Indo-Pacific Charter Gains Support in India, US, Australia and Japan

On 14 August 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, which laid the foundations for Atlanticist primacy for over six decades and led to the tectonic shifts in global geopolitics that saw the United Nations get formed out of the Atlantic Charter-inspired Declaration of the United Nations on 1 January 1942 that was signed by KMT China, the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States. On 15 August 1947, just six years after the Atlantic Charter was made public and despite Winston Churchill’s refusal to give colonised nations the rights of European countries overrun by Germany since 1938, India became free, followed by a procession of other countries in Asia and Africa. The Atlantic Charter changed the world, but from 1 July 1997, when Hong Kong was handed back to Beijing by London, it became clear that the Atlanticist world was giving way to the Indo-Pacific. The economies of Asia now outstrip those of Europe, while across the Pacific Ocean (or what this writer has long called the eastern segment of the Indo-Pacific, with the Indian Ocean forming the western segment), a new superpower arose that in brief years gave evidence of eclipsing the US as the primary economy and therefore power on the globe.Read More…