US determined to show resolve in Asia-Pacific shift
- THE AUSTRALIAN
- OCTOBER 12, 2015 12:00AM
Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Australian and US foreign and defence ministers will join military chiefs in Boston today for their most momentous annual meeting in many years.
Washington is determined to ensure that despite policy prevarication over the Middle East and Ukraine, its Asia-Pacific legacy will be one of resolve — heralded by the “rebalance” US President Barack Obama announced in Canberra four years ago — not one of failure and retreat.
It needs to respond to critiques that its “pivot” has become a pirouette.
The new Malcolm Turnbull government wants to impress its Asia-Pacific neighbours — especially Australia’s core ally, the US — that it offers a safe and reliable pair of hands in playing its full part in regional security, while assuring China that Australia will remain a predictable and co-operative partner for it, too.
Intriguingly, and despite Labor’s difficulties with the China free-trade agreement, there are leaders within the Labor ranks who sniff the vestiges of an opportunity, with the Coalition’s change in course, to profit from any appearance of lack of regional strategic resolve.
The timing of these Australia-US ministerial consultations (Ausmin) is thus exquisite.
It comes immediately in the wake of the conclusion of the world’s biggest regional business pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership covering 40 per cent of the global economy, which offers the strongest evidence yet that the US is back in business in our part of the world — that the rebalance is really under way.
The meeting also comes soon after the US visit of President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. The week-long trip was celebrated in Beijing as underlining Washington’s acknowledgment of China as the other great global power.
The issues set to take centre stage at Ausmin were canvassed in confidential conversations of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue last week in Honolulu, home of the US Pacific Command, which oversees the security of more than half the world’s land area and population.
Those conversations included leading political, security, military and business leaders of both countries, including senior figures from both government and opposition parties. They provided a platform for the sharing and testing of ideas, information and strategy between Americans and Australians.
A total of 42 senior Australian officers work within the Pacific Command, including a general who is deployed as one of the deputy heads of the army covering the vast region.
This AALD meeting was the eighth to be held in Hawaii since founder Phil Scanlan was urged by then US ambassador Rob McCallum to bring his franchise to the heart of US-Australian engagement, especially as in Pacific Command, but also in analytical power as at the East-West Centre.
The Australian team participating in that first dialogue was led by then prime minister Tony Abbott and Kim Beazley, the ambassador to the US.
The questions that hung heavy over last week’s meeting, filling conversations during meal breaks as well as in sessions, included prominently whether the US rebalance is real, where China is heading, and the future of the alliance.
Peter Brookes, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, talks of the unavoidable dangers of “strategic distraction” from the Asia-Pacific region, and of “strategic overload”, with unfinished business in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere commanding US attention.
The increased polarity of US politics provides another hurdle, accelerating a decline under way for some years of expertise and even interest in Asia on the part of the distracted leaders of America.
Pacific Command has statistics to indicate otherwise. It’s rebalance target was for 60 per cent of US military personnel to be based in the Asia-Pacific region — the command oversees a total 378,000 people — and it has already reached 58 per cent, though the overall defence quantums have diminished.
The new Pacific commander, Admiral Harry Harris — the first of Asian, in his case Japanese, heritage to be promoted to that powerful role — has visited Australia four times in the past two years, and anticipates it will be the country he visits most in his role.
He underlined his personal commitment to this relationship by meeting the AALD delegates three times within two days. And he is only four months into a four-year assignment.
Beijing’s goal is widely perceived to be a reduced US presence in Asia, allowing China to become the dominant power in the region. That push is displayed through its suite of New Silk Road initiatives, including a maritime Silk Road in which Mr Xi has offered Australia a big role.
China’s construction of a string of potential military bases, with runways and quays, in the South China Sea, where it has reclaimed 12sq km of land in the past few years compared with 0.4 sq km by other claimants over far longer, has reinforced this perception.
Last May at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, Defence Secretary Ash Carter indicated that the US would conduct further “freedom of navigation” exercises to insist on the right to fly over or sail near China’s reclaimed but mostly disputed islands, as he did with a CNN TV crew on his way to the dialogue.
There has been no publicly attested follow-up, however — although an article in the most recent edition of Foreign Policy, citing unnamed US officials, claimed “the US is poised to send naval ships and aircraft to the South China Sea in a challenge to Beijing’s territorial claims”, manifested in its “Great Wall of Sand”.
And Admiral Harris, who is a participant in today’s Ausmin, told a Senate armed services committee hearing last month that “the South China Sea is no more China’s than the Gulf of Mexico is Mexico’s. I think that we must exercise our freedom of navigation throughout the region.”
Such US actions are handicapped by its congress, which refuses to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, even though the administration cites the importance of nations adhering to rules-based procedures such as defined by UNCLOS, in its South China Sea stance.
US congress has also refused any change in the governance of the IMF or World Bank, thus strengthening the rationale for and legitimacy of China’s creation of new regional institutions such as the infrastructure investment bank backed by Canberra.
While Australia is an UNCLOS member, it has evinced no inclination to exercise freedom of navigation rights in the region.
Ultimately, the question Beijing is asking in the South China Sea, is: do the US and its allies wish to risk intensified conflict, even potentially war, there over a scattering of tiny islands.
China, which portrays the South China Sea as a domestic rather than foreign affairs issue, is gambling that the answer is no — which would see it emerge, in effect, as the country that matters most in that area, through which most Australian trade travels.
It is not only in China’s economy that, as described by Mr Xi, we have to become accustomed to the “new normal”. Its regional centrality is also being projected as another “new normal”.
Yet Beijing-based Tom Miller of Gavekal Dragonomics noted the poor turnout of national leaders for China’s military parade last month to celebrate victory over Japan in 1945: “It was designed to make it look strong, but it truly reflects a chronic lack of self-confidence. Chinese leaders remain insecure about China’s global standing.”
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has sacrificed substantial political capital to reinterpret the constitution to permit defence forces to operate fully in peacekeeping operations and in exercises, and to go to the aid of an ally — in a move that might be interpreted as a substantial contribution to Japan’s US alliance.
But Japan’s capacity to influence regional events is limited by the struggles of “Abenomics” to restore economic health.
China’s own prestige is suffering as its structural transition slows its economy, but it continues to drive most regional, even global, growth. And its leadership continues to focus on domestic issues including corruption, pollution and inequality.
The Obama administration has promised diplomatic, political, military and economic re-engagement with the region. The latter would seem to be vindicated by the TPP’s negotiation in Atlanta last week. This now provides the most urgent test of the capacity of US congress to perform its own pivot back to the region — since the prospect of its ratifying the TPP remains clouded.
And while China provides the US with its biggest long-term challenge, the chief existential threat comes from North Korea, whose young leader Kim Jong-un is rightly seen as a rational if cruel actor, not a crazy one.
The TPP serves to underline the team element now being stressed by the US as a differentiator from would-be strategic rivals including Russia and China. Militarily, the quality of American personnel and their training and technology are viewed as vital for continuing supremacy in the face of a regional arms race, with China’s military spending growing in double digits annually.
But the US — and Australia — have networks of friends, allies and partners round the region that Russia, and especially China with its 14 national borders, lacks. More Southeast Asian countries are now seeking more exercises with US forces than it can manage. Such “distributed presence” is seen by military experts as reinforcing resilience.
In past dynasties, China has leveraged its size and centrality by insisting on “tribute” relationships with neighbours. It remains, as Beijing University professor Zhu Feng says, a “lonely rising power” — one which looks, in part, to Australia as a potential friend.
Beijing sees the US not just as a team captain, but as seeking to dominate the game, which is to contain China, whose own response includes what is being termed by American experts as “coercive diplomacy”. China sees the TPP too as a tool of that containment strategy.
As regional tensions grow, Washington — while continuing to provide its groundbreaking technology to its friends and allies — is increasingly expecting them to pay for their own defence, and to be willing to expend their own lives in that cause, while maintaining substantial forward deployments, as in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam.
And the US military has to remain alert for the possibility, albeit now marginal, of a strategic switch back to deployments in the Middle East, even Afghanistan.
Near Hawaii airport, shared between civil airlines and the military, rows of army vehicles are parked in a yard — all of them still camouflaged for desert combat.
The perceptions of US decline — which have so benefited China’s rise, enhancing its space, and also providing an opening for Russian President Vladimir Putin — have been exaggerated, and can be rooted home substantially to leadership issues that stretch well beyond the White House into the congress and beyond, more than to structural problems.
But we are approaching points of no return, strategically and economically, with international liberal and rule-of-law values under widespread attack.
The habits of friendship and trust formed over decades between the US and Australia count for more, in this climate, than ever — and the alternatives, including allowing narrow interest groups to derail, say, the TPP or the strengthening of the military alliance, should arouse sufficient concern to demand a rare bipartisan response.
Rowan Callick was a participant at AALD in Honolulu.
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