game, however, the new UK government appears to be lagging in the stakes. It has been two months since Labour became the governing party in the UK, and all signs point to a desire to strengthen relationships across the Atlantic and the English Channel at the expense of the Indo-Pacific region. In his first international visit since taking office, Prime Minister Keir Starmer jetted off to Washington to participate in a NATO summit. He followed this up by hosting the fourth summit of the European Political Community, making good on his campaign promise to forge a stronger relationship with European allies and maintain an ‘unshakable’ commitment to NATO. Following his lead, Chancellor Rachel Reeves also visited New York and Toronto in a bid to shore up investment in key sectors of the UK economy.

In stark contrast, the new UK government has kept relatively mum on its approach to the Indo-Pacific. There have been some suggestions that Labour will conduct a ‘full audit' of London’s relations with China, as it puts its ‘three C’s’ approach – ‘challenge, compete and cooperate’ – towards Beijing into action.

More broadly, there has been an emphasis on the need for ‘progressive realism' – using realist methods to prosecute progressive ends – since before the general election. John Healey, the new defence secretary, has already given a big hint as to London’s overall policy direction. Under Labour, he said in an interview last year, London will remain a staunch ally of Australia and New Zealand. But the UK cannot be a ‘strong military force in the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic simultaneously’.

There are reasonable grounds for such an approach. The UK’s defence budget is stretched. The previous Conservative government sought to raise the UK’s defence spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5% in the long term, but this was conditioned on favourable ‘fiscal and economic circumstances’. Labour has stated the same aspiration, but contingent on a review of defence strategy.

However, Reeves has made clear that the new government has inherited a £22 billion budgetary hole from the previous Tory government, leaving Westminster with ‘difficult decisions’ to make and portending the need for further spending cuts. Speaking to the Financial Times in July, a senior MoD official said that the UK armed forces could not defend the ‘British homelands properly’, let alone fight in a ‘conflict of any scale’.

The UK is also focused on shoring up Ukraine in the latter’s war with Russia, and on its participation in NATO and European security, particularly with the possibility of a second Trump administration come January 2025. This is true to form for Labour, which has traditionally been an Atlanticist party.

That said, any form of retrenchment from the Indo-Pacific – and in particular, ASEAN – would be detrimental to the UK’s long-term interests in the region.

The UK has long-standing interests in the region, as highlighted by its ‘Refresh’ of its 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy in 2023. The Refresh doubled down on the UK’s so-called ‘tilt’ towards the Indo-Pacific. In 2021, the UK secured a dialogue partnership with ASEAN. Two years later, it signed the accession protocol to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

The UK has also committed itself to AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership with Australia and the US. This will see the forward deployment of a UK Astute-class submarine in Western Australia later this decade. Likewise, the UK is part of the Global Combat Air Programme with Japan and Italy. 

According to a report by International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the UK also remains engaged with regional partners through combined military exercises. In 2023, the UK expanded its annual combined exercise with Tokyo, Exercise Vigilant Isles, marking the ‘first time British troops have been embedded with their Japanese counterparts’. London also routinely deploys its troops to Australian exercises, such as Exercise Talisman Sabre and Exercise Pitch Black. Moreover, the UK has committed forces to combined exercises with Washington, most notably the deployment of the RAF’s Atlas A400M transport aircraft under the US-led Exercise Mobility Guardian in Guam.

Following its withdrawal from east of Suez in 1967, the UK retained a security footprint in the region with the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA). It has detachments in Singapore and Brunei and maintains two forward-deployed offshore patrol vessels in the region. As part of the FPDA, the UK also engages annually with Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia through Exercise Bersama Lima and Exercise Bersama Shield. 

Unsurprisingly, the UK was ranked among the major powers as the sixth most strategically relevant to ASEAN in ISEAS’s 2024 State of Southeast Asia Survey, just above Australia (to much consternation in Canberra, which considers itself to be far more involved in Southeast Asia and the wider region than London).

More importantly, the new UK government cannot argue that more pressing concerns in the Atlantic and Europe should lead to reduced commitments in the region. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida put this across well when he said that ‘Ukraine may be the East Asia of tomorrow’. That is, conflicts on the western end of Eurasia could come home to roost in the eastern part, and vice versa. Indeed, the aforementioned IISS report suggests that major EU member states, such as Germany, France and Italy, recognise this interconnectedness and have been stepping up their engagement in the Indo-Pacific (albeit in a piecemeal fashion), even as the bloc makes steady progress towards its commitment of spending at least 2% of its GDP on defence. 

Still, given Labour’s fiscal constraints and the urgent need to reinvigorate growth in the UK economy, what can be done?

For a start, the UK should continue to ask for a seat at the table at the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus and the East Asia Summit, building on the momentum of its conferment as an ASEAN dialogue partner in 2021. Participating in ASEAN-led platforms is no panacea, but it would give London access to established regional networks while also signalling the UK’s support for the (much-vaunted) centrality of ASEAN at a minimum. 

In a step in the right direction, the UK also announced in early August 2024 that it would deploy a CSG to the Indo-Pacific in 2025. To be led by the HMS Prince of Wales carrier, the group would include Royal Navy escorts and aircraft, and be bolstered by two ships, including a frigate, from Norway. This CSG would train with the navies of the US and Japan – two powers that are key members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which seeks to manage the challenge posed by China. 

Given that Southeast Asian countries remain wary about assertive Chinese actions in the South China Sea, the UK could also participate in so-called ‘Quad-lite’ exercises (working with Quad countries, without the ‘Quad’ brand) with like-minded Southeast Asian states, demonstrating the active presence of other powers in the region. A good example would be Super Garuda Shield 2023, which involved six participating contingents (including from Indonesia, the US, Japan and the UK) and nine observer countries. The exercise last year was timely given Indonesia and China’s standoffs in disputed waters off the Natuna islands.

Beyond this, the UK should provide assistance to countries that are seeking to build their own capacities to defend the existing rules-based order.

A cost-effective option would be a reciprocal access agreement (RAA) with the Philippines, which is at the forefront of the South China Sea dispute with China. This is not a bridge too far: the UK has signed a similar RAA with Japan, while Tokyo inked an RAA with Manila on 8 July this year and a similar agreement with Australia in 2022. The Japan–UK RAA would also allow the UK to generate significant bang for its buck, as the agreement would not require it to maintain a permanent deployment of troops, and would allow for greater flexibility in the conduct of joint training and exercises. In fact, the latter are key to upholding regional stability, as Japan and the UK can plan for ‘complex military exercises and deployments’ in their own territories as well as the wider Indo-Pacific (most likely with like-minded countries such as Australia, the Philippines and the US).

Taking a leaf from Japan’s playbook, London should also consider augmenting its existing training with coastguards in Asia by providing coastguard ships to countries such as Malaysia and the Philippines. Labour has previously expressed its desire to ‘restore the UK’s leadership in international development’ by reversing the Tory government’s decision to reduce the Overseas Development Assistance budget, and it could explore an arrangement akin to Tokyo’s Official Security Assistance to beef up the capabilities of regional allies. 

Expectations of a UK military contribution to a Taiwan Strait contingency are low. But it is likely that the US would value the deployment of UK forces already in the region. According to another IISS report, Whitehall should at least consider some forward planning as to the likely assets that it could bring to the region in the event of a conflagration in the Taiwan Strait, be it a naval task group or a brigade-sized land force.

It goes without saying that any major power’s regional engagement is contingent on whether it serves the national interest and is sustainable. London’s historic withdrawal from ‘east of Suez’ in 1967 served its interests at the time, given the dire financial straits it was in and its inclination to reduce its global military footprint. Today, the obverse is true: to be a power of consequence, it needs to be present in strength in the Indo-Pacific. Ultimately, the sheer importance of the Indo-Pacific to the UK’s national interests behooves it to lean more towards the dynamic region rather than turn away.

This commentary has been adapted from an analysis published in Fulcrum on 6 August.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors’, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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