Election 2022: The choices we make now will echo in future

On Saturday we vote. There are many domestic issues to consider. But to a greater extent than for a lifetime, foreign policy and national security ought be very much on our minds. The war in Ukraine has global implications. The situation in Asia is delicately balanced. Our freedoms are on the line in this unfolding strategic context.

Yet even as Sweden and Finland abandon longstanding commitments to neutrality to join NATO, because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, there are prominent voices in this country urging that we abandon our alliance with the US in order not to “provoke” a rising China. That is to say, we are being urged by such figures to move in the opposite direction to the great Scandinavian social democracies – which we are so often, in other respects, urged to emulate.

The Cold War was about liberal capitalism and social democracy against Stalinist communism. This new confrontation is not about communism versus liberal capitalism, though there are communists who talk and act as though they are still in the game. No, this confrontation is about democratic politics versus autocratic politics.

Boothby candidate Louise Miller-Frost with shadow foreign minister Penny Wong before voting at Colonel Light Gardens Primary School. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

Putin did not invade Ukraine to impose communism, as Joseph Stalin did in eastern Europe in 1944-45. He invaded it because he does not want a democratic, EU-aligned state on his borders. Our challenge in Asia, similarly, is not that China is communist – though it is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party in a thoroughly Leninist manner. No, it is that the rulers of China have exhibited a determination to crush every aspiration to liberal democratic norms within their borders. They have crushed such norms in Hong Kong. They bid fair to do so in democratic Taiwan, if they can find a way to do so, up to and including a war like Putin’s in and against Ukraine.

Leaving aside, for the sake of objectivity, the specific question of the national security stances of the two main contenders for government, every one of us as a citizen of this liberal democratic state with socialist characteristics should have, in front of mind on this election day, the sweep and importance of what is happening around us and its implications. This applies especially when it comes to voting for independent candidates, whose accountability when it comes to national security is, in some cases, questionable. There are choices to be made – some big ones have already been made – in the immediate future about how best to buttress our security and respond to the blatant pressure that has been exerted on us in recent years from Beijing.

There is a body of opinion that declares we have made poor choices and are chiefly to blame for the deterioration in our diplomatic and economic relationship with China. That body of opinion extends from certain corporate boardrooms to the party rooms of the Greens, from the private stances of some elder statesmen who are household names to the groves of academe. It’s vital – as I remarked in this newspaper four years ago, rebuking Andrew Forrest for his dismissal of criticism of China as “immature” and his description of that vast country as an “ally” of Australia – to bear in mind that there are, in fact, choices before us and they are fateful ones. We could get it wrong in any one of several ways. History is not a melodrama. It is a tragic drama. Historical actors can weight their choices carefully, act out of principle, proceed valiantly and still suffer defeat. Presumption is ill-advised and single-mindedness generates blind spots.

That, ironically, is one of the lessons to be drawn, to this point at least, from Putin’s ill-advised and costly war. It seems clear that he failed to anticipate how sturdy the resistance would be, that he over-estimated the effectiveness of his own military machine, that he underestimated the principles and courage of his European neighbours and disdained the capacity of Washington and Brussels to co-ordinate their strategic policies.

Conversely, Xi Jinping seems to have judged to a nicety what he was confronting in Hong Kong. He positioned his pieces thoughtfully and patiently, then made his moves.

Hong Kong has been as effectively crushed by Xi in the past two years as Miletus and the other rebellious Ionian cities were by the Great King of Persia in 494BC. We would be well-advised, therefore, to think through the logic of Xi’s grand strategy and how not only Taiwan but Australia fits into it. We should treat with great scepticism the “quiet diplomacy” of his new ambassador, Xiao Qian.

Thus far, Xi has shown himself to be a more astute strategist than Putin. But then Putin himself was, until three months ago, widely seen as a wily and patient, if ruthless, strategist. And he has been in power much longer than Xi. Autocrats are at least as prone to strategic blunders as are democratic governments. The difference is that they are far less constrained in making such blunders. If there was a sound democratic government in Moscow right now, there’s a good chance the political opposition would be hammering Putin and that his cabinet colleagues would be looking for ways to remove him from the leadership of Russia.

Yet we know all too well that democratic governments and leaders can make strategic blunders and cling to them long after the miscalculation becomes evident, if only because they lapse into the sunk costs fallacy, of believing it’s better to go on than admit error and pull back. You don’t get things right just because you are democratic, or wrong merely because you are an autocrat.

But the contest of ideas in our time is between democrats and autocrats. Think about that as you vote or now that you have done so. We keep being offered reflections on the state of play by a whole range of thoughtful observers and participants in the dramas of our time. Too many, perhaps, for collective coherence to evolve or be sustained. Right now, if you are looking for some coherence around the debates we have to have and are having, such recent releases as Louisa Lim’s Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (2022) or Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet and Ben Noble’s Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future? (2021) will serve you well. They aren’t about strategic affairs. But they clarify what is at issue in two key theatres. They will provide ballast for your net assessments.

But the single best book to read right now on the question of democracy versus autocracy is Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty (2019). They emphasise the large part played by contingency and agency in the building and sustainment of democratic capitalism.

We cannot take history or some presumed moral scheme of things for granted. Liberties can be lost, good causes defeated, good people tortured and killed, institutions traduced. We are at a time when we seriously need to take all this into account and become more conscious and active in the cause of liberties we too easily take as given.

Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting on the development of the oil industry via a video link in Moscow on May 17.

That is why we and so many Europeans back Ukraine against Putin. That is why we are concerned about the future of Taiwan. That is why we are being urged by deeply informed people to buttress our alliances rather than abandon them, in the face of the ambitions of a relentlessly autocratic China. Simply because we have the right to vote freely and for independent candidates, if we so choose; simply because we have the possibility of renewing or changing our government, we should all be in the streets these days in support of Ukraine and Hong Kong – as the militant left was years ago in support of Hezbollah and Hamas.

But my own thinking, in seeking deep perspective on what is occurring, often turns to historical analogies, not as a guide to what will happen but as a prompt to reflection on the kinds of things that can and could. Yes, Cold War analogies, or those from the 1930s, concerning which I’ve written here. Or the earlier histories of wars in Europe and Asia. Not least, however, two very ancient analogies, which seem perennial in the cautionary lessons they have to offer us – not least as Putin ravages Ukraine and Xi menaces Taiwan, while softening his diplomatic tone towards us, without making the least concession to our concerns. The first is the defiance of the Great King of Persia by the free city-states of mainland Greece, after his crushing of the Ionian rebellion in 494BC and the demands by his emissaries that the Macedonians, Athenians and Spartans send earth and water in token of their submission to the presumed lord of all under heaven.

They defied him and defeated not one but two massive invasions of Greece, a decade apart, by King Darius I and then by King Xerxes. Stephen Kershaw has just given us a fresh take on that history: Three Epic Battles That Saved Democracy: Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis (2022). As Denis Pryor, my old classics lecturer, once put it, “You have to consider that the Athenians defeating the Persian Empire, at Marathon, was like New Zealand defeating the Soviet Union.” It’s inspiring stuff.

But there is another analogy that is more sobering, even if it doesn’t involve democracy versus autocracy. Athens and Jerusalem have long been seen as the two competing wellsprings of Western civilisation. It’s worth pondering the fact that Israel/Jerusalem got its strategic judgments wrong again and again in ancient history. Israel (the North Kingdom) defied Assyria, attempting to rally a regional coalition against it, and was crushed by King Tiglath-Pileser III in the 740s BC. Forty years later, King Hezekiah of Judah (the South Kingdom) rose in rebellion against the Assyrians, thinking they were losing their grip on empire, and Judah was crushed. Then, 100 years later again, King Josiah (of an expanding Judah) thought to set aside Egyptian hegemony as the Assyrian Empire really did collapse, and was crushed by the Pharaoh, Necho II, at Megiddo. In the wake of that debacle, Jerusalem sided with Egypt against the rising power of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon – and again backed the wrong horse, paying a hefty price.

So it goes in strategic affairs. Liberal democratic Australia is a richly privileged and free country. Our dominant institutions do have cultural roots going back to Athens and Jerusalem. We face looming strategic challenges as they did. Do you value your vote, your democratic and civil rights? Then take a stand against the autocrats, Putin and Xi. They are not your friends. And there are ways in which they could win.

Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and author of 10 books, including Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018).