Strategic uncertainty in Australia’s regional outlook
Strategic uncertainty in Australia’s regional outlook
WRITTEN BY MELISSA CONLEY TYLER AND PRAVIN SILVA
5 April 2020
If you want to understand Australia’s outlook on the Indo-Pacific, you could do worse than look at the last two issues of Australian Foreign Affairs. The most recent issue asks “Can we Trust America? A Superpower in Transition” while the previous issue is “China Dependence: Australia’s new vulnerability. These two issues – trust in the US and dependence on China – are at the heart of the strategic uncertainty that Australia faces in the region.
Great and Powerful Friends
Since its colonial period, Australia has relied on the protection of great powers to guarantee its security, first the British Empire and then the United States. Now, however, Australia finds itself facing the prospect of living in a region with a potentially hostile great power without the guarantee of a great power’s military protection. While Australia has been one of the United States’ closest allies, it must contend with a more inward-facing US and a future where China is challenging US primacy in the Indo-Pacific.
This is profoundly unsettling for Australia’s strategic community. The foundation of Australia’s military security has been its close alliance with the United States, through which it benefits from access to advanced technology, sensitive intelligence and some promise of mutual defence, including the protection afforded by the US nuclear umbrella. President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has brought into sharp relief the possibility of a turn towards non-interventionism and even isolationism in the world’s greatest military power. As China’s power increases, the US may have to recalculate the cost of remaining the preeminent military power in the region. The possibility of US retrenchment from the region is a live question in Australian debates and touches on Australia’s historic fear of abandonment.
As the University of Melbourne’s Michael Wesley puts it in Australian Foreign Affairs, “Not so long ago, Australia’s leaders spoke confidently of not having to choose between the United States and China. But the national mood on China has shifted sharply. Now there is a pervasive dread over almost every strand of our engagement with China, revealing a sense of vulnerability deeper and broader than at any time in our history.”
China Rising
It is difficult to overstate the importance of China to Australia’s contemporary prosperity. China accounted for 38 per cent of Australia’s exports in 2019 making it by far its largest trading partner. Australia’s economy is heavily dependent on Chinese demand for natural resources, education and tourism, meaning China has a great degree of economic leverage which some fear could be used as a tool for influence or coercion. More than 1.2 million Australians claim Chinese ancestry, translating into deep people-to-people links.
How Australia responds to the rise of China may well decide how safe and prosperous it will be in the 21st Century. As Australian Institute of International Affairs National President Allan Gyngell puts it in Australian Foreign Affairs, “There is no Australian future – sunlit or shadowed – in which China will not be central.”
This has also affected Australia’s role in its neighbourhood. While Australia remains the largest aid donor in the South Pacific, Chinese influence is growing. Australia has had to accept that it will have to compete for influence in the South Pacific with China in the coming decades and has been engaging in a “Pacific Step-Up” since 2016, seeking to maintain its local sphere of influence.
Strengthening Indo-Pacific Ties
In a time of strategic uncertainty, Australia is focusing on building its relationships with other powers in the Indo-Pacific faced with the same outlook.
Australia’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper identified Japan, Indonesia, India and South Korea as “of first order importance to Australia, both as major bilateral partners in their own right and as countries that will influence the shape of the regional order.” It identified Southeast Asia as “of profound significance” for Australia’s future, sitting “at a nexus of strategic competition in the Indo–Pacific”.
Australia has comprehensive strategic partnerships with Indonesia and Singapore, strategic partnerships with India, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam, and partnerships with South Korea, the Philippines, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. Australia and India are pursuing a closer defence relationship: in 2019, they conducted their third biennial joint naval exercise, AUSINDEX, with the Minister of Defence noting that Australia’s bilateral defence relationship with India had gone from 11 exercises, meetings and activities in 2014 to 38 in 2018. Australia, Japan and India also participate in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with the US.
Australia is also working to build its trade with other Indo-Pacific powers. As well as its free trade agreements with the US (2005) and China (2015), Australia has trade agreements with Indonesia (2020), Japan (2015) , South Korea (2014) and ASEAN (2010) and is part of two major regional trade agreements: the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
If the pivotal question for Australia is managing a re-ascendant China and a United States that is less engaged in the Indo-Pacific, then working with other regional powers is a clear part of the solution.
Australia’s strategic community is learning to live with the reality of an uncertain and contested region. Australia’s future security and prosperity will depend on its ability to finesse the right balance between its largest trading power and closest military ally while forging closer ties with other partners in the region. While Australia’s regional outlook remains uncertain, its commitment to try to ensure a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific is clear.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Melissa Conley Tyler is Director of Diplomacy and Pravin Silva is Project Coordinator, Diplomacy at Asialink at the University of Melbourne. Image credit: U.S. Pacific Fleet/Flickr.