Category: Defence

Australia’s flawed position on the South China Sea

Australia’s 2016 Defence White Paper says a lot about the South China Sea, both directly and indirectly. It expresses concern about land reclamation and construction activities by claimants in the sea and about the possible use of artificial structures for military purpose. It also makes much of the importance of a rules-based global order to Australia’s security, with a clear message that some countries are not following these rules.

While the White Paper does not name China, that’s how most commentators — and China itself — have interpreted these statements. As Benjamin Schreer has claimed, the White Paper ‘reflects the reality in maritime East Asia that China has moved to re-write the rules to fit its strategic preferences and historical narratives’. But what rules are we talking about?

Despite the White Paper’s references to a rule-based global order, the reality is not quite that simple. For one, other countries besides China also don’t follow the rules. Australia’s major security partner, the United States, is not party to many important international conventions, including the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Admiral Harry Harris, Commander of US forces in the Pacific, has said for example that, ‘We must continue to operate in the South China Sea to demonstrate that water space and the air above it is international’. But such statements ignore the carefully balanced regime of exclusive economic zones (EEZ) established by UNCLOS.

The South China Sea is not international water space. It is comprised of the EEZs of littoral countries, which have significant rights and duties in that water space. Other nations operating in that space must do so with due regard to those rights and duties.

Australia itself can also be accused of not conforming to the rules-based global order.One Australian commentary, which claims that China is trashing the rules-based order by refusing to recognise international arbitration over disputed islands in the South China Sea, conveniently overlooks the fact that Australia is taking a similar position to China in its maritime boundary dispute with Timor-Leste.

The White Paper seems to make a subtle swipe at China when it observes that Australia opposes the use of artificial structures in the South China Sea for military purposes. But this further begs the question of who is militarising the South China Sea. The short answer is: everyone. China and the United States accuse each other of ‘militarising’ the South China Sea, but in reality both are guilty.

Who you consider to be militarising the South China Sea largely depends on what you mean by ‘militarisation’. China’s construction of defensive military facilities is not the same as the militarisation implicit in increased military activity by the United States. China acknowledges that its reclaimed features have a military purpose, but describes the measures it has taken as ‘limited and necessary self-defence facilities’ consistent with ‘the right to self-protection’ afforded under international law.

In contrast, the United States has also raised the military ante with its provocative freedom of navigation (FON) operations, increased naval exercises and its military support for the Southeast Asian claimants in the South China Sea. Such initiatives are seen by China as an attempt to contain it.

China’s assertive actions in the South China Sea are cast as a growing threat to American interests, particularly by the Pentagon and the US Navy. But, conversely, instability in the South China Sea helps the Navy justify its budget, particularly as it’s the minor partner of the American Army and Air Force in both Syria and the Ukraine. For example, The South China Sea has become a major theatre of operations for the US Navy.

Demilitarising the South China Sea should be a genuine objective of all stakeholders. To this end, China should clarify its claims in the South China Sea and refrain from activities that will be seen as assertive or aggressive. The US should step back from its current naval initiatives in the region, including its provocative FON operations. A bit of ‘give and take’ is required on both sides.

Australia would do well to take a balanced approach. But in making a big play of the South China Sea, the White Paper falls in line with what Greg Austin has called ‘The Pentagon’s Big Lie about the South China Sea’. For Austin, the lie is the claim that China’s actions in the South China Sea threaten commercial shipping.

The White Paper replays this sentiment. To justify Australia’s concerns, it notes that ‘nearly two-thirds of Australia’s exports pass through the South China Sea, including our major coal, iron ore and liquefied natural gas exports’. This figure is incorrect. The accurate figure is a little over 20 per cent and most of this is trade with China. The White Paper actually disproves its own estimate with the map in Figure 2 showing that most of Australia’s sea freight does not pass through the South China Sea. Nor does the map does show the busy trade route between eastern Australia, Japan and South Korea that passes to the east of the Philippines, rather than the South China Sea.

There is much to like in the White Paper, particularly its focus on increased international defence engagement including with China. But policymakers need to be cautious of the White Papers’ exaggerations about how much China threatens Australian trade and security interests in the South China Sea.

Sam Bateman is an adviser to the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University.

This article was first posted in ANU East Asia Forum.

Strategically timid.

 

In his final book, which was too little noticed, Malcolm Fraser declared that we must reassess the strategic dependence which has determined our defence policy throughout settler Australian history. ‘We need the United States for defence’, he wrote in Dangerous Allies (2014), ‘but we only need defence because of the United States’. It is the ANZUS alliance, presented as guaranteeing our security, that poses the greatest threat to Australia, he concluded.

The reason most Australians in the security establishment held their noses, rolled their eyes, and looked the other way was that Fraser had said the unsayable. If any of them had suggested that the United States is a declining power and is unable or unwilling to defend Australia, their careers would no longer flourish. The reputation of ANZUS, as unilaterally invoked and extended by John Howard in 2001, remains like that of Caesar’s wife, beyond suspicion.

The very freedom we praise our armed forces for defending is not exercised in the security industry. Officials, academics, and mainstream media columnists are too timid to tell the unpalatable truth, face the facts, and sort out the consequences for something as vital as Australia’s defence.

The 2016 Defence White Paper was delayed for years, as political leaders and defence ministers came and went. But this cannot be the only reason it took so long. As the fundamental planning document for future defence budgets, activities, equipment, training and recruitment, it should prepare us appropriately for decades ahead by correctly reflecting changes affecting Australia since the last White Paper. Foremost among these changes are two: the further rise of China and the stationing of US troops in bases in Northern Australia.

American and Australian responses to China’s rise are ambivalent. On the one hand, consultations and exchanges of many kinds take place, and even exercises for military confidence-building. China ‘owns’ much of American debt, and Chinese corporations own the port of Darwin and Cubby Station. China is Australia’s largest trading partner, and its saviour from the worst of the Global Financial Crisis. China is a massive sponsor, through student fees, of Australian higher education. China, Australia and the US regularly consult with our neighbours in the East Asia Forum.

On the other hand, China threatens to surpass the US as the world’s largest economy, and is testing American resolve in the South China Sea. Containment of China is the unspoken purpose of President Obama’s 2011 ‘pivot to Asia’, which Australia welcomed. Successive ministers have claimed Australia ‘does not have to choose’ between the US and China in the event of conflict in our region: but the fact is by offering northern Australia as an expanding base for US surveillance, troops, and now bombers, we have chosen already, and against our best interests. Australia is now implicated in any war the US wages in the region, and beyond.

The White Paper foresees US hegemony for the next 20-30 years, as a dependent ally must. But the United States, Obama admits, has neither the will nor the capacity to wage a land war in Asia, and is seeking to enlist Japan and Australia as its proxy combatants against China. Pushing back against China in the South China Sea, and risking a confrontation, could result in Japan changing its anti-war Constitution and both Japan and Australia breaching the terms of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, involving us in a war which would be unlikely to attract an endorsing resolution of the UN Security Council, and whose outcome might briefly benefit the US or China but not Australia or Japan.

Australians may be concerned about a well-armed China, but a declining United States which still owns weapons of mass destruction in massive numbers should raise equal anxieties. An overreaction from either of the rival superpowers of the future could be catastrophic. With such a prospect, an independent, self-interested Australia had an opportunity with this White Paper to seek a more sophisticated resolution of our ambiguity than ‘we don’t have to choose’. We have chosen, but in 2016 we were too strategically timid to admit it.

As a result of this White Paper – one which the ALP could itself equally have written – Australia has become even more strategically dependent on the United States and has postponed even further the prospect of regaining some form of sovereign control of our defence and foreign policy. Extending the usual spheres of security (land, sea, and air) to include space and cyber is a further exercise in sycophancy to the US and a further abandonment of independence.

Australia is less well prepared for this century than we were before the White Paper’s belated release. In spite of what some have claimed, the 21^st century is not America’s, but the Asian Century. Yet without question, we now accept that answers to differences with our neighbours will be militarised, and that those disputes will be mediated by the United States. We are forgetting that under Howard, with a UN mandate, and without US boots on the ground, we managed a reasonably peaceful transfer of power in East Timor. Before Howard, we did the same in Cambodia. Now, we are forgetting our international obligation to refrain from threat or use of force against other countries.

We seem to have forgotten too, that in another White Paper, on Australia in the Asian Century (2011), China and Indonesia were among five countries to which Australia was urged to give priority status in broadening and extending relationships. Australians at all levels in government, academia, and business were exhorted to become ‘Asia-capable’, not just the young, but people who had been in their positions of influence for decades. Authors Ken Henry and Allan Gyngell offered a resolution to our ambiguity: but the Gillard government didn’t fund it and the rest is history.

Until the contradictory propositions of the 2016 Defence White Paper and the Asian Century White Paper are reconciled, Australia will continue to flounder between its defence alliance and its economic interests, its history and geography, and two superpowers.

Alison Broinowski was formerly a senior officer in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Director of the Australia Japan Foundation.  She is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU. 

The Defence White Paper 2016 has now been published. An engaging, critical, analysis of it has been offered by Professor Hugh White, ANU, (Pearls and Irritations March 10^th ).

Rightly, the purpose of the White Paper is to outline how Australia’s security can be assured in the current and expected environment.

A central assertion of the paper, with respect to that assurance, can be found at page 121, in paragraph 5.20.

“ Only the nuclear and conventional military capabilities of the United States can offer effective deterrence against the possibility of nuclear threats against Australia. The presence of United States military forces plays a vital role in ensuring security across the Indo-Pacific and the global strategic and economic weight of the United States will be essential to the continued effective functioning of the rules-based global order.”

This assertion about the US role in assuring the security of Australia, would make sense to the many Australians who have absorbed the notion that Australia’s security requires what Prime Minister Menzies declared, in 1955, “a great and powerful friend”.

Consequently, candidates for election to our national Parliament, from both major parties have demonstrated, for years, their belief that they would ignore Menzies’ doctrine at their electoral peril.

This stance has led Australia to support the United States in all of its wars, from Vietnam to Iraq and Syria.

In this light, Paragraph 5.20, deserves analysis.

First, it posits the existence of possible nuclear weapons based threats to Australia. Given the existence of nuclear weapons able to strike Australia, that can be seen to make sense, even be prudent. But, there needs to be an assessment of the likelihood of their use. This is complex, involving strategic motivations of others, the costs and benefits of the use of nuclear weapons and, above all, the notion and mechanics of nuclear deterrence.

It also engages “the security dilemma”; the notion that the act of arming to appear to be of superior strength to a perceived adversary, simply brings about an increase in their armament directed at you, thus increasing the danger and probably beginning an arms race.

We have sought to avoid a nuclear security dilemma by eschewing nuclear weapons of our own. The Gorton Government dallied with nuclear weapons in 1969, delaying our accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons (NPT), but a decision on acquisition was not supported and we joined NPT.

It is generally calculated that nuclear weapons would not be used on states that do not possess them and, nuclear weapon States have given assurances to that effect. But, Australia’s continuing participation in US nuclear strategy could be taken as invoking the security dilemma. Specifically, that Australia has on its soil US nuclear control and Command systems can be seen not only as facilitating a US nuclear threat to others but also as making more likely the use of nuclear weapons against Australia, in the event of a nuclear crisis, say, between the US and China.

Secondly, the fundamental assertion that the US would act to defend Australia against a nuclear threat, including through the use of its nuclear weapons, needs to be questioned. The US can be expected, as a rational actor, to consider the full implications of any such use or threat of use. This would obviously engage far wider considerations than the security of Australia.

In the past, a simplistic, perhaps crude way of posing this question has taken the form of asking; “ Would the US, in reality, be prepared to trade Los Angeles for Sydney, if those were the alternatives in a nuclear crisis?” The answer seems obvious, unless of course the bases in Australia had to be saved in order to ensure the US’ wider ability to conduct nuclear war.

As already noted, this is all very complex, but all that can be said of it accurately, is that paragraph 5.20, represents an act of faith.

Thirdly, the assertion is also made that what is at stake in all of this is not simply Australia’s security, but something possibly even more fundamental; “ the continued effective functioning of the rules-based global order”.

It is on this notion, that the White Paper reveals its glaringly blind eye.

There is a rules-based global order. It is the one set forth in the Charter of the United Nations and derived solemn agreements, not least the NPT.

The central point to be made about that order, is that it has come to be routinely ignored and abused, particularly by those powers intended to be its main guardians: the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Outstanding results of this have been; the emergence of DAESH, following the illegal invasion of Iraq by two such permanent members, US and UK, in which Australia participated (consistent with its record from Vietnam onwards), the failure of the Council for 4 years to agree on action on the Syrian civil war, and the western attack upon Libya, engineered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (see the NY Times’ analysis of Clinton and Libya, February 28^th, 2016 ).

That action in Libya exceeded the Security Council mandate to afford protection to Libyans from its government and moved on to regime change, an event never authorized and for which no replacement Government was seriously planned. This resulted in the chaos now seen not only in Libya, but across northern and western Africa and added to the conflicts already underway in Iraq and Syria.

The massive humanitarian and refugee crises in the region are the profound outcome of these failures of the rules-based order; and, they are beginning to threaten another deeply important rules-based system, the EU.

In addition to these disasters, the US and Russia have resumed the development of new nuclear weapons, in violation of their NPT obligations.

There seems to have emerged a preference amongst key States to return to power and interest as the determinants of policy not the compact agreed at the end of the Second World War and Colonialism, as set forth in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (see my; Nuclear North Korea, Pearls and Irritations, November 1^st 2015).

Is this “rules- based order”, now in disarray, the one of which Australia’s Defence Department speaks?

Clearly not. What it manifestly has in mind is the US version of order, presumably because it represents “our side”.

The problem with this is that so many others in the world, West and East, not just obvious adversaries or actors with whom we have little or no sympathy, but also friends, do not look comfortably upon what the White Paper declares to be “US leadership”. How could they, when the US has declared itself to be the “exceptional country”, meaning that it does not have to obey the rules that they say all others must keep?

And now, the US election campaign is revealing that there is a widespread notion, in the US electorate, that the US has been abused and exploited, by the rest of the world.

Whether the ever more grotesque Trump or the proven to be bellicose Clinton prevails, we cannot expect any diminution in the militarization of US foreign policy.

Indeed President Trump may break new ground in revealing how disturbing it can be to be obligated to an Alliance that is shaped by the forces and psychology of US domestic politics

The White Paper, inevitably deals in detail with force structure, equipment, military resources. But, a major resource Australia has at its disposal, for the protection of its security, is its skilled diplomacy. It needs to exercise much more of it, especially in its region. For example, as I have argued previously, (Pearls and Irritations, An Independent Australian Foreign Policy, May 13^th, 2015), we must not accept that our relations with both China and the US are an either/or proposition, in which we must make a choice. We can maintain constructive and principled relations with both.

And, we must reassess with a clear, not a blind eye, and not simply as a matter of faith, our alliance relationship with the US.

Finally,we should also strive, with others, to restore authority to the only valid rules-based system in existence, the Charter of the UN, and seek a new dispensation in the constituency and decision making methodology of the Security Council.

An overwhelming majority exists in the General Assembly of the UN in support of major reform of the Security Council. This must be pursued, because surely the point about rules is that they will only attract faith in them, be followed, if they are applied equally to all.

Richard Butler AC is a former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations.

In a paper distributed by the ANU East Asia Forum, Professor Hugh White has pointed out that the Defence White Paper makes two invalid assumptions: the post-Cold War US-led international order will be maintained and that it must be. He is right on both counts and I will not repeat his views here except to say I agree with them.

The so-called “rules based” order is based on Western concepts and dominated by Western countries. Many other countries simply don’t accept the rules. Even some UN rules, including those we would like to keep, are open to question by some countries especially if you consider “interpretation”. Indeed, we and others break the rules when it suits us; the Coalition of the Willing is just one example of the preachers breaking the rules and we can find countless others. Australia, like the US and Western Europe, sees democracy as an article of faith and condemns as evil infidels anyone who questions the one true political faith. Not everyone agrees with our approach and in an increasingly multipolar world do we have the capacity or need to impose our values on others so long as they don’t try to impose theirs on us?

America’s Gibbon will not appear for some time to come but US power is increasingly limited and its attempts to impose its will on others is weakening. Russians see the world differently and so do Chinese and US attempts to dictate policy to these countries are not succeeding. As Hugh White points out, nobody is going to invade the USA because the Americans would win such a war but America’s limited military actions have a poor record of success. This is mostly because they were poorly planned, lacked clear objectives, were based on bad intelligence and sometimes had a heavy ideological basis. Backing the losing side in a civil war is not good policy.

Any threat assessment is based on capacity and motive. The only country with the capacity to invade Australia is the USA which is hardly likely to do so and nobody has the motive except perhaps in our capacity as a US ally.

Our naval hardware can deter people smugglers and illegal fishing boats but is not able to do much else by itself except perhaps to defeat weak countries who are not likely to pose a threat to our interests. Without a carrier based task force we would not last very long outside the range of our land based aircraft in an action against a major power. All our major military actions since WW2 have been as adjuncts to the US, either legally (Korea and the first Gulf War) or illegally (Vietnam, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan). However worthy, Timor and the Solomons were hardly serious military exercises. From the tone of the White Paper and public statements by the relevant ministers,it would appear that our future military actions will be proposed in Washington; we will theoretically be able to accept or reject participation but our track record so far suggests we will go along. Looking at the wars the US has led us into in the past, we can not be confident that future ones will be any better.

The argument about supporting countries which share our values is a dubious one and we have to ask which values? Donald Trump’s or Ted Cruz’s religious fundamentalism? The USA is a very diverse country with many different values and a complex governmental process. Its decisions are based on the perceived interests of the US and the rhetoric is created to to suit. We might also meditate on that old but true saying that countries don’t have friends, only interests.

It is clear that we are closely integrated into the US military and our public support for the US has not led others to see us a truly independent actor in military matters. As US proposals for basing bombers near Darwin show, the US takes it for granted that Australia will go along with US decisions which are based on US interests. Certainly, some regional countries want the US as a balance to  China but, on the other hand, US facilities in Australia and the perception that we are part of the US team could be the cause of attacks on Australia rather than a source of defence. If we were not a US ally, why would anyone want to attack us? If we had not got involved in the Middle East, why would Islamic extremists threaten us? Our military hardware and increased personnel are no defence against terrorism. We might also consider the Costa Rican approach. They disbanded their armed forces on the grounds that they couldn’t beat anyone else and if they had no armed forces nobody could accuse them of being a threat or see them as one. This is probably not a realistic option for Australia but it does make the point that action to build up military capacity invites a reaction.

​The White Paper does not spell out who is the enemy but it can only be China. The US and China both want to be number one in the region and Australia has clearly backed the USA.  India has a significant and growing blue water navy. It will be an important factor in our considerations, especially in the Indian Ocean. Australia talks about not taking sides between the US and China but walks with the US. We began by doing what we had always done without making a fuss but there is growing pressure on us to send ships or planes through the disputed area purely for the sake of doing so. Does this serve our interests? The US confrontation with China, as with Russia, is not about principle but about great power rivalry. The freedom of navigation issue is probably not what it is all about but is a peg on which to hang competition for influence between two great powers.

To sum up, the White Paper identifies China as a potential threat and the USA as our dominant ally. The structure of our forces suggests that they are designed to operate with a major ally which is the USA and this is confirmed by the extent to which we are integrated with the US armed forces. The USA is not the Great Satan but nor is it God. It is a country like any other which sometimes gets things right and sometimes not but which acts in accordance with its own perceived interests which may or may not coincide with Australia’s. An anti-American stance on our part would be stupid but a much greater degree of independence in word and deed that showed a clearer understanding of Australian long term interests does not emerge from the White Paper. We can of course ask what real influence the White Paper will have on policy? Perhaps not much?

Cavan Hogue was formerly Australian Ambassador to USSR and Russia, and Ambassador to Thailand and Mexico, and High Commissioner to Malaysia.

My clear response is ‘No!’

China, as a major trading nation, now has the same rights as the US to protect its maritime and air approaches to its mainland.  Australia should avoid provocative statements and actions at sea or in the air.

When we talk about the need to support ‘a rules-based global order’, we overlook the fact that this order was framed mainly by the US after World War II.

The world has changed greatly over the last 50 years and rising countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Brazil will want to be involved in reshaping an updated international and regional order.  We should be involved in cooperative discussions with the US, the above five and all countries in the Asian region.

The Australian Government and the ALP – and the factions in both major parties – need to acknowledge this or Australia will be left behind.

Richard Woolcott was Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and the Phillipines and the High Commissioner to Malaysia, Ghana and Singapore. He was the Australian Ambassador to the UN and President of the UN Security Council. He was Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1988 to 1992.

 

In considering the Defence White paper, it is important as Hugh White has pointed out, that we consider carefully the growing power of China and its determination to be accepted as a strong regional and global power. In this article (reposted from 27 April 2015) by Kishore Mahbubani, he describes the likely consequences of China becoming the ‘number one’ regional and possibly world power in the decades ahead. Our Defence White paper discounts the significance of growing Chinese power and the need to accommodate it.  John Menadue

 

ALBERT H. GORDON LECTURE BY DEAN KISHORE MAHBUBANI[1]
AT THE GREEN ROOM, KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT,CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, 8^TH APRIL 2015

In introducing this lecture, the Harvard Kennedy School said that for the first time in more than 200 years, a non-Western power, China, will have the largest economy in the world. China’s emergence will change our world order. To understand how China will behave when it becomes number one, this lecture by Kishore Mahbubani will introduce several questions: What are the priorities of the Chinese leaders? What impact have American policies had on China? Will China behave as America does when China becomes number one?

 It is truly a great honour to be invited to deliver the Albert H. Gordon lecture this year. The hardest part is deciding how to start. Asians always start with an apology. Americans always start with a joke. Sadly, I could not find a good joke, certainly not one as good as the joke that Richard Fisher started with when he delivered this lecture in February 2009.

This is what he said: “Yesterday morning, as I got on the plane to fly up here, I turned to Nancy and said, “In your wildest dreams did you ever envision me following in the footsteps of Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush, David Rockefeller and Ban Ki-moon in giving the Gordon Lecture at the Kennedy School?” And she replied, “I hate to let you down, Richard, but after 35 years of marriage, you rarely appear in my wildest dreams.” My wife Anne and I recently celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary in Greece just before coming here. I am sure she would say the same as Nancy. Anyway, as a good Asian, let me apologise for the fact that I have no joke.

It is also no joke that we are probably living through the greatest transformation in human history we have seen. This was the underlying theme of my two most recent books, “The New Asian Hemisphere” and “The Great Convergence”. However, to illustrate this point more clearly, let me cite three spectacular recent developments whose profound implications have not been adequately noticed. In the spirit of the Albert H. Gordon Lecture series, let me pick three examples from the financial sector.

We all know that the world experienced a global financial crisis in 2008-09. We also know that the Fed launched a series of unorthodox monetary policy measures, most notably quantitative easing (QE), to avert a deep recession. What few noticed was what the Fed’s decision meant for Beijing.

Until the onset of the crisis, Chinese leaders were happy that the US and China had settled into a comfortable pattern of mutual dependence. China relied on the US markets to generate exports and jobs. The US relied on China to buy US Treasury Bills to fund US deficit spending. Tom Friedman, in his usual brilliant way, captured this interdependence with a simple metaphor. He said, “We are Siamese twins, but most unlikely ones – joined at the hip, but not identical.”

This Chinese belief that the US government depended on China was further reinforced when President Bush sent an envoy to Beijing in late 2008 to request Beijing not to stop buying US Treasury Bills to avoid rattling the markets further. The Chinese leaders readily agreed and probably felt very smug as this confirmed that the US was also dependent on China.

This smugness was shattered when the US Fed announced the first round of QE measures in November 2008. The Fed’s actions demonstrated that the US did not have to rely on China to buy US treasury bills. The Fed could create its own money to do so. This decision had profound implications for the world. Axel Merk, the president of the investment advisory firm Merk Investments said, “The US is no longer focusing on the quality of its Treasuries. In the past, Washington sought to promote a strong dollar through sound fiscal management. Today, however, policymakers are simply printing greenbacks.” Merk said that by relying on the Federal Reserve’s printing press, the US has effectively told other nations that ‘it’s our dollar – it’s your problem’.

It was clearly a mistake for the Chinese leaders to believe that they had created a relationship of mutual dependence. When China decided to buy almost a trillion dollars of US Treasury bills, it had to do so from export revenues earned from the toil and sweat of Chinese workers. However, if the US wanted to repay this trillion dollars, all the Fed had to do was to increase the size of its balance sheet. This is why several leading economists have said that the US enjoys an “exorbitant privilege” in being able to repay its debts by increasing money supply. The term was coined by Valery Giscard d’Estaing and the French economist Jacques Rueff explained its workings. Barry Eichengreen famously wrote a book on the topic in 2010.

Let me quickly mention the two other developments whose implications have not been fully noted. It is well known that in recent years, the US has prosecuted several foreign banks, including HSBC, RBS, UBS, Credit Suisse, and Standard Chartered. For example, Standard Chartered Bank was fined 340 million dollars for making payments to Iran. Most Americans reacted with equanimity to the fine paid by Standard Chartered Bank and thought it was just that the Bank was fined for dealing with the “evil” Iranian regime. However, few Americans noticed that Standard Chartered Bank, domiciled in the UK, had broken no British laws. Nor had they violated any mandatory sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council. However, since almost all international payments have to go through the United States payment mechanism, the Standard Chartered Bank was fined for violating American laws.

To put it simply, what the US was doing in this case was to say that American laws applied to non-American citizens and non-American corporations operating outside America. This is called extra-territorial application of domestic laws.

The third development was the threat of the US to deny countries access to the SWIFT system. Since all international payments have to go through the SWIFT system, any country denied access to the SWIFT is thrown into a black hole and denied access to any kind of international trading and investment. In a recent column, Fareed Zakaria described well the Russian reaction to the possibility of being denied access to the SWIFT system. In Western media commentaries, Putin is often portrayed as the bad guy and his successor as well as predecessor, Medvedev, is portrayed as the good guy. Yet, it was the “good guy” who went ballistic when he was told of this threat. This is what Medvedev said, “Russian response – economically and otherwise – will know no limits.”

I begin with these stories for a simple reason. Events such as these will have a deep impact in determining the answer to the biggest question of our time: what happens when China becomes number one in the world? Clearly, the answer to this question will determine significantly the course of the 21st century. Hence, we should study this question carefully.

Let me begin with what I hope you will agree are three incontrovertible facts. First, China will become the number one economic power in the world. Second, most Americans, like most Westerners, view China’s rise with great foreboding. Third, the role that China will play as the number one economic power has not been cast in stone. How the world, especially America, reacts to China’s rise will help to influence China’s behaviour in the future. If we make the right decisions now, China could well emerge as a benign great power (even though most Americans find this virtually inconceivable).

This is why it is timely to address the topic of what happens when China becomes number one. It is always better to prepare for the inevitable than to pretend that it will not happen. So far, on balance, America has reacted wisely to China’s rise. However, it is always easier to be wise when a power assumes that it will be number one forever. When the reality sinks in that the number one power is about to become the number two power, it is conceivable that fear may replace wisdom as the dominant driving force in American policy towards China. It would be perfectly normal for this to happen. My goal in this lecture is to try to persuade my American friends to continue to react wisely to China’s rise.

To achieve this goal, I will make a three-part argument. First, I will try to explain what I think are the goals and ambitions of China’s leaders as China emerges as number one. Secondly, I will explain how several wise American policies have so far managed to allow the relatively peaceful emergence of a new great power. Thirdly, I would like to conclude by recommending that America can protect its long-term interests by reacting even more wisely to China’s rise.

Let me begin with the first question: what are the goals and ambitions of China’s leaders as China emerges as number one? Since China is still run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it is conceivable that the goal of China’s leaders could be the same as the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party (like Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev): to prove the superiority of the Soviet Communist System. As Khrushchev famously said on November 18, 1956, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you”.

One of the biggest sources of misunderstanding between America and China arises from China’s decision to retain the term “Communist” in the name of its party. This may clearly signify a commitment to Communist ideology. Yet, even a brief survey of China’s deeds rather than China’s words will show that China has effectively walked away from Communist ideology. Deng Xiaoping encapsulated this shift with his famous remark, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black and white. If it catches mice, it is a good cat.” Effectively, Deng was saying: “It doesn’t matter if the ideology is communism or capitalism. If it helps us, we will use it.” Effectively, China behaves more as a capitalist country rather than as a Communist country, but for complicated internal political reasons, it cannot abandon the term “Communist”.

So if the Chinese leaders are not defending or promoting Communist ideology, what cause are they trying to achieve? The answer is simple and direct: they would like to revive Chinese civilization. If there is one thing that motivates China’s leaders, it is their memory of the many humiliations that China has suffered over the past 150 years. If there is a credo that drives them, it is a simple one: “No more humiliation”. This is why they want to make China a great and powerful nation again. Xi Jinping explained this goal well in his address to UNESCO on March 27, 2014. He said, “The Chinese people are striving to fulfil the Chinese dream of the great renewal of the Chinese nation. The Chinese dream is about prosperity of the country, rejuvenation of the nation, and happiness of the people. It reflects both the ideal of the Chinese people today and our time-honoured tradition to seek constant progress. The Chinese dream will be realized through balanced development and mutual reinforcement of material and cultural progress. Without the continuation and development of civilization or the promotion and prosperity of culture, the Chinese dream will not come true.”

The revival of the great Chinese civilization is something we should welcome. If the CCP could change its name to ‘Chinese Civilisation Party’, it would do a lot to assuage Western concerns. It has already transformed itself into a meritocratic talent-seeking mechanism that is constantly searching for the best leaders to rule China. Despite the many ups and downs in the history of the CCP, this is what the CCP has become. If the Chinese have finally succeeded in finding the right mechanism to revive Chinese civilization, we should, in theory, welcome this development.

In practice, it is a fact that the West will not rest easy till China transforms itself into a liberal democracy. The Economist, a leading Western magazine, reflects these views. The Economist said in its issue of September 20-26, 2014 that Xi “has become the most powerful Chinese ruler certainly since Deng, and possibly since Mao.” It then calls on Xi to use this enormous power for the greater good and change the system.

The Economist assumes, as most Westerners do, that if China’s system is changed and a Western-style democracy emerges in China, this will be an unmitigated good. This is a dangerous assumption to make. A more democratic China is likely to be a more nationalist China. A more nationalist China could well be a more assertive and aggressive China. Such a China would launch a “popular” war against Japan and act in a far more belligerent fashion over territorial disputes, like those in the South China Sea.

In this sense, the CCP is delivering a major global public good by restraining nationalist forces and voices in China. From time to time, it has to allow some of these forces to be expressed; it has to allow its people to vent nationalist sentiments. However, the CCP also knows when to draw back from volatile situations, as it did with Japan, India, the Philippines and Vietnam in recent years. The West should be careful about wishing for early democracy in China. Its dream could become a nightmare.

At the same time, the West must recognise and respect that China is different; that it is not going to become “Western”. Therefore, the wisest course for the West to adopt would be to allow the present system to continue and to allow it to evolve and change at its own pace.

This brings me to the second part of my argument. As I said earlier, wise American policies have allowed China to emerge peacefully. Some of this wisdom arose out of historical necessity. At the height of the Cold War, when America genuinely feared Soviet expansionism, it reached out to China to balance the Soviet Union. Indeed, America reached out to China when China had emerged out of one of its most brutal phases. Human rights was not a factor in American policy towards China then. This paved the way for Deng to use America as an example to persuade Chinese people to switch away from central planning to free market economies.

In the 1990s, official US-China relations went through a series of ups and downs. Despite the efforts of President George H.W. Bush to keep the relationship on an even keel, the Tiananmen Square episode on June 4, 1989 assaulted American sensibilities and constrained his ability to improve relations. Tiananmen could have derailed US-China relations. When President Clinton took office in January 1993, after having described the leaders of China as the “butchers of Beijing”, one could easily have predicted a far bumpier road. Fortunately, Bill Clinton reacted wisely. I was present at the first Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders meeting at Blake Island in November 1993 and saw with my own eyes how Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin made an enormous effort to reach out to each other. By the end of the day, their mutual wariness was replaced by a significant degree of personal bonhomie. This episode demonstrated that the United States had been wise in welcoming China into the APEC in 1991. Such a move not only garnered the US diplomatic goodwill but also ensured that China adopted the membership of yet another international forum whose rules and regulations it agreed to abide by. Later, the US also worked with China in the East Asia Summit. In addition, the US and China collaborate daily in the UN Security Council to manage the “hot issues” of the day.

The tragedy of 9/11 further solidified US-China cooperation. Apprehensions about the rise of China were replaced by a focus on the War on Terror. East Asia stopped being a priority for the United States for several years. This allowed China to rise peacefully and for the two countries to avoid the “Thucydides trap”.

America made several wise decisions during this time. Firstly, America proceeded to admit China into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. Although the admission was made on the basis of stiff conditions, these conditions ironically benefited China and forced it to open up to world trade – leading to its current pre-eminent position as the largest economy in the world in PPP terms.

Another judicious call was to pay attention to China’s sensitivities on Taiwan. China had always regarded Washington’s policy towards Taiwan with suspicion, as they feared that the US could use the Taiwan issue as a means to destabilise China. Instead, America reacted wisely when in late 2003, the Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian suggested that a referendum be held to assess the views of the Taiwanese people on independence. In response, President George W. Bush made it clear that the United States did not approve of his move. He said: “The comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose.” This was wise statesmanship, even if it was partly the result of Washington’s dependence on Beijing’s support for other more pressing issues, such as Iraq and North Korea.

Some of these wise policies emerged out of America’s selfish interests, especially during the Cold War. However, it is possible that few Americans are actually aware how wise America has been. And even fewer Americans understand that it is in America’s national interest to continue these wise policies towards China. For example, since Deng Xiaoping opened up China in 1978 American universities have educated hundreds of thousands of Chinese students. In the years 2005 to 2012 alone, 788,882 Chinese students studied in American universities. This number has risen steadily – in the 2013-2014 academic year, 275,000 Chinese students were enrolled at American universities . This is an enormous gift from America to China. Future historians will be puzzled by this massive act of generosity as many of these students then return to China to build up the Chinese economy and to create innovations in many different spheres of science and technology that propel China forward in areas ranging from space exploration to defence.

China has also contributed to the maintenance of friendly relations between the two countries. Firstly, China has “swallowed bitter humiliation” time and again and has reacted prudently to America’s mistakes. These mistakes included the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the downing of a US spy plane in Hainan Island in China in April 2001. The tact and restraint demonstrated by China in both situations averted military action between the two countries.

I have described these events in some detail as they help to explain a contemporary geopolitical miracle. Normally, when the world’s largest emerging power is about to pass the world’s greatest power, we should be seeing a rising level of tensions between the two (with the historical exception of one Anglo-Saxon power, the US, replacing another Anglo-Saxon power, the UK). It would therefore be perfectly normal to see rising tensions between the US and China today. Instead, we see the exact opposite: perfectly normal and calm relations between the US and China. This is a miracle.

However, miracles are by definition historical aberrations. They don’t last. Soon, we will revert to the historical norm and competition and tension could rise between America and China. To prevent this from happening, both sides will have to make a special effort to continue on their extraordinarily wise courses.

On the part of China, this means that it will have to learn lessons from the mistakes it has made in recent years in its dealings with its neighbours, especially Japan and Southeast Asia. For example, it completely mishandled an episode in which a Chinese fishing boat collided with Japanese Coast Guard patrols near the disputed Senkaku Islands on September 7, 2010. China unwisely demanded an apology from Japan after having publicly humiliated Japan into releasing the fishing boat. Similarly, China also mishandled the Korean crisis of 2010 by not condemning North Korea’s shelling of the South Korean island of Yeongpyeong. China also made aggressive statements and adopted more aggressive positions on the South China Sea in 2010 and 2011. When China submitted to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf a map including the nine-dotted-line territorial claim in the South China Sea on May 7, 2009, the Philippines lodged a diplomatic protest against China. Vietnam and Malaysia followed. Indonesia also registered a protest, although it had no claims on the South China Sea. In the face of this opposition, Chinese officials refused to back down.

China has also made mistakes vis-à-vis its relations with ASEAN as a whole. The lowest point in China-ASEAN relations occurred in July 2012 at the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting. Until then, for every year since August 1967, ASEAN had always succeeded in issuing an agreed joint communiqué after each Foreign Ministers’ meeting. However, in July 2012, for the first time in forty five years, ASEAN failed to do so. They failed because they could not agree on the paragraph referring to South China Sea. Nine of the ten countries agreed that ASEAN should reiterate the previously-agreed paragraph on this issue. However, the host country, Cambodia, refused to do so. It later emerged that Cambodia had come under heavy pressure from Chinese officials not to agree to these previously-agreed paragraphs on South China Sea. Clearly, China’s rise had made some Chinese officials arrogant.

While China should learn from the mistakes it has made, America should study its own recent deeds through a simple lens: would it like China to replicate these deeds when China becomes number one? The reason for using this lens is that when China clearly becomes number one, it is likely to replicate abroad America’s deeds, not its words.

Bill Clinton saw this coming long before any other American did. In a significant speech at Yale in 2003, he said the following:

“If you believe that maintaining power and control and absolute freedom of movement and sovereignty is important to your country’s future, there’s nothing inconsistent in that [the US continuing to behaving unilaterally]. [The US is] the biggest, most powerful country in the world now. We’ve got the juice and we’re going to use it. . . . But if you believe that we should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour that we would like to live in when we’re no longer the military political economic superpower in the world, then you wouldn’t do that. It just depends on what you believe.”

Actually, as I document in The Great Convergence, Bill Clinton wanted to prepare his fellow Americans for the day when America becomes number two and China becomes number one while he was President. However, all his advisers firmly told him it would be politically suicidal for any sitting American President to talk of America becoming number two. Hence, he could only speak about it after he left office. Sadly, he has not said more on this issue after raising it in Yale. Hence, I fear that Americans are not psychologically prepared for the day when America will become number two.

All this brings me back to the three stories that I began the lecture with. America was able to and could threaten to act unilaterally in all three cases because it is clear that America is still the reigning Emperor of the global financial system. Indeed, like many strong ruling monarchs, it enjoys absolute sovereignty in these areas and is not subject to any checks and balances.

It unilaterally controls the global reserve currency, the US dollar. In theory, the US dollar is a global public good, but in practice, it is an instrument of American domestic and foreign policies. As former Treasury Secretary John Connally said in 1971, “It’s our currency but your problem”. Clearly, global interests are not taken into consideration when the US manages the US dollar. This is why many countries, besides China, were troubled by the QE measures.

Similarly, America acted unilaterally when it applied its domestic laws in an extraterritorial fashion to foreign banks. Its threat to use SWIFT, another global public good, to unilaterally punish Russia could have had even more devastating consequences for the global order.

And what would the devastating consequences be?

To understand this, I hope you will look at my latest book The Great Convergence. One reason why the world has been remarkably stable and peaceful over the past few decades is that the rest of the world, especially Asians, who have been passive for almost two centuries, had agreed to accept and work with the Western-created family of global institutions, including the UN, IMF, and the World Bank. They agreed to do so because they believed that these institutions were serving global interests, not Western interests.

This is therefore the big danger of the US using global public goods, like the US dollar, international banking transactions, and the SWIFT system, for unilateral purposes and ends. It will encourage the world, especially China, to work towards creating an alternative global order. If that happens, the world will become a far messier place.

This is why I was happy to deliver this lecture at this time. We stand at one of the most important forks in human history. I hope America will continue its wise policies of strengthening a global order that serves global interests, not just American interests. If America does this, China will do the same. If this happens, nothing will change fundamentally when China becomes number one. We will continue to live in a safe and predictable world.

Therefore the final question I need to answer is, “Will China emerge as a responsible stakeholder?” – to use the famous words of Bob Zoellick. My simple answer is this “China could emerge as a stakeholder that is as responsible as the United States”. Since America is still the number one power in the world, the big question that America should ask itself is a simple one: would it feel comfortable living in a world where China behaves just as America did when it was the sole superpower?

Dean Kishore Mahbubani is Professor in the Practice of Public Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

[1] Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is the author of “The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World.”

Any defence policy is ultimately based on a view of the international system and how it is expected to evolve over coming decades. These are the judgments that most fundamentally influence the nature and scale of armed conflict that a country’s forces must be prepared to fight. Australia’s new Defence White Paper makes two central judgments about this. First, that the post-Cold War, US-led international orderwill be maintained; and second, that it must be maintained.

Are these judgments correct? Let’s take them one at a time. First, will the ‘rules-based global order’ — as the White Paper calls it — survive over the next few decades, especially in Asia? The White Paper argues that it will, because the United States will remain ‘the pre-eminent global military power’ and ‘the world will continue to look to the United States for leadership’.

Many accepted this view in the 1990s, when America’s unchallengeable global primacy seemed to have created a unipolar order that marked the ‘end of history’. But it is much harder to believe this now, when the United States faces serious challenges in at least three key regions — the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia. In each of these regions, important players directly challenge US leadership.

And in each of these regions, US military power has so far proved insufficient to overcome these challenges. While no country can match the United States’ capacity to project force anywhere on the globe, the US has been unable to defeat major regional powers or even ill-armed insurgents on their own turf.

This is most obviously true in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, where America’s traditionally weak land forces offer no viable military options against regional adversaries. But it is also true in Asia, where the United States’ traditional mastery at sea is being very seriously challenged by China’s growing capacity for sea denial.

This is what makes the contest in the South China Sea so important. China’s stark defiance of US concerns about its conduct there, its willingness to militarise the confrontation and America’s inability to effectively respond indicate that US military power is no longer sufficient to resist the major challenge to the ‘rules-based global order’ in our region.

As I have argued elsewhere, China likely regards US and allied threats to use force in the South China Sea as bluffing. If so, there is no reason to hope that China will back off from its challenge or that the US-led regional order will be preserved.

Now that US primacy is no longer uncontested, the questions are what will replace the US-led order and how will this new order emerge.

The answers to these questions depend a great deal on how the United States and its allies, including Australia, respond to China’s challenge. This brings us to the second judgment in the White Paper — that the old order must be preserved.

The White Paper promotes a vision of the ‘rules-based global order’ as a seamless and indivisible whole that must be either preserved unaltered or surrendered in its entirety. And it sends a clear message that Australia should be willing to join a war against China to preserve it unaltered.

This is plainly wrong. There are many parts of the current international order. Some really are essential, like the prohibition on outright interstate aggression embodied in the UN Charter. Others are much less important, like the rules governing occupation of low tide elevations and the extent of territorial sea claims that they can support embodied in UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. To see them all as equally non-negotiable is absurd. The essential must be distinguished from the negotiable.

Australia has to decide whether leadership of the international order is essential or negotiable. This is what is really at stake in Asia today. Are we willing to concede to China a larger share of regional leadership? Or must we preserve sole US leadership at any price — even at the price of a major war? Anyone who reflects on the likely scale and nature of a US–China war will quickly conclude that it would be better to concede at least a share of regional leadership to China, frightening and difficult though that might be.

The more we are determined to preserve the current regional order unchanged, the more likely it is that it will be replaced not by a new, stable and peaceful order but by a protracted and catastrophic rivalry, and probably by conflict.

So what are the implications of the White Paper’s views of regional order for the defence policy it presents? The blithe assumption at the White Paper’s heart is that we can preserve the current rules-based order without serious military confrontation, because China will back down in the face of our threats. Consequently, it maintains that Australia needs no major changes to its defence policy. And for all the talk of a maritime build up and massive new funding, the government plans no major new capacities and no major funding commitments beyond those already laid down.

This may prove a big mistake. Over the next few decades, Australia will face a new order in Asia in which the United States will play a lesser role, and may even play no substantial strategic role at all.

If that happens, Australia’s forces would have to do much more independently, or with allies, than it has had to contemplate over the past four decades of uncontested US regional leadership. This is the challenge that Australia’s defence policy must address and which the White Paper has ignored.

Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University. This article was first published in ANU East Asia Forum on 8 March 2016.

Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop visited Tokyo, where she outlined an increasing emphasis on security cooperation between Japan and Australia. The next day she was in Beijing, where she reportedly received a frosty reception. The two are not unrelated — Beijing is not thrilled about Australia’s growing security ties with Japan.

Because Australia is concerned about China’s increasing assertiveness in the region, but at the same time benefits from China economically, we find ourselves in somewhat of a foreign policy pickle. In this very complex situation, it is critical that Australian policymakers respond with both immediate and long-term outcomes in mind. To understand the long-term implications for Australia’s interests of policies drawing Japan and Australia closer together, we need to understand how Chinese policymakers view the world and China’s role within it.

Opinions of Sino–Australian relations in Australia are ambivalent and often sceptical. The 2015 Lowy Institute Poll clearly shows Australia’s ambivalence towards China. While most Australian trust the United States, they are far less certain about China. Australians have conflicting views about what China’s intentions are and what they mean for Australia. Of the respondents, 61 per cent felt that China wants to dominate Asia, and just over half thought that China’s growth into an important global power does not make the world more stable.

At the same time, 67 per cent felt that the Chinese government aims ‘to create a better life for Chinese people’, and, compared to 2014, fewer Australians in 2015 felt that China is likely to pose a direct military threat to Australia in the next 20 years.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these uncertainties, Australians appear eager to hedge their bets and play it safe with China. 73 per cent agreed that ‘Australia should develop closer relations with China as it grows in influence’. Fifty-two per cent believed that Australia should not join with other countries to limit China’s influence.

The Poll suggests that Australians are not sure what the consequences of China’s growing global influence will be. All the same, there is a strong sense that Australia would be wise to be on good terms with China as it becomes more powerful. This was a view that underpinned Australia’s decision to become a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite US disapproval.

In comparison to China, Australians view relations with Japan more positively. In a thermometer measuring warmth of feelings towards other countries, Japan rated 68 degrees, to China’s lukewarm 58 degrees. While an overwhelming majority of 84 per cent said that Australia should remain neutral in the case of a ‘military conflict between China and Japan’, 11 per cent said Australia should support Japan, and only 3 per cent said it would be better to support China. This relative warmth towards Japan is reflected in Australia’s deepening security ties with Japan, as shown in its signing in February 2016 of an agreement on new joint maritime security and surveillance operations in the Pacific.

China does not react positively to these growing Australia-Japan security linkages. Future security agreements between Australia and Japan need to take the worldviews of China’s policymakers into consideration. Failing to acknowledge how Chinese policymakers themselves see the world, and how China fits into it, can lead to policies that are ineffective, if not counter-productive, in the longer term.

Several worldviews within which Chinese policymakers operate are particularly relevant to Chinese understandings of its place in the world, namely: the century of humiliation, a conception of national cultural characteristics as inherent and unchanging, the idea of history as destiny, and notions of filial piety and familial obligation that apply both inside China and to its neighbours. These four ideas add up to a foreign policy paradigm that assumes China will resume the central role it once played in regional and global affairs.

Many Chinese policymakers feel that the United States and its allies are holding China back from its rightful leadership, and from the global benefits such leadership would bring. As such, rather than providing a disincentive from further ‘bad behaviour’, this kind of security cooperation creates the serious risk of further entrenching China’s sense of exceptionalism and exclusion from — and irrelevance of — the prevailing international order. China’s disapproval is in itself counterproductive, and serves to reiterate the uncertainty and tension that led to Australia and Japan seeking closer security cooperation.

This negative cycle of mistrust is already having consequences for the security of the region. The call to understand Chinese perspectives when determining foreign and security policy is not an argument for simply accepting China’s view of the world as correct, or appeasing China. Rather, it is about clearly surveying the reality of the regional security situation, and taking long-term goals into consideration when making policy choices now. We should be aware that what may seem to be effective deterrence policy today may be creating more complicated security dilemmas in the future.

Dr Merriden Varrall is the Director of the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute. This article was first published in ANU East Asia Forum on 4 March 2016.

 

After WWII many people, including me, believed that Emperor Hirohito should bear considerable blame for his complicity in Japan’s wars of the 1930s in China and in the Pacific in the 1940s.

There is no doubt that the late Emperor Hirohito was traumatized, as was his nation, by the disasters of WWII. But perhaps that experience of war is the reason why Emperor Hirohito, his son the current Emperor Akihito and his grandson, Crown Prince Naruhito are standing as firm bulwarks against the revisionist tide of history in Japan.

I have written many earlier articles about this and the revisionist tide that Prime Minister Abe is pushing. In many respects he wants to deny the worst aspects of Japanese militarism – the Nanjing massacre and the abuse of ‘comfort women’. He adds vague qualifiers to previously expressed Japanese remorse for the war. Prime Minister Abe keeps the Education Ministry under continual pressure to ensure that its history books are more ‘patriotic’ and minimize Japan’s complicity in WWII. He wants the Japanese people to ignore the fact that 35 m Chinese were killed or wounded as a result of the Japanese occupation of China.

Prime Minister Abe also has a personal agenda. His grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, and later Prime Minister, was an accused Class A war criminal. He was arrested but released without trial.

The Japanese media, including the public broadcaster NHK, are under great pressure to comply with Prime Minister Abe’s view of history. He is succeeding in the harassment of the media with only the Asahi Shimbun standing out against him.

But the lightening rod has been Yasukuni Shrine which includes the remains of the Japanese war dead, but also the secretly enshrined remains of Class A war criminals. Before he became Prime Minister Abe regularly attended ceremonies at Yasukuni Shrine. He is now more diplomatic but many of his ministers continue to pay their respects at Yasukuni in a way that causes concern to the Chinese and the South Koreans.

But the royal family has stood firm against Yasukuni Shrine.

After the enshrinement of 14 Class A war criminals Emperor Hirohito made a decision never to visit Yasukuni again. No emperor, including the current Emperor Akihito has visited the shrine.

The Crown Prince Naruhito has been even more explicit. At a news conference in February 2015 the Crown Prince and heir to the throne was asked for his views about the 70^th anniversary of the end of WWII. He replied

‘I myself did not experience the war … but I think that it is important today, when memories of the war are fading, to look back humbly on the past and correctly pass on the tragic experiences and history Japan pursued from the generation which experienced the war to those without direct knowledge.’ 

It was strong language for a Crown Prince.

A year later, in February this year on the occasion of his 55^th birthday the Crown Prince restated what he had said 12 months earlier about learning correctly from the mistakes of the past. He added that Japan was enjoying peace and prosperity after it was built with the Japanese Constitution as the cornerstone. It is that Japanese Constitution and cornerstone that Prime Minister Abe is trying to change. The Crown Prince continued on his 55^th birthday

‘I hope this year will be an opportunity to take the preciousness of peace to heart and renew our determination to pursue peace’.

The only major Japanese language newspaper that carried these comments from the Crown Prince was the Asahi Shimbun. All the others under the heavy influence of Prime Minister Abe refused to carry the story about the Crown Prince’s plea for peace.

In parallel to rising nationalism, the damaging tide of war revision is running strongly in Japan.

The Japanese royal family is proving a strong and steadfast bulwark against this revisionism. Even the Japan Communist Party is impressed. It used to boycott the ceremonial opening of Parliament by the Emperor because of the earlier behaviour of Japanese Emperors.. Recently they decided to attend the opening of Parliament.

Major elements in Japan led by Prime Minister Abe however continue to  properly acknowledge the disastrous policies of Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.

How different Japan’s response is to that of Germany after the end of WWII.

On 16 February, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida signed a ‘Strategy for Co-operation in the Pacific’, in which both countries emphasised their shared values of ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’

As they were doing so, Japanese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Shinsuke Sugiyama was in Geneva addressing a meeting of the UN committee which oversees the implementation of one of the world’s key human rights accords: the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). On the agenda was the Japanese government’s treatment of the problems of memory, justice and redress arising from the imperial military’s mass recruitment of women (the so-called ‘comfort women’) to military brothels during the Pacific War.

It was a great opportunity for the Abe administration to follow up its 28 December 2015 joint statement with South Korea on ‘comfort women’. In the December statement Foreign Minister Kishida acknowledged ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’ and passed on Prime Minister Abe’s ‘sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women’.The December statement committed the Japanese government to contributing to a fund to assist surviving South Korean former ‘comfort women’, but its rather curious wording left some observers unsure just what Japan had apologised for.

Since coming to power the Abe administration has told the world that it is continuing to uphold — or (in the Japanese version) to ‘inherit’ (keisho suru) — the 1993 Kono Declaration. In that declaration, issued after an extensive study by the Japanese government, Japan acknowledged that ‘in many cases [‘comfort women’] were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments’. The Japanese government also promised to ‘face squarely the historical facts as described above instead of evading them, and take them to heart as lessons of history’.

If the Abe administration has indeed ‘inherited’ the Kono Declaration, one would assume that Abe’s December ‘sincere apologies and remorse’ were apologising for the historical fact that many ‘comfort women’ were recruited and held against their will, and a reaffirmation of Japan’s determination to take the lessons of history to heart.

But oddly, neither Abe nor any of his ministers or spokespeople has ever been heard to echo the key words of the Kono Declaration. Instead, when challenged on the question of state responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ issue, they repeatedly respond with a formula developed during the first Abe administration of 2006–2007: ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’.

This statement is extremely significant. It treats official Japanese government and military documents (the most incriminating of which were deliberately burnt in the closing days of the war) as the only reliable source of information on the topic. It entirely discounts the testimony of surviving former ‘comfort women’. This includes testimony collected and taken into account by the Japanese government at the time of the Kono Declaration. By implication, this formula says to the survivors that their testimony is at best unreliable evidence and at worst lies.

So the key question about the 28 December deal was this: when Foreign Minister Kishida referred to ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’, was he speaking about the involvement of the military in recruiting, transporting and holding women against their will? Was he upholding the promises of the Kono Declaration? If so, then the December accord was indeed a major step forward in Japan–South Korea relations. If not, it starts to look uncomfortably like a move that was motivated less by a desire to bring justice and redress to the victims than to buy their silence.

Foreign Ministry official Sugiyama’s response to the CEDAW committee on 16 February made the answer to these questions disturbingly plain. Pressed on the comfort women issue, he replied ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’. He added that the notion that comfort women had been forcibly recruited was a misconception based on fabricated testimony by a former Japanese labour recruiter named Yoshida Seiji, and that this misinformation had been disseminated by the liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which later retracted the claims.

This statement by Sugiyama is entirely misleading. The Yoshida testimony (which was reported in the early 1990s by almost all the Japanese mainstream media, not justAsahi Shimbun) has been known to be unreliable for more than a decade. And it has had no significant influence on the ‘comfort women’ debate in recent years. More importantly, it is far from the only evidence. The evidence that women were recruited against their will comes from a mass of testimonies from survivors and other eyewitnesses as well as evidence given to war crimes trials and court cases, alongside other historical material.

Australian survivor Jan Ruff-O’Herne, who was marched out of an internment camp and into a military brothel at gunpoint during the war, has never received an apology. Nor have many others forcibly recruited in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

It is time for Japan’s friends and allies, particularly those like Australia who plan to cooperate with Japan in protecting human rights around the region, to ask the hard questions. Will Prime Minister Abe and his cabinet repeat the words of the Kono Declaration loud and clear? Or will they admit that they have abandoned the declaration? They cannot have it both ways. Sugiyama insisted to the CEDAW committee that the Japanese government is not ‘denying history’. Now we need an answer to the follow-up question: which history are they not denying?

Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki is an ARC Laureate Fellow based at the School of Culture, History and Language, at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.This article was first published on 22 February 2016 in the ANU East Asia Forum.

In its short history, Australia has been among the most aggressive nations on earth, regularly engaging in wars that, on any objective basis, have nothing to do with us. These military adventures cost us dearly in men, material and credibility without ever showing the slightest evidence that they improve our security. Malcolm Fraser argued that we graft ourselves to foreign military powers in the hope that they will come to our aid in an emergency but that this has never benefited us. At present, our military is fully enmeshed with the American war machine at all levels, to the extent that Australian officers serve in command posts in US sectors. However, there is no reason to believe that the US would ever go against its interests in order to rush to our defence.

Most scenarios envisage that, in future conflicts, our most likely enemies would be either Indonesia or China. Bearing in mind that, by its control of the Strait of Malacca, Indonesia has us and the huge economies of North Asia in a stranglehold, picking a fight with them seems the height of folly, especially as everything says the US would not endanger its relationship with Indonesia in order to help us. China is now our biggest market and supplier so squabbling with them would take especial folly. But there is another problem to bear in mind: with the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership, Australia’s industrial capacity will be further downgraded. Very soon, we will be unable to manufacture any of the most basic requirements for fighting any sort of war. That is, we will be rendered essentially defenceless. I don’t believe this is in our interest.

My case is that we should immediately begin to move to the defence stance known as “armed neutrality,” meaning we would build our defence capacity to the point where we would be “too prickly” to attack but would have very limited offensive capacity. There is very little reason to believe our northern hemisphere “allies” would be happy with this, because at present, they have the best of all possible worlds. We don’t, and it could easily get very much worse, meaning we would be on our own.

Niall (Jock) McLaren is a psychiatrist with extensive experience in remote area, military and post-traumatic psychiatry. His politics and interests are humanist, rationalist, socialist and poking fun at the self-righteous.

Despite one welcome outburst of independence by refusing a request for more troops on the ground in the Middle East and a generally less sycophantic approach than most of his predecessors,the Prime Minister’s visit to Washington had all the usual hallmarks of a client presenting tribute to the Emperor.  The fact that Australian and American comentators felt the need to sound surprised at the refusal of a US request is instructive.

 The stress on shared values is interesting. Certainly we share many values with many Americans but do we endorse their gun culture? Do we share the values of Trump and his very many supporters? The USA is a complex country with many different cultures and values.When our leaders go to Japan they criticise the Japanese about the rights of whales and when they go to China about the rights of humans but they never criticise the Americans about human rights abuses in Guantanamo or their failure to conform with the the Nuclear Disarmamant Treaty (NPT).

Do we accept the view that the USA is somehow exceptional and that it has a manifest destiny that gives it rights internationally that others don’t have? Quite possibly we do! President Obama, a liberal and moderate President who generally does represent those sections of American society with whom Australia has some affinity, has felt it necessary to boast of America’s economic and military might. The conflict between the USA and China, and Russia, is not really about values but about great power competition. Each of these three powers believes it has some kind of special destiny which makes it different from the rest of us so we should not be surprised if they all want to be supreme globally or at least within their traditional sphere of influence. Mr Turnbull made it clear that we are allied with one of those powers which suggests we will end up getting into more wars we should keep out of.

However, Mr Turnbull’s approach was echoed by the mainstream Australian media response which in turn reflects Australian fear of the outside world and our need for a protector.True independence is not an Australian value.

Cavan Hogue was former Australian Ambassador to USSR and Russia.

On Sunday, Taiwan will elect its next president, the successor to President Ma Ying-jeou from the Kuomintang (KMT) party who has been in power for the past eight years and is ineligible to run for another term. The vote will almost certainly record a decisive choice for political change.

In the run up to the election, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, appears to be heading towards a runaway victory — with polls suggesting that she has about 45 per cent voter support. This puts her far ahead of the ruling KMT party candidate, Eric Chu, with around 20 per cent, and the smaller People First Party (PFP) candidate James Soong with 10 per cent. Around 25 per cent of voters remain undecided. With three-quarters of a million more voters this election than last time, the many young, first-time voters are likely to vote for non-mainstream parties or the DPP.

A series of political stumbles — with the governing KMT forced to change presidential candidate midway through the election — and a steady trend towards independent-mindedness, especially among the younger generation in Taiwan, has left the KMT government struggling to mobilise its support base. The polls suggest that the KMT might also lose control of the Legislative Assembly for the first time in Taiwan’s history.

The coming election result will be widely, if wrongly, read as a referendum on cross-Strait relations. President Ma has focused on improving relations with China and negotiated a succession of agreements with the mainland that have seen relations between Beijing and Taipei at their most cordial since the end of the Chinese civil war. The opening of cross-Strait economic relations was given a major fillip in 2008 after the election of Ma and the return of a KMT majority in the Taiwanese legislature. There followed a series of high-level exchanges between then Chinese and Taiwanese leaders that laid the foundations for steps that saw a major breakthrough in the relationship with the eventual signing of Cross-Straits Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) on 29 June 2010.

But implementing follow-on arrangements to give effect to the agreement wasn’t all smooth sailing. The passage of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement through the Taiwanese legislature was disrupted by the emergence of the Sunflower Student Protest Movement in 2014. The movement gave vent to concerns about incomplete disclosure regarding the nature and potential costs of the agreement, as it related to telecommunications and other issues. And the backing it gained, from the opposition DPP and among students and young people, exposed the underbelly of anxiety about the deepening economic relationship with Beijing and its political implications. Taiwanese are glad to see tensions with Beijing reduced. But many also fear the Ma administration and the KMT might have made Taiwan too economically dependent on the mainland; that might lead to loss of independence and inability to fend off pressure one day to reunify with China on unfavourable terms.

In fact, the profound political shift in Taiwan is more closely associated with the economy’s failing struggle to re-invent itself. With per capita income around US$22,000, Taiwan is above the middle income threshold, but it has been unable to emulate its neighbours like South Korea and Japan in Asia in climbing up the income scale. Its export-dependent manufacturing sector faces competition from South Korea from above and emerging economies, like China, from below. GDP grew a measly 1 per cent in 2014; wages are stagnating and unemployment, at 4 per cent, is considered high. The irony is that Taiwan’s tortured, ‘one-sided’ economic relationship with China — which Ma had been trying to correct — might well be a core element in Taiwan’s economic woes. While direct trade has opened up across the Strait, Taiwan has continued to restrict Chinese imports and investment, essential to enjoying the fruits of fuller integration into the regional and global economy. South Korea has imposed no similar burdens on its international competitiveness.

This week’s lead essay from Mark Harrison points out that while the KMT government may have overstayed its welcome domestically, Taiwanese affairs have looked very different internationally. While the Ma–Xi meeting last November seemed merely to confirm the voters’ view that the KMT had lost sight of Taiwan’s democratic ideals and their everyday concerns, internationally it looked like an historic moment in cross-Strait relations and a step towards resolving one of modern history’s longest-standing ideological conflicts. Indeed, one conception of China’s diplomatic intention in agreeing to the meeting was that it was designed to lay down new benchmarks in cross-Strait relations in preparation for working with a DPP leadership.

‘Should Tsai be elected president, managing these two very different perspectives will be a key task for the incoming administration’, says Harrison. ‘As president, she will need to take heed of the international view of Taiwan and communicate the reasons why the electorate have voted for a more circumspect relationship with Beijing. Tsai’s task will be complicated by memories of the last DPP president, Chen Shui-bian, which still rankle foreign ministries around the world. At the same time, the United States and Japan have both become far warier of China’s assertive regional policies and a Taiwanese government that is less accommodating towards Beijing may suit their policy responses and leadership inclinations’.

It’s true, as Harrison says, that from an international perspective, policymaking in Taipei by a government that will base its legitimacy on its openness to public debate and political activism may appear less reassuring than the policies of accommodation with Beijing under Ma. Certainly Washington was anxious to be reassured that Tsai was not going to disturb the status quo on that front. But this is the tide of Taiwan’s modern political history. Beijing has shown respect for the process and provided a bridge to Tsai and an incentive to meet in the middle. And the policy outcomes that open government can deliver on China and other issues will ultimately stand on stronger foundations of political legitimacy.

Professor Peter Drysdale is Editor ANU East Asia Forum. This article was first published in the East Asia Forum on 11 January 2016.

During the last 10 years, North Korea has resigned its membership of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and conducted four nuclear test explosions. It claimed that the latest of these, detected four days ago, was of a hydrogen (fission-fusion) bomb. It made no such claim for the earlier three tests; said to be merely atomic (fission) bombs.

Argument about the veracity of the current claim is underway. There was seismic evidence of a test, but there is good reason to doubt that it was of a hydrogen bomb. We might have a clearer reading on that soon. The UN Security Council has condemned the test, as it has done in the past, describing it as constituting a “threat to international peace and security”. North Korea’s statements have spoken of a remarkable scientific achievement and their ability to threaten the destruction of its enemies, chiefly the United States.

Any rational appreciation of this current piece of theatre would begin by recognizing its elemental ludicrousness, but then acknowledge the great dangers and deadly earnest politics it incorporates.

Life in North Korea is appalling. Its people have little to eat and as Justice Michael Kirby has reported to the UN, there are virtually no human rights there, just widespread and relentless abuses. Expenditure by the regime of its resources and technological efforts on nuclear weapons is cruel.

Interested western oriented countries, particularly US, Japan, South Korea have attempted to have North Korea end its nuclear program, offering a range of economic and political incentives In return. These have failed. Attempts have also been made to engage China and Russia in diplomatic efforts to the same end. These have also foundered.

China is crucial to any solution given its alliance with North Korea and the depth of the latter’s reliance upon China for economic survival. China is known to be angry with its partner and has joined in the Security Council’s condemnation of the nuclear testing program, but it has taken no serious action against it.

At a fundamental level, the North Korean nuclear weapons issue is now emerging as possibly the paradigm case, even more so than the Iran case, of two pervasive phenomena in contemporary international relations.

1. The reversion by most States to traditional forms of competition and balance of power politics as the determinant of outcomes in international relations. This development has specifically rejected the purposes and principles of the Charter of the UN; the post Second World War compact.It has resulted in the wretched failures we have witnessed in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and a number of countries in Africa and the Middle East.
   The abiding aspect of these failures has been the refusal of key States, particularly Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, to permit collective action to make or keep peace, if it would disadvantage them as such, or in their competition with others. Permanent members have also been the most egregious violators of the Charter by invading or attacking other States, for which actions they have not been sanctioned.

2. As the key extension of this first notion, which places the possession of power, particularly military power, at the centre of legitimacy; the second phenomenon is the insistence by those States which possess nuclear weapons that they alone are legitimately able to determine who else might and might not have those weapons.
   That they are able to make this determination, including through the use or threat of use of their own weapons, is beyond doubt, in the short term. That it is legitimate for them to do so, given global legal and moral commitments to nuclear arms control and disarmament, and the dangers nuclear weapons pose, is preposterous.
   Above all, the consequence of the elemental hypocrisy involved in the attempt to manage the world on such a basis is that it will fail and possibly lead to horrendous war.

The first of the two phenomena identified above is not new, as such. But the extent to which relations amongst States have become militarized is extreme. It has been the result of: the failure to reach a new compact, following the end of the Cold War, then the convulsions consequent upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, the wests attempts to treat Russia as the loser. Russia will not accept this and overall, the world has progressively rejected an imperial America. The principle victim in this situation has been the UN Charter system for the resolution of conflict.

The application of these circumstances to the North Korean case is illustrated by China’s obvious interest in the North Korean irritant to the US, Japan and South Korea, given its conflict with them over it’s South China Sea policies and actions. Simply, it can be expected to indicate that a price for it stepping up pressure on North Korea will be that the others make concessions on the South China Sea and more particularly recognize that if North Korea were to collapse it would not be acceptable for it to be folded into South Korea, as a State allied to the US. Russia could be expected to support China in such a stance.

On the specific issue of North Korea’s bomb, the previous policy of Obama’s first term – “strategic patience”- will need to be supplemented by a refreshed diplomacy and some new incentives, but only if China has significantly stepped up its effort with The North Koreans.

But, the current global situation described above, where nuclear weapon states attempt to hold the ring on the possession of such weapons, is failing. Israel, India and Pakistan have won that game. They have nuclear weapons and have refused to join the NPT and the Test Ban Treaty. Iran is on ice, for now, but Saudi Arabia is not. This is an unstable situation.

The hypocrisy which is intrinsic to the NPT, which privileges States with nuclear weapons, is coming home to roost. NPT is only acceptable if those privileged States implement their Treaty obligation to progressively eliminate their nuclear weapons. Instead what we see today is their expansion of their arsenals and their manifest reversion to power, not law or principle, as the reliable determinant of political and security outcomes.

If states were ever to become serious about ending the threat posed to all by the continued existence of nuclear weapons, they would begin a process of negotiated reductions in which all such weapons were in the frame. This is in fact what they have undertaken to do in NPT, a commitment which the International Court of Justice has ruled is an obligation in international law.

Interestingly, Australia was once a leader in the search for progress on nuclear non proliferation and disarmament. A practical process for the safe elimination of nuclear weapons was outlined in 1996 by the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, established by Prime Minister Keating. The Commission’s report continues to be recognized as a realistic one. But, Australia’s leadership in this field was terminated by Prime Minister Howard. To widespread dismay, this saw Australia actually vote against a resolution of the UN General Assembly calling for enhanced action on nuclear disarmament.

The Canberra Commission report was supplemented, in 2009, by a Japan/Australia study on nuclear dangers, managed by Gareth Evans.

Axioms which the Canberra Commission identified and thought were of enduring importance were: as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will be used, whether by accident or decision; any use would have catastrophic effects; as long as any State has nuclear weapons, others will seek to acquire them.

Were the Commission to meet again today, presumably it would add a further basic warning about the consequences of the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons capability by a group such as DAESH.

Only if the nuclear hypocrisy ends will we avoid these outcomes whether at the hands of North Korea or any other State.

On Australian actions, as a country possessing a major proportion of known reserves of uranium and as a permanent member of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Turnbull government should review the resumption by Australia of an active role in global efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Richard Butler AC is former Ambassador to the UN and was Convenor of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

Repost from 17/09/2015

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — Few in the West remember the fact that China was the first country to enter what would become World War II, and it was an ally of the United States and Britain from just after Pearl Harbor in 1941 till Japan’s surrender in 1945, an Oxford expert said.

In an article titled “Forgotten ally? China’s unsung role in World War II (WWII),”circulated on U.S. TV network CNN’s website Tuesday, Rana Mitter, a professor of modern Chinese politics and history at the University of Oxford, elaborated China’s role in WorldWar II.

As China will hold a major parade in Beijing on Thursday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, “China’s memory of the war is becoming more, not less, important,” he wrote.

“Chinese suffering during the war is not in dispute,” he added, referring to the fact that during China’s resistance against Japanese aggression from 1937 to 1945, the fire of war scourged half of the Chinese territory, with around 260 million Chinese involved in the war and more than 35 million people killed or wounded. The direct economic loss reached some 100 billion U.S. dollars at then price.

The United States and China were allies during WWII and more than 250,000 Americans served in what was known as the “China-Burma-India” theater, many photos showed.

On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops attacked Lugou Bridge, also known as Marco Polo Bridge, a crucial access point to Beijing. This was the beginning of China’s eight-year warof resistance against full-scale Japanese aggression. A year later, by mid-1938, the Chinese military situation was desperate.

Many cities of eastern and central China, including Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan, fell in Japanese hands. Many foreign observers assumed that China could not hold out, and a Japanese victory over China was most likely.

Nonetheless, China refused to surrender, retreating inland to carry on resistance. “This decision changed the fate of Asia,” Mitter said.

If China had surrendered in 1938, Japan would have controlled China for a generation or more. Japan’s forces might have turned toward the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, or even India, the article reads.

The European and Asian wars might never have come together as they did after Pearl Harbor in 1941.

As Chinese hung on, and after Pearl Harbor, the war became genuinely global. The western Allies and China were united in their war against Japan.

China’s contributions were very important to the war efforts. China held down huge numbers of Japanese troops on its territory and acted as an example to other non-Western countries, showing that it was possible to fight with hegemonism and strongly oppose imperialism, Mitter stressed.

This article was first published in Xinhua, The Chinese Daily, n 2 September 2015.

Repost from 02/09/2015

Australia and the War in Syria: Perverting a Noble Vision in International Law for Ignoble Domestic Political Purposes

In 2005 a summit of world leaders at the United Nations unanimously endorsed the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Along with the establishment of the International Criminal Court, it constitutes one of the most noble contributions to international law, ever. Basically the doctrine declares that where a state is incapable or unwilling to protect its citizens, the international community should come to their aid. Intervention may take one or more of several forms: debt forgiveness, manageable loans, direct financial and logistical aid, sanctions, peace keeping operations and – as a very last resort – threatened or actual military intervention.

Like so many modern legal and ethical advances, especially in international law, R2P has been honoured more in its breach than its observance. Since its endorsement by the United Nations, the international community has sat on its hands while vicious ruling elites around the world have unleashed mass atrocities on their pitiless subjects. The prime contemporary example is the criminal Assad regime in Syria. Where interventions in the name of R2P have been initiated (by the UN or other regional or global authorities), they have generally been too little too late, or so badly coordinated they have worsened the very problems they were intended to solve.

It is surely ironic, therefore, that one of the main architects of R2P, Gareth Evans, and another former Labor Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, are now urging the Abbott government to accept the alleged “invitation” from President Obama to extend Australia’s bombing of Islamic State (IS) targets in Syria. They have suggested that this proposed intervention will be in the interests of the hapless victims of the Assad regime and IS, and other opposition elements in the horrific humanitarian catastrophe that is Syria today. That is, they want us to believe that it would entail a humanitarian intervention in line with the principles of R2P. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The bombing campaigns presently being conducted by the United States, Canada, Turkey and other allies are classic illustrations of an inadequately resourced and disastrously coordinated campaign that amounts to much too little, far too late. It will not stop IS in its tracks, nor will it bring down the Assad government. Probably nothing short of a very large number of American, Saudi Arabian, Iranian, NATO and other allies’ boots on the ground will begin to achieve those objectives. As the world well knows, the likelihood of this happening is precisely nil.

Meanwhile the Erdogan government in Istanbul is using the conflict as a cover for its brutal bombing of Kurds in southern Turkey and northern Syria and Iraq. Iran and Saudi Arabia are meddling in the various conflicts in Syria to wage a proxy war for their own nefarious purposes. Russia and China are blocking any genuine R2P attempts in the Security Council. And even if IS is destroyed and Assad and his ruthless cronies are toppled, there is no plan, no strategy, in place to bring order to the region and enable the tragically suffering peoples there begin to rebuild their lives.

It is more than likely that extending bombing into Syria is illegal under international law. Moreover the puny contribution that the few sorties the RAAF is capable of mounting in Syria will be pointless as far as ending the conflict is concerned. Given the propensity for allied bombs to incur “collateral damage” it is inevitable that Australian warplanes will add to the wounding and killing of innocent civilians. Any attempts to dress this up as a humanitarian R2P intervention simply advances the despicable rationale advanced by Tony Abbott for plunging Australia more deeply into a conflict that makes no sense in terms of the country’s real security interests.

Why then is Abbott urging the Americans to let Australia lend a hand in this unholy mess? Two morally grotesque answers immediately come to mind.

First, yet again Australia is cozying up to the United States in the naïve belief that Uncle Sam needs constant assurance of our abject loyalty to the ANZUS alliance. The fact is that the US takes Australia’s uncritical support for granted, end of story.

The second answer relates to Abbott’s electoral fortunes – or misfortunes. There is clearly a belief in the government that scaring the Australian electorate is the surest way of winning the 2016 election. This perverse rationale for recklessly spending Australian blood and treasure in an unwinnable, stupidly conducted, and cruel war reeks of the very basest kind of cynicism. Abbott’s strategy must be exposed for all to see what it truly is: a desperate and despicable attempt to cling on to power, no matter what the consequences for the country or for the world.

It’s time for the Labor Opposition to take an unambiguous stand against sending Australian warplanes into Syria. Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek must denounce the plan in the strongest possible terms. They have to explain to the Australian people that their country’s involvement in Iraq and possibly Syria is in fact endangering their security, not protecting it. In addition, Labor needs to advocate a strategy for immediate withdrawal of all Australian troops and materiel from the Middle East. Bring the troops home. There is no way their presence there will end this terrible conflict or reduce the appalling suffering of the civilians on the ground.

And Gareth Evans and Bob Carr should be turning their intelligent minds to theorizing a revised version of R2P. The first version has palpably failed. It needs a comprehensive rethinking. A future Australian government should be at the forefront of advocating the new version of this noble ideal at the United Nations and every other global forum it can attend. In the meantime compounding Abbott’s lie that America wants us by its side in Syria has to be treated with the utter contempt it deserves.

Allan Patience is a foreign policy researcher in the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.