New vim in Pacific posture

Tony Abbott with US Secretary of State John Kerry ahead of their meeting in Washington on

IF you watched closely, you could see the tectonic plates of Pacific power shifting ever so slightly this week. The Abbott government made two big international plays.

First, Tony Abbott concluded with Barack Obama a force posture agreement that will allow the two nations to expand on the arrangement which sees US Marines rotating through Darwin.

The Marines are not based in Darwin. There are no US bases on Australian soil. If that does happen one day, it will be a further substantial development.

But this week’s move was big enough.

Both Australian and American politicians and officials can claim some credit for the enhanced US military involvement with Australia.

But from Abbott’s point of view, this represents deep strategic continuity with all that has gone before in Australia’s security policy.

Since 1942, but in a sense since Alfred Deakin, a key object of Australian national security policy has been to enmesh the US in the affairs of the Asia Pacific.

Securing the Marine rotation in Darwin was a way of reinforcing this and indeed represents a further US commitment to Australian security.

In Abbott’s meeting with Obama a wide range of issues was traversed, but the key was the security alliance.

Intimately related was a sharing of perspectives on the recent actions of China, especially its naval assertiveness and Beijing’s dangerous brinkmanship in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.

In public, Abbott has given a carefully weighted, nuanced series of messages. The rise of China is a good thing for China, for the US, for Australia, for the world. The Chinese government and the Chinese people deserve great credit for the magnificent achievement of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty so quickly.

In interviews with Australian media, Abbott has stressed that much of Australia’s recent prosperity has been based in part on China’s rise.

But Abbott has also made two other points which the Chinese don’t like so much. Australia wants the US to continue and extend its military, economic and diplomatic presence in Asia, and the US-Australia military alliance is central to that.

Second, Abbott, like his defence and foreign ministers, says that maritime and territorial disputes must be resolved in accordance with international law, peacefully and by negotiation, and that there should be no unilateral or intimidatory actions. That means China. Australia, Abbott and his ministers say, does not take a position on the merits of competing territorial claims but it does take a position on the methods used to prosecute them.

Abbott, when questioned, acknowledges that the Chinese have engaged in unilateral actions and says these are regrettable.

This is a delicate and finely choreographed diplomatic dance. Whether it is sufficiently restrained that the Chinese will not eventually overreact is unclear.

Apart from a broad-ranging security discussion, Abbott and Obama also discussed the trans-Pacific Partnership which the US is pushing in the region, and other economic issues.

They did discuss climate change but this was a tiny sideshow. In all the preparations for the meeting, US officials did not emphasise, indeed barely raised, climate change.

So the new force posture agreement with the Americans is one of Abbott’s big plays this week.

The other occurred in Tokyo and involved Julie Bishop and David Johnston. This is the preparation for final signature by Abbott and the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, of a defence science and technology exchange agreement.

Don’t let the bland words fool you. This signals a historic new stage of defence intimacy between Canberra and Tokyo.

It could well pay very big dividends in the future. The main talk has been about accessing Japanese submarine technology. The Japanese produce the best and the biggest conventional subs in the world.

But the bigger picture is Canberra playing a modest midwife role to Japan’s historic re-emergence as a security player in East Asia, engaging, like any other nation, in collective self-defence.

This is not militarism (no one could accuse modern Japan of militarism), it is modernisation. But it is certainly occurring within the context of China’s recent assertiveness.

At the level of grand strategy, this can be seen as Canberra helping to hook up the different parts of the US alliance system in Asia.

Australia too has defence technology which can help Japan. When both our air forces are operating Joint Strike Fighter F-35s, the Japanese may well find Australian air testing ranges invaluable. There are radars and sonars we have that will be of intense interest to the Japanese.

Again, naturally the Chinese don’t like this, but Beijing has no one to blame but itself for this kind of regional reaction.

A third play that Abbott made this week was for a newly intense semi-alliance relationship with Canada, and that too was very successful.

Abbott’s program in Washington was extremely full, meeting all the congressional leadership, all the relevant cabinet secretaries, some of the presidential contenders. Unusually for a prime ministerial trip to Washington, he took a substantial business delegation with him and they got especially good access because they were travelling with the Prime Minister.

The only real downside of the trip was the woeful performance of the media. The Canberra press gallery should have a compulsory week-long course on the basics of foreign policy before they are allowed to accompany a prime minister overseas. Even an accomplished journalist like Phil Coorey at The Australian Financial Review had China as a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership whereas the key point of all discussions about the TPP is that China is not a member of it.

Obama was warm and even a little effusive about Abbott. Their meeting went very well. The ­bizarre creation of the Fairfax media and the ABC of an alleged crisis in the relationship over climate change was completely fraudulent.

The worst piece of misreporting was a splash on the front page of The Age alleging that Abbott was going to build an international coalition to counter Obama. This is completely untrue. This is not a matter of interpretation. Either Abbott is building a bloc to counter Obama or he is not doing so. Of course, as he and his office confirm, he is not doing so. You will never hear of such a bloc again because no such bloc exists.

The ABC, which happily ignores stories which don’t fit its ideological bias, feasted for a day on this misinformation, reporting it as fact and then getting all the usual suspects to denounce the Abbott government on the basis of factually wrong information.

That the ABC made no effort to verify this preposterous report ­reflects poorly on its professionalism.

The reason for going on about this at some length is that for several days this week, the audience of the ABC and the Fairfax press were denied basic factual information about Australian foreign policy and about what the Prime Minister was actually doing overseas.

That’s a pity, because the real story was compelling.