{"id":55722,"date":"2020-05-11T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2020-05-10T20:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=55722"},"modified":"2020-05-17T14:40:26","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T04:40:26","slug":"turnbull-memoir-lays-out-australias-shift-on-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/turnbull-memoir-lays-out-australias-shift-on-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Turnbull memoir lays out Australia\u2019s shift on China"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Australia must both hug the panda and slay the dragon. Simultaneously.<\/p>\n

A quarter of Australia\u2019s international trade<\/a> and well over a third of our exports go to a nation that might assault a Royal Australian Navy ship in the South China Sea. That ship fear shaped Malcolm Turnbull\u2019s shift on China while he was prime minister.<\/p>\n

The trade boom benefit<\/a> confronts the danger of security bang.<\/p>\n

Turnbull, Australia\u2019s 29th prime minister, once got the China relationship in one word: \u2018frenemy\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Turnbull\u2019s predecessor, Tony Abbott, needed only three words for what drives our China policy: \u2018fear and greed\u2019.<\/a><\/p>\n

Two Liberal prime ministers, who could agree on little else, concur on the challenge that is China.<\/p>\n

While not reusing the \u2018frenemy\u2019 word, Turnbull\u2019s memoir, A bigger picture<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>devotes a chapter to China and that balance between friend and enemy. And how to deal with Beijing when it\u2019s being a bully. That word \u2018bully\u2019 runs through the account.<\/p>\n

Turnbull\u2019s discussion of China\u2019s island-building land grab in the South China Sea\u2014\u2018to create facts on the ground, or above the water\u2019\u2014illustrates the tests and tensions.<\/p>\n

Turnbull says he repeatedly told Chinese leaders that their strategy was counterproductive: \u2018Was the tenuous advantage given by establishing these forward operating bases worth the tensions that it was creating?\u2019<\/p>\n

Australia doesn\u2019t recognise the legitimacy of what China has built. But unlike the US Navy, the Royal Australian Navy doesn\u2019t sail ships inside 12 nautical miles (the limit of territorial waters) of the new islands. Australia stays outside that zone to avoid a confrontation that \u2018would easily play into China\u2019s hands\u2019, Turnbull writes.<\/p>\n

The People\u2019s Liberation Army Navy knows that if it conflicts with a US ship, it runs the risk of rapid escalation into full-blown conflict. But an Australian ship is a different proposition altogether. If one of our ships were to be rammed and disabled within the 12-mile limit by a Chinese vessel, we don\u2019t have the capacity to escalate. If the Americans backed us in, then the Chinese would back off. But if Washington hesitated or, for whatever reasons, decided not to or was unable immediately to intervene, then China would have achieved an enormous propaganda win, exposing the USA as a paper tiger not to be relied on by its allies. My judgement was that given the volatile geopolitical climate at the time, especially between the USA and China, it wasn\u2019t a risk worth taking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The possibility of what China might do becomes a question of what the US would do. Australia does the panda\u2013dragon balance while keeping a constant eye on Uncle Sam.<\/p>\n

Turnbull hates being called a panda hugger. Yet his China chapter describes a hugger who slowly picked up the sword.<\/p>\n

Start that journey from a speech<\/a> Turnbull gave in 2011 at the London School of Economics which rejected any thought that \u2018China\u2019s economic growth meant it was inevitably going to become a military threat\u2019. The strategic response, he said, \u2018should be to hedge against adverse and unlikely future contingencies as opposed to seeking to contain (futilely in all likelihood) a rising power\u2019.<\/p>\n

The 2011 speech had elements that ran through all of Turnbull\u2019s later foreign policy thinking:<\/p>\n