Dr Rod Lyon of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute will discuss the growing multipolarity of Asia from 10.30am to 12.00pm in the IISS-Asia Meeting Room, Singapore.
Two inter-related strategic trends are reconfiguring the Asian regional security order: a relative decline in US power and influence in Asia, and the end of the age of weak Asian great powers.
US primacy in Asia is giving way to a more multipolar order. But Australian analysts remain uncertain as to the makeup and tone of that order. Asia seems likely to grow its own special variant of multipolarity, separate from the European model nurtured over recent centuries within the Napoleonic war tradition. Each of the Asian great powers is strategically introverted, and none has a narrative of how the growth of its power and the expansion of its role will be of benefit to the region. Moreover, the region is pulled together by patterns of trade and dialogue as well as pulled apart by history and nationalism. That makes for a region oddly poised between cooperation and competition.
Innovations in Australian strategic policy, so far not much explored by the current minority Labor government, seem likely to growing in coming decades as Australia explores both the shape of the new Asia and its opportunities there.
Dr Rod Lyon is the Program Director (Strategy and International) at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra. Previously, he was a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. From 1985 until 1996, he worked in the strategic analysis branch of the Australian government’s Office of National Assessments. His research interests include Australian strategy, global and regional security, and nuclear weapons strategy and proliferation. In 2004 he was awarded a Fulbright Professional Scholarship to study alliance relations at Georgetown University. He has published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, and a range of papers for ASPI, including ‘Alliance unleashed’, ‘The eagle in a turbulent world’, and ‘A delicate issue: Asia’s nuclear future’.
To RSVP: E-mail: HO Yi Jian (Mr) at asiaevents@iiss.org Tel: (65) 6499 0052
9 Raffles Place, #53-02 Republic Plaza I, Singapore 048619
