In early June 2017 Malcolm Turnbull gave the keynote speech at a big defence conference in Singapore. He warned of China’s ambition to become the region’s leading power, and called on America and its friends and allies in Asia to block this ambition and preserve the old US-led regional order.

This was the first time an Australian prime minister had plainly acknowledged the strategic rivalry between China and America, which was long overdue. But Turnbull expressed great confidence that America would prevail over China, and that Asia would therefore continue to flourish under US leadership. So the Australian government is still a long way from acknowledging, to the rest of us or even to itself, what is really happening between America and China, and what it will mean for Australia.



For a long time Canberra’s refusal to admit either that a great strategic contest is underway between our major ally and our major trading partner – or that the contest might not go as we’d like – has been symbolised by the bold assertion that “Australia doesn’t have to choose between America and China.”

This has become something of a mantra, intoned by leaders on both sides of politics whenever the question of US–China relations comes up. Malcolm Turnbull even repeated it in his Singapore speech, though he’d made it perfectly clear why it was wrong. It is a perfect example of the very human tendency to confuse a wish with a fact.

It is certainly true that Australia doesn’t want to choose between America and China. Our whole vision of Australia’s future assumes that we can avoid such a choice, so that we can keep relying on China to make us rich while America keeps us safe. But in recent years, as the rivalry has escalated, we have more and more faced important choices about when to support America and when to stay on the sidelines. We have not so far been forced to make an all-or-nothing choice to side with one and abandon the other, but that could come if the rivalry escalates further. And if America steps back from Asia, the question of Australia’s choices becomes irrelevant. We won’t have a choice, because America will no longer be there for us to choose.

Canberra is making the same mistake as Washington: it is underestimating China’s strength and overestimating America’s

But, false or not, the “we don’t have to choose” mantra reveals Canberra’s assumptions about Australia’s future. If we won’t have to choose between America and China, it can only be because they are not serious strategic rivals, and if they are not serious strategic rivals, it can only mean that China has decided not to challenge America for regional leadership, because it lacks either the power or the resolve to do so. Canberra, then, is making the same mistake as Washington: it is underestimating China’s strength and overestimating America’s. That is the story we are telling ourselves to avoid facing what’s really happening.

The pattern is clear. Under successive governments since 2011, Canberra has offered strong rhetorical support to America’s leadership in Asia, but has refused to do anything practical which can unambiguously be seen as directed against China. Our aim throughout has been to convince Washington that we are supporting it against China, and to convince Beijing that we are not. It is, in other words, a policy of systematic duplicity. Some might say that such duplicity is unavoidable and even admirable when one is walking a diplomatic tightrope, but that is only true if the duplicity works. Our problem is that it isn’t working: we are fooling no one, except perhaps ourselves.

Certainly the leaders in Beijing are not fooled, but nor are they displeased. They don’t expect us to support them against the United States. They just want to us not to support the US against them – to turn us into a neutral. That is a big win for them, because we are America’s oldest and closest ally in Asia. They therefore tolerate our lip-service to the alliance so long as we don’t give America any tangible or significant support. So far they are getting what they want, so we haven’t been punished. Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull have all avoided doing anything that Beijing has seen as violating Howard’s understanding with then-leader Jiang Zemin – that Australia’s alliance with America was not negotiable, but nothing Australia would do as a US ally would be directed against China.

Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop received a famous dressing-down from her Chinese counterpart after she condemned Beijing’s declaration of an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea. Photograph: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images

Occasionally, however, they give us a flick of the whip to keep us in line, sometimes in private and sometimes in public. Julie Bishop received a famous dressing-down from her Chinese counterpart after she condemned Beijing’s declaration of an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea. In March 2017 Premier Li Keqiang warned Australia not to take sides “in a Cold War fashion” after Bishop gave a speech in Singapore which in some ways prefigured the one Turnbull gave in June. We don’t know how Beijing responded to Turnbull’s speech, but it would be surprising if it hadn’t sounded a stern private warning.

The Chinese know how susceptible Australian political leaders are to anything that suggests trouble in the relationship, because our leaders keep reminding them of this. Every time they say, “We don’t have to choose between America and China,” they remind Beijing how easily a diplomatic frown from China can create an acute political problem for any Australian government by disproving the mantra on which Australian foreign policy is based.

The point has not been lost on Washington. Not long before Obama left office, a senior official vented his frustration to me. “We hate it when your guys keep saying, ‘We don’t have to choose between America and China’! Dammit, you do have to choose, and it is time you chose us!” US policy-makers have clearly been disappointed by our reluctance to displease Beijing. They have been worried that Australia is being “Finlandised” – slowly slipping into China’s orbit. Washington has mounted a sustained low-key diplomatic effort to counteract this and stiffen Australia’s spine. A steady stream of academics, diplomats and senior military officers has been sent out to remind Australians of how much we should fear China, and to encourage us to lean back towards America.

Over the past year or two, Australian policy-makers have become more anxious about China’s power and influence, and less confident that America can handle this without clearer and more tangible Australian support. Beijing’s flagrant conduct in the South China Sea has at last convinced many of Canberra’s optimists that China’s challenge to the region’s “rules-based order” – by which they mean the US-led status quo – must be taken more seriously. But it has been China’s conduct inside Australia that has really got people’s attention.

Areas of concern include espionage and cyber-infiltration, the vulnerability of major infrastructure, influence over Australia’s Chinese-language press, and surveillance and intimidation of Chinese nationals in Australia, including students. There have been allegations of threats to the academic independence of our universities, of attempts to buy influence over Australian politicians, and of efforts to sway Australian public debate and media coverage about China. These are serious issues which raise important questions about China’s influence in Australia and how we manage it, though discussion about them has, perhaps inevitably, been tinged with populist xenophobia. They have nudged both government and opposition to start raising concerns about China’s growing power more frankly than they have been prepared to do before.

At the same time, Donald Trump’s presidency has undermined Canberra’s confidence both in America’s future in Asia, and in Washington’s regard for Australia as an ally. Policy-makers were shocked when it became clear after the election that Trump would be as bad a president as everyone had feared, and that his commitment to Asia could not be taken for granted. Even more shocking was the realisation that Trump cared nothing for the alliance. His abusive first phone call with Malcolm Turnbull soon after the inauguration in January overturned Canberra’s assumptions about how the two countries communicate, and raised real concerns that, for the first time in living memory, the US president simply didn’t care about Australia.

Canberra’s instinct has been to try to turn this around. This too has nudged the government to start talking more frankly about China than it ever did in Obama’s time. It seems that Trump has finally made those in Canberra realise how fragile America’s position in Asia is, and so they have now decided to encourage Trump to stand up to China, and to see Australia as a valuable ally in doing this.

This explains Malcolm Turnbull’s and Julie Bishop’s more forthright remarks in Singapore earlier this year. It also explains the strange and sad spectacle of the Australian government trying to pretend that Donald Trump is anything like a normal president leading a competent administration. Most significantly, it may explain Turnbull’s extraordinary decision to offer Donald Trump unqualified support in his threats to launch a war against North Korea. Such a war would probably and quickly become the worst the world has seen in many decades, and Donald Trump is the last person in the world to be trusted with a blank cheque on such a matter. The costs to Australia of encouraging Trump to launch such a war, and of joining in ourselves, could be immense.

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So what now the much-anticipated Foreign Policy White Paper has been released? Despite everything that has happened since 2011 it seems we’re still clinging to the idea that America will remain the dominant power in Asia, that it will be there to shield us from China, and that China can somehow be convinced happily to accept this.

So our government has once again failed to come to terms with the full implications of the profound shifts that are transforming our international setting. It is a triumph for wishful thinking over serious policy, and a further confirmation of the systemic failure in political and policy leadership that has afflicted Australia for at least a decade, and arguably since the turn of the century.

Of all our recent political leaders, Turnbull did at one time go furthest beyond wishful thinking and seriously discuss these questions, but that was before he became prime minister. Labor in opposition has ventured a little further than the government. Penny Wong, as shadow foreign minister, has spoken quite seriously about our relations with China, but her words suggest that she too assumes that we will face no hard choices, and that America will always be there in Asia for us.

It is perhaps understandable that none of our leaders wants to break the bad news, especially when the implications of that news are so unwelcome and unsettling. But until we find leaders with the imagination to see what is happening and the courage to start talking frankly about it, Australia has no chance of adapting effectively to the new Asia into which we are being thrust. And that could well be disastrous for us.

This is an edited extract from Quarterly Essay 68, Without America: Australia in the New Asia, by Hugh White