Caught between the giants

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This was published 12 years ago

Caught between the giants

It's dangerous to pretend Australia won't face a fateful dilemma if the US-China rivalry in the Pacific worsens.

By David Humphries

Richard Armitage instils a certain wariness. A barrel-chested US Navy veteran, he's archetypal tough and straight-talking; not the sort to take backward steps and certainly not the sort to wrestle. Even with his reputation preceding him, however, the bluntness of his remarks to an Australian-American Leadership Dialogue gathering in Sydney left at least the Australian side struggling for breath.

Australia would have to choose between siding with China in its dispute over Taiwanese sovereignty or siding with America as Taiwan's protector, Armitage said, implying a high likelihood of war on the issue.

<em>Illustration: Rocco Fazzari</em>

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari

Speaking in 1999, two years before he became George W. Bush's deputy secretary of state and America was distracted from its Asia watch by the September 11 terrorist attacks that precipitated the Afghan and Iraq wars, Armitage was also making clear there was a price on American willingness to include Australia under its protective wing.

The Armitage line 12 years ago - from a man considered by both sides of local politics as a Washington friend of Australia - has renewed significance because the signals, albeit coded in usual diplomatic doublespeak, point to Australian-American agreement on us hosting an expanded US military presence here.

It's one thing to wonder how Australians might react to the possibility of American combat troops being based here for the first time since World War II, or even of America's minimum expectation that Australia allow it to store combat resources on our soil.

It's quite another to anticipate the Chinese reaction. It matters little how we would massage the meaning.

Beijing would hear it as Australia, one of the key beneficiaries of Sino economic strides, siding with the US in muscling up to China to thwart the latter's ambition of ending 65 years of American economic, political and military primacy in the western Pacific.

From the Chinese point of view, we would have answered Armitage's call to arms, if only figuratively. We might have dug ourselves a hole without immediately knowing it because for years we've hidden behind a phony policy construct that assumes Australia can shroud itself in a cloak of invisibility when the going gets tough.

In one sentence, Armitage exposed the delusionary nature of Australia's official mantra. Since the Howard years, and under Labor, we've been sweating under the misapprehension that we don't have to choose between our biggest trading partner, China, and our great security ally, the US.

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We've assumed we can continue to take from one the massive payments for supplying its blast furnaces and other raw material needs while keeping up-close and comfortable with muscled America.

That's because the choice whether to choose may not be ours to make, even though undoubtedly it's a choice we should avoid. The Chinese and Americans will decide whether we get to choose, although not what we choose. If either demands our loyalty against the other, we have little choice but to choose one or the other.

And if we insist on not explicitly choosing one over the other, that too would amount to a choice. When the stakes are high enough (and, here, the contest is for paramountcy in the western Pacific), even staying mute would be taken as unequivocal rejection not just of the solicitation but of the suitor, too.

Our leaders say we don't have to choose. What they mean is: "We don't want to choose."

Regrettably, this is not some word game about a fanciful Faustian choice. It's not about whether the US and China are about to go to war, a prospect so horrible its implications for Australia and the rest of the world are too frightening and extensive for discussion here.

It's about events shaping now and about how this Australian government seems blissfully unaware of foreign policy implications. Accommodation of a bigger US military presence here - still distant from more likely hotspots or collision points between the US and China - would be tantamount to explicitly aligning ourselves with American military expansion intended to directly counter China's growing strategic weight in Asia.

''It's one thing for Australia to think that's the best thing to do and quite another to expect China wouldn't respond," says Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the ANU. "It's a moral certainty China would include that overt alignment with the US as a significant factor in its calculations on its reliance on Australia as a source of resources." China would have to rely on Australian mining for next week, next month, next year, but it has more supply options longer term than we have wealthy customers.

White is unusually qualified as a commentator on issues of this scale. Before returning to academia, he was a security analyst, a policy adviser to Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley and held top positions in the Defence Department, where his duties included authorship of a defence white paper.

Australia's geographical location, says White, is of relatively minor operational value. Singapore, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Guam and even the old US navy port of Cam Ranh Bay, in Vietnam, are more strategically valuable in trying to box in China.

But America is keen to expand on its current presence here of naval port visits, occasional joint exercises and the joint spy base at Pine Gap because "I think they want the political symbolism", says White. "Interest is primarily diplomatic rather than military because it would be seen as Australia affirming to the world, to the region and to China that we are on America's side."

George Friedman, author of The Next Decade, a global forecast through American eyes and from a standpoint of American interest, sees Australia's value as more tangible. "Should any great power emerge in the western Pacific to challenge the United States, Australia will once again be the strategic foundation for America's Pacific strategy," writes Friedman.

His observations suggest US confidence that Australia is already in its basket. "For the United States, maintaining a relationship with Australia shouldn't be difficult," says Friedman. "Australia has only two strategic options. One is to withdraw from alliance commitments and assume that its interests will be addressed in passing.

''The other is to participate in the alliance and have more formal commitments from the United States. The former is cheaper but riskier. The latter is more expensive but more reliable." That could just as easily have been written by Richard Armitage.

White rates the question of alignment with America or China as "a huge issue for Australia, going right to the heart of our place in the world". The challenge, says White, is to avoid having only two options - "treating China as our enemy or our master".

"We've got to avoid Chinese hegemony but also avoid making China an enemy."

Maybe that's not possible. But it would be unwise to assume a relationship couldn't be built with China that acknowledges its enhanced economic, diplomatic and military powers without conceding an inevitability about Chinese dominance, and dominance over us.

Already, the US is a couple of steps ahead of us. As our leaders tell us we've got to stay the course in Afghanistan to support the Americans, Washington is telling us our alliance credentials will be judged on how strongly we support the US against China.

America has moved beyond the Middle East. Its focus is back on China - America's chief financier and a country tipped by Citibank to overtake the American economy within a decade - because China's resilience during the global financial calamity rudely awakened the US to the reality of its Asian primacy being contested.

While the US concentrated elsewhere, China's economy rocketed (economy being the foundation of everything else when it comes to national power), its regional diplomacy expanded and improved and its armed build-up, particularly naval, closed the era of American confidence that its superior technology would block the Chinese from sinking US warships, including aircraft carriers.

America likes leading in Asia; China wants to lead. That's what makes it so intractable.

Concerned that China could become the dominant power in the region, the US thinks the only way to respond is to stare down

the Chinese so as to push them back into the box of accepting American might to set rules for Asia.

Asia ought to have a future where the US and China play significant roles and neither is dominant. That, at least, appears the safest course for Australia in seeking the best of both worlds.

But sabre rattling won't do that trick because China no longer is more afraid of the Americans than the US is of it.

Yet, the Australian government and the opposition show little evidence they comprehend the sign language, unsubtle though it is. When the government announces details of our "invitation" for America to establish a bigger military presence here, they'll likely tell you it's got nothing to do with China. Be sure to tell them to pull the other leg.

Peter Hartcher is on leave.

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