As Modi arrives in Australia, the bilateral is only half the story

When Narendra Modi arrives in Australia this week, much of the focus will rightly be on how far the India–Australia relationship has travelled. This will be his third visit (Opens in new window) as prime minister in just over a decade. Trade has expanded, defence cooperation has deepened, and both governments now speak of each other as countries with a shared stake in shaping the future of the Indo-Pacific.

Yet the more interesting story may not be the bilateral one alone.

Modi arrives after high-level engagements with his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi in New Delhi (Opens in new window). He will have just left Indonesia and has New Zealand still to come. Taken together, the focus points to a strategic geography that is becoming harder to ignore: a maritime arc (Opens in new window) stretching from Northeast Asia through Southeast Asia to the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific.

Across Tokyo, Jakarta, Canberra, Wellington and New Delhi, policymakers are grappling with remarkably similar questions. How do they secure access to technology, energy and industrial inputs when economics and security are becoming harder to separate?

Those questions are producing a quiet convergence. The opportunity now is not simply to strengthen India–Australia ties, but to connect India, Japan and Australia in particular as three countries beginning to reach similar conclusions about the region they share.

The idea of an India–Australia–Japan trilateral is not new. The three countries experimented with such a framework more than a decade ago before attention shifted to the revived Quad. What is striking today is not the return of the idea itself, but the way the strategic environment has caught up with it.

Over the past several years, New Delhi, Canberra and Tokyo have each rethought how they approach national security, economic resilience and the Indo-Pacific. Security is no longer viewed only through a military lens. Economic security, technological resilience, industrial capability and supply-chain diversification have all become central elements of national strategy.

India now treats the Indian Ocean and the wider Indo-Pacific as a connected strategic space. Australia’s defence planning places greater emphasis on resilience, sovereign capability and regional partnerships. Japan’s updated (Opens in new window) Free and Open Indo-Pacific vision links economic security, critical technologies, supply-chain resilience and maritime stability within a single strategic framework.

More tellingly, they are now describing the same map.

Critical minerals provide perhaps the clearest example. Australia possesses the resources. Japan brings capital, technology and processing expertise. India offers scale, industrial demand and a vast market. What was once framed primarily as a commercial opportunity now sits much closer to key national security conversations.

The Australia–India–Japan Supply Chain Resilience Initiative recognised (Opens in new window) this reality early. Launched in 2021 amid pandemic disruptions and growing concerns about concentrated supply chains, it struggled to attract sustained political attention.

The same shift is visible in defence.

Australia and India have spent much of the last decade building practical habits of cooperation through exercises, logistics arrangements and operational engagement. Japan, meanwhile, has steadily expanded its security partnerships and become more comfortable discussing defence-industrial collaboration.

What is emerging is a recognition that maritime security, industrial capability and technological resilience now reinforce one another.

Over the past year, disruptions to global shipping routes, instability in West Asia, concerns about undersea infrastructure and intensifying maritime competition have reinforced how dependent Indo-Pacific prosperity remains on secure commons. At the same time, advances in satellite technologies, information-sharing and maritime domain awareness have created new opportunities for collaboration.

Seen in this context, Modi’s stop in Indonesia is especially noteworthy. The routes connecting Japanese industry, Australian resources and India's economic future run through the same Southeast Asian chokepoints. Keeping those waterways open, stable and secure is no longer simply a maritime concern; it is a prerequisite for economic resilience.

None of this means India, Australia and Japan will see every issue in the same way. India’s commitment to strategic autonomy remains fundamental to its foreign policy. Australia’s alliance with the United States remains central to its security outlook. Japan’s calculations are shaped by its own alliances, geography and threat perceptions. Yet each of these actors must confront the reality of a changing Indo-Pacific where the US is no longer taking on the onus of organising and coordinating cooperation. On the contrary, calls for burden sharing are growing as the US recalibrates its own strategic priorities.

But that is precisely what makes the conversation worth having.

The value of a trilateral framework is not that it brings together three identical countries. It is that it brings together three complementary ones. Japan contributes technology, capital and a sophisticated approach to economic security. Australia contributes resources, maritime reach and a growing defence role. India brings scale, geography and an ever more expansive maritime outlook.

For much of the last decade, the task facing Canberra, New Delhi and Tokyo was to build trust. That task is largely complete. The challenge now is translating shared interests into shared capability.

If there is a larger significance to Modi’s visit, it lies there. The region’s future will depend on the ability to connect maritime security, industrial capability and supply-chain resilience into a coherent response. The strategic logic for that conversation already exists if India, Australia and Japan are prepared to give it a more durable form.