This is a maritime century. Securing the strategic domain of sea has and will increasingly become a shared concern and goal for most countries, including India. International efforts to secure freedom of navigation at sea and protect vulnerable choke points have multiple political, security, technological, defence, and economic implications that intersect and overlap.
The ongoing crisis in the Red Sea was triggered after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. For over six months, international efforts have been made to respond, but a lack of coordination has impeded their impact.
Effective coordination is not an easy feat in today’s embedded world order and requires carefully charting the maritime postures of relevant actors. Countries join and withdraw from missions depending on the leadership and the modus operandi of the end goal. It is true that most responses began as defensive postures aiming to uphold deterrence. However, the US and UK transitioned to an offensive posture, launching joint air strikes on the Houthis as a subset of the original operation.
European countries joined the US-led operation but started withdrawing after it turned offensive. Since then, the EU has launched its own defensive operations.
India preferred a solo naval response after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s visit to Iran failed to secure the safety of Indian vessels passing through the Red sea. While most commercial ships bound for India rerouted through the Cape of Good Hope despite sharp increase in cost and time, the Indian Navy promptly responded to distress calls from attacked or hijacked vessels and deployed assets accordingly.
Spanning global maritime shipping routes and critical energy and telecommunications infrastructure, the Red Sea crisis unveils how far-reaching terrorist activities can subvert international trade and stability.
International response
In December 2023, the US launched Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) in the Red Sea, which was joined by numerous countries, including the UK, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand. The operation’s original defensive mandate motivated many countries to come on board.
However, in January 2024, the US and UK launched Operation Poseidon Archer (OPA), an escalatory spiral of coordinated strikes that triggered retaliation from the Houthis. Some countries, like France, expressed reservations about this escalation.
Around the same time, the EU began asserting its own agency, preferring a defensive posture. Instead of expanding the mandate of the ongoing Operation Atalanta, which had a different agenda, the EU went ahead with Spain’s demand to form a separate mission for the Red Sea called the EU Naval Force (EUNAVFOR) Aspides. Launched on 19 February 2024, under the operational command of Rear Admiral Vasielios Gryparis from Greece, Operation Aspides had a purely defensive mandate.
Aspides is complemented by another EU Naval diplomacy tool, the Coordinated Maritime Presence (CMP). While EUNAVFOR missions are under EU command, CMP operations and assets are under the national command of member states on a voluntary basis.
Additionally, the French-led Agenor mission supports Aspides by providing a military track to European maritime awareness in the Strait of Hormuz, outside the Common Security and Defense Policy framework.
Independent agency
The formation of Aspides separate from OPG has a precedent in 2008 when the EU launched its first EUNAVFOR mission, Atalanta, separately from the US-led Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) operations to consolidate its posture as a strong maritime actor. Since then, the EU has taken an active but defensive posture in strategic areas of increasing confrontation. These activities predate the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy in 2021 and the revised Maritime Security Strategy and Action Plan endorsed in October 2023. These efforts aim to complement the EU’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific by connecting existing frameworks and operations, reviewing mandates, and pushing for international partnerships.
The EU aims to play a robust role in the maritime domain by boosting international cooperation and investing in maritime awareness, among other steps.
The chain of events shows a successive evolution of the EU’s independent naval diplomacy toward securing the strategic domain of seas by preferring a defensive posture.
India’s response
India has been pragmatic when joining the maritime activities of the West. US-led operations such as Sentinel and OPG are not preferred engagements for India.
However, unprecedentedly, to expand cooperation with major maritime powers, the Indian Navy joined the CMF (when its command was under Canada) in November 2023. Subsequently, the INS Talwar, a Talwar-class frigate, conducted its first interdiction of illicit narcotics as a CMF member on 13 April 2024. For many years, the Indian Navy has been cautious about the US-led CMF because the western Indian Ocean region is not part of the US’ spatial construct of the Indo-Pacific and remains under the US Central Command (CENTCOM). The Pakistani Navy has been cooperating with the CMF in more tangible ways for years. Therefore, India has maintained a restrained posture regarding the CMF.
However, when it comes to the EU, the bloc’s vision for the Indo-Pacific is more aligned with India’s, creating an opportunity for the two sides to converge deeper on defensive postures by enabling frameworks around maritime awareness, which is key to maritime security.
Pathway to better convergence
New Delhi has been contributing to Operation Atalanta and is likely to join Aspides as well, provided EU remains committed to a defensive and independent posturing. India has also conducted joint exercises with European vessels deployed under the CMP in the Gulf of Guinea in October 2023. Additionally, India has been engaging another European project, Enhancing Security Cooperation in and with Asia ( ESIWA) which is steered by EU, France and Germany and has a major vertical on maritime security.
The India-EU Maritime Security Dialogue, established in 2021 and last held in October 2023, as well as the India-EU latest consultations on Security and Defence last held on 6 May 2024, should brainstorm exchanges on maritime capacity-building initiatives where India and the EU can converge most meaningfully.
The EU launched the Critical Maritime Routes Indo-Pacific (CRIMARIO) project in 2015, predating its Indo-Pacific Strategy of 2021. CRIMARIO-1 was founded with an ambition of supporting other like-minded partners in the western Indian Ocean. CRIMARIO-1’s mandate was expanded to CRIMARIO-2 through a second phase from 2020-2024, evolving towards the Western Pacific, closer to India. CRIMARIO-2 not only complements the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy but also fits perfectly into India’s maritime vision and enhances maritime domain awareness (MDA) through platforms such as the IFC-IOR and other plurilateral platforms like the Quad-led Indo-Pacific MDA initiatives.
Time is right for the EU to expand the mandate of CRIMARIO-2 to next five years, 2025-2030, with a focus on MDA convergence with partner countries in the region. In its third mandate, it will be particularly useful to connect CRIMARIO with Aspides and European Maritime Awareness in the Strait of Hormuz (EMASoH) for a big picture of European MDA capabilities to emerge. MDA is the bedrock of tackling the complex terrain of grey zone challenges in sea.
New Delhi and Brussels need to iron out operational divergences, such as using different portals for sharing information among members, but these remain minor issues. The larger political question is the commitment to creating a strong defence posture that can deter these lapses.
When MDA can be shared through enabling and complementing frameworks among friendly countries in the region with a commitment to defensive postures, jointly conducted activities will become more fruitful. This remains a fundamental step in putting together a more effective multi-stakeholder security architecture in the vast Indo-Pacific domain. The region operates in the fear of great power contestation escalating in the future, but does little to collectively tackle the grey zone threats it is infested with today.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)