I think it may be harder for Australia to play this role than Jane suggests, because what is at stake here goes beyond the very important economic policy debates she raises. This is an issue of strategic power and each country’s status in Asia’s international order. These issues pose very deep questions for Australia itself. Before we can have much influence in Washington or in Beijing, we Australians need to decide what we think about them. To be blunt, Australia has always believed that its security depends on the domination of the Western Pacific by a Western, and indeed Anglo-Saxon, power. China’s rise, if it is sustained, may well pose a decisive challenge to US primacy in Asia. I have argued that Asia’s future peace is best preserved by the US accommodating China’s power and accepting a dilution of its primacy. But America’s instinct is to contest China’s challenge and preserve US strategic primacy even as its economic primacy fades. Australia faces a stark choice: do we go with our instincts and our history, and support the US in trying to sustain primacy against the Chinese challenge? Or do we encourage the US to make space for China, remaining actively engaged in Asia to balance its power but not to dominate?
So far our leaders have dodged this choice. John Howard tried to pretend we did not have a choice to make, but leaned towards accommodation until his final year when he plumped firmly for supporting US primacy against the Chinese challenge. Rudd in Opposition also leaned towards accommodation, but in Government he too has so far stuck to the political safety of fence-sitting. Our new government faces some big choices if it is to live up to its self-image as a government which reshapes Australia for the new century. These choices include, as Jane implies, deciding whether we remain an open economy. They also include a choice about whether we can rethink our place in Asia, and find a new model for our security that replaces the one that worked so well in the European and American Centuries with one more suited to the Asian century.
I personally think what Hugh talks about in the above entry is the most important strategic decision that Australia has to make in this century.
But before going to my response, just a few qucik questions about some of the things Hugh mentioned.
I think that in order to answer the strategic question Hugh is asking about the choice between supporting the U.S. “supremacy” and giving China more “space,”
we need to clarify what “supremacy” and “space” here mean.
If the U.S. supremacy simply means the largest material power the U.S. is currentlying enjoying, there is little Australia can do about it except to control natural resource exports to China (though it is not easy to implement, given pressures from Australian business community).
If the supremacy here means the U.S. forward deployed presence and its hub-and-spokes alliance network, Hugh’s question can be interpreted the following way: Should Australia keep the alliance relationship with U.S.? How far should Australia need to support U.S. in their diplomatic and military actions around the world?
About the space for the rise of China, does it mean oversears military presence of China? reunification of Tawian? or about a number of export-control sanctions that most of the western countries are currently imposing on China?
I think, withiout thinking things “concretely” the way I showed above, Hugh’s great question can hardly lead anywhere but to practically meaningless answers. It is because this question is not only about U.S.-China relations but more importantly about the choice and decision that Australia has to make.
So hope we can hear more from Hugh soon.
[…] further depth to Jane Golley’s piece on China’s “great balancing act” and Hugh White’s comments. They write: As my former HOM would have said, the argument is “completely […]