The Indo-Pacific as strategic imagination

Professor Brendan Sargeant left a profound legacy for all of us who make, implement and analyse Australian strategic policy. The fullness of his gift to the nation ranges across an exceptional commitment to leadership, analysis and mentorship, from the Department of Defence to the wider policy community and the academy. He is not the only senior official to have made a mark beyond the bureaucracy. One element, however, that distinguishes the work of Brendan Sargeant was his embrace of the act of imagination as integral to strategy. This was accompanied by a disarming openness about the place of imagination in policymaking. Professor Sargeant’s pioneering official work on the concept of the Indo-Pacific as a two-ocean regional framework for Australian strategy, articulated in the 2013 Defence White Paper, merits examination and proper prominence.

To describe the Indo-Pacific as an artefact of strategic imagination is not to reject this construct as meaningless or ‘not real’; quite the opposite. The single strategic arc of connectivity and contestation Brendan identified a decade ago is now the orthodox understanding among many countries, even (however tacitly) China.

Looking ahead, Australia’s great challenge, as Brendan argued in his later scholarly work, is how to learn to live in the Indo-Pacific.

Accordingly, Australian policy thinkers and practitioners have the opportunity and obligation to build on his vision in developing a statecraft to suit this inclusive strategic environment.

This account brings together a sense of Brendan’s exceptional personal qualities, his championing of the idea of strategic imagination, a case for the validity of the concept of the Indo-Pacific and his place in foregrounding that in Australian policy. It concludes with a reminder of the unfinished business of shaping and implementing an Indo-Pacific strategy.