Australia’s China dilemma

Sushil Seth

Because of its historical beginnings as a British colony, Australia didn’t need to make hard choices on the international stage. It simply followed Britain, the mother country.

During WW11 when Japan was over-running one Asian country after the other pushing Britain out of the region, Australia feared for its security drawing closer to the United States. After WW11, it became part of the US-led ANZUS alliance.

But now with the rise of China and the resultant strategic competition between it and the United States, Australia is in a serious predicament.  China is now its biggest trading partner, with much of its export income coming from trade with that country.

The predicament is, therefore, centered on how best to balance its relationship with both these countries to maximize Australia’s advantage.

This is where it becomes tricky, because Australia not only wants to keep its strategic alliance with the United States but also is seeking to further strengthen it against the backdrop of China’s rise and the perceived security threat.

To this end, it is providing new base facilities for the US military as part of its new energized Asia-Pacific policy, as announced by the US President Barack Obama in an address to the Australian parliament when he was last visiting Australia.

Predictably, China is not happy, as it fears that this new development is directed against it. And Beijing has let it be known in no uncertain terms. Australia, of course, denies this. It regards its ties with the United States as part of its long-standing strategic relationship with the United States without any anti-China connotation.

The problem though is that even within Australia, there are some important voices that counsel against aligning too much with the United States in US-China strategic rivalry.

But they are not politically important enough to make any difference so far because Australia’s political establishment, by and large, favors US strategic connection.

This is for two reasons. First is that Canberra’ US alliance is an insurance against any security threat to Australia, and China is seen as a potential threat as indicated in its 2009 defense white paper.

Second, by being welcoming of the US presence and engagement in the Asia-Pacific region, Canberra hopes that the United States wouldn’t one day simply walk away from the region, leaving Australia to its own devices.

 However, those in Australia who would like a more nuanced relationship with the US argue that Canberra should rather play a role in persuading the United States to share power with a rising China.

In this way, the US-China relationship would be managed peacefully, thus avoiding a potential military conflict sometime in the future as happened in the past between a rising Germany and the established European powers in WW1, and to Hitler’s rise leading to WW11.

An important proponent of this broad argument is Professor Hugh White at the Australian National University, formerly a senior defense department official. He has argued his line in his book, The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power.

It is believed that China will become the world’s biggest economy in a decade or so, thus leaving the US behind. Its military power is also growing, though the US will still remain the world’s strongest military power for many years to come.

Even at this stage China has amassed a strong military deterrent, if not denial, capability to make the United States cautious about exercising or using its superior military power against China.

Therefore, to avoid any mischance of a US-China strategic rivalry breaking into a war, it is considered necessary that US should accommodate China into a power-sharing arrangement.

Paul Keating, a former Australian prime minister, is another one cautioning his country against drifting towards confrontation with China as a US ally. He recently said that peace in the region lay in accommodating China as a “great power”.

He added, “The presumption has been that the foreign policy of Australia is somehow synonymous with the foreign policy of the United States.”  Which “could never have been broadly true, notwithstanding the points of coincidence from time to time in our respective national interests.”

He, therefore, advocates a more independent approach for Canberra in its relations with the United States. Incidentally, Keating chairs an international advisory council of the China Development Bank.

There are problems with this thesis, not with the idea of sharing power but its feasibility. First, it assumes power sharing as if it is there for the US to give and for China to partake.

International relations do not operate like that. The US might be the dominant power in the region but there are other regional actors that might not go along with a regional duopoly between the US and China. 

A solution to this might lie through creating a concert of powers as in the Europe of the 19^th century to create balance of power. Even that didn’t stop military conflict eventually leading to WW1.

In its supposed Asian reincarnation, this might involve other regional heavy weights like Japan and India. But China might regard it with suspicion as Japan and, probably, India too is tilted toward the US. Therefore, Beijing is unlikely to relish the balance of power idea tilted against it.

China might also find the idea of being assigned a power-sharing role as condescending hearkening back to the days when the European powers, including the US, decided what was good for China.

The humiliation of 200 years of European domination of China is too fresh in Chinese mind to accept arrangements, even of an enhanced power-sharing role, as demeaning.

Besides, who decides what sort of power sharing is involved? For instance, China basically wants the US out of the Asia-Pacific region that it regards as its own political and strategic space since 14^th and 15^th century. And the European colonial meddling, in their view, was a historical aberration.

Now that China is powerful, it wants to restore, what it sees as, its historical destiny. It, therefore, wants the US, as Beijing sees it, to stop interfering and/or encouraging some regional countries to put forward their rival sovereignty claims to South China Sea islands. The US is not willing to abandon its regional allies to China’s wishes.

In other words, it might be difficult for both China and the United States even to go beyond the first base of a regional sovereignty issue.

It would, therefore, seem that strategists like Hugh White and former politicians like Paul Keating are barking up the wrong tree.  In international relations, where national interests are involved, there are no neat solutions.