Australia sees the world most often in terms of itself. This is of course a common failing with all nation states. Australia may not be the worst offender, but it has room for improvement.
So when Kim engages in his dangerous tomfoolery, the Australian government cites an existential threat to Australia. It is true that if Kim can hit Los Angeles, he can also hit Sydney. But Berlin is 500 kilometres closer to Pyongyang than Sydney. London is only further by 100 kilometres. And there are many other obvious targets closer to the North Korean mainland — Seoul and Tokyo to begin with. So we have to keep things in perspective.
After the latest exchanges on North Korea, Australia’s immediate reaction was to proclaim its possible military involvement should things heat up on the peninsula. Some Australian officials and commentators looked back to the Korean War. As one of the nations under the UN Command when the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953, it was suggested Australia would be obliged to react if North Korea broke the terms of the Armistice. If there is anything to this assertion — which is certainly subject to challenge — it will puzzle some of the other co-combatants of the time who range from Britain and France to Turkey, Colombia, Ethiopia and Luxembourg.
In the context of a possible missile launch towards Guam, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia would be ‘joined at the hip’ with the United States (in terms of its honouring the ANZUS treaty should the United States be attacked). Fine, Australia is in an alliance. Most Australians would want to stay in it. And while Asian partners may wonder about the pitch of Australia’s alliance rhetoric, some — including Japan, India and some ASEAN countries — see ANZUS as in their interest as well as in Australia’s. But is emphasis on the alliance in this particular context really needed?
North Korean behaviour is more of a genuine existential threat to South Korea and Japan than it is to the United States. It also has enormous negative implications for China. Hence Australia’s main focus should be on what it can do as a second tier player to help the main players — and not just the United States — develop policies which have some prospect of success.
No doubt Australia’s diplomats, who are generally good at their jobs, are doing just this. But again, the question for Australia is where it places its policy emphasis.
If Australia is to be taken seriously as an independent and useful voice on this or any other Asian security issue, it would do better than to closely associate itself explicitly or implicitly with the garbled policy messages coming from the Trump administration in Washington, whatever the good sense of some in the US cabinet and armed services.
Rather than making statements of unalloyed fealty to the United States, Australia should demonstrate an awareness that the strategic circumstances in which it, its allies and its adversaries operate in this century are different to those in the last.
In the Cold war, both sides understood each other and for the most part behaved predictably. Australia and the alliance framework worked on the basis that most of the time they would be led if not always wisely, at least rationally. The nuclear powers knew the dangers of mistakes and behaved accordingly. So being joined at the hip to the United States was more a matter of occasional embarrassment than imprudent policy.
We have now entered an era in which there is not the same common sense on the nuclear board. Kim presumably does not want suicide for his country and Trump is being guided by some good people. But given the two main protagonists are inadequate men, Australia and its alliance partners cannot afford to fall unquestioningly behind US policy. Misjudgements are more likely than they once would have been. Australia may need to differ and say so. And in making public commitments, Australia should above all avoid excessive zeal.
John McCarthy is a former Australian ambassador to Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, the United States, Indonesia and Japan, and former High Commissioner to India.
In my view, the writer, who was a former Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Mexico, the US and High Commissioner to India, has given Australia a very valuable advice that “in making public commitments, Australia should above all avoid excessive zeal.” These are my rationale:
1 The writer has been inside the Halls of Power and he has seen them all. His advice is true that “As important as the North Korea issue is for everyone, it is primarily about the countries of Northeast Asia and the United States.”
So why is Australia involved? Is it because “of what North Korea might do to Australia and of what Australia’s treaty obligations to the United States mean under ANZUS”?
On 18 June 2014, Ms Julia Bishop, the Foreign Minister, made a speech in an event “to participate once again in this vitally important conversation about the future of the Australia-United States Alliance” and said zealously that “At the heart of the treaty is a commitment to come to one another’s aid in the worst of times.’
But the intelligentsia community in Australia questioned what was meant by the words “in the worst of times.”
The verdict from a RMIT/ABC Fact Check was that “While history and the depth of the US-Australia alliance might suggest otherwise, experts say there is no commitment to military assistance from either side under the ANZUS treaty.”
2 Ms Bishop also gushed forth with zeal that “Our shared commitment to the Trans-Pacific Partnership is one way we’re taking this forward” never mind that China and six Asean nations were deliberately left out of the TPP, by President Obama, to contain China.
But on 20 January 2017, as if karma would have it, when Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th POTUS, he characterized the TPP as the worst deal for America ever and summarily ended America’s participation. Here is an example that zeal did not mean that a deal was set in concrete.
3 What if a Ron Paul type of candidate is elected the 46th US President, who is a realist and who has a predilection to close most of the 900 US military and supply bases all over the world, including in Australia, Japan and South Korea to stop the endless foreign wars which are bankrupting America, whose national debt is now more than US$20 trillion plus an unfunded debt of over US$220 trillion? Will the Australia-United States Alliance be still at the heart of the treaty in the White House? The answer is obvious.
4 She continued with more zeal “It is United States investment in our energy and resource sector that enables us to be an energy powerhouse – to enable us to supply China, South Korea and Japan with LNG for example.”
But the aphorism that ‘Customer is King’ seems to have been conveniently left out of the equation. Can Australia still be an energy powerhouse if China, her biggest trading partner today, turns to other nearer and hence cheaper LNG sources in Russia and in the Eurasian continent, during the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, if China senses that she is not welcome in Australia? The answer is also obvious.
Lastly, in my view, instead of following Uncle Sam into the ‘Valley of Death’, Australia should take the following Peace Initiatives urgently:
a)conclude a UN Convention for a Nuclear-Free Zone treaty for Oceania and the South Pacific.
b)sound the alarm that it is not sustainable that 300 tons of water, contaminated with cesium137 and strontium90, be allowed to flow from Fukushima into the sea every day as this could usher in a catastrophe of biblical proportions in the Pacific Ocean, which contributes to 60 per cent of the world’s seafood resources. The strong currents are spreading the radioactivity westward to Hawaii and to the West coast of America. Large sea mammals and seabirds are already dying along the way.
c)convene a Conference of Pacific Nations to help decommission the 4 damaged Fukushima reactors for good, as Tokyo is unable to do it on its own.
d)convene a Reconciliation and Outreach Convention to bring a higher quality of life to all the Australian Aborigines so that they can participate in the civil society as equals if Australia values freedom, democracy and the human right to a good life and happiness.
Prime Minister Turnbull’s response to the DPRK’s missile “threat” is not so much an overreaction as an attempt at distraction – from the mounting problems associated with his ramshackle government. He knows that a good bit of sabre rattling will go down well with the weak-minded, from the USA president down.