Pearls and Irritations

The Foreign minister Penny Wong should recall Kevin Rudd as Australia’s ambassador to Washington.

Australia badly needs an ambassador who performs the traditional diplomatic role of trying to prevent a war: in this case, one involving Australia, China and the US. Instead, Rudd is promoting a new book in the US, “On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World”. He has also been performing his many other ambassadorial roles. In his book he argues that the Chinese President’s concept of “struggle” is one that need not always be peaceful. Writing in Pearls and Irritations recently the highly regarded Chinese scholar Jocelyn Chey notes that Rudd has well established anti-China views.

Although Xi has been China’s paramount leader since 2012, he can’t be understood solely through an analysis of his presumed ideology, as Rudd does. Chey says Wang Huning is the most influential advisor to Xi. He’s been involved in the development of Communist Party ideology since the 1980s, but is not referenced in Rudd’s book.

Regardless of ideology, Xi has not resorted to military force, unlike one of his more highly praised predecessors Deng Xiaoping who approved the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In 1979, Deng ordered a brief but brutal military incursion into Vietnam to teach it a lesson for removing the genocidal Pol Pot as leader of Cambodia.

In contrast to 1989, under Xi protesters in Hong Kong threw Molotov cocktails at police without being arrested immediately, as would have happened in Australia. Xi did not call in the military and the situation was resolved without major blood-shed.

While Rudd wants to focus on the alleged China, “threat”, a lot more attention needs to be given to how the newly elected Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto will govern. As Duncan Graham noted in P&I, “Even Deputy PM Richard Marles must now acknowledge that the nation next door he praises for its moderation and democracy is now a military dictatorship and a serious threat”. It’s not clear who advised Marles to say this – perhaps was it the chief intelligence advisor to the government, Andrew Shearer. We don’t know.

Graham said that after his inauguration Prabowo ordered his ministers and senior public servants to present themselves in US-style camouflage uniforms at the army’s training camp at Magelang in Central Java. They had to be up by 4 am to start exercises. Prabowo is on the record as saying democracy is ‘very, very tiring’ and ‘very, very messy and costly”.

Prabowo doesn’t necessarily pose a threat to Australia. But it is unlikely he will readily join Australia in backing the US to treat China as the enemy. After all, Indonesia enjoys large scale Chinese investment that helps boost its economy.

As well as a diplomat who can focus on preventing a war, Australian needs another one in Washington to make a forceful case to the US that we cannot support its economic policies that are harmful to Australia and the world. Meanwhile, the Albanese government announced it is considering a US proposal to ban Chinese software in cars which allegedly can impact on privacy and national security. However, tests made by Choice magazine show other car brands are worse, in some cases much worse. Toyota is one of the main culprits.

The US blocks China from having access to high-tech equipment, even though that could boost economies around the world. Worse, the Biden administration whacked a 100% tariffs on electric cars from China. All this will do is force American consumers to pay more for electric cars when their home industry is not becoming more competitive in this area. Faced with these challenges from the American side, our foreign policy should no longer be dominated by the simple assumption that China presents a military threat to Australia.

From the diplomatic perspective, Rudd has a history of playing the political “tough guy”. When he was Prime Minister in 2009 he was asked by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over lunch in Washington about the challenges posed by China’s economic rise such as, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” WikiLeaks later released a US diplomatic cable showing that in response Rudd described himself as “a brutal realist on China.” Brutal? Yes. Realist? No. He said supported a policy of integrating China into the international community – “all while preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.” A realist wouldn’t glibly canvass going to war with China, as Rudd is shown to do. A war with China could leave millions dead, wreck the world economy and offer no prospect of a military victory in any meaningful sense. A realist would not have raised the option of resorting to force against a country that is Australia’s largest trading partner and America’s biggest financier. Moreover, the US is by far away the most powerful military nation on earth. It does not need gratuitous advice about military preparedness from Rudd or anyone else. Instead, it could benefit from hearing from a foreign leader who counsels restraint.

Unfortunately, there are signs Rudd believes he has a special responsibility to warn the world about the alleged threat China poses. Never mind that no one knows what will happen to China in future. It might become a benign democracy; it may disintegrate economically and politically; it could remain a relatively stable authoritarian country whose trade purchases underpin Australia’s economic strength.

The least likely outcome is that it will use force to try to dominate the world, not least because it has long rejected doing so in its policy making forums. Its present level of military spending, about 1.7 per cent of GDP compared to almost 3 per cent for the US, suggests Chinese domination is not an immediate prospect. But Rudd’s imagined ability to see inside the minds of China’s leaders after 2030 now informs the unstated basis of Australia’s defence policy.

In 2008, Rudd gave a non-attributable briefing for senior News Ltd journalists in Sydney, during which he said about the Chinese leadership, “I don’t trust the bastards.” Never mind that he seemed to trust a succession of American leaders who lied about the appalling wars they engaged in. He said Australia’s 2009 Defence White paper would unveil a hugely expensive military build-up to counter the prospect of future Chinese aggression. When the White paper was released, it said it did not see any serious conflict arising with China until after 2030. Even then, it gave no reason why this would occur, other than to rely on vague references to the “strategic risk” posed by China’s growing economic success.

After being deposed as Prime Minister, Rudd became the foreign affairs minister who attended the 2010 Australia-US ministerial talks along with defence minister Stephen Smith, and Hillary Clinton and the US defence secretary Robert Gates secretary. Outside the talks, Rudd once again told journalists that China lacks a transparent defence policy – a call that sits oddly with the Australian defence department’s reluctance to provide journalists with relatively mundane details about its own activities.

In this context, two well regarded defence analysts, Mark Thompson and Andrew Davies. had just argued that China is completely transparent about its goal of achieving “the capacity to deny its air and maritime approaches to potential adversaries”. They said this was as fundamental to China’s defence as it is to ours.

A leading strategist Hugh White argued “We should not encourage China’s tenancy to bully, but should also avoid a dangerous escalation of tensions with our biggest trading partner. White subsequently argued there was no reason China should not be allowed to have a bigger leadership role in Asia. White was trying to avoid the ultimate policy failure of a full scale war with China.

An enduring victory against China in that full scale war would require the military occupation of a country with 1.3 billion people who show every sign of fierce resistance. In the end, US and Australian troops would march into the most vicious human mining machine ever deployed.

Share and Enjoy !

SHARE TWEET SHARE COPY EMAIL PRINT