For a long time Australia's leaders, including Tony Abbott, have told Australians that "we don't have to choose" between the US and China. But Abbott made a big choice himself last week. He chose to reject stern warnings from Barak Obama not to get too close to China. He chose instead to embrace President Xi's Jinping's vision of Asia's future under Chinese leadership, and Australia's place in it.
Obama's warning came in his major speech
in Brisbane during the G20. The headlines were grabbed by the remarkably direct
attack he launched on Abbott's climate change policy. But much more of the
speech was devoted to an even more remarkable attack on China's ambitions for
regional leadership, and a stark warning about the choice that Australia and
other regional countries face as we decide how to respond to it.
"So the question that we face is,
which of these futures will define the Asia Pacific in the century to
come?" Obama said. "Do we move towards further integration, more
justice, more peace? Or do we move towards disorder and conflict? Those are our
choices - conflict or co-operation? Oppression or liberty?"
He left his listeners in no doubt at all
which choice was which. He implied that the US offers co-operation
and liberty, while China offers conflict and oppression. Overall the speech was by far the strongest attack Obama
has ever made on China's claims to a bigger say in Asian affairs. Despite his
own climate deal with Xi at APEC, this was probably the most anti-Chinese
speech delivered by any American President since Nixon opened relations with
Beijing in 1972.
By speaking here in Australia on the eve of President Xi's
address to Parliament, there can be no doubt that Obama's purpose was to warn
Tony Abbott against accepting Beijing's vision of a peaceful and harmonious
Asian future under Chinese leadership in return for a free trade agreement.
Interestingly, British PM David Cameron issued exactly the same warning when he
spoke to our parliament just the day before Obama's address.
But Abbott ignored both of them. Instead he enthused over
President Xi's speech to Parliament, which was in its way every bit as
remarkable as Obama's speech in Brisbane, and much more effective. Obama had
overshadowed his message and infuriated his primary target by his riff on
climate change which, important though it is, was clearly tangential to the
main purpose of his speech.
President Xi's speech, by contrast, was a model of
disciplined statecraft. It conveyed two simple messages - strength and
reassurance. Xi calmly and confidently asserted that China would be "the
big guy in the room" in Asia in future. And he offered warm assurances
that Australia could look forward to a safe and prosperous future under China's
regional leadership - as long as "we respect each other's core interests
and major concerns".
Abbott took all this on trust. He spoke of that trust at
the State Dinner for Xi after his speech. He praised Xi for his commitment to
democracy and a rule-based international order. And in what sounded like a
direct repudiation of Obama's dark warnings, Abbott went so far as to say that
"when I listened to the President today, some of the shadows over our
region and over our world lifted and the sun did indeed shine brightly".
This is, by any standards, a remarkable thing for Tony
Abbott to say. Even his warmest friends accept that Xi's commitment to democracy
stops far short of tolerating any challenge to the power of the Communist
Party, and his commitment to a rules-based international order is conditional
on China playing a leading role in setting the rules.
All this suggests that last week Tony Abbott went a long
way towards endorsing China's ambition to take over from the US as the
leading power in Asia. In a telling sign, Andrew Robb has since said that
Australia will join China's new Infrastructure bank, which we refused to join
last month at Washington's request precisely because it enhanced China's
regional leadership ambitions.
Yes, this is the same Tony Abbott who has, until now, built
his political career on an ideology rigorously opposed to everything Xi stands
for, and who has built his foreign policy on the most fervent support for the
US and Japan in resisting China's claims to regional
leadership.
So why did he do it? The obvious answer is the free trade
agreement, but can Australia's geopolitical alignment really be brought so
cheaply? For all the hoopla, the agreement is unlikely to do more
for Australia's economy overall than the equally-hyped US free trade
agreement has done - and that is, according to the government's Productivity
Commission, exactly nothing. The government estimates the effect of a free
trade agreement with Chinais a possible GDP increase of 0.039 per
cent a year, which is so near to nothing that it doesn't matter.
Another answer is that he is just hopping mad with Obama
over his climate change remarks, and has chosen to ignore Obama's warnings
about China and cosy up to Xi just to spite him. But surely he couldn't be that
petty.
So perhaps the best explanation is also the simplest.
Abbott does not know what he is doing. Despite the speeches he has heard over the
past 10 days, he underestimates how stark the rivalry between America and
China has become, and he overestimates Australia's ability to stand above
it.
He probably believes that what he said last week will soon
be forgotten, and he can return to his alignment with the US and Japan
against China whenever he likes, with the free trade deal in his pocket.
He perhaps mistakes such patent insincerity for clever diplomacy. He thinks he
has struck a careful and clever balance between China and the US, allowing
Australia to maintain a close alliance with one while expanding trade with the
other. In fact he is swinging helplessly between the two poles of regional
power, siding with the US one day and China the next, without any clear
conception of where we want to end up.
In the end we cannot afford to side with either of them.
Obama's speech showed that he has no answer to China's ambitions except the
uncompromising but underpowered resistance embodied in the Pivot – and we know
that isn't working. On the other hand Xi showed that China's aim is clearly to
exclude the US from Asia entirely, and that would not work for us either.
The only way to protect Australia's immense interests in
the Asian power struggle that came to our shores last week is to think for
ourselves about what outcome suits us best, and to act as best we can to
promote it. Whether we try to do that or not is the real choice we face.
Hugh White is a
Fairfax columnist and professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and
Defence Studies Centre, ANU.
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