Australia’s critical supply chains rely on China. This man I met at the White House has a Plan B

It was a bad habit. For decades, Washington couldn’t kick it. While one presidency after another acknowledged that the Indo-Pacific was the future, crises erupting in the Middle East kept dragging them back to the past. It was an American reflex and a Chinese advantage. While the US was preoccupied elsewhere, Beijing made enormous strides towards achieving its aim of dominance.

The Indo-Pacific is the dominant region of the global economy; the power that controls it can command more resources than any other; the power with the dominant share of global resources can command the world.

“Changes unseen in a century” as China’s leader, Xi Jinping, likes to put it as he plays for primacy. In the greatest geopolitical contest of the 21st century, America’s top-level attention was elsewhere.

Peter Hartcher meets US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. 

Even the US president who launched America’s “pivot to Asia”, Barack Obama, failed to deliver it. Rush Doshi, who worked in the Biden White House as director of China strategy, remarks that “a decade ago, US Asia policy lost momentum after Crimea, Syria, ISIS, and other challenges”. America was distracted again, a bad habit. Until now. “This time there was a sense we couldn’t afford to repeat that pattern,” says Doshi, now at the US Council on Foreign Relations.

Huge crises have exploded. Russia invaded Ukraine in the biggest land war in Europe since 1945. Hamas burst through Israel’s defences and slaughtered more Jews on October 7 than on any day since the Holocaust, provoking an Israeli retaliation that has shocked the world. Full-scale war between Israel and Iran is a daily prospect.

Yet even as the Biden administration tended to these dramatic events, it has continued steadily to advance its agenda in the region today known as the Indo-Pacific. The contest had been joined. How did the US overcome its attention deficit disorder?

The Lowy Institute’s executive director, Michael Fullilove, credits “the holy trinity of the Biden administration’s foreign policy”. The three are Joe Biden himself, his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. In the American system, the national security adviser is at the president’s elbow at every moment of decision in foreign policy.

The “holy trinity” of US foreign policy: Joe Biden, his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.Credit: AP

“Individuals matter in foreign policy,” says Fullilove. “It was the president’s inclination to adopt this approach to Asia, but it was Jake Sullivan’s view and his empowering of Kurt Campbell that licensed a huge amount of effort to strengthen the US relationship with its allies and relationships between its allies. There has been no national security adviser since the end of the Cold War who’s been as focused on Asia as Sullivan.”

Kurt Campbell worked under Sullivan as the administration’s Indo-Pacific co-ordinator, and now is in the State Department as deputy secretary of state.

Rush Doshi concurs. “Jake was the one who kept the Biden administration focused on making gains in the Indo-Pacific even amid war in Europe and the Middle East,” he tells me. “And the progress with allies and partners had been historic and undeniable.”

Like what? The creation of Quad summits, the invention of AUKUS, the convening of Japan-South Korea-US trilateral group, the forging of the so-called “squad” – the US, the Philippines, Japan and Australia. And there is a new energy in engaging the Pacific island states as the US and its allies seek to check China’s advances.

Biden became the first US president to host all the region’s leaders at a joint summit at the White House. The US recently signed a military co-operation agreement with PNG. Even in frenzied election season Campbell last week made certain to visit the Pacific to join the meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum and to open the new US embassy in Vanuatu.

Anthony Albanese speaks to Kurt Campbell at last week’s Pacific Islands Forum. Credit: X @LydiaLewisRNZ

And then there’s the military. Now that China has overtaken the US to wield the world’s biggest navy, Sullivan has brought intense focus to the revival of the US submarine-building capacity.

The Congress – and Canberra, under AUKUS – are delivering the funds for a doubling of the rate of submarine manufacturing while Sullivan holds the Pentagon leadership accountable at regular meetings at the White House.

If Sullivan has been so important to the Indo-Pacific strategy, why have we heard so little from him? Fullilove, who was a fellow Rhodes scholar with Sullivan at Oxford, says that “Jake’s centrality has been underestimated because of his Midwestern humility,” a product of his childhood in Minnesota. “Unlike most Washington players, he doesn’t seek media attention.”

And with five months remaining until Biden hands over the White House to his successor, Sullivan is not relaxing. This week he was once more overseeing US efforts to broker a ceasefire deal in Gaza. Yet he retains his Indo-Pacific ambitions. Last week he was in Beijing meeting Xi Jinping just two days after the US imposed new sanctions on more than 400 Chinese entities and individuals for supporting Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Illustration by Matt DavidsonCredit:

And still he is driving an agenda to achieve much more in the remaining days of the Biden presidency. The US developed its Middle East fixation after World War II because it was the centre of the global oil supply. But oil is the fuel of the past. China has been working for many years to become the centre of the world fuel supply of the future. “Saudi Arabia has its oil, China has its rare earths,” said Deng Xioping, the leader who initiated China’s economic awakening, as early as the 1980s.

Rare earths are among the larger group known as critical minerals. Beijing has its own underground resources and has driven its state-controlled corporations to own and develop other resources around the world. A renewable energy system can’t be created without these essential ingredients. Solar panels and wind turbines can’t be made without them, for instance. In fact, renewables demand much greater mineral input than fossil-burning systems.

“A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant,” says the International Energy Agency.

So China’s increasing dominance of global supplies of critical minerals threatens to entrench Beijing’s control over the future of the global energy industry. And also poses a serious risk to the military capability of the US and its allies. “Critical minerals,” as the Carnegie Endowment’s Gregory Wischer wrote this year, “undergird great power competition and war.”

You can’t make sophisticated missiles without them. Or radars or lasers. Which is where Australia comes into its own. Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, often tells American interlocutors: “When you look at a map of Australia, you are looking at the periodic table.”

In other words, Australia happens to be endowed with every element that a renewable energy system could possibly want. Or a military industrial complex.

Beijing knows the strategic importance of Australia’s critical minerals. That’s why, for instance, it attempted surreptitiously to take control of Northern Minerals, the company set to supply Australia’s first integrated rare earths refinery.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers recently forced China-controlled investors to divest their stake after they broke foreign investment laws. And it’s why Sullivan wants to create a new supply chain of democratic powers, including the G7 nations plus South Korea and Australia.

As he told me in the navy mess in the White House basement this week: “The technology competition between the US and China remains probably the place of greatest sustained and strategic friction. The single biggest thing the US and Australia can do, from a strategic perspective, is really to create effective, diverse, resilient supply chains when it comes to critical minerals that have huge implications for clean energy but also for our defence industrial base. We need concerted, co-ordinated policies to ensure that China cannot simply dump and drive alternatives out of business.”

He’s not leaving it to the next administration, whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, even though it’s speculated in Washington that Sullivan could turn up in a top position in a Harris administration. He’s driving to have it done by January 20, handover time.

As Fullilove says: “I think allies are incorrectly assuming that future administrations will be as focused on Asia as the Biden administration has been. Whether it’s Harris or Trump, I think it’s wrong to assume that.”

After all, old habits die hard. Reflects Fullilove: “Jake Sullivan will be a very hard act to follow as national security adviser.”

Peter Hartcher is political and international editor.