Pearls and Irritations

In the wording of the Ministerial Statement after the recent AUSMIN meeting between Australian and US Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs, and in a subsequent on-the-record conversation, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles strongly endorsed both AUKUS and a greater US defence presence in Australia. Unfortunately there are questions about AUKUS which the Government has never answered, and about how the US Government sees itself possibly using the stronger military presence which it is establishing in Australia and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific.

At AUSMIN, Marles made it very clear that the Government is happy to have an expanded US military presence here, “involving every domain: land, sea, air, cyber and space”, and with a lot going on in Northern Australia (where defence activities could impinge on the position and rights of First Nations people).

Of course, close military engagement with the US is not necessarily unpopular with the Australian public. The US is our major ally, and saved us from invasion in World War II. We share a lot. And we are forever being told that China is “aggressive”, and the international situation is tense and dangerous, to an almost unprecedented degree. Our own defence procurement plan, especially AUKUS, even if it goes smoothly will not give us a much expanded — and adequate — defence capacity for decades. So is placing our current defence and security arrangements so clearly in US hands wise? According to press reports “senior people in Canberra” have concluded that this is the best thing to do.

But in a number of speeches, Foreign Minister Penny Wong has said that our aim should be an Indo- or Asia-Pacific where no one country is dominant, and all are secure. Does this apply to the US, our major ally, and the world’s strongest military power? Unfortunately, there are various points of concern.

The first is the extremely uncertain status of US domestic politics. Who will win the presidential election? What will be the attitudes of either candidate to the Asia-Pacific, let alone to AUKUS? Donald Trump is famously quixotic, and anti-alliances, and Kamala Harris is not experienced in this field. We simply don’t know what either will do.

Secondly, will any American administration be prepared to weaken the US military posture by transferring Virginia-class submarines to us, at a time when its own fleet is below the stated minimum, and its rate of building new ones about half the desired replacement rate? There are press reports of Congressmen and possible future office-holders being favourably impressed by our readiness to contribute financially (US$3 billion) to America’s submarine-building capacity, but they are only reports of attitudes at this stage, and attitudes of people who may in fact not become important players in the new administration, whichever the party.

And there are “get-outs”. A report by Ben Packham in The Australian of 13 August points out that the AUKUS documents that Marles is so proud of, now tabled in Parliament, contain provisions for an indemnity by Australia for the UK and US against any loss or damage, and to enable the UK and US to opt out at one year’s notice if they decide the program is adversely affecting their ability to meet their military requirements and/or their nuclear propulsion programs. As Packham comments, these clauses “come as both the US and Britain struggle to turn around their nuclear submarine programs after years of slow progress and cost blowouts”.

In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 16 August, Dr Elizabeth Buchanan, a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former Defence Department official, pulls few punches, saying that, “the current AUKUS plan is unhinged from reality”, and that “we have an overly optimistic and out-of-touch plan to arm Australia with a capability she does not necessarily require”.

The senior New York Times security correspondent, David Sanger, was recently in Australia. Asked by the ABC about the AUKUS submarine deal he had this to say: “My biggest concern is that when you look out over the Pentagon’s plans for the next 5 or 10 years, it’s about the transition to unmanned autonomous submarines, the kind that you could put, say, sitting on the bed of the Taiwan Strait that could pop up during a confrontation for either surveillance or for attack, and that by the time, should AUKUS get fully unfolded, in the 2030s, the equipment that you have negotiated for may look wildly vulnerable, because AI is going to help track submarines, and may look wildly out of date.”

So, even if we get them, they may not be of any use.

And then there’s China. In an SMH article of 9 August, international editor Peter Hartcher quotes Joe Courtney, a US Congressional Democrat described as AUKUS’s “most important advocate in the US Congress”, as saying that support for AUKUS is growing in the Congress “chiefly because it’s seen as part of the US effort to brace for war against China”. In a press release issued before he left Washington to lead a Congress Delegation to the Philippines and Australia, Michael McCaul, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said that in Australia he looked forward to receiving an update on AUKUS, which “works with Australia and the UK to deter the Chinese Communist Party”.

Is ”bracing for a war against China” the kind of approach we want to be part of? A war with China should be the last thing we want, and the thing that we should most try to prevent. China is our most important trading partner, the provider of about 1.5 million Australian citizens, and a major Asia-Pacific country, primarily concerned with developing its domestic economy, which is facing difficulties, providing a better future for its people, and playing a role in Asia and the world proportionate to its size and capacities. Since the skirmish with Vietnam decades ago, it has been involved in no foreign wars, and its rearmament is to a major extent in response to the United States’ naval presence in the Western Pacific.

The above is, of course, an Australian perspective. To the US, China has another, and unwelcome, characteristic, and that is as a “peer competitor”. Professor John Mearsheimer, a well-known member of the “realist” school of international relations, famously said that “the United States cannot tolerate a peer competitor”— really a surprising comment to come from a citizen of a nation that normally espouses the merits of competition. But China is certainly a competitor — by one widely used method of comparison its economy is already the world’s biggest — and Mearsheimer may be right, viz. the Congressmen’s comments cited above. Many Australian journalists have reported that advocacy of a hard line against China is the one issue that at present unites the two major US political parties.

A particularly worrying aspect of this is that in many civilian aspects of modern life, e.g. manufacturing and some advanced technologies, China is already on a par with, or has overtaken, the United States. Military strength is one aspect in which the US is still superior, and there is a theory circulating in China that the US is not only taking steps to hamper China’s rise, but also planning to lure it into a war, probably over Taiwan. But US Defence Secretary Richard Austin, using a formula also used by other very senior US officials, has said that war between the US and China is“neither imminent nor inevitable”, which is welcome, if not complete, reassurance.

Of course, China is at fault on some issues, and in terms of international opinion has sometimes shot itself in the foot. It would cost it little, for example, to draw in its horns in regard to the South China Sea, and to the Philippines in particular. In fact, it has cost it little to draw in its horns in regard to its obnoxious treatment of Australia in regard to some important trade items, which was widely condemned, and which the Chinese came to see had been a mistake. “Playing it cooler” on Taiwan would also help international perceptions of China, but the US has also been provocative on that score.

We often talk about seeking closer relations with ASEAN. Closer relations are good, but we can also note and learn from how they approach some of the major problems of the region. In regard to China, perhaps only the Philippines approaches the whole-hearted embrace of an expanded American military presence aimed at China, which our Government has offered through Marles. We should perhaps have thought more about the approach of our recent guest, Indonesian Defence Minister and future President Prabowo; it’s generally believed that while he may well make Indonesia more active internationally, he will maintain its non-aligned status.

While our present Government decided to support Scott Morrison’s AUKUS proposal in a day and a half, there has been continued debate and discussion, both of the practicality, cost and merits of the AUKUS project itself, and of the purposes to which a successful project, if it ever comes about, might be put. One recent venue for such discussion was a symposium at the ANU on “AUKUS, Assumptions and Implications”. Professor Ross Garnaut, former economic adviser to the late Bob Hawke, and ambassador to China, gave a major address. In part he said: “There is no future for our two peoples and there may be no future for humanity unless our ally can get used to being one of several powerful states in a world that allows primacy to none of them.”

It really is time for our Government to do better than its current ambiguous performance, with Wong advocating a multilateral Asia-Pacific in which all countries have a place and none is dominant, and Marles enthusiastically welcoming a current-day version of “all the way with LBJ”, which risks leaving us with out-of-date equipment. The Government owes it to itself, as well as to us, to do better than that.

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