Will Trump’s hard line on Beijing ‘blow up’ Canberra’s China policy?
Jan 21, 2025
Canberra insiders fear the second coming of Donald Trump could bring pressure on Australia to disown its “stabilisation” policy with Beijing.
As Foreign Minister Penny Wong sits before that vast concourse of the American people on Washington’s National Mall next week, listening to Donald Trump deliver his second inaugural address, she will doubtless ponder how his words will affect an already fragile geopolitical order.
She will be hoping that the disciplined and diligent diplomacy on which she has embarked since Labor came to office in 2022, especially in relation to China, does not end up suffering collateral damage in what is likely to be the ensuing trade and rhetorical crossfire between Washington and Beijing.
Canberra’s policy of “stabilising” relations with China constitutes a genuine foreign policy achievement for Australia and the Albanese government.
It resulted in the removal of China’s punitive tariffs, the resumption of annual leaders meetings and the release of Australian journalist Cheng Lei (although Chinese-Australian writer Yang Hengjun remains detained).
But the second coming of Trump may bring with it pressure on Australia to disown its China policy.
This assumes that as Trump and his inner circle of China hawks – particularly incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz – bring a tougher tone to the US-China relationship, allies will be expected to follow suit.
The kitbag of Rubio and Waltz does contain blunter instruments than those carried around by Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, key advisers to President Joe Biden. They summarised their China policy as “competition without catastrophe”. Their claim, once Biden came to office, was clear: they were going to be smarter about strategic competition with Beijing.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong will attend Trump’s inauguration and meet with her counterparts from the US, Japan and India.
Indeed, the very formula that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Wong have used to frame ties with Beijing, that Australia will “co-operate where we can, disagree where we must and engage in the national interest”, was itself adapted from the Biden White House. In early 2021 the administration’s language on China was “we’ll co-operate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must”.
Trump advisers have already tossed that formulation into Washington’s Potomac River. In his nomination hearing this week before the US Congress, Rubio said China had “lied, cheated, hacked and stolen their way to global superpower status, at our expense”.
In those 14 words he gave voice to so much of the hurt and feelings of betrayal felt by American political elites at China’s rise. As a statement summarising the new American attitude to China, it could hardly be bettered. Rubio also said in that same hearing that the US and its allies might have to deal with the Taiwan question before 2030.
It may be, too, that new pressure is applied on Canberra in terms of its defence expenditure and that Australia’s economic relations with China once more become a source of frustration in the American capital, as they have always been.
Former Trump Pentagon official Heino Klink told a US Studies Centre conference late last year he was “100 per cent confident” that the preparatory briefs for Trump’s second term will feature one question upfront: “What is that country’s defence budget?”
If Australia reacts in servile fashion it will reveal the threadbare nature of our foreign policy towards the US. What is Australia supposed to say? Ask whether 3 per cent is sufficient? Would Canberra offer Trump a bigger margin on the AUKUS nuclear subs?
A more hopeful scenario is that Trump seeks some kind of detente, or even a “grand bargain” with Beijing. The latter may well be a step too far, and comparisons with the Reagan administration’s approach to the Soviet Union are problematic.
A position of parity
Xi Jinping and the broad mass of the Chinese elite still see the US as trying to stifle the country’s growth as a great power and intimidate them militarily. America’s hostile language towards China has been virtually unrestrained, even if the back-channel communication has been maintained. Some, like historian Niall Ferguson, believe this intimidation, on tariffs for example, can be followed by some kind of groundbreaking deal with Beijing, stabilising the last six years of a “new cold war” between the two.
In the meantime, the Chinese will continue to escalate their military preparedness, distrust Washington and seek parity – probably in the form of being able to threaten a limited nuclear attack on American soil – before they commit to any serious talks with the US. The Soviet negotiations with America at the Cold War’s height were, after all, conducted from a rough position of parity.
How does this play out in Canberra? The very uncertainty in how America’s China policy will evolve over the life of the next Trump administration means that Australia’s tight discipline on “stabilisation” with Beijing will probably hold – at least under Albanese.
Canberra insiders dismiss any suggestion of disharmony within the Australian national security establishment. They say the Prime Minister’s Department and Foreign Affairs are not at loggerheads over how to manage China with their counterparts in the intelligence agencies and the Defence Department, as some have claimed.
Indeed, the prime minister has already defiantly said that Australia will not change its China policy and that it is resolutely in favour of free trade, not protectionism.
It should also not be taken for granted that Peter Dutton will turn his back on Labor’s adjustment. Though his language on China may be more forthright, he is likely to continue – given the pressure from Western Australian miners in particular – a form of “stabilisation”, even if the term itself is not sprinkled through his speeches.
Upping the ante
It is worth noting that Japan and India also emphasise “stabilisation” in their respective relations with China. For the Japanese, that’s primarily about trying to avoid incidents that stimulate belligerence in Beijing.
“We are on the front line,” one official in Tokyo said to me late last year, “so it’s different.”
And last July, India’s External Affairs Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, also stressed after meeting his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi that “it is in our mutual interest to stabilise ties”.
There is frustration among some officials in Canberra at the expectation that Australia should simply jump to America’s attention. They also bristle at the suggestion that “stabilisation” equates to forgetting about China’s treatment of Australia from 2017-22.
Sceptical American sentiment on Australia’s China policy has a long history, reaching all the way back to the Cold War. Australian governments allowed citizens to travel to and trade with China at a time when Washington pressured its allies to do neither.
Hillary Clinton publicly stated in 2014 that Australia was putting “all [its] eggs in the one basket”. And there was even more concern in Washington when Australia signed an FTA with Beijing the following year. More recently, Kurt Campbell opined that Australia was for many years flirting with a different strategic orbit – for that, read China – and that AUKUS had got it “off the fence” for the next 40 years.
The conclusion to be drawn from US criticism of Australian “stabilisation” with China is easily deciphered: Washington preferred it when Australia was “out front” and poking Beijing in the eye.
But as one senior official in parliament says, with some exasperation, “What is the point of blowing things up with a superpower?”
If Trump ups the ante on Australia and seeks to undermine the foundations of “stabilisation”, he will have a ready chorus of support here. That chorus is largely populated by those carrying sour grapes from the experience of the Morrison government: the officials and advisers who copped a battering from Beijing but now watch Albanese and Wong cruising with China and reaping the political and electoral benefits.
Michael Shoebridge, from policy adviser Strategic Analysis Australia, deems “stabilisation” akin to walking away from “restraint and deterrence”. Australian Strategic Policy Institute CEO Justin Bassi laments it as “dialogue without depth and without real purpose”. Former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo says it is an “abstraction”, a set of “talking points that do not add to public understanding”, while John Lee, an adviser to former foreign minister Julie Bishop, dismisses it as “naive and fuzzy”.
Rowan Callick, an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute, defines the term as a “straitjacket” inhibiting stronger Australian responses to the China challenge. And the now-retired Japanese ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami, wrote last year that the term would not amount to much when the “gun is pointed at your head”, even blaming the rhetoric of stabilisation for stalling the Quad’s momentum over the past 12 months. But Yamagami no longer speaks for Tokyo, and Quad foreign ministers, all gathering in Washington now for the inauguration, will meet with Rubio after the festivities.
Stabilisation, not detente
Is all this criticism of stabilisation fair? Labor has not unpicked a single decision of the Turnbull or Morrison governments when it comes to countering Chinese interference or on critical infrastructure. On AUKUS, Labor is more American than the Americans themselves. It laps up every single statement out of Congress that seeks to reassure on the agreement. And the Albanese government has also been far more active than its predecessor in countering Chinese influence in the Pacific, as recent agreements with Nauru and others reveal.
Stabilisation, however, was never intended as a synonym for detente, or a prophecy that dangerous military incidents, such as those that have occurred between the Australian and Chinese militaries in the air and at sea, would never eventuate.
Some in government point out that Labor has gone where the Coalition feared during its time in office. Canberra, along with the Philippines, Japan and the US, conducted a joint sail through the South China Sea in April last year – the first time it has been done.
In November, Australia and New Zealand conducted a joint transit of the Taiwan Strait for the first time in 15 years. Canberra also led for the first time a 15-country joint statement on China’s human rights abuses at the UN General Assembly, and Treasurer Jim Chalmers directed Yuxiao Fund to reduce its shareholding in strategic rare earths miner Northern Minerals, based on advice from the Foreign Investment Review Board.
In essence, the debate over stabilisation amounts to one about how middle powers like Australia handle their relations with a rising great state like China. Only with the perspective of time will it be clear whether stabilisation was part of a system of off-ramps to avoid military conflict, or a temporary hiatus in a climate of ongoing strategic danger and contest.
Albanese’s plans to meet Trump are within the norm
There appears to be a great deal of consternation over when, precisely, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will first sit down with President Donald Trump. Last week, there was panic in some quarters when Albanese conjectured that their initial encounter might not be for some months yet, possibly when a Quad leaders meeting is held later this year.
The fulmination over the delay, however, ignores that it is well within the norm for an Australian prime ministerial pilgrimage to call on a new president in the year of their inauguration.
Malcolm Fraser met new president Jimmy Carter for the first time in June 1977, five months after he took the oath of office, and it was the same month in 1981 that he initially shook the hand of Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan.
June was also the month in 1989 that Hawke visited the White House to meet with new President George H. W. Bush, and it was September 1993 before Paul Keating entered the Oval Office to speak to then Democrat wunderkind Bill Clinton.
John Howard, as is now well known, did not see president George W. Bush until that fateful visit in September 2001, when his talks coincided with the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York. Kevin Rudd, ironically, has been the quickest off the mark in recent times, securing a March meeting with Barack Obama in 2009. Malcolm Turnbull saw Trump in New York in May 2017.
The critics will say Trump is different, that getting in his ear now will calm whatever turbulence may later erupt. But it might just be worth seeing the administration settle into governing – if indeed it does settle – before racing off helter-skelter to receive a White House welcome on the South Lawn.
Republished from AFR, 17 January, 2025