Australia
will face many, relatively modest choices about how to balance its economic
dependence on China, its alliance with the United States, and its desire to
bolster the regional rules that Beijing increasingly transgresses.
A senior U.S. Army officer recently generated headlines on both sides of
the Pacific by highlighting the strategic and economic challenges facing
Australia today. Keen to maintain close ties with both their American ally and
their chief economic partner in China, Australian officials are today conscious
of the potential tensions that lie ahead.
According to Col. Tom Hanson, the time has come for Australians “to make
a choice.” The Assistant Chief of Staff at U.S. Army Pacific, Hanson noted that
“it’s very difficult to walk this fine line between balancing the alliance with
the United States and the economic engagement with China,” adding that “there’s
going to have to be a decision as to which one is more of a vital national
interest for Australia.”
A Pentagon spokesperson immediately dismissed the comments as personal
views and stressed that “the idea that Australia, or any country” needs to
choose between the United States and China “presents a false choice.”
Yet the notion that there is a looming “China choice” facing Australia
is gathering support among portions of its strategic elite. Some foreign policy
leaders hold that, faced with such a dilemma, their country should double down
on the U.S. alliance, whatever the economic costs. Others believe that Canberra
would do well to be on better terms with Beijing in light of its trade and
investment, China’s regional ascendance, and doubts about American staying
power in Asia. And still others advocate a more neutral Australian course in
the future, neither aligning with China nor signing up for every American
effort to resist Beijing’s assertiveness.
The reality is more complex. An all-or-nothing China choice would damage
both Australian and American interests, and in Canberra such a dilemma should
be viewed as a policy failure rather than the inevitable outcome of economics
and geopolitical competition. Rather than single, stark option, Australia will
instead face a series of “China choices” on discrete issues that require
Canberra to balance its economic and security risk. And therein lie the
challenges.
Australia’s close and growing commercial ties with China have fueled its
domestic economy but created worrying asymmetric vulnerabilities. A third of
Australian exports now go to China, a higher percentage than any other G20
country, and China buys more than half of its exported iron ore. Chinese
investment in Australia is on the rise and the government recently rejected, on
national security grounds, a Chinese bid for a major electricity grid in New
South Wales. Nearly 50,000 Chinese students started courses in Australian
universities and schools over the past year, boosting the country’s “education
export” industry. China is the largest buyer of Australian government debt and
a million Chinese tourists visited Australia in 2015.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop points out that never before has
Australia’s chief ally and top economic partner existed in a highly competitive
relationship. Complicating matters significantly is Beijing’s habit of employing
economic tools to punish perceived foreign policy transgressions. In the past
several years, for instance, China stopped exports to Japan of rare earth
materials during the Senkakus crisis, banned the import of Philippine bananas
around the time of the Scarborough Shoal flare-up, and promised trade and
commercial benefits to Seoul if rejected Washington’s proposed deployment of
theatre missile defenses.
The result, however, is not Australia’s forced selection between a
binary outcome in Asia: a continuing alliance with an America that may or may
not maintain regional primacy, or continued good economic ties with a China
that aspires to regional dominance. Such an overarching strategic choice is not
one that even the United States would make. Washington too has a complex
relationship with Beijing that mixes areas of cooperation, such as trade and
investment, climate change, and Iranian nuclear diplomacy, with issues of
fierce competition, such as in the East and South China Seas and in the cyber
domain.
The Australian aim, as is the American objective, should be not to
choose or to contain but to hedge and balance. In that sense, economic
dependency on China enhances rather than diminishes the rationale for a closer
security relationship with the United States and others. A neutral, quiescent,
or China-leaning Australia would undermine both the regional balance and the
conditions necessary to ensure Australian foreign policy independence, while a
stronger and more regionally connected Australia reduces the risk associated
with its Chinese economic ties.
Yet it is also untrue that Australia can avoid choosing at all. The
likely scenario is that Australia will face many, relatively modest choices
about how to balance its economic dependence on China, its alliance with the
United States, and its desire to bolster the regional rules that Beijing
increasingly transgresses.
The first of these challenges may be close at hand. Australia’s view on
Chinese behavior in the South China Sea has been clear across multiple governments.
Officials routinely urge all claimants to resolve their disputes peacefully,
and note that Australia will continue to exercise its rights to freedom of
navigation and surveillance overflights. It followed naturally when Canberra
called on China to respect the recent Permanent Court of Arbitration’s judgment
on the South China Sea.
Yet after it did so, a Chinese foreign policy spokesman pronounced his
government “shocked” by Australia’s “wrong remarks.” China’s notoriously
jingoistic Global Times went further, calling Australia a “paper cat”
and warning that if it “steps into the South China Sea waters, it will be an
ideal target for China to warn and strike.”
The exchange has thus far generated little more than rhetorical heat,
but it represents the kind of difficult trade off that Australia may well face
in the future. It might, for example, wish to conduct freedom of navigation
exercises in the South China Sea, as Washington would like, but risk Chinese
economic retaliation if it does so. It might seek to fly through any air
defense identification zone established by Beijing in the South China Sea;
China has already protested even existing Australian P-3 surveillance flights
out of Malaysia.
A second kind of challenge could arise amid a significant disagreement
between the United States and Australia over China. Already, Washington has
expressed displeasure with the decision to grant a 99-year lease for the port
of Darwin, located near the deployment of U.S. Marines, to a Chinese firm.
Similarly, Australia and the United States found themselves on opposite sides
of the debate over whether to join the China-led Asian Infrastructure
Development Bank. None of these differences amounted to much, but disagreement
on a more important matter – for example, whether to impose economic sanctions
on China over its South China Sea activities or its cyberattacks and
intellectual property theft – could produce a cleavage.
A third set of challenges could result from Canberra and Washington’s
shared enthusiasm for giving ever-greater concrete meaning to the alliance.
Australia might, for instance, one day express openness to the Pentagon’s
interest in rotating new bombers and tankers through Australian air bases –
already, nuclear-capable B-2s and B-52s take off from Australian airfields.
China has warned Australia against new deployments, and it is conceivable that
Beijing could object even to the continued rotation of existing bombers.
In any of these scenarios, Australian policymakers would undoubtedly
weigh the potential economic punishment that might result from appearing to
side against China or with the United States; indeed, it would be irresponsible
not to take such matters into consideration. And in a vibrant democracy like
Australia’s, it would be natural for some domestic business leaders to press on
Canberra a policy of distancing itself from the United States in order to
preserve good commercial ties with China.
The task before Australia and the United States today is neither to make
an all-or-nothing China choice nor to deny that choices of any kind lie ahead.
Instead, they should focus on mitigating the risks that such dilemmas pose to
an alliance that has done so much good over the decades.
There are a number of starting points. Washington and Canberra should
endeavor to prevent the kind of flare-ups with China that would force such
choices in the first place, by broadening the application of existing rules for
handling potentially dangerous incidents at sea. They should remind the
Australian public and business sector of non-Chinese commerce to the economy;
the country’s top foreign investor, for example, is not China but the United
States. Australia should couple a better understanding of its specific economic
vulnerabilities with an honest conversation about how much risk its leaders are
willing to assume in order to help push back against unwanted Chinese actions.
Above all, policymakers and business leaders should understand that
Australia does not, in fact, face a singular and nearly existential choice
between security and prosperity. The country’s leaders have a task that is at
once less consequential but more difficult: to make many choices, on many
issues—and for years to come.
Richard Fontaine is president of the Center for a New American Security
and recently served as the inaugural Alliance 21 Fellow at the University of
Sydney’s US Studies Centre.
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