The cavalcade of China apologists continues to grow today. At Domain we have this:
Australia’s former top diplomat says the government needs to approach China with “more nuance” and be wary of being drawn into a United States policy of confrontation with Beijing.
Philip Flood, secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade between 1996 and 1999, said the “current low point” in relations between Australia and its biggest trading partner had been caused by both parties.
The call for a shift in strategy comes after New Zealand Trade Minister Damien O’Connor suggested Australia should speak with a “little more diplomacy” and “respect” towards China.
China last year imposed more than $20 billion of trade strikes on Australian exports and its senior government officials have refused to return the phone calls of Australian ministers after the Morrison government pushed for an independent inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr Flood – who was also high commissioner to the United Kingdom, ambassador to Indonesia and director-general of the nation’s top spy agency, the Office of National Assessments – said Australia needed to do more to invest in the relationship with Beijing.
“Both sides contributed to the impasse and both have interests in a return to greater cooperation,” he said.
“This is not just a matter for the two governments though they have the greatest role. Australia needs to approach China with somewhat more nuance and be wary of being drawn into a US policy of confrontation with China.”
Let’s not stand on ceremony here. Which of the CCP’s 14 violations of Australian freedom does Mr Flood support? I guess it is all 14 given that is the CCP’s precondition for engagment:
If that’s not unsettling enough, the entire frame of reference for the issue is wrong. The relationship has NOT stumbled into crisis owing to errors on both sides. It has succumbed to the structural schism of the Australian democracy helping grow the Chinese autocracy.
Australia’s Chinese engagement came in two distinct phases. The first was via commodities through the 2000s when China was liberalising. The second phase happened from 2011 as the mining boom died and Chinese capital and people arrived in services sectors just as China illiberalised into dictatorship. With the second wave came immense corruption in the form of lobbying and cashed-up foreign influencers in parliaments aiming to manipulate Australian policy to favour the CCP.
The second evolution of the relationship was doomed from the outset as the rock of dictatorship smashed into the immovable object of democratic institutions. Focusing on the details of the unravelling is beside the point.
Which brings us to the second appeasement piece of the day, James Curran at the AFR:
Based on his earliest actions – inviting the most senior Taiwanese representative to the inauguration, continuing arms sales to Taiwan and delaying high-level talks with China until such time allies are consulted – US President Joe Biden hardly looks to need Australia as a guide. American analyst Walter Russell Mead has said these constitute the “most aggressive concatenation of moves against a foreign power that any peacetime US administration has ever launched so early on”.
Some in Canberra will see it as vindication for Australia’s stance. And it does seem clear that momentum for co-ordination with others in pushing back against Beijing, such as with Japan in the East China Sea, is only building.
But it’s also not clear that, should more serious costs eventuate from continued Chinese coercion, America can throw much Australia’s way if it is still bunkered down in its dugout, shouting.
That’s not an argument for retreat, but it is a call to make Australian diplomacy and statecraft less tethered to alliance management and mobilised much more smartly to prosecute the nation’s distinctive interests in this part of the world.
It is a call for retreat. Which of the 14 violations of Australian freedom does Mr Curran agree with? Come on, let’s have it. We’re all friends here.
Australia’s long history of ally dependence is well known. Coral Bell chronicled it brilliantly in her seminal work Dependent Ally. As a middle power with a liberal system attached to distant great powers surrounded by illiberal neighbours, the role was thrust upon Australian statecraft. Has that basic truth changed? No.
So, the second part of the AFR’s trumpeting retreat is the question can the US be trusted? The answer again lies in structure not political details. At no point in the Trump Administration did internal political strife bear upon the structure of the US relationship with the Pacific. Indeed, if anything, it intensified it.
The most basic tenet in all strategic thinking is that it’s better to fight on somebody else’s soil than it is your own. The US is never going to see giving away North Asian and Indo-Pacific sea lanes as a good idea for this reason alone. Withdrawal means Chinese ships sailing around the US coast.
It would take an act of suicidal stupidity for the US to sacrifice its Pacific assets to a rising China. Possible? Anything is possible. Likely? Plausible? Meh.
But that will throw up some tricky questions, for sure. Hugh White on Friday:
Last weekend, as US carrier forces showed the flag in the South China Sea, Beijing launched provocative air manoeuvres around Taiwan. Neither side wants a war, but both sides hope to win their point without fighting by making the other back down.
The danger is that they will miscalculate one another’s resolve, especially in Beijing, where they must be sorely tempted to provoke a crisis with, for example, an air and sea blockade of Taiwan that is both militarily feasible and strategically effective in forcing Taiwan to yield.
Success in that may now seem the only way for Beijing to reclaim what China sees as its rightful territory, but that is not all. If Washington failed to defend Taiwan, it would fatally undermine US leadership in east Asia and allow China to take over as the leading regional power. The stakes could hardly be higher.
But it would be a huge gamble, because if America did decide to fight for Taiwan, China would face a catastrophic war against a formidable adversary. So everything depends on how China’s leaders assess Joe Biden. Will he fight for Taiwan or not?
…The US Navy is no longer unchallengeable in the western Pacific. Today, Chinese forces can find and destroy the ships and aircraft that America must use to project power into the western Pacific. Its iconic aircraft carriers would be especially at risk.
And more fundamentally, it is not clear how a full-scale war against China can be won at all. Not even America could invade and occupy that vast country. Nor, when the stakes so high, can it inflict enough damage to force the Communist Party to capitulate.
…Unless it uses nuclear weapons. America still declares its willingness to cross the nuclear threshold if its conventional forces cannot win, and threatening to do this might seem the only way America could prevail.
…China’s nuclear arsenal might be small, but it could kill millions of Americans, and only a fool would bet that China would blink first.
…And where would Australia stand? We want America to keep leading in Asia, so it seems obvious that we should encourage it to fight for Taiwan. It seems equally obvious that if America fights for Taiwan we would have to fight too, or risk destroying our ANZUS alliance.
But again, it is not that simple. We gain nothing by urging America to fight a war it will not win, with or without our support, and it makes no sense to join a war to preserve the alliance when the war would be fatal to America’s position in Asia – and hence to the alliance itself – anyway.
The terms of the conflict are less stark than that. Hugh White has been darkly fantasising about Taiwan as the end of US empire for years.
For a long time, Taiwan has been seen as a special case in North Asia. The US has no strategic alliance with Taiwan nor does it contest the One China Policy.
- The United States did not explicitly state the sovereign status of Taiwan in the three US-PRC Joint Communiques of 1972, 1979, and 1982.
- The United States “acknowledged” the “One China” position of both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
- U.S. policy has not recognized the PRC’s sovereignty over Taiwan;
- U.S. policy has not recognized Taiwan as a sovereign country; and
- U.S. policy has considered Taiwan’s status as unsettled.
Successive generations of US administrations have very sensibly given themselves maximum strategic flexibility on Taiwan.
Everybody in the Indo-Pacific knows this. Thus White’s notion that “If Washington failed to defend Taiwan, it would fatally undermine US leadership in east Asia and allow China to take over as the leading regional power” is overly dramatic. Taiwan is not an ideological issue, it is a strategic one. It has only been a democracy for twenty years or so. It has been colonised and ruled at various times by Spain, the Dutch, Imperial China and Imperial Japan. Just about everybody except the US. Other Asian and US allies understand this.
Moreover, just about every modelling of any kinetic conflict concludes that it is an unwinnable war for the obvious reason that the island lies so close to the Chinese mainland and so far from everybody else.
This makes the situation around Taiwan much more fluid that White countenances. There are many tools at US disposal in such a conflict. The Cold War tactics of soft power sanction and proxy war. This would turn Taiwan into an interminable bleeding sore off the Chinese coast as it is supported by military hardware and trade sanctions that poison China globally.
If China is forced to pay the maximum deglobalisation price for that then any invasion will mark the peak and decline of Chinese power as it is isolated from commodity and financial markets, leaving it prey to its own terrible demographics and economic reckoning. In a sense, therefore, the Taiwan war has already begun: fought against our own cohort of CCP appeasers and sell-outs.
In the end, if the worst happens, the US goes stark raving mad, pointlessly squanders its huge array of Pacific assets to allow China to park aircraft carriers off California, China manages to grow through all of its fatal internal contradictions, and hold together a liberal world with which it has nothing in common, and all of the dark musings of these CCP apologists come true, then so what?
China will still need Australia a lot more than we need it and we can use that leverage then.
