Australia alone 2: Where’s the enemy?
The US wants Australia to help constrain China and preserve America’s supremacy. But what’s in it for us?
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| An American carrier group patrolling the South China Sea |
If we are going to prepare for a possible war, we need to
know who we are likely to be fighting. If there’s a clear and imminent threat
to the nation’s core security concerns, that needs to shape everything we do –
equipment, personnel, deployment, diplomacy. An imminent and serious threat
would amply justify an urgent and substantial increase in defence spending.
But misidentifying an enemy can not only be costly: it can
be dangerous. A mindset that falsely assumes that war is imminent can too
easily lead to a war that might have been averted.
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| Vietnam ... what were we fighting for? |
Iraq under Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a repressive
regime but, by the time George W Bush ordered an invasion in 2003, it was no
serious threat to anyone. That war is estimated to have
cost 376,000 lives.
The enemy in Afghanistan, the enemy was Al Qaeda, not the
Taliban regime that had given them shelter. It was not necessary to take over
an entire country (in which no war has been decisively won from Alexander the
Great until now) to defeat one group of terrorists. After 20 years and at
least 200,000 deaths, the Taliban returned to power.
Australia took part in all three of those wars, to no
apparent gain. All three represented humiliating defeats and substantial losses
in blood and treasure. But because those wars were against minor opponents with
relatively weak military capabilities, the damage to American and Australian
personnel and interests was limited. If any of these opponents had been a major
power, that damage would have been intense.
The new enemy has, of course, been identified. It is China,
and we are being encouraged to step up and take part in military action of, as
yet, unspecified extent and character.
The anti-China agitation, inflamed by belligerent and
counterproductive rhetoric from the Chinese leadership, can be traced back to
2016 when Malcolm Turnbull, then the Prime Minister, announced that Australia
would “stand up” to China. The reckless rhetoric from the conservative parties
was endorsed and amplified by security hawks such as the Australian Strategic
Policy Institute and by their followers in the media.
The Lowy Institute’s regular poll, which asks respondents
whether China was likely to be a military threat to Australia, shows what that
rhetoric did to the sense of fear in this country.
The hysteria reached its peak in 2023 with the publication
of an series of alarmist articles in The Sydney Morning Herald and The
Age, under the catchline Red Alert. Five carefully-selected experts were
assembled to give their views of why China and Australia would be likely to be
at war very soon, and why we had to be prepared.
“While the official Canberra guidance on timing is that
Australia will have less than 10 years’ warning of war, the five experts think
that this timeline is misleading. We need to be ready to fight in just three
years, they found.”
That was two years ago. One year to go, apparently.
There is another possibility: that China is not an enemy
after all. Certainly, open conflict would not be in their interests or ours.
China is Australia’s largest two-way
trading partner: last year China took Australian exports worth $196 billion
and Australia imported $116 billion of Chinese products.
Among China hawks, there is much concern about Australia’s
military capacity to secure our seaborne trade routes from Chinese disruption.
But why on earth would they do that? Our trade routes are theirs too.
The most likely flash-point is, of course, Taiwan. But there
are cogent reasons why invading that “wayward province” would not be in China’s
national interest.
The first is that nobody can tell – particularly with Trump
in the White House – what the United States would do; and the Taiwan
Relations Act commits America to give Taiwan the means to defend itself, providing
military equipment and services.
Any American intervention would carry the risk, and perhaps
the likelihood, of escalation. But despite doomsayers among Australia’s
security establishment, nuclear conflict seems improbable, for the same reason
that there nuclear weapons have not been used in combat since 1945: it would be
suicidal for both participants.
Would China be prepared to risk Beijing, Shanghai and
Shenzhen for Taiwan? Would America be prepared to sacrifice Los Angeles, San
Francisco and Houston for Taiwan?
An analysis
for the Atlantic Council found that a full-scale conventional war between the
world’s two major military powers would not be over quickly, massively
increasing the costs in lives and wealth. For the US, is another military
adventure, far away from home, really worth while?
Any war would effectively block all ports on the East and
South China Seas to commercial shipping, strangling the trade on which the
Chinese economy depends. Within a few weeks, stocks would be exhausted,
production would be devastated and exports would cease. Millions would be
thrown out of work, life savings lost and the Chinese economic miracle would
come to a close. Under this scenario, how safe would be the continued dominance
of the Community Party?
The Chinese leadership is well aware of these dangers. The
director of research at the Brookings Institution, Michael O’Hanlon, put
it this way:
“The good news about deterring this war is that, for China,
it would be a huge roll of the dice – and I do not detect a recklessness or
acceptance of high risk in the leadership of today’s People’s Republic of
China.
“There are, of course, different views about the nature of
the China threat today, but few really argue that China would fail to
carefully consider the costs and risks of any major military operation.
President Xi Jinping is nationalist, assertive, and autocratic, but there is
little to suggest he shares his friend Vladimir Putin’s proclivity to use force
for high-risk ventures. And this one would be very risky.”
Nobody wins a war. There are only degrees of loss.
From Australia’s point of view, there would be immense cost
and no benefit from entering a war over Taiwan. It would turn our principal
trading partner into a dangerous enemy, able to inflict far more damage on us
than we could on them. And any military assistance we could give to Taiwan would
be too small to make any material difference to the outcome.
As Paul Keating has said, Taiwan’s status affects none of
Australia’s core interests. The prospect of being dragged into yet another war
by our involvement with the US is a powerful reason for cutting those ties.
China has
other interests than us
Geoff Raby, the former Australian ambassador in Beijing, has
written convincingly that China is not interested in invading other countries.
In his 2020 book, China’s Grand Strategy, he wrote:
“China’s doctrine has been force-denial in and around its
littoral waters, Taiwan, and extending to the first island chain, and
supporting its claims – or at least raising the costs of denial by others – in
the South China Sea.”
More generally, China’s ambitions are in the east, not the
south; and they are economic and diplomatic, not military. China certainly has
grand ambitions, but they do not extend to invading Australia. They can get
anything they want from us already by buying it. So why bother with military
aggression?
At the core of China’s ambitions to take its place as a
global power is the enormous Belt and Road Initiative. It is well into the
process of creating a network of highways, ports, railways and high-voltage
power grids embracing the entire Eurasian land mass and east Africa. The “belt”
is the overland network of roads and rail; the “road” is the maritime routes
linking new and existing ports in a nod to the ancient Silk Road trade route of
the Ming dynasty. So far, 151 nations are signed up, including Argentina, Chile,
the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Malaysia, Luxembourg, Singapore,
Ukraine and New Zealand. Australia is not among them.
Among other things, it shows how isolated America is now
becoming.
China clearly sees its future is in economic expansion, not
in conquest. In terms of purchasing power – by far the most meaningful measure
of real economic output – shows that China’s economy began to outpace America’s
ten years ago, and the gap has continued to widen.
By the end of the 20th century, there was one
major economic power. Now there are four: China, the USA, India and the
European Union. Economic growth in the US and EU is reasonably steady if unspectacular, but the two Asian giants
are still expanding rapidly.
War would derail China’s remarkable transformation, damage
its economy and potentially undermine the Communist Party’s hold on power.
Although its defence capacity is expanding significantly, military spending is
not at the level to be expected from a nation planning for war.
Nations that are engaged in armed conflict, or think they
might be soon, devote greater proportions of their economy to military
expenditure. Ukraine is the current outlier, where 34.5% of GDP goes on
defence. Then there’s Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar. Countries
sharing borders with Russia, such as Estonia and Finland, have ramped up
military spending since the invasion of Ukraine. According to the Stockholm Institute, China spends just 1.7% of GDP
on defence – less than Australia and half as much as America.
China, unlike the Soviet Union and the United States, has
shown no sign of wanting to export its form of government to other countries.
That’s just as well, because the authoritarian and overbearing internal
apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party is unlikely to appeal elsewhere. Nations
which have authoritarian, repressive leaders already don’t need it; and more
democratic, freer societies reject it.
China’s has spent huge amounts of money and effort in
attempts at soft-power projection, no one of which have been particularly
successful and most plainly
counterproductive. An example is the Confucius Institutes funded by
China n universities around the world. If they had worked as promised – as a
means of educating people in Chinese language and culture – they might have
worked well as soft power. But because they quickly became a means of
propaganda and control, they have largely failed in their aim.
The ABC has reported
that the institutes required volunteer teachers to demonstrate loyalty to the
Chinese government, and Human Rights Watch reported that any discussion of
topics sensitive to Beijing had been censored. Confucius Institutes were originally
set up in 13 Australian universities; six have already closed, with more likely
to follow.
China is now repeating some of the mistakes made by the US following
the end of the Cold War. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a leading foreign policy figure
and National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, wrote that once other nations
could no longer depend on the American president (in this case, George W Bush)
telling the truth, the pursuit of policy “suffered grievously”.
There is a palpable sense of distrust in Australia and
elsewhere for any big power. Trump’s contribution is that America is now
arguably less trusted even than China. That alone makes it more necessary than
ever to this country to go its own way.
China will never be Australia’s strategic ally. But it must
not become our enemy either.
NEXT: Australia Alone 3: In the national interest.