Australia wants to join India, US and Japan in joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean, widening participation in multilateral drills as China’s influence in the region grows
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Tags: Australian Defense Minister Kevin Andrews, India, Indian Ocean, Japan, Naval Drills, United States
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Australia wants to join India, the United States and Japan in joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean, widening participation in multilateral drills as China’s influence in the region grows.
Australian Defense Minister Kevin Andrews said expanding the exercises to include more countries would help avoid military mistakes in a region where China and India are increasingly competing.
“Exercising together is one way to avoid some kind of miscalculation happening,” he told reporters on the second day of a visit to New Delhi.
“India shares our interest in the wider free passage of international trade.”
India and the United States hold the so-called Malabar exercises in the Indian Ocean every year.
This year, Japan will take part, the first time since 2007 the exercises have included a third country – and a sign of closer military ties between allies worried about Chinese activity in the region.
China’s increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea has angered neighbors there as well as Japan and the United States, two of the major maritime powers in Asia.
China also shocked India last year with two Chinese submarine visits to Sri Lanka, India’s island-nation neighbor to the south.
Andrews said on Wednesday Australia was concerned about escalating strategic rivalry in the South China Sea, saying it put Asia at the risk of a military blunder.
His visit to New Delhi comes as India and Australia prepare to hold their first bilateral naval maneuvers next month, where they will showcase their anti-submarine warfare capability.
Andrews said defense ties with India would deepen.
“Gradually we will expand the range of exercises. We are looking at air force to air force and army to army exercises over the next year or two,” he said.
India last hosted a multilateral exercise in 2007 when it invited Japan, Australia and Singapore to join drills with the United States in the Bay of Bengal, prompting disquiet in Beijing.
India’s Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar also expressed interest in Australia’s “Bushmaster” armored infantry vehicle, Andrews said, although talks on any sales were at an early stage.
(Reporting by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Douglas Busvine and Robert Birsel)
It was bound to happen. China also recently claimed that oil and gas exploration by India in Vietnamese territorial waters is “illegal”.
They have the gall to say that after sending submarines on port visit to Colombo and Karachi.
Its incredible. Vietnam of all countries is now becoming a close US ally
Keep in mind, China invaded Vietnam very soon after the US war in Vietnam ended. China has had conflict with Vietnam, not just recently, recurrently for millennia.
The US is a far away country that invaded Vietnam once, as part of the Cold War, which is over, to intervene in the Vietnamese civil war. It was horrible, but there’s no reason for Vietnam to expect a second war with America in the future.
The attitude in the west is also (somewhat unsurprisingly) very western centric.
This means that on the one hand we see the Western way of doing things as being the best way of doing things, or the only civilized way of doing things.
And then there is a liberal backlash against this viewpoint where the west is “evil” and everything that is bad in the world is the result of the west.
People who think in this way fixate on things like the Vietnam war as being one of the greatest atrocities committed in the history of man. While the actual Vietnamese who have a long history totally independent of the west see it as an event, even a tragic event, but still a single event in a long history. They’ve had many wars, they’ve seen many atrocities, and while they might not be happy about the American invasion, it is not the seminal event in their history. They have far stronger and more deeply rooted feelings about China than they do about America.
It’s also worth noting that the Vietnamese have had an easier time of getting over the Vietnam War (or as they call it The American War) because they won, in their eyes they went toe to toe with the greatest power in human history and more than held their own.