In a tougher, more dangerous world, the US remains our best option
Sitting on the fence and hoping for a return to the halcyon days of the past where we were able to cash in on China’s rise while enjoying the privileges of cut-price US alliance membership is a mirage. Those days are over.
Contrasting the bonhomie of Anthony Albanese’s visit to China with his less than effusive embrace of Donald Trump’s America, an intergalactic visitor could be forgiven for concluding that China, not the US, is our principal ally and closest friend.
Seldom has the tension between our security alliance with the US and our trade relationship with China been so starkly exposed. The optics are damning. While the Prime Minister talks enthusiastically about increasing trade, tourism and cultural contacts, his words are jarringly at odds with the unwelcome presence of Chinese naval ships monitoring the Australian and allied Talisman Sabre training exercise off the Queensland coast.
Concerns that Australia is slowly drifting away from the US under the centrifugal pull of an increasingly powerful and ruthlessly focused China have been heightened by Albanese’s unusually long six-day visit to China and his fourth meeting with Communist Party secretary-general Xi Jinping. The Trump administration clearly is beginning to worry about Australia’s reliability as an ally as Albanese continues to resist US calls to ramp up defence spending.
Unless this drift is arrested, Australia risks moving into a national security no-man’s land freeloading off the US without a corresponding commitment to the alliance or our own defence.
That way is a values-free, security dead end. It would further weaken our already feeble defence capabilities and dilute our voice in the world – the exact opposite of the government’s professed desire to better manage what Defence Minister Richard Marles repeatedly has warned is the “most complex and challenging strategic environment since the second world war”.
Trump doesn’t help matters by his unabashed admiration for authoritarian strongmen leaders and chaotic, transactional approach to the world that gratuitously alienates allies. But asserting a faux security independence from the US, the so-called Labor way, is unconvincing. It’s belied by the stubborn refusal to increase defence spending and reverse the potentially fatal hollowing out of our defence force that becomes daily more evident. The Albanese government seems unable to differentiate between a still democratic US and an increasingly authoritarian China that shares none of our values and precious few of our interests.
Labor’s China policy has been marked by a curious and unedifying timidity uncharacteristic of a government more than willing to take potshots at US policies it doesn’t like and robustly criticise Israel, a fellow democracy, for its alleged sins. But Beijing’s many egregious assertions of its interests at the expense of other countries, including Australia, is routinely met by silence or platitudes typified by Albanese’s vacuous shibboleth: “We will co-operate where we can, disagree where we must but engage in our national interest.” Appeasement may be too strong a word. But Labor opens itself up to the criticism that it willingly self-censors, which is exactly what China wants.
Sometimes this borders on the farcical when the government bends over backwards not to mention China’s name when warning against cyber intrusions, espionage, information operations and attacks against our critical infrastructure that our security agencies know full well are largely orchestrated by Beijing.
Refusing to call out China publicly when our interests and values are clearly violated undermines our sovereignty. And it encourages China to believe an “America First” Trump provides a historic opportunity to decouple Australia from the alliance and neutralise us in any confrontation with the US over Taiwan. Given these risks, and the mountain of hard evidence that China’s interests often are diametrically opposed to ours, why is it that the Albanese government is so reluctant to call out bad behaviour by the People’s Republic when warranted? Four reasons spring to mind.
First is the assumption of “pragmatic realists” that China will inevitably become the dominant regional and global power. We had better get used to this reality, so the thinking goes, and stop venting about China’s behaviour.
But there are many reasons to doubt that China will dominate the region or the world, among them the Middle Kingdom’s long history of domestic instability, factional divides, economic failure and succession crises.
Pragmatic realists should familiarise themselves with recent Chinese history. In 75 years of Communist Party rule, the country has suffered the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the excesses of the Gang of Four and the bloody turmoil of Tiananmen Square – all self-inflicted. No matter how powerful it becomes, China’s policies still will be shaped by the actions and resilience of others.
To wash our hands of agency or influence is entirely self-defeating. For a government that prides itself on running a moral foreign policy, willing to hold Israel to a higher standard of behaviour than anyone else, what is the moral imperative for allowing China’s many transgressions to go unremarked? Should we forget the trade coercion, “wolf warrior” diplomacy and blatant interference in our domestic affairs used to assert Beijing’s interests and desensitise us to what once would have been routinely condemned and certainly wouldn’t be tolerated in reverse?
Second, the Albanese government continually emphasises China’s position as our most important trading partner, the unstated subtext being that we can’t afford to jeopardise this trade by offending China.
Trade Minister Don Farrell recently bridled at the suggestion the Trump administration might pressure the government to reduce trade with China. In a pointed slapdown of the US and the Morrison government, he said bilateral trade “is almost 10 times more valuable to Australia” than trade with the US and that we’ve “stabilised” the relationship, claiming that trade had “effectively recovered” under his stewardship.
Albanese also played down the significance of exports to the US during his meeting with Xi, noting they made up less than 5 per cent of trade compared with China’s 25 per cent.
But there was no acknowledgment of the importance of the trillion-dollar US investment here annually, more than 10 times larger than China’s, or mention of our major trading partner’s coercive trade measures that cost us $20bn in lost exports.
Neither was there any reference to the fact Beijing literally is moving mountains to find alternatives to Australian iron ore by funding African mines in Guinea (Simandou), Cameroon and the Republic of Congo (Mbalam-Nabeba) that soon will end our iron ore dominance even in the unlikely event that “green steel” comes to the rescue.
Bilateral trade is a two-way street, meaning a mutual dependence, so Australia is not without leverage. China buys our iron ore, coal, minerals and agricultural products because they are high quality, well priced and necessary for its economy.
Even at the height of the wolf warrior attack our iron ore exports were unaffected. Given the failure of Beijing’s coercive trade practices to bring Australia to heel they are unlikely to be repeated any time soon unless Albanese mishandles his promise to cancel the 99-year lease on the Port of Darwin granted to the Chinese-owned Landbridge company.
But we should be diversifying trade, not increasing our already high dependence on a single market. This only increases our vulnerability to coercion, a lesson Xi has taken to heart by actively pursuing strategies to increase China’s self-sufficiency and reduce dependence on imports, particularly in strategic industries.
Third is perceived political advantage overlaying a sense that Labor is the true champion of the relationship stemming from Gough Whitlam’s historic decision to establish diplomatic relations with Mao Zedong’s China in December 1972.
Labor successfully weaponised the Coalition’s perceived hostility to China in the run-up to the election in May, peeling away significant numbers of ethnic Chinese voters sensitive to the imputation that they were not loyal Australians. Labor was aided by the Coalition’s overly aggressive criticism of Beijing and avoidable stumbles, notably from former frontbencher Jane Hume, who injudiciously claimed that Chinese spies were volunteering for Labor Housing Minister Clare O’Neil.
But Labor’s sweep of seats with a high Chinese-Australian population has come at the expense of foreign policy bipartisanship on China that Beijing has exploited for strategic gain. And the political win for Labor may prove short-lived. New Coalition leader Sussan Ley has quickly moved to cauterise the wound, acknowledging that the Liberals “didn’t get it right” with the Chinese community during the election: “We didn’t get the tone right.”
A fourth reason for the shift towards China is the increasingly entrenched anti-Americanism of Labor’s Left, no longer muted by the once dominant pro-American Centre-Right. Labor’s cohort of “moral equivalencers” asserts that the US is no different to China in seeking hegemony and arguably is worse under Trump, a proposition that has superficial appeal but fails the truth test.
Despite Trump’s disruptive and indiscriminate tariffs, on just about every other meaningful measure of interests and values we are far more closely aligned with the US than we can ever be with China while it remains a one-party dictatorship that brooks no dissent and squeezes the space for smaller countries to freely exercise their sovereign rights. Unlike China’s surreptitious $20bn hit on our trade, Trump’s tariffs are at least transparent. Neither are they specifically directed at Australia.
The reality is that our relationship with China is now defined by strategic competition and opposing objectives.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, American scholars Charles Edel and David Shullman document how the Chinese Communist Party promotes its avowedly illiberal governance model globally. The CCP works assiduously and strategically to hollow out our institutions; enhance tools of repression in developing countries; silence academic discourse; dilute liberal norms; erode human rights protections as the continued incarceration of Australian writer Yang Hengjun attests; and make autocrats the world over more powerful and less accountable.
That’s why Beijing supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; suppresses the Uighurs; denies Tibetans their autonomy; threatens Taiwan; illegally militarises the South China Sea; repeatedly infringes the borders, seas and air space of its neighbours; routinely harasses the defence forces of other states in international waters often dangerously so; and presides over the largest peacetime arms build-up in history including a doubling of its nuclear weapons inventory by 2030.
Yet China’s ambassador to Australia has the temerity to lecture us about the dangers of increased defence spending. It’s hard to see how economic, trade and cultural ties can flower in such infertile soil.
So, to borrow from Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done?
By all means trade. But don’t allow the CCP access to our strategic industries, critical national infrastructure such as ports and communications architecture or technologies that could be used against us, especially artificial intelligence. We should be thinking about how to diversify trade away from China just as China is doing and for the same reason – economic resilience and supply chain security. The last thing we should be doing is increasing our dependence on a state that has no love for democracy or democracies.
As to public diplomacy and political rhetoric, Albanese could learn a thing or two from Europe, which has stopped kowtowing to China and is standing up for its interests in a firm but measured way, recognising the dangers of dependence. Stung by China’s close ties to Russia and concerned about the avalanche of cheap, subsidised Chinese goods flooding into the continent, European officials now are far more critical of China publicly.
In 2023, former German Greens leader and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock characterised China as a “systemic rival” that behaved “aggressively” and was repressive domestically, phraseology that was later picked up in last year’s NATO summit that specifically referred to the communist state’s systemic challenge “to Euro-Atlantic security”.
We also could learn from Europe about the realities of alliance membership in today’s unruly world and how calculations of geopolitical risk will increasingly shape economic and trade policy.
Once true believers in a stable, peaceful, civilised world underpinned by treaties, deliberative bodies and international law, and famously described as coming from pleasure-loving Venus by conservative American commentator Donald Kagan, Europeans finally are hardening up. Confronted by the harsh realities of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they have committed to a level of defence spending and burden sharing that would have been inconceivable six months ago.
Having brought huge pressure on NATO to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP, the Trump administration is about to turn up the heat on Australia to lift defence spending well beyond Labor’s comfort zone. Influential US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby has pointedly asked Australia and Japan whether they are committed to supporting the US in any conflict with China over Taiwan.
Albanese slowly is being squeezed between a rock and a hard place. Refusal to go beyond the government’s commitment of 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2033 will have serious consequences for the alliance and our broader relationship with the US. But going it alone would cost much more in blood and treasure, so the US alliance remains our best option in a tougher world. Sitting on the fence and hoping for a return to the halcyon days of the past where we were able to cash in on China’s rise while enjoying the privileges of cut-price alliance membership is a mirage. Those days are over.
If the US and China come to blows over Taiwan, we will be involved on the US side whether we like it or not because China will target US forces and supporting defence infrastructure here. They are essential to US warfighting capabilities as they were during the Pacific campaign against Imperial Japan during World War II.
Albanese would do well to reflect on this reality as well as the words of Thucydides, the great Athenian historian and strategist: “Weak states do what they must, and strong states do as they please.”
Alan Dupont is chief executive of geopolitical risk consultancy the Cognoscenti Group and a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute.
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