‘US wants open and free Indian Ocean’: Top official

The US wants the Indian Ocean to remain free and open and believes transparency about maritime activities, public-private partnership to improve maritime infrastructure, and multilateral coalitions to secure the waters are key to achieving this goal, a top National Security Council (NSC) official has said.

Lindsey Ford, the senior director for South Asia at NSC who has earlier served in senior roles in Pentagon, also outlined the high costs of instability in the waters of the Indian Ocean, visible in the ongoing Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and the doubling of insurance costs for ships, the vulnerabilities due to disruptions and chokepoints, and warned that challenges were not standing still.

Ford was speaking at the launch of The Contest for the Indian Ocean: And the Making of a New World Order, written by Darshana Baruah, the director of security and geopolitics at Australia-India institute, at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. Veteran scholar, Ashley J Tellis, chaired the event. A key argument of the book is that while the Pacific may see military conflict, the key theatre of geopolitical contestation will be the Indian Ocean where China is continuing to make inroads and which Beijing depends on for its economic advancement from energy to minerals to trade to outreach to global south.

Ford, who said that the first Indian Ocean dialogue between the US and India was on track to be held by the end of the year, acknowledged that keeping the ocean free and open was a “lofty goal” given its expanse and diversity and challenges, but pointed to three lines of effort towards this goal.

“The first is transparency. Lack of transparency about the activities or rules of the road is a recipe for instability,” Ford said, giving the examples of illegal fishing, reclamation, and movement of dark vessels. She spoke about the Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) initiative of Quad as aimed to address this need by “leveraging technology to bring transparency” and offering “real-time, integrated, cost-effective maritime information” to over two dozen countries. Ford, who was a part of Biden’s select delegation at the Quad Leaders’ Summit, also referred to the group’s recent efforts to deepen analytical training and legal dialogue on maritime issues. Bringing transparency, Ford said, would help bring stability.

The second line of effort that the US is pushing is around public-private partnership, with Ford pointing out that it was not just governments but port operators, insurance and shipping companies and private sector as a whole that shared this interest. They also had a shared interest in “quality infrastructure”. She placed Quad’s efforts on cable connectivity and resilience to support and strengthen the capacity, durability and reliability of undersea cable networks, the announcement of a Quad Regional Ports and Transportation Conference in India next year, and the US Development Finance Corporation’s $500 million support for a deep water shipping container terminal in Sri Lanka (in collaboration with Adani Ports) as examples of this line of effort.

And finally, Ford suggested that the US believed in multilateral coalitions to secure the waters, but she emphasised this did not mean military alliances. “This is not the goal that US has now or in the future,” Ford reiterated, but added that it was not possible for a single country to manage problems in such a vast region. She gave the example of the Combined Maritime Forces, a 46-nation grouping where countries could come “as they are” and were not bound by any “political or military mandate”. “This flexibility is particularly important of late,” Ford said and offered the example of Operation Prosperity Guardian where a “willing subset of countries” worked together to secure the Red Sea against Houthi attacks. While Ford did not say it, other countries such as India worked separately but in close coordination with the same objective.