Australia faces a contested region
Australia faces a contested region
WRITTEN BY NICK BISLEY
12 August 2021
For a white colonial settler society with an economy strongly dependent on primary production for its export earnings, Australia’s international interests are remarkably similar to many countries in the region. It has a strong security relationship with the United States but burgeoning economic ties with the PRC. Much of its prosperity depends on international trade and capital flowing relatively freely across the international economy and it is but one of many small and mid-sized players in Asia, which has a small number of great powers. Australia is thus a useful lens through which to look at Asia’s rapidly shifting strategic dynamics and the choices countries are making in response to a regional context that is more unstable and uncertain than at any time since the mid-1970s.
From the early 1990s, when Australia began to fully embrace its regional destiny and started seeking security in Asia and not from Asia as then Prime Minister Paul Keating put it, the country’s regional policy has focused on three core interests: a stable and favourable regional balance of power; an open and broadly liberal economic order; and increased political and economic cooperation through institutions.
For much of the past three decades, the winds have been favourable for Canberra’s ambitions. US power and its acceptance by virtually all regional countries ensured the first of its core interests. Integrating into the capitalist global economy fuelled regional prosperity, albeit in selective and carefully managed ways, thus ensuring a broad regional consensus supportive of the second interest. These two conditions laid the foundation for a great boom in regional institution building to which Australia contributed notably. Now, however, the winds are blowing in a very different direction. Asia’s contested strategic dynamic means that achieving and sustaining these goals is much harder and requires rather different approaches than in the past.
Reconfiguring Australian strategy
The combination of China’s growing military power and its ambition threatens the stability of the old order and presents the very real prospect of a strategic balance in Asia that is unfavourable to Canberra. Until around 2017 Australian policy was guided by the view that while China’s rising power was disruptive it was unlikely to present a meaningful challenge to the status quo for some decades. Now, however, Australia is actively working with the US and other allies and partners to corral Chinese power and limit its capacity to challenge the status quo. This is most visible in the relatively rapid growth of security collaboration under the auspices of the Quadrilateral Security Initiative involving Australia, India, Japan and the US. But it can also be seen in Australia seeking to strengthen security cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore. It has also embarked on the biggest expansion of defence spending outside of war with the view that it needs a greater capacity to project force at distance than previously.
Whether others follow the example Australia has set, placing the military at the heart of regional policy, will be key to determining Asia’s emerging strategic landscape. Thus far even Japan, which has much greater clashes of interests with China, has not gone as far as Canberra.
A second key shift in Australia’s approach to the region has been the adoption of the Indo-Pacific construct as its framework for approaching Asia. The intention of this, beyond signalling a broader canvass of operations than the Asia-Pacific label that had hitherto prevailed, is to provide an organising principle to limit China’s influence. Binding India into this larger strategic concept is central to this effort due to the scale of challenges China presents. Without India, the prospect of containing Chinese power seems extremely difficult.
While Australia has been actively engaging India, and the Indo-Pacific seems ubiquitous in foreign and security policy speeches and documents, the substance of Australia’s regional policy remains firmly focused on the Western Pacific theatre. If anything, despite invoking a bigger strategic map, Australian regional policy has narrowed its focus with a much greater emphasis on the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Its self-styled ‘Pacific Step-up’ is an effort to counter growing Chinese influence in a part of the world where historically Australia has been the dominant power. Australia has recognised that Southeast Asia is again playing its part as the front line of great power competition. While Australia has ramped up its engagement with ASEAN and related entities, it has yet to fully devise a coherent approach to the region’s key powers, reflecting in part the complexity of the task.
Given its trade dependence and the openness of its economy, Australia has been unsettled by the resurfacing of economic nationalism driven by American trade policy under the Trump administration, the geopolitics of high technology, and the fallout from the COVID pandemic. Consequently, it has been an active participant in large multilateral trade deals, signing both CPTPP and RCEP. While its engagement with multilateral processes, particularly those linked to ASEAN such as the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus process continues, there is a growing recognition of the limits of those institutional forms to stabilise the region and that they have become fora through which great power competition is being played out. This has further constrained the capacity of these entities to shape the regional order.
Strategy above all
Until around 2016, Australia’s regional policy was marked by a balance of economic and military-strategic concerns. Indeed, if anything, economic matters took precedence in driving the pragmatic engagement policy that guided relations with China until very recently. Now, strategic considerations are the priority with economic matters subordinate to the logic of geopolitical competition.
Australia opted not to continue hedging its bets with China perceiving that the threat it poses to the region and the country itself warrants a significant shift in direction. Domestically, it established a range of means to curtail Chinese efforts to influence Australian politics and society, most of which were out of proportion to the challenge and which has led Sino-Australian relations to a low ebb. Given Australia’s diplomatic tradition one might have anticipated that middle power coalition diplomacy rather than power balancing might have played a greater role in Australia’s approach to China and the region more broadly. By making its choices, Canberra is helping to further drive militarised geopolitical competition in Asia.
Whether others follow the example Australia has set, placing the military at the heart of regional policy, will be key to determining Asia’s emerging strategic landscape. Thus far even Japan, which has much greater clashes of interests with China, has not gone as far as Canberra. But if Japan and other actors, such as South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam were to do so, then the risks of unvarnished geopolitical contestation utterly dominating the region grows significantly.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Nick Bisley is Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University, Australia. Image credit: Wikimedia.