Why America's Relationship with Australia Revolves Around Its Geopolitical Competition with China
“Who lost Australia?” retains currency in the American capital. Even if its use is not widespread, the phrase carries baggage worth unpacking, for it highlights a central dilemma for the U.S.-Australia relationship as it responds to China’s rise.
IT SEEMS remarkable that some U.S. congressional hawks are reported to have recently asked: “Who lost Australia?” At first glance, the very need to raise this question borders on the absurd. Notwithstanding the dip in Australian public support for President Donald Trump and the doubts that this key American ally, like others in the region, retains about the U.S. staying power in Asia, the last four years have seen Canberra emphasize its loyalty to the strategic alliance with the United States. This was perhaps best symbolized in the toast delivered by Australian prime minister Scott Morrison at the White House last September. On that occasion—only the second state dinner bestowed by the Trump administration after that given to Emmanuel Macron’s France—Morrison raised a glass in effusive salute to the past “100 years of mateship” between the two countries, mostly forged on battlefields in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East, and also to “100 more.”
Little wonder, then, that the Australian Embassy in Washington is troubled that the proposition “Who lost Australia?” retains currency in the American capital. Even if its use is not widespread, the phrase carries baggage worth unpacking, for it highlights a central dilemma for the U.S.-Australia relationship as it responds to China’s rise. Not only does it clearly—and intentionally—revive the bitter, partisan recrimination in Washington following the coming to power of the Chinese Communists in 1949, its use now suggests that some in America think their grasp on Australian loyalties is slipping, that China is getting what it wants in terms of gradually peeling Australia away from the U.S. Asian alliance system. Perhaps it constitutes, then, a none too subtle American diplomatic ploy to remind its ally of the risk of getting too close to Beijing.
But Australia is not and moreover does not want to be “lost.” After all, this is an ally that has hosted American intelligence facilities on its soil for over half a century Moreover, many in Washington, and Canberra for that matter, see Australia as an exemplar of how to meet the China challenge. The very asking of the question symbolizes not a crisis in the U.S.-Australia alliance, but a lack of awareness in Washington as to Australia’s particular circumstances when it comes to dealing with the rise of China. Indeed, it shows once more the tendency amongst some U.S. observers to take its junior ally for granted, and to demand positions that Australia cannot deliver.
For the United States, then, its relations with Australia increasingly revolve around its geopolitical competition with China. A new consensus has emerged in Washington that the age of engagement with China, which has held sway from the early 1970s to 2012, is now over. Australia, however, has never had an exceptionalist view of its own world role. For Canberra, while China’s rise does stoke older fears and phobias about its geopolitical location, along with anxieties about actual and perceived threats to its sovereignty, the Australian government has not yet signaled a readiness to announce the death knell of engagement. It knows, even if it will not say so publicly, that its trading relationship with China will continue to be crucial on the other side of the coronavirus. So however much its current relations with China are mired in acrimony and mistrust, however much its prime minister lays down clear and necessary lines over what Australia will not tolerate in terms of Chinese interference in its politics, Canberra will find it difficult to align itself with a full-throated, U.S.-led policy of containing China, or even a stance of “strategic competition.” For all its preparedness to “push back” against a more hostile Beijing, Australia may be ultimately unable to deliver the kind of hard-line that some U.S. hawks in Congress and elsewhere clearly desire.
Where there is alignment, however, is on the respective debates amongst political elites in Washington and Canberra over China’s most recent, aggressive efforts to assert its international presence and personality. These include the way in which analysts, think-tankers and journalists in both countries have responded to Chinese unilateral land reclamation and intimidation in the South China Sea, Xi Jinping’s saber rattling and legislative change in Hong Kong, Beijing’s ongoing repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang province and of course the ongoing fallout from China’s initial handling of the coronavirus, not least the tendency of a new generation of “wolf warrior” ambassadors to aggressively prosecute the party line on China’s response to the outbreak of the pandemic. Indeed, both the Australian and American debates over China had already reached a fever pitch before the globe went into lockdown. Much of this has been in response to clear Chinese provocation and assertiveness, not only in vital Asian waterways, but also its attempts to influence institutions and domestic politics in both countries. In Australia, some prominent defense and foreign policy commentators quickly endorsed the characterization of U.S.-China rivalry as a “new Cold War.” Although varying in their enthusiasm for the return of this conceptual framework to the parlance of international affairs—one analyst in Canberra warned of things “getting out of hand” if the Cold War moniker struck deep roots—there has nevertheless been a remarkable enthusiasm to reapply the labels of nearly half a century ago to the current geopolitical environment.
Even former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, one of the more astute China watchers in either country, concedes that we might be looking at “Cold War 1.5.” Indeed, in the Australian public debate more generally the rhetoric of the “China threat” has now morphed not only into a classic red scare but also something of a paranoid syndrome. Evidence of Chinese interference in Australian politics there most certainly is, but not on the scale which would suggest, to borrow the title of one of the more hysterical tracts on this subject, that the country is at risk of a “silent invasion.” Allowing for the periodic bouts of panicked agitation that have characterized Australia’s China discussion since 2016, the comments from some senior figures over the past twelve months have been extraordinary. Late last year, the former head of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, Duncan Lewis, said publicly that the Chinese are readying to “take over” Australia, and that its people “might wake up one day and find decisions made in our country that are not in the interests of our country.” Ministers and officials, borrowing the language of the American wild west, talk openly of the need for “scalps” from the foreign interference legislation that was introduced by the government of Malcolm Turnbull in late 2017. It is worth recalling that at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, Australians, like others in the Western world were often instructed, even if metaphorically, to beware “reds under the bed.” We are basically being told to look there again.
PARLIAMENTARIANS IN Canberra openly call for “political warfare” with China—one, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, suggesting that the government in Canberra ape Mossad and “take the fight” to the Chinese, “even if only to create effective deterrence.” Perhaps the most visible sign of Australian political activism on China is seen in the creation of a bipartisan group calling themselves the “Wolverines.” The formation of such a group mirrors developments in both the United States and Britain; in Washington, the reconvening of the Committee for the Present Danger; in London, the creation in the British parliament of a group of backbenchers calling themselves the “China Research Group.” More recently a global inter-parliamentary alliance has been formed to urge governments across the world to adopt a tougher stance on China. Canberra’s “wolverines” assert their preparedness to “speak out against China’s expanding power,” and take their name from the 1984 Hollywood film Red Dawn, in which high school jocks thwart a Soviet invasion of the United States. Membership of the group is now advertised by the appearance of wolf claw stickers on the entrances to their parliamentary suites. The U.S. ambassador to Australia, Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., has recently accepted honorary membership of the group. Its most prominent member, backbench politician Andrew Hastie, a former special forces soldier, has labelled the West’s belief that an economically globalized China would politically liberalize as an “intellectual failure” akin to the French delusion that the Maginot line would withstand the Nazi advance in 1940.
What is being witnessed now in both Australia and the United States is a toxicity of views on China across three levels—security, economic, and now the unleashing of a pandemic—coalescing into one. First, there is the fear of an over-dependence on China for certain supply chains—indeed there are calls from the most hawkish voices in both countries to decouple from China economically, or at the very least to dramatically reduce their trade dependency on the middle kingdom. In the United States, the economic grievance towards Beijing has taken the form of a prolonged trade war; in Australia it has been manifest in growing calls to “diversify” its trading relationships more broadly across southeast Asia, and particularly with India. Second, there is the military fear of Xi’s strategic muscle-flexing in the South China Sea and his use of the Belt and Road initiative to push an expansionary vision of the “China model” or “China dream” for developing countries. Third, there is now the anger over the outbreak of a lethal virus in China that has spread worldwide, taken lives, upended livelihoods, and diminished economic prosperity. All of these anxieties in one way or another touch deeper chords in the respective strategic imaginations of both countries—most particularly the fear of Communist China they shared during the Cold War and which in that period cemented the strategic bond embodied in the ANZUS treaty, signed in September 1951.
It is not simply the case, however, that the American and Australian debates appear to be increasingly vociferous in responding to legitimate concerns over China’s increasingly aggressive posture. It is that Australian governments have often and openly thrust themselves forward as the first and loudest in calling China to account. Not only is this explicable by the way in which “pushing back” against China has become hostage to domestic political point-scoring, it underlines the enthusiasm with which some Australian leaders and analysts wish to prove their anti-China credentials in the eyes of Washington. This was certainly the case in Prime Minister Morrison’s abortive attempt to initiate an independent inquiry into the outbreak of the coronavirus. The Australian calls for such an inquiry—originally conceived as one that would not be led by the World Health Organization (WHO)—came in the wake of a phone call between Morrison and Trump, and in full knowledge that the British, French and Germans were already pushing for an investigation. The prime minister went so far as to call for international health officials to have the same powers as weapons inspectors to deal with future pandemics, challenging directly Chinese sensitivities over territorial integrity and non-interference. An independent inquiry was ultimately signed off, but it was a far cry from the original Australian proposal, being sponsored by the EU and supported by China, but not by the United States. What counts here was yet again the perception—however inaccurate—that Canberra was doing Washington’s bidding. Canberra consulted no regional partners before launching the idea, leaving once more the view in Southeast Asia that Australia’s foreign policy is inauthentic, that for all its language about wanting closer regional cooperation, it remains a stalking horse for its U.S. ally.
The same is true of how the Australian government has dealt with the exclusion of both the Chinese telecom giant Huawei and China’s second-largest telecommunications equipment maker ZTE from the 5G telecommunications network. When Morrison’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, took the decision, one of his first acts after the Cabinet meeting was to telephone Trump and inform him of the Australian move. Then, earlier this year, when British prime minister Boris Johnson decided to keep faith with his predecessor’s commitment to allow Huawei access to certain components of Britain’s own 5G network—a stance now overturned—reports emerged in the local press that members of the Australian Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security had allegedly leaked details to journalists of a meeting in which the committee’s deputy chair had rebuked visiting British foreign secretary Dominic Raab over the British position. Outraged by the leaking of such confidential discussions, the British government subsequently cancelled the committee’s visit to London.
WITH THIS seeming determination to prove its toughness on China, how then could American diplomats even remotely be of the view that Australia’s loyalty as an ally might be “lost?” There are echoes here of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which had a rather bizarre discussion of Australia as a “torn country,” juggling its geopolitical reality with its Western European origins. Huntington was scathing about what he called the decision of Australia’s leaders at that time to, in effect, defect from the West, redefine the country as an Asian society and cultivate close ties with its geographical neighbors. He claimed that the then Australian government of Prime Minister Paul Keating and Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, in pushing so hard for Australia to locate its destiny in Asia, were motivated by the belief that economics overrides culture in shaping the future of a nation. What both episodes reveal, in essence, is that in the eyes of some Americans, Australia’s Western credentials remain in doubt.
Like all such phrases in diplomacy, asking the question as to “who lost Australia?” may reveal other, no less important meanings. Another possibility is its reflection of concern amongst American diplomats that what they hear outside the Australian capital is far more discordant than the recital of uplifting hymns of “mateship” and psalms of enduring solidarity that so often typify American-Australian exchanges in the seat of national power. Some Australian captains of industry have been noticeably audible in criticizing recent governments for being in lockstep with Washington on China, but the greater concern for U.S. officials is probably the waning support amongst younger voters for the relationship. Lowy Institute polling in 2019 showed that 78 percent of young Australians (aged between eighteen and twenty-nine years) agree that Donald Trump has weakened the U.S. alliance: this year a majority in the same age bracket (54 percent) say that Australia’s relationship with China is more important than the U.S. alliance. These numbers have been enough to prompt the U.S. embassy in Canberra to sponsor the creation of a young leaders’ dialogue, whose aim is to “equip the next generation of alliance leaders” and to broaden their geographic distribution across the Australian continent.
Doubtless too the popping of the question over the potential loss of Australia betrays a particularly nagging sense, especially amongst some quarters in Washington, that for all Australia’s loud roaring on China, it is still having it both ways—maintaining America as its security guarantor whilst shoring up its economic prosperity via its largest trading partner, China. Something of this American frustration was evident in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks during his visit to Sydney last year for annual ministerial talks. In unscripted public remarks, Pompeo told his Australian audience that “you can sell your soul for a pile of soybeans or protect your people.” He was refuting analyst Hugh White’s argument that Australia should not follow the United States into a confrontation with China in which America was unlikely to prevail, but his comments were widely interpreted as a barely concealed rebuke to his hosts, a sharp reminder, as Pompeo added, that “all that glitters is not gold.” This was much like the revelation in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s memoir where she recounted telling Tony Abbott’s government in 2014 that its drive for more trade with China “makes you dependent, to an extent that can undermine your freedom of movement and your sovereignty, economic and political.” More recently Pompeo threatened to “disconnect” Australia—presumably from the U.S. intelligence feed—if the state government of Victoria continued to participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative: comments subsequently walked back by the U.S. embassy. All of this comes on top of longstanding U.S. disquiet at Australia’s lack of preparedness to conduct freedom of navigation operations through the contentious twelve nautical mile zone in the South China Sea. That stance was again confirmed at July’s Australian-U.S. Ministerial Consultation meetings in Washington. Pompeo simply showed that American reminders to Australia, as to other allies, are likely to come more frequently, and with more pungency.
Pompeo’s prickliness in Sydney was followed by the assertion that on “the things that matter,” the United States and Australia were “the same,” and that the alliance was “unbreakable.” Yet again that might be read both ways—as the ultimate paean to a relationship grounded in shared values and history, but also as a reflection of American unease that those very bonds are being subjected to unusual strain as Australia finds itself jammed between unreliable belligerents. Pompeo’s words have been consistently echoed by Ambassador Culvahouse in his own speeches. In an address to a closed seminar of Australian academics and analysts earlier this year—convened to discuss the future of the relationship—Culvahouse repeated the words “unbreakable” and “unshakeable” on so many occasions, and with such strident emphasis, that it served only to reveal his worry that the alliance might, after all, be “breakable.” Culvahouse finished with a stirring peroration that “this is not an alliance in retreat.” And yet it would be difficult to find a credible Australian voice arguing such a case.
FOR SOME in Washington, then, it is what Australia hasn’t done that grates. Perhaps with the Trump presidency this was somewhat inevitable—the strains arising from the president’s quixotic approach to alliance management were always going to put the acid test on the sentimentality washing through the commemoration of “100 years of mateship,” a phrase relentlessly marketed in Washington by former Australian ambassador Joe Hockey. It is surely debatable just what Australia’s incessant appeals to the legacy of wartime solidarity have actually achieved in concrete terms. For as former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed in a recent memoir, the administration’s decision to exempt Australia from higher U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum derived from Australian appeals to basic economics and common sense—rather than plaintive sermons about standing side by side in wartime.
What then is the gravamen of American unease over the China policy of one of its key Pacific allies? A distinction is important here, for while the Morrison government has mostly steered clear of some of the sharper edges in Washington’s approach to China, there remains a substantial difference in the type of language and terminology being employed to label this new era of geopolitical competition. The steering away can be seen most clearly at the height of the coronavirus outbreak when the Australian prime minister stopped short of echoing Trump’s call to litigate Beijing for its handling of the pandemic. Nor did Morrison share Pompeo’s conviction that the virus was deliberately started in a Wuhan laboratory. Similarly, while Australia joined the United States in condemning Beijing’s introduction of a national security law in Hong Kong, Morrison would not support Washington’s position of imposing sanctions on Chinese officials. Indeed, he was at pains to stress to Australian journalists that Canberra’s opposition to Chinese actions in the former British territory had been expressed in a “very diplomatic” and “courteous” way. And in Washington in July, Foreign Minister Marise Payne was emphatic that Canberra had “no intention of injuring” its relationship with China.
Of greater import, however, is that the Australian prime minister has still not matched the rhetoric of the White House’s National Security Strategy which labels China a “strategic competitor.” For good measure, Morrison has said on any number of occasions that he sees no value in the U.S.-China relationship being defined by “confrontation” or becoming solely interpreted through a “binary” or “zero-sum” prism. Thus, the Australian leader has not stated unequivocally that his government views China as an existential threat to Australian security and prosperity. Indeed, he clings to the existence of a “comprehensive strategic partnership” between the two countries, however hollow its very utterance now rings. It is telling that neither Morrison nor any senior ministers have publicly endorsed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent Nixon Library clarion call to the “Free World” to muscle up to China. He has eschewed talk of a new Cold War, and, on more than one occasion, even defined the United States and China as Australia’s new “great and powerful friends.” That statement has its own resonance in Australia’s Cold War history, and was coined by the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, to define what was virtually a canonical faith in Australia’s international outlook—that Britain and the United States formed a protective umbrella for the country in a threatening Asia. But even as that phrase reflected the dictates of national interest, it also carried enormous emotional and sentimental weight: anchoring Australia’s cultural moorings in an unfamiliar Asian setting. For Morrison to use it in relation to the United States and China was therefore nothing short of remarkable—an attempt, perhaps, to clothe in older rhetorical garb the imaginative leap he wants Australians to make. There was at the very least the suggestion in his use of the phrase that Australia’s relations with the United States and China might come to have a certain equivalence, that these dominant two sides of Australian foreign policy could exist in something of an equilibrium. Morrison is known to have been personally pleased by this very interpretation of his remarks, but his staff has since advised him to stop using the phrase. And, indeed, given the recent tone of the Australian debate over China it would be virtually unthinkable for the prime minister to now do so.
Morrison came to office not having given much thought to foreign affairs. It is true that as Treasurer in the Abbott and Turnbull governments he played a major role in some of the key decisions on China—most notably the blocking of a Chinese state-owned company’s bid to purchase the electricity grid in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, and on Huawei. But his approach to the world has been mostly ad hoc since coming to office. There is no Morrison doctrine. For all his studious passing over of old Cold War glossaries of containment, Morrison has been unable to arrest the slide in relations with Beijing, a slide brought on first and foremost by new Chinese assertiveness, but one that has been hardly helped by the growing tendency of the more hawkish in his own party—particularly those outside Cabinet—to freelance on China policy. A national foundation for Australia-China relations, established last year to nurture a new era of engagement between the two countries, is now adrift following the resignation of its chair, who claimed faltering government support for the initiative. There is clear unease from party elders on the escalating tension in ties. As Morrison launched the idea of an independent inquiry into coronavirus, former prime minister John Howard, widely respected for his adroit stewardship of both the China and U.S. relationships, warned that a “pragmatic approach” to China policy was still needed. This was not a time to “suddenly turn the relationship on its head.”
THERE WOULD be no shedding of tears in the State Department or the Pentagon that Australia-China relations have been in a state of permafrost—at least in terms of leaders’ exchanges—for the past three years, with no thaw in prospect. China’s ambassador in Canberra, Cheng Jingye, as if to emphasize the point made by Pompeo and Clinton on Australian economic “dependency,” held a press conference in October last year to remind Australians that China’s thirst for Australian natural resources constituted the source of Australia’s prosperity. Up until this year, the Australian economy had enjoyed twenty-eight years of consecutive economic growth, a record amongst developed economies. More recently, China’s Global Times has labelled Australia “chewing gum on the boot of China” and a “dog of the US,” adding that China’s decision to sign up to an independent WHO inquiry was a “slap in the face” for Australia’s original proposal. These slurs have met with appropriately vigorous responses from ministers and commentators, and have served only to inflame popular hostility towards China. Australian public opinion strongly supported the prime minister’s initiative on an independent inquiry.
The bellicose Chinese rhetoric has now been followed up by retaliatory action—in trade, tourism, and higher education, with authorities in China advising both university students and tourists to resist travelling to Australia. Ambassador Jingye has indicated that economic sticks would be used to punish Australia since the Chinese public was “frustrated, dismayed and disappointed” by Australia’s “politically driven” call for an inquiry. In May, China not only slapped an 80 percent tariff on Australian barley exports for a period of five years—affecting 50 percent of Australia’s overall barley trade—it blacklisted beef imports from four major Australian abattoirs, which on some estimates comprise approximately 35 percent of total Australian beef exports to mainland China. Australian ministers have been at pains to dismiss talk of a “trade war,” but parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Trade and Investment Growth has already commenced an inquiry into diversifying Australia’s trade and investment profile. Its chair, another of the hawks, released a scarifying video that drew on a slew of Cold War imagery to depict the nation as being under virtual attack from China. And yet, for all the breathless talk of “diversification”—the assumption being that new markets equivalent to China can be found overnight—the distinguished Australian National University economist Peter Drysdale points out that over the period of these tensions, Australia’s exports to China grew by 4.3 percent from 2019 figures, even as China’s GDP growth dropped 6.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020.
Herein lies Canberra’s dilemma. For nearly two decades now its mantra has been that Australia could manage both the U.S. alliance and its relationship with China, that it “didn’t have to choose between its history and geography,” in the words of former prime minister Howard, or that it could have “an ally in Washington and a friend in Beijing” as put by Julia Gillard. But President Xi’s aggressive brand of Chinese exceptionalism, and Trump’s increasing belligerence towards China, is bringing Australia’s delicate diplomatic waltz to an abrupt end. The situation for Canberra becomes more acute as the United States moves increasingly along the spectrum towards the virtual containment of China, at the same time as the Morrison government recognizes—even if it will rarely say so unequivocally—that trade with China remains essential to its economic recovery post the pandemic. Yet American hawks rarely if ever take into account Australia’s economic interests—they assume that Canberra can easily find similarly profitable destinations, other than China, for its two major exports, iron-ore and coal. But such thinking is delusional.
There has been no shortage of American visitors to Australia in reinforcing the message as to where Canberra should stand, and that the United States is in for a long twilight struggle with China. During a 2019 speaking tour, Chicago University’s John Mearsheimer told Australian audiences that since the United States last century had dispensed consecutively with German militarism, National Socialism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Communism, it would likely do the same to Xi’s China. Indeed, Mearsheimer had no doubt that political elites in Washington and New York would “go to enormous lengths to portray China as the greatest threat the world has ever seen” in order to galvanize the American public into action. It is likely that he reinforced this message in his private meetings with the Australian prime minister and other national security officials. This hardening of American attitudes towards Beijing was also stressed in a visit to Sydney earlier this year by a former senior official in George W. Bush’s national security council. According to this interlocutor, any moderate U.S. voices on China had been “stampeded” by those pushing a tougher line. Even the Chinese embassy in Washington now has little inclination to seek out the views of those articulating the need for ongoing U.S. engagement with China. Hawkish voices are not confined to the Pentagon, with a younger generation of State Department officials depicted as “particularly ideologically gung-ho on countering China.” An official at the Australian embassy in Washington put it in different terms, observing that the various flocks of hawkish views on China in Congress—on trade, human rights, and national security—far from taking different flight paths as they had in the past, now fly in unison.
PRESIDENT TRUMP and Secretary of State Pompeo increasingly sound as if they desire an iron curtain-like stand-off with China, but how that is possible with China’s global economic heft remains unclear. The White House’s recent release of its “Strategic Approach” to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) might have been at pains to point out that Washington did “not seek to contain China,” but it still talked about “prevailing in strategic competition with the PRC.” There are some signs of optimism, particularly with the cautious agreement of both sides to push on with phase one of the trade deal. But a Pew Research Center survey in March found that 66 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of China—a rise of 20 percent since Trump came to office. Even if a Biden presidency sought to reset the tonal mood of U.S.-China relations, and encourage limited cooperation, it will still have to deal with increasingly febrile attitudes within the United States towards Beijing.
There is little doubt, then, that Australia is and will continue to be feted by Washington as the United States rallies allies to the cause of standing up to China.
Secretary Pompeo certainly sees the ongoing development of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad,” in that light. “We’ve built momentum in the Quad,” Pompeo said last September in Sydney, and there is “room for growth.” But the inordinate time spent by its Australian proponents in refuting its containment credentials is in itself instructive. Thus, in its new iteration, as one analyst explains, the Quad has “the potential to constrain China’s strategic choices beyond its maritime periphery, but not to contain it as the Soviet Union was contained in the 1950s.” This new emphasis on “constraining,” not “containing” China leaves room for some level of engagement, particularly on trade. It has been given its most powerful expression by the former head of Australia’s foreign affairs department, Peter Varghese, who has stressed that “containing China, in the way the West has sought to contain the Soviet Union, is a policy dead end,” since a “country which already looks to redeem itself from a century of humiliation does not need its worst fears confirmed.” Rather Varghese espouses a policy of “engage and constrain.” Unable to see Japan, Indonesia or India supporting containment, Varghese has expressed the hope that “Australia will have more sense than to embrace it.”
That reticence among some in Australia at the use of the very word “containment” will be sorely tested over the near-term, as Washington looks to erase whatever might be left of a longstanding Australian policy of strategic ambiguity where the question of commitments under the terms of the ANZUS treaty are concerned. Washington would no doubt be pleased to see the recent lift in Australian defense spending to above 2 percent of GDP, but they would have noted that the government’s recent Defence Update, by stressing the centrality of Australia’s “immediate region,” appears to exclude Northeast Asia. It is doubtful that this is blunt signaling to Washington that Australian assistance in any future U.S.-Sino conflict in the region is not necessarily a fait accompli. But equally the government will not mind that others apply that interpretation to the document. The essence is that Canberra does not want to be pressured to contribute to further U.S. military adventures in the Middle East.
Australian leaders will also resist implicit American calls to economically self-harm by diversifying trade away from China. All this is likely to profoundly displease the more hawkish voices in Washington. What it does show, yet again, is the propensity for American observers of Australian politics to get the jitters when its junior ally acts in a way not fully commensurate with U.S. expectations and demands.
THIS IS by no means the first time that American observers have asked this most fundamental of questions about Australia’s ultimate stance. In late 1982, a former U.S. foreign service officer, James A. Nathan, writing in Foreign Policy, raised precisely the same question, contending that “Who lost Australia?” might “soon be a significant debate in American politics.” Nathan at the time had been on an academic exchange to Australia, and was writing in the wake of ongoing speculation in Australia that the CIA had been involved in the downfall of the Whitlam Labor government, which had been in power in Australia from 1972–75 and whose time in office pushed the U.S.-Australia alliance to breaking point. Henry Kissinger told one Australian official at the time that Whitlam’s approach to Asia policy amounted to a “symbolic retreat of Western power” from the region. And so low did relations sink, most particularly over disagreements between Whitlam and President Richard Nixon about the end of the Vietnam War, the shape of a new Asia and the status of critical U.S. intelligence facilities on Australian soil, that Nixon ordered a National Security Study Memorandum to explore options for essentially abrogating the alliance.
By the time Nathan’s article appeared in late 1982, the conservative government of Malcolm Fraser that had replaced Whitlam’s looked headed for electoral defeat, and the then Labor party leader, Bill Hayden, was publicly calling for joint control over the U.S. intelligence facilities. With other calls from prominent academics for a review of the ANZUS treaty, Nathan saw only “ominous portents” ahead. A new Labor government, he felt, might well see fit to end the alliance. Nathan could not have known then that Hayden would be replaced as Labor leader on the very day that the Australian election for March 1983 was called, and that Labor’s new leader, Bob Hawke, would go on to be one of the most pro-American prime ministers since the Second World War. Indeed, it was Hawke, along with his Defence Minister Kim Beazley, who calmed rattled nerves in the Australian Labor party on the very existence of the U.S. intelligence facilities.
There is, of course, an alternative to how this plays out. If Australia’s China posture continues to harden, then Canberra could well end up being a more forceful advocate of containment than Washington itself, particularly if the United States continues to be more inwardly focused over the next presidential term. But that would mean the need for Australia to develop—and fast—not only an independent defense capability but a suite of new markets. Neither can happen overnight. The new cliché in the Australian foreign policy debate is that management of both relationships is “getting harder.” The reality is that such a statement reveals the continuing grappling within government in relation to its longer-term thinking on foreign affairs, and especially its China policy. It shows Australia playing once more for time, hoping that it will not be forced to choose, knowing though that the clock is ticking as both the United States and China make it clearer than ever the stakes involved for Australia’s future.
James Curran is Professor of History and United States Studies Centre Senior Fellow at Sydney University. He is a former analyst at the Australian Office of National Assessments and is writing a book on Australia’s China debate.