{"id":69484,"date":"2021-12-20T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2021-12-19T19:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=69484"},"modified":"2021-12-19T16:07:04","modified_gmt":"2021-12-19T05:07:04","slug":"aspis-decades-riding-china-and-the-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/aspis-decades-riding-china-and-the-us\/","title":{"rendered":"ASPI\u2019s decades: Riding China and the US"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI\u2019s work since its creation in August 2001.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dealing with China and the United States is a two-horse challenge.<\/p>\n

One of the great Oz realists, Owen Harries, captured the dilemma<\/a> in typical vivid fashion at ASPI\u2019s 2006 Global Forces conference: \u2018We\u2019re going to have to learn to ride two horses simultaneously, which is not the most comfortable of feats. We\u2019re going to have to cultivate a greater degree of complexity and ambiguity than we have in the past.\u2019<\/p>\n

The rough ride has arrived.<\/p>\n

Xi Jinping pushed in the South China Sea. China grew louder and sharper. When Donald Trump took power, the US gyrated. The US always has options about its role in the Indo-Pacific, and Trump offered a vision that was isolationist and \u2018America first\u2019.<\/p>\n

Canberra\u2019s dealings<\/a> with Beijing<\/a> became icy<\/a>. Australia\u2019s number one trading partner delivered trade punishment.<\/p>\n

The China\u2013US ride prompted recurring intellectual stoushes between ASPI\u2019s first executive director, Hugh White, and the institute\u2019s third executive director, Peter Jennings. \u2018We\u2019ve been talking about these things for decades,\u2019 White observed in one of his microphone jousts with Jennings.<\/p>\n

The two fronted the lectern for a debate in 2013<\/a> over the choice<\/a> White offered in his book The China choice: why America should share power<\/em><\/a>. Then they sat down in front of the ASPI camera again in 2014 for a return bout<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A multi-author discussion on The\u00a0Strategist<\/em> became an ASPI paper, To choose or not to choose: how to deal with China\u2019s growing power and influence<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

White defined his key difference with Jennings as a view about the future of the regional order:<\/p>\n

I think the order is going to change\u2014indeed, is already changing. It\u2019s simple. Asia has been stable since 1972 because China has accepted US primacy as the foundation of the Asian order. China did so because it believed it was too weak to contest it effectively. Now China believes it\u2019s strong enough to contest US primacy, and it\u2019s doing so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The choice, White wrote, was between accommodating China or confronting it as a rival. The more firmly China\u2019s ambitions were resisted, \u2018the faster strategic rivalry will escalate\u2019.<\/p>\n

Peter Jennings\u2019s attack was that in the Asia\u2013Pacific the Hugh White road was the road not taken, because the fork on that road was either subordination or incineration:<\/p>\n

[N]owhere in the civilised world is the China Choice logic gaining traction. Countries in the Asia\u2013Pacific stickily persist in cooperating with each other; in wanting the US to remain engaged; in building defence capabilities and otherwise refusing to sacrifice their own interests to give China more breathing space.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dealing with China \u2018brings into play American idealism and Australian pragmatism,\u2019 Ross Terrill wrote in Facing the dragon<\/em><\/a>. Between the two extremes of Beijing and Washington seeing each other as a \u2018threat\u2019 and a China\u2013US condominium, Terrill hoped for a peaceful competition that offered Asia breathing room:<\/p>\n

While some Australians may view China as the new America to lead the Asia\u2013Pacific, China has a less dramatic view of Australia. We\u2019re useful but not indispensable to Beijing, and less politically important to it than China is to us. Shared experiences haven\u2019t brought us to this moment of economic partnership, and the Chinese owe us no guiding loyalty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

China would be \u2018Australia\u2019s greatest foreign policy challenge during the 21st century,\u2019 David Hale declared in 2014 in China\u2019s new dream<\/em><\/a>. He described a Canberra nightmare if America\u2019s fiscal problems forced it to slash defence spending and withdraw from the East Asian region:<\/em><\/p>\n

In such a scenario, Australia would cease to have a great-power ally and be more vulnerable to foreign aggression than at any time since 1942. The only Asian country with the long-term potential to challenge Chinese hegemony is India. Australia should therefore hedge its bets with the US and China by pursuing better relations with New Delhi.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Surveying ANZUS and alliance politics in Southeast Asia<\/a> under President Trump, William Tow observed that the greatest impediment to alliance credibility was Washington\u2019s tendency to oscillate between commitment and alliance detachment, between internationalism and neo-isolationism. The true test of the Trump administration\u2019s \u2018free and open Indo-Pacific\u2019 policy, Tow wrote, would be to overcome ASEAN and Australian concerns that Washington was easily distracted.<\/p>\n

The idea of \u2018Chimerica<\/a>\u2019\u2014the joining of China and America\u2014had ended, John Lee pronounced in 2019. Chimerica had rested on a global economic consensus that had passed. Instead, Lee described the rise of US\u2013China technological contest and strategic hypercompetition.<\/p>\n

A long period of Chinese economic and trade malpractices had distorting effects on the global economic system, Lee wrote, and US dissatisfaction was irreversible:<\/p>\n

The deepening tension isn\u2019t a transient phase in US\u2013China relations. China has long treated America as a comprehensive rival. The US has finally accepted that reality, and that pessimistic conversion is deep and enduring. The administration\u2019s turn against China is perhaps the only policy of Trump\u2019s that the Democrats overwhelmingly support.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

US voices for the containment of China were getting louder, Peter Varghese told a 2019 ASPI conference, and dangers loomed. The former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said there was nothing new about US determination to hang on to strategic primacy. What was new was the call to block or thwart China<\/a>, Varghese said:<\/p>\n

Containing China is a policy dead end. China is too enmeshed in the international system and too important to our region to be contained. And the notion that global technology supply chains can be divided into a China-led system and a US-led system is both economic and geopolitical folly.<\/p>\n

The US is right to call China to account. But it would be a mistake for the US to cling to primacy by thwarting China. Those of us who value US leadership want the US to retain it by lifting its game, not spoiling China\u2019s.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s rise needs to be managed not frustrated. It needs to be balanced not contained. Constructing that balance and anchoring it in a new strategic equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific is the big challenge of our time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Taiwan had returned as a critical security question<\/a> for Australia, Mark Harrison wrote\u2014an issue framed by the US alliance and a longstanding risk calculus for Australia\u2013China relations. Australia\u2019s thinking rested on pragmatism and realism, he said, but Beijing\u2019s treatment of Taiwan challenged Australia\u2019s medium- and long-term interests.<\/p>\n

The Chinese trade punishment that began in 2020 cut the value<\/a> of Australian trade with China for almost all industries by 40% (only China\u2019s huge appetite for iron ore sustained the trade figures). Australia\u2019s ambassador to Beijing, Graham Fletcher, said that China \u2018had been exposed as quite unreliable as a trading partner and even vindictive<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

The idea of Australia having a \u2018strategic partnership\u2019 with China faded.<\/p>\n

Canberra had accepted Beijing\u2019s \u2018strategic partnership\u2019 language during the Gillard Labor government in return for an annual summit. The foreign minister who did the deal in 2013, Bob Carr, wrote that \u2018strategic partnership\u2019<\/a> was \u2018the shorthand description of what they want from us, and what we will agree to in order to get them to give us guaranteed annual leaders\u2019 meetings\u2019.<\/p>\n

In February 2021, Prime Minister Scott Morrison bid adieu<\/a> to strategic partnership:<\/p>\n

China\u2019s outlook and the nature of China\u2019s external engagement, both in our region and globally, has changed since our Comprehensive Strategic Partnership was formed and going further back than that, certainly in the decades that have led up till now. We cannot pretend that things are as they were. The world has changed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today, Beijing doesn\u2019t take phone calls from Australia\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n

Peter Jennings offered a set of conclusions about the icy relationship<\/a>:<\/p>\n