In the first part of this series, I looked at just how flawed assumptions lead to wrong answers about how Australia and New Zealand should shape their strategic response to the “Rise of China”, especially its increasingly blatant efforts to turn the Pacific into a Chinese lake. Australia and New Zealand, while we might not be great powers, are not exactly completely helpless, either.
Australia – and by extension New Zealand – have, in fact, unique strategic assets. Not least is our membership of the Five Eyes intelligence network, which, to her credit, Ardern is helping preserve by resisting the intrusion of Huawei into New Zealand’s telecommunications infrastructure.
What White entirely fails to grasp, or at least consider, is that our long alliance relationship with the United States, our deep cultural and political affinities with it, our military and intelligence inter-operabilities that have long been institutionalised through the Five Eyes and ANZUS alliances, our enormous geographic advantages at the base of the Indo-Pacific super-region and beneath the vast archipelagic screen of Indonesia and Melanesia—even our deep complementarities with China’s economy—all point to this as our natural strategy…
The small island-state of Malta serves as an instructive example. Malta is tiny: my Maltese father-in-law would often gesture out his windows to Port Phillip Bay and observe that Malta’s three islands would easily fit. Yet Malta’s strategic significance saw it fiercely defended from German invasion by the Allies in WWII, when Malta was the most-bombed place in the world.
Australia and New Zealand are simply too strategically important for its allies to let China simply walk in and take them. Especially given their proximity to Antarctica, which will almost certainly be heavily contested in the next decades. China is already attempting to not-so-secretly stake a claim in Antarctica.
Even assuming that China’s economy continues to grow and that the failures of institutional reform within it do not hobble it; even assuming that it has significant success in asserting primacy in South-East Asia and even East Asia (where South Korea and Japan pose far more robust opposition to its pretensions than any state in South-East Asia), the notion that Australia must prepare itself to face a direct large-scale Chinese invasion on its own is simply preposterous…India and Indonesia are likely to grow massively in wealth and power in the next couple of decades, what makes him think that they would stand aside and acquiesce in a Chinese attempt to conquer this island continent with its vast natural resources, its democratic system of government and its extraordinary strategic geography at the base of the Indo-Pacific?
What makes him think that Japan would do so? That the United States would do so?
Australia and New Zealand’s strategic path thus becomes clearer. We could never hope to match China, mano-a-mano. But, just as against Japan in WWII, we are more defensible than might be thought, and we can enlist much bigger friends to our cause.
We should be making plain to China and to our neighbours that while we welcome China’s increased prosperity and are keen to trade under liberal rules, we will not be kowtowing to Beijing…
We should be seeking to master asymmetric technologies, pilotless aircraft, information warfare and the creation of resilient infrastructure and institutions, in order to buttress our defences against the threats we and our allies manifestly face. We should be engaging—as Scott Morrison appears to be doing—in energetic efforts to talk with the Americans about the strategic environment and how better to protect and revitalise the liberal international order against the dangers posed by the new authoritarians and other hostile forces.
quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/09/how-not-to-defend-australia-against-china
As I wrote in earlier articles, there’s certainly a danger in placing too much faith in kumbaya liberal assumptions of “global order”. China has shown that it is willing to stick to the international rules only so far as it suits them. On the other hand, though, hard international relations realism often makes international cooperation entirely necessary for nation-states facing down a global bully.
While China – and especially its underhanded activities in our countries – should be watched with clear-eyed wariness, Chicken Little panicking is scarcely necessary. Australia and New Zealand have a lot of powerful friends, and we ought to make sure they don’t forget how key we are to their own interests.