No hard feelings: How Scott Morrison came up trumps

Scott Morrison walked a tightrope in the US and came home with his reputation enhanced.

A show of hands ... Prime Minister Scott Morrison and US President Donald Trump during Mr Morrison’s US trip. Picture: Adam Taylor

Scott Morrison has spent the past 10 days sharing a global stage with the world’s most powerful and disruptive leader, US President Donald Trump, knowing that the world’s second most powerful and determined leader, China’s President Xi Jinping, was having every minute watched.

The Prime Minister and Australia were precariously placed between two colliding tectonic plates, each with enough power to easily blight our economic future and a combined destructive force that could crush it completely.

The economic and strategic stakes for Morrison couldn’t have been higher as he risked fatally offending one of these powerhouses and vastly exacerbating the collateral damage Australia is already experiencing from the tariff trade war between the world’s two biggest economies.

It wasn’t just Morrison’s visit to the US that provided a timely tension but also the arrival of an inevitable historic moment — China’s growth miracle, which has lifted millions out of poverty, outgrowing the international system that helped foster it, leaving the world grappling to come to terms with how to treat modern China.

This week Morrison, and then Trump, publicly uttered what has been coming for years — that China’s claim to be a developing economy, as well as distorting international rules, has to be confronted and challenged. There has to be an adjustment of the world trading framework if the global economy is to function efficiently and with a fair distribution of obligations and responsibilities.

While Morrison’s stated prime objective of his 10-day state visit to the US was to recommit and re-energise Australia’s longest and most important alliance and relationship, the unstated prime objective was to avoid offending our biggest trading partner and our closest, most powerful neighbour.

There is no doubt Morrison succeeded with the first objective and with the bonus of securing a warm, enthusiastic personal relationship with Trump as well as a deeper understanding of what the President wants. There is also an amount of objective evidence to suggest that despite Trump’s rhetorical attacks on China in Morrison’s presence, Australia’s position on the need for change has been clearly identified by Beijing without offence taken.

Success in sending a message about the need to change trading rules “no longer fit for purpose” while staunchly supporting the US alliance was always going to be decided by what Morrison said or didn’t say.

Indeed, there is clear evidence from China that Trump’s bombast and bluster describing China as a threat to the world gave the Prime Minister a chance to demonstrate successfully his stated position of refusing the “binary choice” being thrust upon him of picking China or the US.

Of course, the substantive difference between Morrison and Beijing — that China is a “newly developed” nation that should lose its generous trade concessions and its sheltered position of not having to limit carbon emissions and of receiving international funding to fight climate change — will continue for years to come.

This is inevitable and has been coming for years. But that debate can be conducted without rancour and recrimination in a mature manner that holds the best prospect of both sides benefiting from change. It also allows Australia to endorse legitimate claims from Trump, or any other US president, about unfair trade advantages and the need for reform of World Trade Organisation rules without superficial distractions.

At the end of the week, as Morrison prepared to return home, he pointed to clear signs China had not taken offence, was pleased with what he had said and was not surprised.

“I am very enthused and encouraged by the Chinese Foreign Minister’s comments, which recognised the way that Australia has been sensibly addressing the broader relationship and the issues around the comprehensive strategic partnership,” Morrison said and pointed to a positive editorial in the English-language People’s Daily.

“I think there are far too many data points out there now to ignore that show Australia is managing our great and powerful friends very well both through our longstanding and significant alliances as well as our strategic comprehensive partnerships.”

In New York, after meeting Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi praised Morrison’s attitude towards the “sensitive issues” relating to China’s security, sovereignty and development.

The editorial particularly praised Morrison’s refusal to repeat the US President’s claim that China was a threat and had “publicly stated China is a partner rather than a threat”. “This is a positive gesture, showing that despite the twists and turns in bilateral relations in recent years, the fundamentals of China-Australia ties still remain solid,” it said.

The editorial supported China’s continued status as a developing nation, in the face of both Morrison’s and Trump’s view that it should be considered a newly developed nation, without personalising the argument.

In a statement, Wang said: “The healthy development of China-Australia relations is in full compliance with the interests of both countries and is also conducive to regional peace and stability.

“I hope that Australia will properly handle sensitive issues related to China in a constructive manner, especially on issues concerning China’s sovereignty, security and development interests, and work together with China to promote healthy and stable relations on the basis of mutual respect.”

Apart from avoiding Trump’s inflammatory language and constantly referring to the Australia-China comprehensive strategic partnership, Morrison also had ensured that what he said about China’s developed nation status was not a surprise.

Far from announcing this policy shift with a megaphone from the US and taking China by surprise, as Labor leader Anthony Albanese accused Morrison of doing, the entire script for the US-China relationship, including China reaching “a threshold level of economic maturity”, was delivered publicly in Sydney in June.

Labor may have missed Morrison’s first major foreign policy speech as Prime Minister but China didn’t — and neither did the Trump administration.

Morrison went out of his way to give the US credit for providing the conditions that allowed China’s growth so the Chinese could see he was suggesting they owed the US.

“We have not seen the emergence of a nation economically like China since the United States, frankly, and at a pace which has even outstripped that,” he said.

“So that obviously is going to impact on how the global institutions and rules work. So mine is a fairly obvious point, that this was an inevitable point that we would arrive at, because of the objectives and purposes of the policies and the enthusiasm with which we pursued them over all of that time.

“So similar rules will apply to countries of similar capabilities, whether it is your obligations on environment or obligations on trade, and to do it transparently with other countries, and certainly when it comes to debt arrangements and things of that nature, that should apply to us, it should apply to the US and should apply more broadly.”

Part of the success for Morrison was that although he was making the same points as Trump about free trade, forced technology transfer and transparency when lending money to smaller nations, he did it from a different perspective and with courtesy.

Trump bellowed about making billions in new tariffs from China and being in no hurry to settle the dispute while Morrison talked about all sides prospering from free trade.

But Morrison also recognises that any positive changes Trump can wrest from China in the trade war will be good for Australia as a trading nation.

Curiously, former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, who is now head of the New York-based Asia Society, has been predicting as recently as two weeks ago in Beijing that the trade war will be settled by the end of the year because both sides can’t afford to have

it continue.

Morrison had other agendas for the US and UN visits that were not as significant or clearly successful as being able to get on personally with Trump and not upset China.

He wanted to “change the conversation” on climate change by shifting the debate away from vast multilateral emissions reduction agreements towards practical measures dealing with more immediate threats, such as plastic pollution in the oceans.

The Prime Minister made it clear Australia had no need to apologise for what it was doing about climate change because he said Australia was setting targets and meeting them, even exceeding them, and very few leaders could stand at the podium of the UN General Assembly and make the same claim.

In addition to arguing that the environment wasn’t “just about climate change”, Morrison also promoted what will be a popular argument that waste recycling and other pollution solutions should not be handled by big government committees but should be commercial, job-creating operations.

The shift to “practical and commonsense” solutions on plastic pollution and recycling won’t stem the criticism of the Coalition over climate change but it will give supporters something solid to talk about. Just like the workers who will be employed in Pratt Industries’ paper plant in Wapakoneta, Ohio, they can point to jobs and a cleaner environment rather than discuss climate change theories about the rate of global warming and 2050 targets for net zero carbon emissions.

Certainly it was a bad look for Morrison to be involved in what became a Trump campaign-style event at the opening of the $US500m ($740m) plant as workers and supporters plumped for Trump’s re-election, but what was Morrison to do? Like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a “Howdy Modi” event earlier in Texas, which attracted 50,000 cheering Indian-Americans, Morrison was the guest who could hardly say he wasn’t going to come to the opening of the plant that fitted his mantra of mutual investment and trade advantages.

For someone who loves wearing baseball caps, Morrison didn’t go near the popular hats emblazoned with Trump’s re-election motto of “Keep America Great”.

Albanese had a legitimate complaint about appearing to be partisan but it was thin and missed the wider point and the deeper, more mature message about the trip and Australia’s difficult position.

Morrison renewed the vows on the US alliance regardless of who leads the US and Australia, he certainly got on with Trump, he didn’t offend China while kicking along the essential debate about China’s status as a developing or developed nation, he tried to change the focus on climate change without denying climate change and he promoted Australia-US trade and investment.

Trump’s euphoria for Australia may not last but unlike French President Emmanuel Macron, the only other leader Trump has honoured with a state visit and White House dinner, the warmth lasted at least until the end of the visit.

The debate on China’s status as a developed nation to match its economic and strategic might is vital and will last for years but in the short term Morrison managed to walk the tightrope and his visit wasn’t a failure by any means.