{"id":13195,"date":"2014-04-04T11:30:02","date_gmt":"2014-04-04T00:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=13195"},"modified":"2014-04-07T13:09:37","modified_gmt":"2014-04-07T03:09:37","slug":"battling-the-spin-on-australias-asian-exercising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/battling-the-spin-on-australias-asian-exercising\/","title":{"rendered":"Battling the spin on Australia\u2019s Asian exercising"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Republic<\/a><\/p>\n

As Tony Abbott wings his way to Northeast Asia, up to 130 ADF personnel are already there, participating in a major US-led amphibious exercise off the South Korean coastline. That number comes from a mid-March Stars and Stripes<\/i> piece<\/a> that referred to the Exercise SsangYong (double dragon) as \u2018unprecedented\u2019 and as \u2018the peninsula\u2019s largest joint amphibious landing drill.\u2019 That\u2019s no small thing for Australia to be part of.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a more recent Wall Street Journal <\/a><\/i>article<\/a> that has put a specific and challenging spin on Australia\u2019s involvement (which it must be said is dwarfed by the nearly 10,000 US and several thousand Korean personnel). Depicting this large exercise as an attempt to reassure Washington\u2019s allies about America\u2019s commitment as the regional distribution of power is changing, Yuka Hayashi also had this to say: \u2018The U.S. has also expanded joint-exercise programs with Japan as well as Australia, regional allies that are building their own amphibious forces to counter Beijing’s.\u2019<\/p>\n

That\u2019s certainly not the way Australia would explain the development of its own amphibious capabilities, nor its cooperation with the United States, including from Darwin. But those assumptions are hard for regional observers to resist and will be even harder for Canberra to disown. A similar challenge faces New Zealand. As Benjamin Schreer and I observed last year in an earlier piece for The Strategist<\/i><\/a>, the NZDF\u2019s participation in a large amphibious exercise off the California coast came with some interesting connections. Japan\u2019s significant contribution to the same drill, cast in relation to the Senkaku\/Diaoyu islands dispute, had drawn the attention of China which unsuccessfully sought to have Dawn Blitz cancelled.<\/p>\n

Korea doesn\u2019t raise the same alarm bells in Beijing: indeed the two have often teamed up in their criticisms of Tokyo. But Australia still needs to be wary. Exercises which may be perfectly justifiable on training and skills grounds for the ADF need to be increasingly checked for the political signals they so often will be sending about Australia\u2019s intentions as Asia\u2019s geopolitics heats up. Some observers are bound to connect those peacetime examples of what Thomas Schelling has called<\/a> \u2018the diplomacy of violence\u2019 to attempts by the Australian political leadership to build ever closer strategic links to Japan and the United States. In that case, and with Mr Abbott\u2019s visit to Japan bound to attract attention, it\u2019ll be even harder for Canberra to fight the spin.<\/p>\n

Robert<\/a><\/em> Ayson<\/a> is professor of Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Image courtesy of Flickr user United States Marine Corps<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Tony Abbott wings his way to Northeast Asia, up to 130 ADF personnel are already there, participating in a major US-led amphibious exercise off the South Korean coastline. 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