Romance, Power, and Thinking Like a Think Tank

Perhaps the most prominent Australian think tank, The Lowy Institute, has an Asia Power Index that it issues annually and the 2024 version just came out.

The top line findings, at first blush, are the kind of thing that might make you fall asleep:

• China’s plateauing power: China’s power is neither surging nor collapsing. It is plateauing at a level below that of the United States, but still well above any Asian competitors.

• Resilient US power: The United States has buttressed its standing in Asia — though it is losing ground to China on Military Capability.

• India rising slowly: India has overtaken Japan to become the third­ranked power in Asia, but its clout remains below the potential promised by its resources.

• Japan is hardening up: Japan is changing from an economic and cultural powerhouse to one much more active in defence and security cooperation.

• Southeast Asian powers on the rise: Southeast Asia’s heavyweights are getting heavier: Indonesia’s power has grown more than any other Index country since 2018.

I’m not sure what normal people are supposed to do with this kind of information, but that’s the thing—this ain’t for “normal” people.

Look, I’m not mad at the scorpion for being a scorpion. Any think tank worth its salt has to speak in the language of charts, graphs, and indexes from time to time; nothing wrong with that. Also, I have no beef with The Lowy Institute per se, which has been more intellectually pluralistic than some of its counterparts and does publish some insightful analysis. They are among the most rigorous and honest brokers within a larger Australian military-industrial-academic complex that Sian Troth wrote about so penetratingly.

But most think tanks that touch foreign policy exist to manufacture consent for the going concerns of the national security state—however fluid, vibes-based, and empirically unfounded those concerns may be. That’s precisely what’s happening here at a structural level, perhaps in spite of the authors’ intentions.

The index in this case has been created with an admirable degree of transparency, and that tells me they eat the dog food they’re selling. And to be sure, the findings here are, to a great extent, inoffensive, even banal.

But these findings have a horse-race quality and read like an affirmation of conventional wisdoms that are at best misleading. They’re based on a methodology that has problems and is highly contestable. And all of those issues distract from what’s really going on.