South Asia and Beyond

China’s Coercive Behaviour Needs Proportionate Response: Maritime Strategist James Goldrick

NEW DELHI: Australia needs to have strategic weight, increase deterrence to increase lethality and reach in the region so that we can tell people ‘this far and no further’, says maritime strategist James Goldrick. Elaborating on his country’s plan to ratchet up defence capabilities in the coming decade to deter Chinese aggression, Rear Admiral (retd) Goldrick told StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale that Australia doesn’t want China to be an enemy but “coercive behaviour needs to be responded to in a proportionate way”. A lot of China’s behaviour in recent months has been against China’s interests, he added. Adm Goldrick favours frequent and constructive Indian and Australian maritime presence in the South China Sea, exercises with littoral countries and helping them build capacity. South China Sea cannot become a closed sea, he asserts. ‘We need to push back against what is not right’. And not all cooperation necessarily need to be Quad. There’s enormous potential for bilateral and trilateral cooperation, he said.

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Nitin A. Gokhale

Left to himself, Nitin A. Gokhale would rather watch films and sports matches but his day job as a media entrepreneur, communications specialist, analyst and author, leaves him little time to indulge in his primary interests. Gokhale in fact started his career in journalism in 1983 as a sports reporter. Since then he has, in the past 41 years, traversed the entire spectrum across print, broadcast and digital space. One of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Gokhale has moved on from conventional media to become an independent media entrepreneur running three niche digital platforms—BharatShakti, StratNewsGlobal and Interstellar—besides undertaking consultancy and training workshops in communications for military institutions, corporates and individuals. Now better known for his conflict coverage and strategic analyses, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years between 1983 and 2006, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 and also brought us live coverage from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009.    An alumni of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, Gokhale now writes, lectures and analyses security and strategic matters in Indo-Pacific and travels regularly to US, Europe, Australia, South and South-East Asia to take part in various seminars and conferences. Gokhale is also a popular visiting faculty at India’s Defence Services Staff College, the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the IB’s intelligence school.

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