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No Mattis miracles at Shangri-La as allies urged to keep the faith

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Japan's Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera, US Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and South Korea's Defence Minister Song Young-moo attend a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, 3 June 2018 (Photo: Reuters/Edgar Su).

In Brief

US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis revealed much more than Washington’s intense frustration with China’s continued militarisation of the South China Sea in his speech at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue.

On display in Singapore was a considered attempt to remind US allies and others that America’s regional presence has a history. 

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This kind of rhetoric in the speeches of leaders may be dismissed as superficial gloss but in the current circumstances it takes on renewed significance. It adds to the sense that the competition between the United States and China, while primarily in the economic and strategic spheres, is in the process of acquiring an ideological dimension.

In short, the United States is now marshalling history to shore up its credibility in the eyes of Asian allies and partners.

Mattis reached a good deal further back than the end of World War II and the foundation of the ‘rules-based order’ in revealing the roots of America’s Asian gaze. He returned to Jefferson’s dispatch of the Lewis and Clark expedition through the Louisiana territory to the Pacific Ocean in 1803: proof, he said, of America’s longstanding tradition of ‘looking West’.

Since then, Mattis said, the United States had signed its first treaty of amity and commerce with Thailand in 1833 and maintained its regional footprint as the waves of colonialism, fascism, imperialism and communism washed through the region.

Amid a period of ongoing anxiety over Trump’s leadership style and the White House’s wayward treatment of allies, it should come as no surprise that history is being wheeled in as the anchor point of America’s regional presence.

The question is whether it offers a convincing enough life raft for regional allies as they continue to compare the rhetoric and intent of reassurance from Washington with the reality of Beijing’s growing assertiveness — not to mention China’s own longstanding historical claims on the contested territories in the South China Sea. Mattis was clear, principled and purposeful about the possible consequences for China if it pushed on. But he also said that no military action is currently being contemplated by the United States, in effect conceding that Washington is no longer prepared to ‘pay any price’ or ‘bear any burden’ in its ‘priority theatre’. That unnerves key allies.

At a time when the regional credibility of the Trump administration continues to take heavy knocks, the history that Mattis references offers only partial comfort. For every American clarion call to keep the faith at Shangri-La, for every plea to ‘not count us out’, there was an ally expressing concern that American regional leadership is not what it was and that the chill protectionist and nationalist winds coursing through domestic US politics are unlikely to dissipate any time soon.

American teeth must be ever so slightly gritted that their Secretary of Defense now talks about US freedom of navigation operations being conducted in the name of ‘all nations’. While this claim is no doubt true (and is grounded in an appeal to the ‘rules-based order’), it has the unintended consequence of emphasising the fact that no US ally has followed Washington in military vessels through the contested 12-nautical-mile zone. Speaking at the same gathering, Republican Senator Dan Sullivan claimed that such operations were in his country’s DNA, stretching back to the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s refusal to bow to the demands of the Barbary Pirates in 1801.

Where Mattis’s history lesson sought to soothe fevered alliance brows, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked the deep civilisational impulses that shape India’s Asian vision: the roots of New Delhi’s maritime embrace lie in the Indus Valley civilisation, the ancient Purana stories of Hindu mythology and Vedanta philosophy.

Washington would no doubt have welcomed Modi’s line that US–India ties had ‘overcome the hesitations of history’ and assumed a ‘new significance in the changing world’, but it likewise would not have missed Modi’s emphasis that no other of India’s relationships ‘has as many layers as our relations with China’.

And Modi gave no oxygen to the much-vaunted Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). Amid a plethora of regional forums that demonstrated India’s ongoing growth towards great-power status, the only bone Modi threw the Quad’s way was that his country sometimes meets in ‘formats of three or more’. Instead, Modi afforded greater prominence to the new ‘dawn’ for India’s relationships with Pacific island nations.

For his part, Mattis required prompting to even raise the Quad, pointing only to the bare basics: it comprised four democracies and was ‘fit for the times’. But he also quipped that a reference to it had been contained in the ‘seven-hour version’ of his speech. In other words, it simply didn’t make the cut. Instead, the Quad’s next meeting has been hived off to the sidelines of an ASEAN officials summit, proof it remains a forum literally on the margins: sure in its distrust of China but unsure of how to build a coalition to counter it.

Much greater emphasis was given to the Pentagon’s decision to rename its Hawaii headquarters as the ‘Indo-Pacific Command’ — a simple but symbolic acknowledgement, Mattis stressed, of India’s emerging role. Judging from Modi’s speech, however, it will take much more than affixing new nomenclature to the brass plates of Camp Smith to overturn the deep patterns in India’s strategic culture and its studied avoidance of countervailing coalitions. The rebranding continues nonetheless: a new chapter in the history of America’s Asian engagement. Without doubt, it is already the most testing one for Washington yet, as it grapples with China’s rise.

James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and a Lowy Institute Fellow. He was a delegate to this year’s Shangri-La dialogue.

2 responses to “No Mattis miracles at Shangri-La as allies urged to keep the faith”

  1. “At a time when the regional credibility of the Trump administration continues to take heavy knocks, the history that Mattis references offers only partial comfort.” Isn’t this an ahistorical and, sorry to be unkind, rather cheap journalistic yawning? How many ‘freedom of navigation’ expeditions has Trump thus far dispatched through the South China Sea? More than those under Obama’s watch, combined. What else is needed for America’s regional allies to be convinced of America’s will to stay in the Asian side of the Pacific? Pulling the trigger, a couple of times a year, perhaps?

  2. Climate change and the refugee crisis seem much more important issues. Were these issues addressed at the Shangri-La conference? If not, why not? If they were addressed, why so little comment on these issues following the Shangri-La conference?

    I hope that future security conferences address climate change, its consequences and the refugee crisis. These seem to be genuinely important security issues, and it would be odd for security conferences to neglect them!

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