Four months ago, Singaporean foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan stated that Singapore would not be joining the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) because he did not know what the strategy entailed. In fact, the United States has not released a formal FOIP plan. At the time of his statement, public descriptions of the developing strategy had been confined to President Trump’s speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEOs Summit and a press event at the State Department. At the time, the world knew only that the United States was pursuing an international rules-based order built around the centrality of ASEAN (Association for Southeast Asian Nations) and defined as free and open. Congressional testimony on May 15 provided a more refined statement of the principles “free” and “open,” but did not speak to the manner in which FOIP would achieve them.

Secretary Mattis used his speech at the Shangri-la Dialogue to highlight the need for Indo-Pacific countries to cooperate in shaping the region’s future and outlined four themes of the FOIP strategy: 1) expanding attention on the maritime space; 2) improving interoperability with partners; 3) strengthening rule of law, civil society, and transparent governance; and 4) enabling private sector-led economic development. These themes provide an outline for how the United States intends to bring about the FOIP, but are broad lines of effort. As of yet, there are no specific initiatives for regional leaders to buy into.

Hesitancy among Indo-Pacific leaders is understandable. They have repeatedly been promised that the United States is committed to the region, but since the Al Qaeda attacks of 2001, attempts by the United States to demonstrate this have not always been convincing. Regional leaders continue to fear the United States is not wholly committed to a role in the Indo-Pacific region, subject to strategic distraction at the next crisis, and incapable of building an architecture that will maintain stability in the face of rising tensions.

Overcoming Diplomatic Baggage

In order to succeed, the FOIP must convince regional leaders that the United States is building a new regional order worth signing up for. Principles and themes for implementation are important, but the United States must demonstrate the willingness and ability to implement its vision. In the language of strategic planners, the United States has described the ends (principles) and the broad ways (the themes) of its strategy, but regional partners want to see the means (the tools used to implement the ways), which remain undisclosed.

Regional fears of flagging U.S. commitment suggest the FOIP should be implemented quickly. Since the FOIP is cooperative in nature, the means selected must be used in concert with partners. In fact, policy manifestations should encourage states to participate in multiple initiatives that uphold this order so they will become accustomed to working cooperatively towards that end. Additionally, the 2017 National Security Strategy and the FOIP themes recognize the requirement for these actions to span the components of national power: diplomatic, informational, military and economic. Taken together, these points suggest U.S. initiatives to implement the FOIP be narrowly focused, varied, easy to join, and interest-based.

This article proposes the United States promote dozens of small initiatives that partners can join as they choose, based on their own interests. It should also encourage partners to step forward and establish additional initiatives, which the United States will join as appropriate. This framework of small coalitions will not be a new take on treaty alliances, but a system of overlapping groups that pursue interests in common. In short, the United States should begin establishing dozens of communities of common interests (CCI).

Foundational Interests

Individuals are not motivated by a script, destiny, or orders they must obey. Rather, they seek to pursue their own interests, gain and maintain their own values, and increase their own flourishing. Often, the effectiveness of these efforts can be increased through cooperating with others. However, cooperation cannot take place at the point of a gun, or where no common interests exist.

Through CCIs the United States will seek those issues on which it has common interests with others in the region and begin acting in concert to gain or maintain the targeted interest. These interests should be narrowly defined so negotiation over their meaning is limited, allowing the CCI to rapidly begin functioning. Importantly, the United States must not be distracted by the siren song of a comprehensive regional-security architecture. Instead, it must pick low-hanging fruit that many countries can support to quickly establish the concept and demonstrate its efficacy.

A similar idea was offered in 2014 in Responding to Indo-Pacific Rivalry: Australia, India, and Middle Power Coalitions. Rory Medcalf and C. Raja Mohan argue for an approach to regional security built around “middle power coalitions.” Shunning new security structures or institutions—which they view as infeasible—they opt for an “array of overlapping coalitions that seek to improve the national security of their members through flexible partnerships defined by geography, capabilities, interests, or shared functional objectives.” Though they eschew the United States and PRC as members of these coalitions, it is not the size or influence of the powers that participate, but issue-specific coalitions founded on shared interests that lend the concept its value.

The FOIP is important in this regard due to its conscious attempt to define shared values as the foundation for closer cooperation regionally, not just with treaty allies or traditional partners. The United States and regional states should find many narrow interests they agree upon and build coalitions, not by taking sides, but taking interest—specifically their common interests in security, stability, and the freedom to pursue individual prosperity.

A Whole-of-Region Approach

The issues around which interest-based multilateral coalitions can be built span the components of national power, but they need not be comprehensive in execution. Each individual CCI can span two countries or the entire region in participation. A natural starting point is law enforcement, not writ large, but focused on individual issues. In fact, law enforcement is an area where significant cooperation already occurs. Instead of replicating forums or information-sharing mechanisms that already exist, CCIs should focus on the actions to protect interests so that partners have a direct stake in maintaining an Indo-Pacific region that is free and open.

Counter-trafficking in persons (CTIP) is one area in which a great deal of cooperation already occurs, especially in the education, information sharing, and recovery fields. Forming a CCI is a natural extension of this cooperation. The implementation of a CTIP CCI could take the form of patrols with multinational crews of rotating leadership operating off a mix of participating country vessels. These patrols will act on intelligence concerning people-smuggling routes to stop trafficking in progress. Although brought together for one specific task—CTIP at sea—this CCI reinforces the values of free and open individuals, countries and commerce, while demonstrating U.S. commitment to a new regional security scheme and reinforcing the importance of regional states as participants and beneficiaries of cooperative security.

Maritime patrols are attractive because they visually communicate the strength of international partnership while emphasizing the strategic themes of focus on the maritime environment and interoperability. Other maritime CCIs could reinforce international treaties or protect international waterways to strengthen the rules-based international system. Maritime CCIs will also enable partners to build the skills, relationships, and procedures that ensure interoperability in a crisis. Moreover, the requirement to reduce costs and use taxpayer dollars efficiently encourages smaller operations that leverage combined resources of partner countries. However, concrete FOIP initiatives must quickly move beyond a maritime patrol for every issue. States must form CCIs around all manner of interests and cooperatively develop methods for protecting them.

Leveraging the Trader Principle

Protecting individual rights speaks directly to the theme of private sector-led development, including the right of individuals to trade their property in a free and open international system. Businesses are often hamstrung by tariff and non-tariff barriers at home and abroad that limit access to markets traders would otherwise be turning into destinations for investments and sources of income. In other words, states are standing in the way of wealth creation and prosperity for the individuals involved in any trade that happens to take place in their jurisdiction.

Trade liberalization under FOIP should not be done not by hundreds of delegates from dozens of states attempting to hammer out comprehensive pacts. After all, state-to-state trade deals are still state-managed trade. Liberalizing trade through government pacts is better than not liberalizing trade at all, however, trade pacts remain state-interference in free economic exchange, with bureaucrats picking economic winners and losers.

Economic liberty CCIs could be built by selecting a particular good or service and declaring the United States will eliminate all tariffs on it for any economy that will do the same—immediately. Once a single partner agrees, that initiative becomes a CCI and any state that joins demonstrates a commitment to pursue their shared interest in economic freedom and the open flow of that good or service. The next day, another tariff or trade barrier is be eliminated and another CCI formed. As communities grow, the power of individual economic actors will begin linking countries faster than any state-directed planning initiative could, and with greater benefits for all partners involved.

This approach will fundamentally change the nature of U.S. engagement in the region. Instead of preaching the benefits of free economies, the United States will demonstrate it by establishing relationships of mutual benefit. Those who find common interests for collaboration enjoy the benefits that serve as advertisements for the value of an Indo-Pacific region that is free and open.

An Interest-Based Indo-Pacific

As President Trump stated at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit last year, he expects all leaders to put the interests of their own countries first. Not only is it the proper function of a state to protect its own interests, it the necessary precondition for successful cooperation. Only by identifying where interests intersect can parties trade or cooperate to mutual benefit. The FOIP promotes these ideas by advocating that states and individuals should rightfully be free from coercion and free to pursue their interests. Similarly, it advances openness so the linkages required for effective trade and cooperation are unimpeded. However, current descriptions of the FOIP lack tools for implementing this vision of an interest-based Indo-Pacific. CCIs provide those tools—the strategic means—to enable the FOIP to tie the region together through cooperation.

As the United States expanded across the North American continent, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political theorist, was impressed by the way multiple, independently formed, and cross-cutting associations—from knitting groups, to commercial clubs, to political parties—wove the early American Republic into a stable fabric of diverse individuals, who cooperated where their interests aligned. Similarly, CCIs can build the Indo-Pacific region into a quilt of shared interests that wraps the region in security, comforts individuals with stability, and enables them to pursue their individual prosperity in an environment of free interaction and open commerce.

To ensure this open environment has longevity, an anchor is necessary, not only for the FOIP in general, but to help tie CCIs into a framework. ASEAN, therefore, will sit in the middle of this quilt—at the crossroads of the Indo-Pacific region—and ensure disagreements are handled through dialogue and respect for individual actors. The United States, as the region’s security partner of choice, will need to work closely with ASEAN to ensure member states are convinced of the value of this regional approach and brought into multiple, overlapping CCIs that are tied back to one or more existing ASEAN dialogue forum.

Building on its history of cooperation, dialogue, free association, and finding shared-interests, ASEAN can serve as the loom on which the FOIP is woven. But without connective threads, the FOIP and ASEAN risk having little impact on the regional-security architecture. CCIs provide a rapidly actionable tool to link the region together, act along the themes Secretary Mattis outlined, and achieve the principles that will transform the FOIP from talking points into a new, cooperative regional-security architecture.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Lt. Col. McDonald is a tank officer and China Foreign Area Officers in the U.S. Marine Corps. He has served in multiple attaché and operational tours in the Indo-Pacific and is currently a Military Professor at the Daniel K Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, HI.

Image: A U.S. Navy MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter assigned to the Indians of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 6 prepares to land on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) in the Indian Ocean Nov. 24, 2017. Theodore Roosevelt was deployed in support of maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts. Flickr / U.S. Department of Defense