‘China risk’ from Joe Biden regime

The Biden presidency could deliver a version of American disengagement that ‘cedes too much initiative to an angry and activist Beijing’, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute says.

US president-elect Joe Biden in Newark, Delaware. Picture: AFP

The Biden presidency could deliver a version of American disengagement that “cedes too much initiative to an angry and activist Beijing”, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute says.

Institute executive director Peter Jennings describes a risk that US president-elect Joe Biden could oversee an “America First” approach that turns into an “America Only” strategy that would be unhelpful to Australia in the Indo-Pacific.

However, he says Mr Biden’s strategic ambition is Australia’s to sway and Scott Morrison should visit Washington soon. Mr Biden is due to be sworn in as the 46th president of the US on January 20.

In an essay in The Australian on Thursday, Mr Jennings writes there is a possibility Mr Biden could be distracted by COVID-19 and a poisonous election year and choose not to press Beijing on cyber spying, human rights abuses, Taiwan and the South China Sea and instead shape an agenda around climate, arms control and multilateral diplomacy.

“Canberra decision-makers are relieved the unpredictable chaos of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is almost over, but Trump presided (perhaps without realising it) over a US policy establishment that shaped a bipartisan consensus on China which will last into Biden’s time,” he writes.

The official release in Washington on Tuesday of a 2018 Nat­ional Security Council document, “US Strategy Framework for the Indo-Pacific”, shows the US had been working to a handbook that advocated pushing back against China, working more closely with India, and bolstering alliances with Australia, Japan and South Korea. As well, the document advocated doing more in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands to help democracies.

Mr Jennings says all of this can easily be adopted by Mr Biden. “The price for an active and engaged Washington is that we will have to step up our involvement in the region and do our best to shape American policy thinking.”

He says key elements of this strategy should be to shape a common response against Chinese economic coercion, a formalising of Quadrilateral defence co-operation that also involves Japan and India; a shared condemnation of China’s dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy; an agreement to develop supply chains that shun Chinese forced labour; and combined planning to strengthen the defence of Taiwan.