Lowy’s dangerous fantasy of a stable bipolar Asia

Oct 4, 2024
US dollar and China Yuan banknote with multi countries banknotes.

Lowy’s fudge doesn’t work – Australia has to choose between peace with China or following the US towards war.

Don’t tell Joe Biden (“You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world”) but according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs not merely is the US not running the world but it is no longer undisputed ruler of Asia. ‘Asia Has No Hegemon’, we are told.

Rather, there is a bipolarity with the US dominating militarily while China is ascendent economically. Moreover, ‘U.S.-Chinese Bipolarity Is Good for America and the Region’.

However, such apparent scepticism about his megalomania need not worry Biden too much. For although this heterodox argument appears in what is the Bible of the US foreign policy establishment, and is purportedly about American grand strategy, it is really mainly a convoluted justification for Australia’s subservience to US militarism. The piece is written by Susannah Patton and Hervé Lemahieu of the Lowy Institute, ‘Australia’s leading think tank’.

Anyone arguing in support of Australia’s participation in the American attempt to contain and constrain China must address three issues:

  • Is China a serious, perhaps existential threat to Australia rather than a relationship that can be managed to Australia’s benefit?
  • If China is a threat, how does the relationship with the US address that? Who benefits and in what proportion?
  • Can Australia still manage its profitable, arguably necessary, economic relationship with China while being a significant part of US anti-China strategy?

Patton and Lemahieu tackle the first issue by side stepping it. Instead, they declare:

Without the United States as a balancing force, East Asia would be utterly dominated by China.

This is a hypothetical statement since the US shows no sign of leaving the scene and even if China were to become militarily superior, what then? The US has been militarily dominant for decades with no objection from Australia. There has to be some explanation why ‘Chinese dominance’, whatever that might mean, would be a danger. In fact, Australia is not threatened by China in ‘any shape or form’ and wisely Patton and Lemahieu do not attempt to pursue that here.

They spend more time on the second issue with the surprising claim that it is telling that almost every form of renewed security cooperation in recent years has been first sought by a U.S. ally rather than by the United States.

And first on the list is AUKUS. People as varied as Bruce Jones of the Brookings Institution and Paul Keating do not see it that way, but it is a necessary part of the argument that Australia, and other allies, get more out of the relationship than the US. Another thread is that these ‘allies’ add little to US military power, which is so superior to that of China as exemplified by:

Its capacity to put China’s military assets at risk from afar was demonstrated earlier this year, when a U.S. B-2 bomber fired a low-cost munition and sank a decommissioned Chinese vessel.

Slight problem here. The decommissioned ‘vessel’ used for target practice was not (of course) Chinese but American, and there were two used in what the Pentagon calls a SINKEX in July 2024 – the USS Dubuque and the USS Tarawa. In fact, it appears that the Air Force B-2 only ‘helped’ sink the Tarawa, which was actually sunk by a Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), fired from a Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet. This suggests that the involvement of the B-2 (which costs a modest US$2billion each) was a bit of a PR exercise, that it tried to sink the Tarawa and failed, and the F-18F was brought in to finish the job. A temporary glitch perhaps, but far from a slam dunk that demonstrated America’s military might. The US military faces innumerable challenges in conducting industrial warfare against a peer competitor such as China, and one of them is that the battles would be at ‘the end of a logistics train that stretches over 10,000 miles across the Pacific’. In this respect, the US is much more vulnerable than China.

Despite Trump’s claim of ‘freeloaders’, the reality is that the US needs all the help it can get from ‘force multipliers’, which is why it increasingly cultivates malleable allies such as Australia.

However, it is the third issue – can Australia keep its profitable economic ties with China while joining the US crusade against China – which is the centrepiece of the article. Patton and Lemahieu attempt to square this circle by constructing a bipolar Asia, with China as the economic hegemon and the US as the military one:

But the dynamic is not that of a rising power eclipsing an established one; it is a dynamic of two powers that will likely continue to coexist as peer competitors applying different means of influence: the United States mainly uses security partnerships; China mainly uses economic relationships.

Moreover, they argue that this bipolarity is ‘Good for America and the Region’ because it is stable.

It is here that their thesis unravels and gets mired in contradiction and confusion. They think that military and economic power can coexist because they are different but compatible; one does not necessarily infringe on the other. But then they blow up this happy picture by claiming that:

Bipolarity stabilises Asia for the moment and enables the United States to protect its vital regional interests, preventing a potential hegemon from disrupting the peace, and safeguarding the economic benefits that Washington derives from trade and investment with the region.

The ‘potential hegemon’ presumably is China, which they admit is leading the US in trade and investment. Why, then, would it want to ‘disrupt the peace’? Peace provides the necessary environment for trade and foreign investment. The ‘economic hegemon’ would have the greatest incentive to preserve the peace. The ‘economic benefits that Washington derives from trade and investment with the region’ might be under threat from China, but by economic means -better and cheaper products, investment more beneficial to the host country – rather than through military means at which, according to the authors, it is inferior to the US. Indeed, the very use of the term ‘hegemon’ in respect of both military and economic power is misleading. Military power is inherently coercive while economic power, outside some sort of colonial relationship, basically is not. If a person buys a Chinese electric vehicle in preference to an American one, it is because it offers better value for money. The person could ignore the ‘economic power’, spend more and buy American. But you don’t so easily ignore the barrel of a gun.

A military hegemon has specific characteristics. Military power loses its function unless there is an enemy from whom it needs to protect ‘its vital regional interests’. Moreover, it gains in functionality if there is a promise of new conquests to be made. Because of these differing characteristics economic power seeks stability (a word which occurs frequently in Chinese statements) and military power tends to be inherently destabilising, because it needs constantly to beat the drums of war and claim, as former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates does, that ‘We face unprecedented peril’. For the military behemoth, without perceived peril there is no profit.

Moreover, it is clear that in respect of China the US is turning to military power, and other forms of coercion such as sanctions and pressure on subordinate governments to ban Chinese products, because it is faltering on so many fronts- manufacturing, technology, infrastructure, shipbuilding, education and even governance – and the current election circus gives no indication that deep-seated reforms are on the horizon.

In these circumstances, military power is not only an alternative to economic power, but it is a substitute for it.

Patton and Lemahieu try to argue that their construction of an Asia with two hegemons, compatible because the source of power of the two is different, enables Australia to enjoy the benefits of peace – the profitable economic relationship with China – while being an enthusiastic participant in America’s frantic militaristic attempt to counter the Chinese challenge.

That is a dangerous, even suicidal, fantasy for Australia and other countries in similar circumstances, such as New Zealand, to embrace.

What we need to do is to attempt to nudge America into peacefully accepting the loss of hegemony and adapting to a multipolar world with countries equal in sovereignty, so avoiding nuclear apocalypse. Then we can get down to addressing common global problems such as climate change and poverty which have to be tackled cooperatively within a relatively egalitarian, non-hegemonic framework.

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