The US might be coming back to the region, but so too is Europe, a nod to the fact that the central locus of global economic weight and geopolitical activity has moved. However, we need to beware the excessive zeal of Boris Johnson.
US President Joe Biden tells us that America is coming back to the region. Less noticed is that Europe is, too.
This is good news for Australia. For one thing, no country has more skillful external policy systems than Britain and France.
With French Polynesia still part of Metropolitan France, the French never left the region, and in 2018 were the first European power to announce the genesis of a national Indo Pacific strategy. Together with Germany and the Netherlands, they are the prime movers for a new EU strategy on the Indo Pacific, likely to be rolled out this year.
This enhanced European interest in the region is prompted by an appreciation that the central locus not only of global economic weight, but also geopolitical activity, has moved to the Indo Pacific, not an easy concept for Europeans to grasp.
It is also stimulated by the view in European governments that Chinese external policies potentially menace European security interests, and by the popular perception in Europe that Chinese internal strictures – particularly its policies on Hong Kong and Xinjiang – are seriously at odds with European values.
However EU members, like Japan, tend to frame their security policies more in terms of keeping the region “free and open “ than in the language of Trump and Pompeo, which effectively espoused containment of China.
Britain’s evolving policy on the Indo Pacific is in part based on considerations similar to those of the EU. But having left Europe, it is also seeking how best to justify its self-described independence. In 1962, Dean Acheson commented that Britain had lost an empire but had not yet found a role. Britain is again in search of a role.
These shifting European policies will be evinced by a heightened security presence – albeit a largely symbolic one. A French aircraft carrier visited the region in 2019 and further visits are likely. The British are also to send a carrier this year. Germany and the Netherlands will dispatch smaller vessels to the region.
But symbolism can matter, particularly if backed up by enhanced diplomatic and economic engagement.
Most Asian countries will welcome these developments, if discreetly.
While memories of the colonial past still remain relevant, they are for the most part overshadowed by the realities of the era. But for Covid 19, Boris Johnson was to have been the Guest of Honour at India’s national day. The French and the Indians have close security relations, largely unnoticed here.
Britain’s interest in joining the pithily termed “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership” (CCTPP) has had a largely positive initial response.
In a recent “State of Southeast Asia” survey of ASEAN states (conducted from 18 November to 10 January by the ISEAS-Yusuf Ishak Institute, a Singapore think tank), Japan again emerged as the most trusted ASEAN partner (67%), but the EU was in second place at 51%.
The key to assisting ASEAN countries to resist Chinese pressures lies not in trying to align them more closely with America – which most wish to avoid – but in helping them further develop the means to maintain their resilience in their own way and with visible support from their friends.
The Southeast Asians have long felt neglected by the United States. Since the Indochina wars, American policy emphasis has been North East Asia. Then there was Trump.
The Europeans, Japan and Australia must put more economic and diplomatic grunt into the sub region and encourage Biden to do so as a policy priority.
Serious economic engagement and development assistance will be all the more important, with increasing evidence that for poorer countries the economic sting of Covid-19 will be in the tail.
The Southeast Asians see the optimum regional outcome of current Sino-United States tensions as multi-polarity, or a system by which a number of power centres balance each other. The Europeans broadly share this view – as was confirmed by a recent comment by a senior French official to Nikkei Asia.
The EU also values its strategic autonomy, all the more given its experiences with Trump. This was manifest in its recent signature of an economic agreement with China, despite the express wish of the incoming Biden administration that it hold off doing so.
Hence one of the benefits of European regional engagement is that while the policies of the Europeans have much in common with the United States and the other Quad countries, their perspectives are different.
We should, however, beware excessive zeal. One concern should be the reported ambition of Boris Johnson to join the Quad. When this was idea floated in the London Times in January, it did not resonate. No bad thing. The assertion that the Quad is a hefty plank in a containment strategy against China is still plausibly deniable. With an extra-regional power whose leader is particularly vocal, denials would sound a tad hollow.
A second unwise tendency is the growth of the Anglosphere as a policy vehicle. As a once discreet “Five Eyes” intelligence group it had – and retains – merit. With its current aspirations to policy salience, you would think the idea derived from conversations in the Drones Club a century ago – and you would be broadly right. The Asians – minus China –seem comfortable enough with the return of Europe, but an echo chamber comprising the two most recent imperial powers and three largely white former British dominions might be a bridge too far.
Thanks to Asialink Insights for permission to publish this article.
John McCarthy AO FAIIA is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Melbourne University, a senior adviser to Asialink, and a former ambassador and high commissioner to the United States and numerous Asian countries.
Comments
34 responses to “Skilled operators: Europe is back in the Indo Pacific”
“The key to assisting ASEAN countries to resist Chinese pressures lies not in trying to align them more closely with America – which most wish to avoid – but in helping them further develop the means to maintain their resilience in their own way and with visible support from their friends.” But how will ASEAN countries resist EU, UK and USA pressures ??
Is there a certain wistfulness in this piece by our ex Ambassador?
Warmly welcoming 2 erstwhile colonial powers with ‘skillful systems’ back to the region, not so much for economic reasons, but clearly to buttress the colonial white man’s hold on influence in this part of the world is surreal.
This entire piece reeks again of the panic being felt by some of the rise of China. Perhaps they are also fondly looking back at an older ‘skillful system’ in 1900 when the Eight Nations Alliance (which also included troops from colonial India) ganged up to bash China.
The dogs are barking, but the Belt & Road Caravan moves on. One such project is the high speed rail being built in Indonesia, the Jakarta-Bandung section scheduled for completion this year. Suddenly our Melbourne to Sydney rail will look like a museum piece in comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDR5Iwoh3Vk&t=628s
A bit ’50s pro-white, isn’t it? Don’t think the Indonesians would welcome the Dutch back, or Duterte the Spanish or Americans. The white man’s rule is over in this region, thank God! All Australia needs is a little humility and it will be well accepted. Is that too much to ask? New Zealand is doing it.
Not according to Hartcher of the Herald. He reckons that the dreaded commie chinese received a tremendous setback at the recent meeting of European nations and PRC. Completely ignoring that FDI from the EU into PRC has grown by a staggering 225% over just nine years and last years trade between the EU and PRC hit record levels. And is projected to grow. The outrageous propaganda pot boiler got the real estate agent readership of the old rag going. Pete doesnt let facts get in the way of a good yarn.
By the time the SMH, NYT and WP got around to putting their stuff behind a paywall, it wasn’t worth reading, let alone paying for. It’s important to know what kind of crap those scoundrels want people to believe, but you can tell that from the free headlines.
Meanwhile Europe became China’s largest export partner.
Hartcher is just part of the filthy military industrial complex.
When Eisenhower came up with the term, he called it the military-industrial-congressional complex. In other words government was included in the cabal.
Today we should call it the Military-Industrial-Government-Media complex.
Hartcher thinks he can dance ‘goody two shoes’ on top of it, but he must be one of the most compromised journalists in the land now.
I note the Military-Industrial-Government-Media complex’s puppet Linda Reynolds is giving a talk at the national press club today about the need to contain threats in the Indo-Pacific region. Hartcher will be in 7th heaven.
The only threat in the Indo-Pacific is America and lapdog Australia, and the main reason for this is to increase further weapons sales and create another arms race in the region causing a tipping point of even more sales. Meanwhile the diplomacy gets worse and worse, and inclines towards sociopathic inability to communicate normally. It’s diplomacy through threat and sovereignty for America not Australia.
Well done little Linda, who would have thought such a quiet little individual could have such a love for the death of others?
Update:
Linda Reynolds taken to hospital (make of it what you will).
Greg Hunt says:
“I had some prior notification that she may have had an illness. I was not aware of the nature of it and, honestly, I think in this situation, we have to remind ourselves that this is the most intense, arguably, environment in Australia.
There are many intense environments and all of us need to be aware of the pressures and pains, the impact of each of us on each other so reaching out and she is a good person and so she needs our support as she has our support.”
Unlike those that saw Medevac defeated, or those who suffer intolerably in war zones due to the industry she supports.
You are spot on about US arms sales. The Indonesians have just been arm-twisted to buy US military aircraft, instead of buying Russian SU35s. Just like Australia, the contract will probably lock the Indonesians into many years of rich pickings by the usual US Defence companies.
George we dont have any industry left in this country. Apart from the joke ‘finance industry” of rip off rentiers. We now have just the military. And its touts like pistol Pete.
What, precisely, are these ‘pressures’ that so concern capitalist nations like ours?
Must Be Zhou Enlai’s ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’ for which it is reported is relevant again to Xi Jinping.
The Five Principles
1. mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,
2. mutual non-aggression,
3. mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,
4. equality and mutual benefit, and
5. peaceful co-existing.
Clearly this is unacceptable to the US military-industrial-congressional complex, and all the other Western bunnies including Australia.
Chilling. Those Commies will stop at nothing!
I read yesterday that the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that there was genocide in Xinjiang.
Of course that did not stop Pompeo and Trump claiming the contrary only a short time later.
George (and you, Godfree), if you haven’t seen the article by Max Blumenthal and Gareth Porter, at The Grayzone, published last week, Feb 18th, get yourselves a look at it.
A complete destruction of every last piece of ‘evidence’ concocted by Adrian Zenz, and channelled via Pompeo, into the cold, dead heart of Western ‘democratic values’.
What makes the piece so complete, is how Blumenthal and Porter went root and branch through Zenz’ own sources, ‘data’ and findings. Superb job.
A clue is found in the header above the article;
“WANTED BY FACT-CHECKERS
ADRIAN ZENZ
FOR SERIAL DATA ABUSE”
Thanks DJT
I’ll put the link here
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher/
I’m glad I clicked into this article and read it. Quite an eye opener. I hope John Menadue asks thegrayzone to publish the full article here. A must read for this coming week when one can foresee plenty of mainstream articles about Canada’s parliament voting unaminously to condemn China for a genocide that was in fact the ravings of a madman. Lots of eggs on Canadian faces if thegrayzone article is right.
The Grayzone article is right, Banana No 3. They are not the first to point out how Adrian Zenz has conned the West into his fundamentalist ‘anti-communist’ mania, they just dug deeper into Zenz own ‘research’ and showed the depths of his fraud.
Did you know Zenz is also a raving – genuine – anti-Semitic? Look for a Google book he co-wrote, where he talks about Jews having limited options for saving themselves. Blumenthal and Porter touched on it the article I referenced, where they wrote;
“Zenz’s first published book, “Worthy to Escape: Why all believers will not be raptured before the Tribulation,” he and his co-author, Marlos Sias, urged Christian believers to subject unruly children to “scriptural spanking,” condemned homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast,” and argued that Jews who refuse to convert to evangelical Christianity during the End Times would either be “wipe[d] out” or “refined” in a “fiery furnace.”
That’s the book I referred to, with Sias as co-author. These people are insane, yet ‘scholars’ in the West, like idiot Hartcher at ‘The Rag/SMH’ not only swallow this garbage, they transmit it as ‘gospel’.
Thanks to DJT as well since he brought my attention to the article – I just provided the link to make it easier.
What this also shows is that loopy right wing Christians already have a vendetta against China, no matter what it does, simply because it is not a white folks Christian country.
Just think, only a couple of months ago, Morrison bolstered his cabinet with more right wing Christians just like Pompeo and Pence are. So I guess these fools believe they are doing God’s work in seeking to destroy China, no other motivation needed, its an entire country of sinners.
Canadian parliament just voted 266-0 to declare that China is committing genocide. It can’t be that they are all so stupid to accept the lies.
I think DJT is on the money. It’s more to do with the cold, dead heart of Western ‘democratic values’. Which is nothing more than a massive biased and prejudiced push back against a non-Western country which has dared to work hard and succeed. And more gallingly to the Western powers, China going out to the world to pull other countries out of poverty.
The Canucks (Canadians) are about peak genocidal European extracted criminals, Man Lee.
Culturally dominated by about the worst combination you could find – Brit and Frog.
They’ve also been one of the worst for importing European Nazis seeking refuge after WWII. Their current Deputy PM, and former Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, is the descendant of straight up Nazis from the west of Ukraine – Azov Battalion and Svoboda are the current incarnations of the worst of Ukrainian Nazism, who fought ‘enthusiastically’ alongside Hitler’s Third Reich, particularly in trying to bring down the USSR in WWII.
To quote an Observer.com article from March ’17;
“Why Is This Canadian Foreign Minister ‘Proud’ of Her Family’s Nazi Past?”
Chrystia Freeland apparently blames Russian disinformation for her grandfather’s Nazi editorials that described Poland as ‘infected by the Jews’”
Canadians are garbage people, Trudeau is a fraud (even his father must be banging on the coffin lid), and one of their biggest diasporas is European Nazis.
It’s almost hilarious that they launched a Western push against arbitrary detention (by others) when they’ve been holding the Huawei founder’s daughter for more than a year, trying to work out how to extradite her to the US.
Ooh, sounds like Julian Assange, who Canada, like all their Western ‘partners’ who supported their push, could not even bring themselves to mention.
Filth accumulates in the most inconvenient places – that’s Canada, in a nutshell.
It was two Canadian units the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers that the English left to defend Hong Kong in 1941 against the Japanese Imperial Army. Outgeneraled and outfought the Canadians surrendered after two weeks with about a 50% casualty rate. One of the worst defeats of WWII. And that was about it as Canada’s contribution to the defeat of Japan. They committed one ship to the naval war. Canada was and is an almost completely insignificant country in Asia.
Well 加拿大 is another 5eyes country. Roll over. Say no more.
Remember what they said during the Lambing Flat Riots (Young NSW, Australia) in the early 1860s? The reason why they had to run the Chinese off the gold fields, and in so doing killing a number of Chinese people, scalping Qing pigtails off their heads, and seriously wounding many others? In the middle of Winter.
It was because the Chinese could work harder, live off less, and also work as a team together.
That was what they were accused of.
White people worked as individuals or partners, tended to blow their money on hedonistic lifestyles, then blamed other people for their failures.
Nothing much has changed, yet a whole lot has.
Thanks, George. I am sure glad I wasn’t one of those 1860s Chinese miners!
(I think you are right about the Chinese being able to work hard- around the same time, they were the labourers who helped build the California rail road. Fast forward to today- apparently, California has been struggling for more than a decade to build a High Speed Rail; they just can’t get it done without the cheap and efficient Chinese labourers!)
That’s correct they virtually built the early US railways, ironically paid for by American opium money they accumulated from the illegal trade with China.
Not much thanks from the US either, they were paid poorly, and were recipients of racist attacks as well. The US had observed Chinese working in teams in China, and they knew they would do the job faster, cheaper, and would be meticulous with the construction.
It is what led to the White Australia Policy, which was specifically about keeping Chinese people (and others with Asian features) out of Australia. There is a woman of Chinese background living in Australia who in recent times wrote an excellent doctoral thesis which covers a long chapter about the riots. I can link a copy for you if you are interested.
It is fundamental to the understanding of the cultivation of yellow peril in Australia which is still a ghost that haunts Australia.
She also points out in her thesis that it is only in recent times when a couple of Chinese artists that came to the town, that a mural they painted finally depicted the riot from the Chinese point of view.
https://cdn.britannica.com/05/196605-050-3F576CB9/Lambing-Flat-Riots-Harvest-of-Endurance-1988.jpg
Nice mural, even if it depicts a sad story.
Just to be fair to White Australia, much worse anti-Chinese riots have also occurred in the last few hundred years across SE Asia.
One has to say that a contributing factor is the inability of many of these Chinese peasants branching out to new lands to appreciate that there is a certain obligation on their part to understand the locals, and to learn how to contribute to a positive relationship.
Unfortunately, you still see it happening, whether in some Pacific Island state, or in some part of Africa. Some of these Chinese emigrants just don’t get it!
Look there are bad and good ambassadors from all countries, but I think several of the major cultural differences between Chinese people and Western people is a part of the problem.
You’ll know all of this but it is worth writing it down.
For a start Chinese people are more used to functioning in collectives, rather than as individuals. The extended family until recent times, has played, and still does play a significant role in Chinese society. As you know the word for everyone in Chinese is 大家 or the ‘big family’ literally speaking, while in English every ‘one’ is about each and every individual.
The basic traditional Chinese family structure was always parents, grandparents, and children all living together in large families, sometimes aunties and uncles as well. In the West families often live well apart from each other and while some grandparents are involved with bringing up grand children, it is more often the case that child care facilities or friends look after the kids in the family.
Another difference is that Westerners are more likely to be confrontational, even in public, while Chinese people by and large don’t see that as a positive. It was the worst aspect of Donald Trump. That may make them less likely to say anything in a Western society, such as being outspoken during the gold rush days.
Yet another point is that language and writing and the propensity for Chinese people to speak different dialects within China. In past times that would have made it very difficult to learn English for example, so like all people that are expats, it is often the case to live in a form of ghetto,or compound with your own people purely for communication reasons.
It is also hard to learn Chinese for English speakers given the lack of clear cut phonetics within the writing. Languages like Thai are far easier given they have a much more recently invented phonetic script. I’ve studied both, but Chinese remains still the most difficult, you either know the characters or not.
I’ve seen many migrants come to Australia and virtually every group at some time colonises a suburb, say in Sydney, and it becomes a kind of ghetto. Italians, Greeks, Middle Easterners, Vietnamese have all establish such communities. So do Australian diplomats who work overseas often living in diplomatic compounds where they are separated from the main culture.
I can remember when shopfronts in Newtown Sydney, only had Greek writing on them.
When it is hard to communicate because you don’t know the language, and you live in a different country to your own, it can lead to people becoming suspicious about you, I have experienced that when living in Europe in a Francophone country.
Xenophobia and fear of the unknown sets in.
Returning to the Lambing Flat Riots.
Australians, Latvians, even black Americans all took part in the riot against the Chinese. So there are the commonalities of both white skin or English language that linked them all together. The Chinese miners were informed and appealed to officials and the police to enact the Riot Act. Some among them understood its use and importance. But it made little difference. They were eventually due compensation for the riots according to Australian law at the time, their gold was stolen and their possessions burned, some had shocking injuries, some were dead.
Yet they only received about a tenth of what was by precedent due.
Very good George. All very valid points! I gotta give it to you- you have much knowledge, awareness and undoubted wisdom.
Thank you Man Lee
We are at a time when there is much division in our world. If I can use my skills to bring people together rather than pull them apart then I will. Especially when military-industrial-government hybrid wars are more about profits than truth.
It’s also a long time since I realised that China and Chinese people in general have much “knowledge, awareness, and particularly wisdom” in their culture. Some of it has rubbed off on my mind over the years. But it is a pity that many in Australia and beyond have never been able to open the door into that world, and in so doing had the chance to value its great worth.
Another most excellent correspondent on the reality of Xinjiang is Danny Haiphong, who is an editor at the ‘Black Agenda Report’.
Danny’s been to Xinjiang a number of times, and reported what he found. He’s an American of Vietnamese extraction, and an absolutely first rate journalist and author. Entirely admirable, and lauded by many an African American, including the wonderful Margaret Kimberly, who is also at the Black Agenda Report.
Thank you DJT, really enjoying your references.
Britain and France “skilled.” After Suez and Dien Bien Phu they are back with a helicopter carrier and a sub. PRC must be quaking.