Asia posturing. At least the Americans discern no contradiction in Australian strategic policy, but the government continues to contort its messaging.
At least the Americans call it as it is.
Over the past few weeks, Washington’s language has again revealed the raw power equation in US-Australia relations. And it has overwritten the government’s consistently careful script about wanting to deal with Southeast Asia free of the prism of great power rivalry.
Remember this the next time you hear the resident American stooge in Australia say that Canberra is more important to the US than ever. They’re right; but only because successive recent Australian Governments have readily and steadily agreed to a greater US military presence in the country with neither public nor parliamentary debate.
It began with US congressman Michael McCaul’s visit to Australia in mid-August. McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, put the capstone on just what the rotations of marines and the network of American airfields and facilities across northern and Western Australia really mean.
He said Australia had become the ‘‘central base of operations’’ in the region for the US military’s plan to ‘‘counter the [China] threat’’. Just don’t expect to hear an Australian prime minister or minister say it.
Then, at a Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga, US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell spoke as if he were an imperial proconsul to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Albanese, lacking again the gravitas of the office he holds, boasted to his ‘‘mate’’ of the regional policing agreement he had just steered to conclusion. He even asked Campbell to foot half the bill. What he got instead was American power. ‘‘We have given you the lane’’ in the Pacific, Campbell said, as if a puppeteer coordinating Albanese at the end of a string, so ‘‘take the lane’’.
These statements carried more than a faint echo of how previous US officials have talked about Australia. As Henry Kissinger remarked privately to Nixon in early 1972 after truculent criticism of Washington’s Vietnam policies, the ‘‘Australians will need us one hell of a lot more than we need them’’ at war’s end.
Or when John F. Kennedy’s adviser Bob Komer asked pointedly a decade before, ‘‘how long will Australia’s resentment last’’? That was after Washington intervened in the dispute between Indonesia and the Dutch over West New Guinea, telling Canberra that support for Indonesian nationalism took precedence over bolstering Indonesian Communists.
The McCaul and Campbell comments lent almost the perfect, if ironic, backdrop, to Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s speech at last week’s Australian Financial Review Asia Summit.
Because in a room of Asian policymakers, business figures and policy wonks, Wong commenced her remarks saying that Australia above all had to ‘‘prioritise its relationship with the United States’’.
Yet Wong chafes at an Australian debate she says is obsessed by the US/China binary rather than what happens in the region outside that framework. But this is the very binary that defines her ‘‘priority’’, manifest by AUKUS and creeping US basing.
Wong is also exasperated that Australian business has not yet taken up in sufficient numbers the urging of the Moore report to plant a firmer commercial tread in Southeast Asia.
Exasperated that as a result, Australia looks like it will be left behind, she pointed out that Canada quadrupled, and the US and China doubled, their investment into the region between 2016 and 2020. As former DFAT secretary Peter Varghese laments, ‘‘governments have done a reasonable job of Asian engagement but business and the broader community have lost focus since the Asian Century White Paper of 2013’’.
Varghese worries too about the trend towards reductionist policy thinking, but his laser beam is more trained on what the outcomes might be, not what is being talked about. He warns of the ‘‘real risks of overreach in securitising economic policy and forcing trade and investment into a zero-sum framework which hugs the contours of a bipolar world’’. Australia ‘‘needs to find a way’’, he says, ‘‘to reinvigorate regional institutions notwithstanding the strategic fault line in the region’’.
Wong’s frustration stems partly from the lack of a coherent framework for assessing the world. One moment it is a region ‘‘where no one country dominates’’, the next she recalls former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s positioning of America as the ‘‘indispensable nation’’. Regional capitals are long used to the rote articulation of ‘‘ASEAN centrality’’ in Australian speeches being drowned out by more boisterous language on the Quad, AUKUS and NATO’s Indo-Pacific imaginary.
Former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo has noted this very contradiction at the heart of Australian strategy.
Current Australian foreign policy, he notes, says the region should not be ‘‘defined by great power rivalry’’, a noble goal. But he says, ‘‘Our defence policy presumes not only that great power rivalry is something we need to engage with, but we’ve picked a side in great power rivalry and we’re quietly, incrementally and arguably, in a way that’s not fully transparent – putting in place essential building blocks of what US congressman McCaul said when he visited here’’.
The importance of what Pezzullo is saying is obvious. Here is the first China hawk to call out without equivocation the choice Australia has made and stress the consequences that come with it.
The US military aircraft are ‘‘not going to come here with anything other than their assigned war load, the load that they would take into battle’’, Pezzullo notes. It’s also that Australia is now even more of a target for the Chinese than at any point since the establishment of the US intelligence facility at North West Cape in 1963.
Shared from the Financial Review eEdition, September 09, 2024
James Curran is Professor of Modern History and senior fellow at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre. He is writing a book on Australia’s China debate for New South Press.
James Curran is the AFR’s International Editor and Professor of Modern History at the Sydney University.
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