In the latest in our Foreign Policy Rethink series, Mark Beeson takes a look at Australia’s long-standing alignment with the United States and argues it is increasingly out of step with shifting global realities and regional dynamics.
Anxiety about our literal and metaphorical place in the world is seemingly baked into the minds of Australian policymakers. Ever since this country became notionally independent, fretting about ‘Asia’ and our distance from fellow members of the Anglosphere has been the default position of strategic thinkers and foreign policy officials.
Despite Australia being economically dependent on the region to our north and enjoying an enviably benign strategic geography that also fortuitously confers fabulous resource wealth, not much has changed. On the contrary, Australia’s integration into the strategic posture of the United States has only grown over time, in spite of pointless and costly wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Only the absence of other countries joining America’s latest folly in Iran seems to have stopped the Albanese government from dutifully enlisting in yet another disastrous coalition of the willing. But given the impulsive, clueless and increasingly unhinged policies of the Trump administration, which are undermining the international order it helped create, even the likes of Richard Marles must surely recognise that America is no longer a reliable ally – if it ever was.
Being a ‘sub-imperial power’ is clearly a role Australian policymakers have embraced in the belief that it has economic as well as strategic benefits. Whatever the merits of that argument may have been, they clearly no longer withstand scrutiny. All of which begs the question of what it takes to change the conventional, seemingly unchallengeable wisdom that prevails in Canberra.
Ironically enough, Trump’s contempt for alliance partners and international institutions may make a rethink possible. Looking ‘weak’ on security may no longer be the sort of electoral liability that caused the Albanese government to wave through Scott Morrison’s woefully ill-conceived AUKUS project. Indeed, as Mark Carney has discovered, standing up to the Trump administration and seeking new international partners may be electorally advantageous, as well as in the much-invoked ‘national interest’.
Australia might develop much closer ties with our neighbours and become a genuine part of the region, rather than a transactionally minded opportunist. Improving links with the middle powers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ought to be the easy part. The real test will be Australia’s relationship with China.
At present, Australia is a prime mover in AUKUS and the QUAD, both of which are driven by the assumption that China’s rise is a strategic threat that needs to be ‘contained’, not that they’re described as such, of course. But given that America has been at war with someone or other for nearly all its history as an independent country, the claim that China is the principal source of regional instability and that the US is the irreplaceable bedrock of peace and security looks increasingly implausible.
Of course, there are justifiable concerns about China – or any other country, for that matter – developing a hegemonic sphere of interest in the Indo-Pacific. But at least the People’s Republic uses the language of multilateral cooperation and a common destiny; ideas that look both appropriate for this historical juncture and strikingly at odds with ‘America first’. More to the point, perhaps, by using and exporting massive quantities of green technology China has done more to address the greatest security problem we have ever faced as a species.
No doubt, such views will induce eye-rolling in Canberra. But recent events remind us that, whatever the logic that underpinned Australia’s version of a grand strategy, it hasn’t worked out too well: it has undermined sovereignty, nullified independence, and was always hostage to whoever happened to be in the White House. Trump embodies the inherent folly of this policy.
If opportunity really is the flipside of crisis, perhaps this perilous historical moment does offer the chance for a reset. As Keynes famously pointed out, if the facts change, it’s best to change your mind, especially when there is absolutely no guarantee that whoever replaces Trump will be any better, or that it will even happen as a result of a democratic process, for that matter.
True, it is difficult to imagine the ultra-cautious Albanese government doing anything radical, especially if the recently released National Defence Strategy is anything to go by: China is the principal threat to security, and military cooperation with the US is the only way of countering it. Spending ever-more money on guns and bombs is still seen as the best way to ‘safeguard Australia’s sovereignty, security and prosperity.’
Really? As the report notes, ‘international cooperation on disarmament, arms control and risk reduction, is in stasis or is being rolled back’. Hardly surprising at a time when Trump intends to expand US defence spending by $US1.5 trillion. Suggesting that China and the US could engage in meaningful arms control negotiations and introduce a de-escalatory dynamic into global security sounds like a good idea, especially if all the savings are diverted to paying for a global green transition.
I have absolutely no expectation that’s going to happen. But in a slightly saner world it’s just the sort of thing a plucky independent middle power with lots of influence might suggest to its greater counterparts. Now that would be an idea for the times.
Mark Beeson is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. His latest book is Environmental Anarchy? International Relations Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene, (Bristol University Press: 2021) He has also written Environmental Populism: The Politics of Survival; in the Anthropocene Palgrave 2019