Richard Broinowski

According to The Australian’s defence editor Brendan Nicholson, an Australian submarine twice penetrated the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam in 1985. Nicholson’s claim appeared in an article in the newspaper on 27 April 2016 analysing Canberra’s decision to build French Barracuda submarines in Adelaide. HMAS Orion’s first intrusion resulted in ‘brilliantly clear’ footage of sonar and other hull fittings on a Soviet Charlie-class nuclear submarine. On the second, it shadowed a Soviet Kirov-class nuclear-powered cruiser and monitored its communications.

In 1985 I was Australia’s Ambassador to Vietnam, resident in Hanoi. I knew nothing of Orion’s activities. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden had instructed me to repair relations with the country, damaged by the war and by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s over-reaction to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia in December 1978. I was to encourage bilateral trade, re-start an aid program halted by Fraser, formally hand back to the Vietnamese our extensive embassy properties in Saigon, initiate a missing-in-action mission for Australian soldiers, facilitate a Royal Commission into Agent Orange, and generally re-build trust with Hanoi. I was to engage the Vietnamese in a dialogue on Cambodia and find out specifically if and when they intended to leave.

At the time, the Cold War was at its height and Vietnam was commonly and quite mistakenly regarded in the West as a Soviet colony. Mr Hayden’s initiatives were strongly criticised by China, and five of the then six members of ASEAN (Indonesia, distrustful of China, and wanting a strong Vietnam to stand up to China to its north, was the exception). The Thais were particularly incensed, certain that the Vietnamese army would soon invade across the Cambodian border. Still smarting from their pull-out from Vietnam in June 1975, the Americans thought Hayden naive and foolish. Trenchant critics of Hayden’s initiative towards Hanoi also existed in Canberra, particularly in the Office of National Assessments and parts of Foreign Affairs.

Despite the static, I was getting on with my job. We began an aid program and hosted a trade mission from Australia. I handed back our embassy properties in Saigon. With Vietnamese cooperation, we conducted the first MIA mission by any participating country in the Vietnam War and gathered evidence for the Royal Commission into Agent Orange.

And I was also getting somewhere with Vietnamese officials on Cambodia. During meetings over several months, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach became increasingly frank with me. Since reunifying the country in 1975, Hanoi had been doggedly trying to pull the place together. By 1978, China, which had been unhappy with unification, was making threatening noises from the north. And that ‘madman’ Pol Pot persisted in attacking Vietnamese villages across the border from the south west. Vietnam had insufficient military strength to challenge China, but could certainly put a spoke in Pol Pot’s wheel. So on Christmas Day 1978, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh. Vietnamese forces would leave when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been neutralised. Thach ridiculed the suggestion that Vietnam would stay in Cambodia or had territorial designs on Thailand.

I reported our conversations to Canberra, along with my view that Thach and his colleagues were telling the truth.

Meanwhile, if Nicholson and The Australian are to be believed, Orion was busy in Cam Ranh Bay. At the least, its activities were contrary to customary international law and the newly promulgated 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention. If detected in Vietnam’s internal waters, the consequences would have been horrific. Orion could have been depth-charged or captured, its complement of 63 crew interned, its armaments including its Mark 48 US torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles stripped. Bilateral relations could have come to a grinding halt. I could have been recalled or expelled from Hanoi. The increasing goodwill and understanding created through Hayden’s initiative and my activities would have been lost, and our sceptical western and ASEAN allies would have glowed with schadenfreude.

In spite of its appalling baggage, this spying hubris appears not to have given either the Australian government or opposition cause to reflect. Indeed, it resonates in at least two respects with Australia’s recent decision to build at enormous expense a dozen French Barracuda submarines. First is range. The government says it wants long-range subs, a capacity the German and Japanese boats lack. This is presumably to enable us to spy on Chinese assets in the South China Sea. But 1960 British-designed Oberon-class boats costing a mere $10 million a copy (triple that in 2016 terms) had the capacity to reach the same neighbourhood in Vietnam. What is so special about the range of the vastly more expensive French Barracudas?

Second, why is the Australian government so fixated on submarine espionage outside our immediate maritime neighbourhood? The consequences of discovery by China are more appalling than by Vietnam or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It’s one thing to sail on the surface through waters claimed by China in the interests of reinforcing ‘rules-based’ freedom of navigation, but quite another to penetrate coastal waters by submarine and conduct maritime espionage. If that’s not the purpose, why spend such colossal amounts on new submarines? To sustain the South Australian economy, keep Christopher Pyne in parliament, catch up with our neighbours? All of the above? I will explore motives and consequences in a following article.

Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico.He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW.

A tangled web of territorial claims threatens stability in the South China Sea. The figures appear rubbery, but a consensus is that Philippines occupies seven islands and reefs, Malaysia five, China eight and Taiwan one. Vietnam occupies twenty seven. There is also conflict over fishing grounds. Meanwhile, there seems little or no room for compromise, especially between China, Vietnam and Taiwan, all of which claim sovereignty over all of the main chain of islands, the Spratlys.

In three unusual examples of public diplomacy, both Chinese and Vietnamese officials recently put their conflicting cases to selected Australian audiences. On 1 March, Ouyang Yujing, Director General of Boundary and Ocean Affairs in the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told selected groups of Australians in Canberra and Sydney that China was the first country to name and administer the South Sea islands. Chinese sovereignty was established in the second century BC. He cited more recent treaties and maps from British, French, Chinese and Japanese official sources to reinforce the claims.

Guo Yezhou, Vice Minister of the International Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee was less restrained. On 18 March he told Australian participants at a round-table at AIIA in Sydney that all South China Sea islands were part of China. But this, he asserted, was disputed by the United States. While claiming it was not taking sides between conflicting territorial claims, the US was marshalling its considerable military assets in the region, and busily reinforcing military alliances with Japan, Australia and the Philippines, all designed to contain China. Some littoral countries had deployed heavy weapons on islands they occupy, so China had reciprocated on the ones it occupies. Guo said China has the capacity to take back islands occupied by others, but would not do so because this would foment war. China wanted to work together with all concerned countries to reduce tensions. China supports the freedom of navigation, but freedom could be compromised by outside interference.

The Vietnamese case was put by Dr Lan Anh of Vietnam’s Diplomatic Academy, an offshoot of the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry. In a meeting with AIIA councillors at Glover Cottages on 3 March, she claimed all South Sea islands belonged to Vietnam. In a complex recital, she claimed historical records from France, Britain, China and Japan ‘proved’ Vietnam’s case. Vietnam would continue to defend its claims, by force if necessary. She spoke with a fierce conviction born of painstaking research for a PhD she took at Bristol University.

At the official level in Canberra, Australia seems to be reflexively following the American lead and sleep-walking into an increasingly dangerous situation. We claim neutrality. We insist that former Prime Minister Howard’s promise to China during the Taiwan crisis in 1996 means that our alliance with the United States is not directed at China, and that his later claim that Australia does not have to choose between China and the US remains true. But these assertions look increasingly shaky. During President Obama’s visit to Australia in 2011 when he announced his ‘pivot’ to Asia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard welcomed US Marines into Darwin, the first enduring deployment of American ground troops since World War II. Australia recently countenanced deployment of USAF B-1 bombers to Darwin, later withdrawn, but not before an adverse Chinese reaction.

Meanwhile, visiting American officials ramp up the Chinese threat. In March 2016, US commander of the United States Pacific Fleet, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr, told a naval conference in Canberra that China was building a ‘great wall of sand’ in the South China Sea.

Danger runs high for Australia in what former Defence Deputy Secretary Hugh White describes as a titanic struggle for regional leadership between China and the US. White suggests only two alternatives – either the US abandons any major role in Asia, or the US and China agree on a new order which accommodates some of China’s ambitions but preserves a major role for the US. While these choices are stark and unrefined, leaving little room for a more nuanced compromise, White is right to suggest the present situation is untenable, because there is little regional support for trying to force China to back down. The leaders of Japan and India have made it plain that they will not carry America’s banner by sending naval units through the Sea to test China’s territorial claims. Neither will South Korea, nor most of the leaders of ASEAN, or Canada, Britain, or New Zealand.

But Australia? In an article published in November 2015, Bob Carr quotes the American strategist Edward Luttwak saying that Australia ‘fully retains the Anglo-Saxon trait of bellicosity’. But to gallop off wearing our deputy’s badge in Australian ships or aircraft to test China’s resolve to protect the islands it occupies in the South China Sea would be a lonely road. We would be Washington’s only ally pursuing military means. What Australians should agitate for is agreement between Washington and Beijing which allows China space in the South China Sea as befits a great power, the kind of space the United States enjoys in the Caribbean and along its eastern and western seaboards. Can the hawks in Canberra and their advisers be persuaded to support such a plan? We should fervently hope so.

Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico.