{"id":21703,"date":"2015-07-23T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T20:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=21703"},"modified":"2015-07-22T15:35:15","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T05:35:15","slug":"anzus-china-and-the-prisoners-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/anzus-china-and-the-prisoners-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"ANZUS, China and the Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Prisoner's<\/a><\/p>\n

The recent ANU\u2013CSIS paper The ANZUS Alliance in an Ascending Asia<\/a><\/em> is a welcome addition to contemporary thinking on the Australia\u2013US alliance and its prospects over the next couple of decades as China looms ever larger. The even more recent release of the Economist Intelligence Unit\u2019s Long-term Macroeconomic Forecasts: Key Trends to 2050<\/a><\/em> offers a challenging counterpoint to the comfortable policy prescriptions of the ANU\u2013CSIS study.<\/p>\n

While it might suit some to dismiss China\u2019s capacity to realise its leadership ambitions, as did the Secretary of PM&C at the Crawford School\u2019s Australian Leadership Forum at the end of June, its growing economic dominance is already affecting the regional strategic balance. And when the relative economic strength of the major global economies is viewed through the lens of demographic change, workforce participation rates, greater capital use efficiency in R&D and adjustments in immigration policies, the mid years of this century look even murkier.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the fashionably ignored problem of global warming, which may bring with it significant and adverse security effects, particularly in the riverine deltas and archipelagoes of Asia, with entire communities moving to higher and drier ground. And as the large emerging economies of China and India move away from carbon-intensive energy production, Australia\u2019s relative economic position and associated political throw-weight will decline.<\/p>\n

Those combined forces could well stress the alliances that the US already has in place with Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, and may well impact on its alliance with Australia. The ANU\u2013CSIS paper ignores these factors.<\/p>\n

The ANU\u2013CSIS paper does, however, provide a useful overview of the ANZUS Treaty, identifying the key political and military developments that have served to support the continuing relevance of the alliance. Curiously, it overlooks what was probably the most profound change to the operation of the alliance\u2014 the re-engineering of the operating arrangements at Pine Gap and Nurrungar\u2014which happened on Kim Beazley\u2019s watch as Minister for Defence. Although that was three decades ago, it inaugurated the integrated cooperation paradigm that continues to define the alliance to this day.<\/p>\n

The paper correctly acknowledges that the ANZUS alliance, like most defence treaties, was initially threat-based: Australia and New Zealand needed US military assurances if Japan were to rebuild an independent self-defence capability. It doesn\u2019t, however, come to grips with the significance of how the ANZUS alliance has changed since 1951, as shared strategic aims and values have replaced threat as the driving force of the treaty. AUSMIN communiqu\u00e9s since the mid-90s have reflected this fact.<\/p>\n

Sadly, what might have worked in the past is no guide to what might work in the future. The paper\u2019s curious language of hubs, spokes, pivots and rebalances suggests a mindset that remains entrenched in the linear strategic concepts of the past. While the US, Australia and New Zealand will continue to coalesce around human, social and political values as the foundation of their long-term strategic relationship, these values are not readily transferable to strategic associations that might be established elsewhere in Asia.<\/p>\n

This seems to have escaped the authors of the ANU\u2013CSIS study, especially as they considered the prospective place of both Indonesia and Japan in the evolution of Australian and US strategic interests in Asia. The idea that Indonesia and\/or Japan might in some way replace Australia as the US\u2019s preferred strategic partner is ludicrous. What isn\u2019t ludicrous is the interest that the US (and Australia if it can replace a transaction-based Indonesian relationship with an outcomes-based diplomacy) should have in engaging Indonesia and Japan more constructively in the strategic affairs of Asia.<\/p>\n

Australia, Indonesia and Japan each bring quite different strengths and benefits to the US as it seeks to secure and manage its global strategic interests. These strengths and benefits are complementary rather than competitive.<\/p>\n

The joint US\u2013Australia approach to the emergence of China as a global strategic power cannot rest on some kind of latter-day containment doctrine, or even a policy of constraining China. Nor are the US and Australia in a position to \u2018shape\u2019 China\u2019s expectations or \u2018permit\u2019 it to take a larger leadership role.<\/p>\n

Our joint ability to condescend extends only so far!<\/p>\n

Rather, the US and Australia are well positioned to construct a network of intersecting and differentiated relationships that capitalise on the opportunities now on offer in Asia to strengthen and extend a rules-based strategic architecture that engages China, not corrals it. Our collective aim should be to exploit and leverage complexity and ambiguity rather than engage in a form of linear reductionism that misrepresents multi-dimensional strategic opportunities as competitive binary options.<\/p>\n

The ANU\u2013CSIS paper questions whether US\u2013China and Australia\u2013China relations might be diverging, but without recognising that difference isn\u2019t necessarily divergence. While the paper implicitly resolves this artificial dichotomy by proposing a return to first principles\u2014what is the regional and global order we seek, and what are the ways and means we have to achieve and sustain that order\u2014it doesn\u2019t answer those questions.<\/p>\n

In Australia\u2019s case, the suggestion that some kind of \u2018strategic choice\u2019 between Washington and Beijing is inevitable is just another form of the prisoner\u2019s dilemma. Because the nature and dynamics of Australia\u2019s relationships with the US and China are so different, the management of those relationships is much more a question of \u2018both\/and\u2019 than of \u2018either\/or\u2019.<\/p>\n

The effect of the ANZUS alliance on the strategic evolution of the Asia\u2013Pacific region will ultimately depend on the skill shown by Washington and Canberra in fostering a rules-based regional security architecture supported by economic and trading arrangements that generate prosperity, build resilience and enhance political and social stability. The ANU\u2013CSIS paper has made a start by identifying some of the problems that need to be addressed. But it also reminds us just how much further our joint policy development needs to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent ANU\u2013CSIS paper The ANZUS Alliance in an Ascending Asia is a welcome addition to contemporary thinking on the Australia\u2013US alliance and its prospects over the next couple of decades as China looms ever …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":264,"featured_media":21704,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131,52,135,1146,31],"class_list":["post-21703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-anzus","tag-china","tag-japan","tag-prisoners-dilemma","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nANZUS, China and the Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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