Japan/Australia Minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific (II): Advancing Cooperation in Order-building and Geoeconomics

This East-West Center Occasional Paper is the second of a set of two papers examining how Japan and Australia are seeking to employ minilateral institutions to enhance their cooperation and compete strategically in an increasingly contested region. The first paper demonstrated how Japan and Australia have adopted a minilateralist approach that chiefly prioritizes traditional security concerns, in contrast to China’s emphasis on geoeconomics alongside its efforts to entrench its global/regional leadership and shape the international
order. This second paper considers the strategic objectives underlying China’s practice of minilateralism and reevaluates the order-building and geoeconomic dimensions within the Australian/Japanese practice of minilateralism. It concludes that for Australia and Japan minilateral cooperation in these areas continues to lag traditional security efforts, and thus points to the need for the partners, along with the United States, to invest greater attention and resources in these directions to give greater substance to their joint vision of Free and
Open Indo-Pacific.