(Bloomberg) -- The U.S., Japan and Australia agreed to invest in infrastructure projects in the Indo-Pacific in a move that will be seen as a counter to China’s rising influence in a region that stretches from the east coast of Africa, through Australia to Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
“This trilateral partnership is in recognition that more support is needed to enhance peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region,” Australia Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Tuesday in an emailed statement. The pact will mobilize investment in energy, transportation, tourism and technology infrastructure, according to the statement, which didn’t give any funding details.
The announcement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy, released in December, called for policies to answer rival powers’ infrastructure-building efforts. Chief among these is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, a global plan to build or expand highways, railways, ports, pipelines and power plants that Morgan Stanley forecasts could grow as large as $1.3 trillion over the next decade.
U.S. infrastructure cooperation with Japan and Australia would dovetail with the Trump administration’s evolving national security policies, which have cast the U.S. as in “long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia.
Before visiting China in November, Trump signed two deals with Japan, pledging cooperation on infrastructure projects in the region.
In February, Bishop said the three nations, along with India, had discussed opportunities to address “the enormous need for infrastructure” in the region, which encompasses some of the world’s poorest as well as fastest-growing economies.
India wasn’t mentioned in Tuesday’s announcement. Instead, the pact will be organized by the U.S.’s Overseas Private Investment Corp., the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
“This partnership represents our commitment to an Indo-Pacific region that is free, open and prosperous,” the three nations said in a joint statement issued on Monday, according to Bishop. “By working together, we can attract more private capital to achieve greater results.”
Strained Ties
No funding arrangements were announced in the statement. The trilateral partnership will be formalized “in due course,” Bishop said.
Australia’s diplomatic relationship with China, its most important trading partner, has been strained since December when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Chinese meddling in the nation’s government and media were a catalyst for new anti-foreign interference laws, which passed parliament last month.
China lodged a formal protest with Australia in January after Turnbull’s minister for international development, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, said the Belt and Road plan risked building “useless buildings” and “roads to nowhere.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Scott in Canberra at jscott14@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.net, Andrew Hobbs, Peter Vercoe
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
Advertisement