Author: ROBERT ALDRICH
The French Australian Review No 70 (Australian Winter 2021): 4-19: DOI
Robert Aldrich gives a concise overview of four centuries of the French presence in the Indo-Pacific region. The political and commercial idea of an ‘Indo-Pacific’, it seems, came to attention with a statement by the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2007, then was taken up by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in 2010. In 2013, the idea appeared in the Australian Defence White Paper. In the words of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, at the virtual meeting of the Quadrilateral group of powers of the region—Australia, the United States, Japan and India, though not including France—held in March 2021: ‘It is the Indo-Pacific that will now shape the destiny of our world in the 21st Century.
Keywords: Indo-Pacific, French presence in Indo-Pacific, 21st Century, Australia and France in a Regional and Global Context.