Tgk1946's Blog

From Without America (QE68, Hugh White 2017) pp76-9

Historians looking back at our time will be puzzled by how complacently our political leaders have clung to their illusions about America’s power when the evidence that things were changing has been so clear. Had they not done so, there is much that could have been done to make our position today stronger. They could have begun to build the armed forces we will need when we can no longer rely on the American alliance, rather than wasting billions on warship projects designed to win votes in Adelaide rather than battles at sea. They could have begun to build the relationship we will need with Indonesia in coming decades, rather than hold it hostage to third-order issues like people-smuggling. They could have begun quietly but firmly to set clear limits to what we are willing to allow China to do in our territory, instead of flipping, as we have done, between timidity and petulance.

Above all, they could have begun a serious conversation with Washington about America’s future in Asia. Looking back from late 2017, it is hard to avoid the thought that we missed a big chance with Barack Obama. America was never going to do as Obama hoped and remain the uncontested leader of Asia indefinitely. But it could nonetheless have retained some significant strategic role, balancing and limiting China’s power and influence, and that would have been greatly to Australia’s benefit. It would have meant a new US role in Asia that maximised influence and minimised rivalry with China by making some significant concessions while holding firm to some non-negotiable principles. It would have required extraordinary feats of international statecraft and domestic politics to deliver, but Obama could have been the leader to do it. He never seems to have really engaged intellectually with Asia policy, perhaps because he was persuaded by his advisers that the Pivot was going to work. But things might have been different had he been persuaded by someone outside Washington that the Pivot wouldn’t work, and that a more radical and creative approach was both necessary and possible. An effective Australian prime minister could have convinced him of that, had he or she had the insight to understand the issues and the courage to present them forcefully. Obama was the kind of president who might have listened, and acted. It is wrong to assume that Australia could never have had that kind of influence; how could we know if we’ve never tried? We will never know now, because it is too late. But we do know that the chance for America to build such a role was there, and has now passed, and Australia did nothing.

There is a warning in this. If we don’t lift our game, we will fail to navigate the biggest shift in Australia’s international circumstances since European settlement. The signs of failure are already clear, as we risk sliding straight from complacency to moral panic, so that our capacity to respond effectively is undermined by a growing assumption that even a relatively light version of Chinese primacy would pose a mortal threat to Australia’s values, interests and identity. We can see the signs of this panic in the implication of Malcolm Turnbull’s Singapore speech that even a Monroe Doctrine model of Chinese regional leadership would be simply intolerable for Australia. In fact, it is far from clear that this is so — but if we assume it is, we will miss the chance to adapt to make the best of it.

That kind of failure might take several different forms. One would be to launch ourselves into a desperate and futile search for a new great and powerful friend to protect us from China as America fades. That would increase our vulnerability by entrapping us in others’ disputes with China, while giving us little reason to expect their support in return. Another form of failure would be to give up and not even try to limit China’s influence, even where there are clear options to do so. A third way to fail would be to flirt with the idea of defying geographic and economic reality by turning our back on an Asia that fell under China’s sway. This might have seemed wildly improbable were it not for the example set by Britain’s Brexit from Europe. It will be interesting to see whether Australia’s political populists follow the example of their British counterparts and agitate for Australia to escape China’s clutches by abandoning its economic opportunities and throwing our economic and strategic lot in with America, and perhaps with a post-Brexit Britain. It would be absurd, of course, but then again so is Brexit.

What would success look like? It would start, first, by acknowledging the problem, instead of denying it. It would also mean recognising that Australia’s relative power in Asia has declined sharply, and is going to { keep declining as Asian economies grow faster than ours. Today in Southeast Asia only Indonesia’s economy is bigger than ours, but (on PwC’s estimates) by 2050 Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines will all have overtaken us. In 2050 China’s economy will be twenty-three times larger than ours. Today America’s is only sixteen times larger. But it would also mean recognising that we have some real and growing assets, including over 1 million Australians of Chinese descent. It is too easy to overlook the vital and obvious contribution they will make to helping us find our way in a Chinese-dominated East Asia. It would mean learning a lot more about China, thinking a lot more about how to influence it to our advantage, and reconciling in our own minds the conflicting imperatives that drive us in dealing with Beijing.

And it would mean recognising that we will change as a country as we adapt to the new Asia without America’s support. We will become more Asian, of course — demographically, socially, culturally, diplomatically and strategically. That is a path we embarked upon a long time ago — back in Donald Horne’s 1960s, in fact, with the end of White Australia — but we are perhaps a little less comfortable than we were a few decades ago about the reality that our identity as a country is changing, at least to judge by how our leaders talk. Would any of our leaders today speak of ”Australia’s Asian future” with Paul Keating’s eager confidence? We need to recapture some of that confidence in our changing identity, because there is no going back, and the trends that drive us forward into Asia will accelerate and deepen when Asia is no longer dominated by Western powers.

None of this can be done without political leadership. We will not begin to adapt to the new Asia until our political leaders start to explain what is happening and to debate what we should do. It is not complicated. Someone — a prime minister or a leader of the Opposition, a foreign minister or a shadow foreign minister — just has to find the courage to say a few things that everyone knows, deep down, to be true.

China’s rise is a fact and isn’t going away. It constitutes a profound shift in the distribution of power in Asia, and is creating a new regional order in which China has a lot more influence, and America has less. America’s future role cannot be taken for granted. It won’t help to panic. Australia must adjust to this new order, by working out how we relate to China and working with other countries in Asia. This will require us to rethink a lot of things, to make some hard choices, and perhaps to pay some heavy costs. We will be changed in the process. Let’s get on with it.