The Bay of Bengal key to free and open Indo-Pacific

Over the past decade or so, with the winds of geopolitical change sweeping Asia, the Indo-Pacific has emerged as a focal point in global economics, diplomacy, and security. With its more than half of the global population, fast-rising prosperity, and the challenges of rising regional powers, the Indo-Pacific is the prime strategic hub for deciding the future of existing global order. To maintain the status quo in the region and keep China’s assertiveness in check, the United States, Japan, and Australia, among others, have advanced the idea of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.” Although each of these countries has its own vision, the general aspiration to keep the region free from coercion and open for all is the benchmark that they share. Within the Indo-Pacific theater, the Bay of Bengal — situated at the intersection between South and Southeast Asia — is a divider, a connector, and one of the prime battlegrounds. The tumultuous strategic environment of the Bay — driven by traditional and nontraditional security concerns, and a rising economy mainly powered by infrastructure — suggests this subregion is fast becoming one of the key emerging hotspots for the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy. This, combined with the fact that climate change poses an existential threat to several states in the region, calls not only sustained focus by extraregional powers, but also for governance structures that can facilitate a rules-based order.

Roughly three-quarters of the Indo-Pacific region’s entire surface is water. Yet apart from the South China Sea, the great majority of geopolitical studies concern not those maritime spaces — including the vast Pacific and Indian oceans or critical bays such as the Bay of Bengal — but rather land areas that cover a much smaller share of the whole.

However, after decades of being regarded as an international backwater, the Bay of Bengal is fast becoming a key area of strategic competition as the Indo-Pacific strategy continues to evolve. It is the largest bay in the world, bookended by India on its western side and Thailand to its east, with Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka as its prominent littoral states. Together they host fully one-quarter of the world’s population with sustained growth in its gross domestic product, which currently is $3 trillion. A quarter of the world’s traded goods cross the Bay, including huge volumes of Persian Gulf oil and liquefied natural gas, providing energy-scarce countries with a corridor to securing resources.

The states around the Bay of Bengal have exhibited a pattern of cooperation based on rule of law and free from coercion, reinforcing the aspiration of a free and open Indo-Pacific. Two major regional organizations — the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation — lie on the border of the Bay of Bengal. In addition, key nations of the Bay joined in establishing the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation in 1997. In 2012, Bangladesh and Myanmar settled their maritime boundary disputes in the Bay of Bengal through the International Tribunal for the Laws of the Sea, setting a precedent of respecting the rule of law. In contrast, in the contested South China Sea, China disregarded the tribunal’s verdict when the tribunal overruled Beijing’s territorial claims over the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

With the exception of Thailand, countries surrounding the Bay of Bengal largely missed the economic miracle that took place in Asia in the latter part of the twentieth century. This, however, is now changing. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, South Asia had experienced the world’s fastest growth of 7.3 percent on average per annum throughout the last decade. Low-cost, labor-intensive, export-manufacturing industries such as garments, coupled with rapid urbanization, have been the driver of this fast growth.

Just as industrial economies such as China, Korea, and Japan moved toward high-tech, capital-intensive growth models, Bay of Bengal countries have the potential to benefit from offshoring labor-intensive industries from developed countries. With relatively young workforces, for example — in Bangladesh, 20 percent of the population falls between age 15 and 24 — labor-intensive industries will likely continue to flourish in the coming decades. An important factor in the growing strategic importance of the area is the relatively bright economic prospects of many littoral states.

The Bay of Bengal is also believed to have significant gas reserves. Some unofficial estimates have put Bangladesh’s reserves alone at 200 trillion cubic feet, which would make it the largest source of supply in the Asia-Pacific. Another Bay of Bengal state, Myanmar, is also a significant natural-gas producer and consumer. Myanmar has the fourth-largest proven natural-gas reserves in the Asia-Pacific, and currently the highest reserves-to-production ratio in the region, at 63 years. It exports petroleum gas to both Thailand and China, customers accounting for 75 percent of its production.

The two Asian giants, China and India, have become major consumers and are among the top three oil importers in the world. China’s and India’s dependency on oil imports are expected to rise to 75 percent and 95 percent, respectively, of their total oil consumption by 2030. Japan and Korea are also highly dependent on energy imports, particularly oil and gas — importing primarily across sea lanes passing through the Bay. In addition to energy, the Bay of Bengal region is also critical for commercial shipping routes. About half the world’s container traffic passes through this region, and its ports handle approximately 33 percent of world trade, thus becoming an important economic highway.

However, the full economic potential of the region is currently constrained by the low level of regional economic integration and a dearth of infrastructure, especially transport connections within those countries, to neighboring states and the rest of the world. For example, intraregional trade in Southeast Asia is 25 percent of total trade, while it is only 5 percent in South Asia. This, however, creates a window of opportunity in which major powers’ focus on the Indo-Pacific could catalyze infrastructure development and connectivity in the Bay of Bengal.

The domestic political constraints on Bay of Bengal states such as political instability, ethno-religious tensions, urbanization, and the coronavirus pandemic will have a knock-on effect on this subregion. To tackle these emerging challenges and establish a rules-based order in the region, the United States, along with its regional allies and partners and international organizations, will need to provide technical, financial, and humanitarian assistance to the Bay countries. Leadership succession in domestic politics in both Myanmar and Bangladesh further complicates the prospect of a sound resolution. Sri Lanka poses the highest risk, as it is currently facing an unprecedented economic crisis in addition to its decadelong ethno-religious and political impasse. India’s responses have been instrumental in ameliorating the recent crisis in Sri Lanka. However, a collective regional response of major Indo-Pacific proponents — India, Japan, and the United States — could change the trajectory of the Bay of Bengal.

While traditional security concerns are mostly along or around national boundaries, nontraditional security issues pertaining to the Bay such as climate change, natural disaster, terrorism, refugees, drugs, piracy, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing transect boundaries and affect the region as a whole. The negative impacts of climate change, especially rising sea levels and an alarming level of salinity, pose existential threats to several Bay states, including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Two-thirds of Bangladesh is less than five meters above the sea level rise. The latest projection says that if there is a 50-centimeter rise by 2050, 11 percent of Bangladesh might be underwater, making millions homeless. Thus, the issue of potential climate refugees is more salient in the Bay of Bengal region than anywhere else in the world. This demands cooperation, as well as assistance from Indo-Pacific promoters such as the United States. This is particularly critical as the Biden administration made tackling climate change a top priority — an area where the Bay of Bengal could play a leading role, which would ultimately yield stronger ties between Indo-Pacific promoters and the countries in the region.

While strategic interests often dictate conflicting positions, a consensus over the principle of mare liberum (free seas for everyone) as one of the four global commons is required for the protection of marine resources. Since the Indo-Pacific vision aspires to establish international rules and norms, these nontraditional security concerns in the Bay of Bengal could give impetus to other regional organizations, such as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical Economic Cooperation, to bring countries to work together on common challenges.

For decades, the significance of the Bay of Bengal remained underappreciated due to the absence of great powers’ interest and lack of economic vitality, but this has changed as strategic competition in the area intensifies according to its own dynamic. The Bay of Bengal now has considerable — and growing — strategic importance for Asia, and for the world as a whole. In many ways, the Bay of Bengal lies at the core of the Indo-Pacific region — a centerpiece of the broader Indo-Pacific concept and the place where the strategic interests of the major powers of East and South Asia intersect. As the Bay will become a test case for a nascent multipolar world order, it is of the utmost importance to establish governance frameworks that can facilitate the integration of rising powers in regulating this order and upholding the principles of a free and open Indo-Pacific.

The writer is a Ph.D. student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He can be contacted at [email protected]