{"id":62991,"date":"2021-03-09T06:00:16","date_gmt":"2021-03-08T19:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=62991"},"modified":"2021-03-08T20:48:19","modified_gmt":"2021-03-08T09:48:19","slug":"the-compass-of-australias-asia-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-compass-of-australias-asia-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"The compass of Australia\u2019s Asia strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The pandemic has geopolitical and geoeconomics equivalents. Disruption all around, amid the end of the old global order<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The central truths that set the topography of Australian grand strategy in Asia\u2014the four compass points\u2014haven\u2019t fallen, but their alignments are shifting. New navigation is needed.<\/p>\n

The first compass bearing is a major trend that\u2019s tough for any Oz politician to talk about in public: the long-term decline of Australia\u2019s relative power. Call this our Going South star.<\/p>\n

When a bunch of development, diplomacy and defence<\/a> leaders got together for a foreign policy rethink in 2019 (ah, how long ago that seems), their statement pinged relative decline first up: \u2018Australia\u2019s weight in the world is declining. Primarily, this is driven by two factors: firstly, the fall of Australia\u2019s relative economic weight to other nations and secondly, the fragmentation of the international order from which Australia has benefited.\u2019<\/p>\n

In Asia, our waning weight is striking because once we were heavy. Back in 1990, China\u2019s GDP was US$360 billion, while Australia\u2019s was US$310 billion. From that point, the World Bank graph<\/a> has China\u2019s economy soaring up a mountain while Australia\u2019s gently streams.<\/p>\n

Close to the end of the 20th century, the Australian economy was larger than the economies of all ASEAN members combined. No more. It\u2019s a given that the shift of economic and strategic power means Australia faces a \u2018disruptive Asia\u2019<\/a>\u2014a truism heavy with significance.<\/p>\n

In a book on Oz foreign policy<\/a>, 21 years ago, my starting point was Australia\u2019s relative economic and military decline: \u2018This core reality has shaped Australian assessments. It is a key trend often hinted at but rarely stated in blunt terms. In the phrase \u201crelative decline\u201d the important word is relative. Decline does not equate with decadence or internal failure. Australia can keep getting richer and ever more affluent.\u2019<\/p>\n

The still-happy-and-getting-richer message of \u2018relative\u2019 suffers because of Edward Gibbon\u2019s great title: any Oz leader who says \u2018relative decline\u2019 knows what the voters will hear is \u2018decline and fall<\/a>.\u2019 To avoid nasty headlines, the polity deals tacitly and tangentially with Australia\u2019s relative loss of power.<\/p>\n

Much easier to talk about is a related compass point: Australia\u2019s Great Asia Project<\/a>. The compass metaphor means this is our East star.<\/p>\n

Asia is \u2018fundamental to Australia\u2019s future,\u2019 a Canberra consensus that former prime minister John Howard expresses in his 2010 memoir<\/a>, starting his Asia chapter with this sentence: \u2018For more than 40 years, every serious political leader in Australia has been committed to the belief that close engagement and collaboration with our Asian neighbours was critical to Australia\u2019s future.\u2019 On the next page, Howard makes clear that the leader at the head of this line is Gough Whitlam. While the term \u2018Great Asia Project\u2019 is mine, see 1972 as the start date, as tacitly embraced by Howard.<\/p>\n

Howard often hammered the debating point that Australia didn\u2019t have to choose between its history and geography. Yet in embracing (or recognising) geography, the Great Asia Project is a defining choice. Obvious, even unavoidable. But still a choice. The consensus is set and Australia\u2019s political unity ticket on our Asian future approaches its 50th birthday.<\/p>\n

Australia knew Asia existed before 1972, but didn\u2019t want to have to translate geography into policy. The importance of the project is the acceptance that Australia must function as part of Asia, not apart from Asia. The Commonwealth of Australia spent its first seven decades seeking security from <\/em>Asia; since then we\u2019ve sought security<\/a> in<\/em> and with <\/em>Asia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The get-with-the-Asia-strength sentiment complements the North point on our compass (our axis of rotation): the reordering of the way Australia operates as a democracy with an open economy and open society.<\/p>\n

The march to a multicultural identity started in 1966 when the Coalition government of Harold Holt quietly began to inter the White Australia policy; full burial with loud fanfare was delivered by the Whitlam Labor government after 1972. Both sides of Oz politics did the big deed.<\/p>\n

Remaking the nation\u2019s face with a new non-discriminatory immigration policy, we remade political traditions, junking the original \u2018Australian settlement\u2019 mindset (white Australia, industry protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism and imperial benevolence). The term \u2018Australian settlement\u2019 was coined by Paul Kelly in one of the great works of Oz journalism as history, a magisterial tome with a superb title that resonates anew, The end of certainty<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The only time Oz leaders have broadcast the relative-decline reality was during that era when Australia was tearing down tariffs and casting off the protection mentality (most memorably with Paul Keating\u2019s 1986 warning about Australia becoming a \u2018banana republic\u2019<\/a>).<\/p>\n

An open society, in and of Asia, is why \u2018our ethnic face has made a decisive shift from Anglo-European to Eurasian,\u2019<\/a> as George Megalogenis writes, turning Sydney and Melbourne into Eurasian cities<\/a>: \u2018Australia\u2019s identity is undergoing epic transformation. In seventy short years, we have shifted from the most insular rich nation on Earth to being a global role model for diversity. It took fifty years to get from white to Anglo-European, but only another twenty to cross the threshold to Eurasian.\u2019<\/p>\n

Looking north, east and south, Canberra ponders what a Eurasian grand strategy will mean. And how that relates to the fourth point on the compass, the leader of the West, the United States.<\/p>\n

The US alliance came through Donald Trump\u2019s presidency unscathed. Canberra worked the bilateral relationship with success while quietly horrified at Trump\u2019s multilateral mayhem<\/a>; Malcolm Turnbull called Trump a \u2018natural isolationist\u2019 and \u2018thoroughly dystopian\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The US has bounced back before<\/a>, and Canberra offers President Joe Biden a fervent welcome. The Western point of our compass, though, has lost much \u2018credibility and influence<\/a>,\u2019 as Biden acknowledges.<\/p>\n

As the pandemic fog clears, we can take some compass sightings across tough topography. Our stars do not align.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The pandemic has geopolitical and geoeconomics equivalents. Disruption all around, amid the end of the old global order. The central truths that set the topography of Australian grand strategy in Asia\u2014the four compass points\u2014haven\u2019t fallen, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":62993,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[354,17,56,21],"class_list":["post-62991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-asia","tag-australia","tag-indo-pacific","tag-strategy-2"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe compass of Australia\u2019s Asia strategy | 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\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-compass-of-australias-asia-strategy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The compass of Australia\u2019s Asia strategy | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The pandemic has geopolitical and geoeconomics equivalents. 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