Chinese ships are monitoring the exercises of the US and its allies in Australia.
According to Daily Mail, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles announced that the two-week joint exercise between the United States, Australia and 10 other countries will begin this Friday in Australian waters.
The “Daily Mail” website, while talking to the Australian Defense Minister about the details of this exercise, wrote that Chinese spy ships are present near the coast of Australia and closely monitor this exercise.
This exercise was initially held with the presence of American and Australian forces, and then expanded with the presence of Japan and South Korea, and now 12 countries are participating in it. This joint exercise will be held in Australia with the participation of 30,000 troops from 12 countries.
According to the Minister of Defense of Australia, the military forces of Canada, Fiji, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Republic of Korea, Tonga and England will participate in this exercise, and forces from India, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand are also present as observers.
The German government recently announced that it will send military forces to Australia for the first time as part of participating in the joint exercise. A move that shows that in the midst of increasing tensions with China, Berlin’s focus on the Indo-Pacific region has increased. In recent years, Germany has had a greater military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, even if this means pursuing security and economic interests.
Alphonse Meiss, commander of the German army, said in an interview with Reuters: “This area is very important for us in Germany and also for the European Union due to economic interdependencies.” According to Reuters, China is Berlin’s most important trading partner, and 40% of Europe’s foreign trade flows through the South China Sea; A waterway that is the focal point of territorial disputes in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
In recent years, the efforts of the United States and Western countries to deal with China’s growing power have been mostly focused on the “Indo-Pacific” area; The Indo-Pacific is the geographical region where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet in Southeast Asia, and Shinzo Abe, the late Prime Minister of Japan, was the first politician to introduce this concept into the political literature.
In his speech to the Indian Parliament in August 2007, Abe proposed the creation of a “Greater Asia Crescent of Freedom and Prosperity” in the bi-Pacific region. Without naming China, he emphasized that India, America, Australia, and Japan are the four powers involved in this proposal. Although in the definition of “Indo-Pacific” geographical area, every political thinker, politician and country has a different definition of it according to their own ideology and interests, usually the geographical area from the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific Ocean is called the two-Pacific.
This geographical area includes Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, America and Vietnam.
