US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is like the circus cleaner with a bucket following around the elephant cleaning up the mess the big guy just made.
In this case Sullivan gave a rapturous rendition of what the AUKUS agreement might mean, in an obvious effort to move beyond the sour taste left by President Joe Biden’s bizarre remarks that the agreement had been clumsy and he was so sorry the French hadn’t been told, and that he even, wrongly, thought Paris had been informed.
Sullivan also joined a strange and temporary unity ticket with China’s president, Xi Jinping, who told APEC that the region must avoid “a new Cold War”.
Sullivan says the US, too, wants to avoid a Cold War with China.
But whereas Xi thinks “small exclusive groups” – namely AUKUS – promote Cold War thinking, Sullivan thinks AUKUS will help prevent a Cold War by keeping the region stable.
Meanwhile Xi and Joe Biden showed that, at the end of the day, they are both politicians, as they joined together in one of the vaguest, least impressive, most undemanding, ethereal, Latinate joint statements on climate action yet, in that richly populated field of content-lite climate declarations.
Sullivan, a widely respected foreign policy professional, was expansive about what AUKUS meant, and spoke to the Lowy Institute in the best traditions of American rhetorical generosity about Australia and our alliance with the US.
This alliance, he said, “is fundamental to our vision” and he meant the Washington vision for the whole globe and across all foreign policy issues.
The Biden administration was hard at work implementing AUKUS, Sullivan said.
AUKUS showed that “if you are a strong ally and friend of the US and you bet with us, we’ll bet with you, with the most advanced, most sensitive technology we have”.
And: “We trust you, we believe in you.”
These are exceptionally welcome words from Sullivan. They will reverberate throughout Asia and will be read with intense interest in Beijing, and indeed in Paris.
But it remains the fact that from five minutes after AUKUS was announced Biden himself has said nothing about it other than to repeatedly apologise for it, has said nothing positive about Australia, and has shown no interest in meeting Scott Morrison when they were together at international forums.
It is surely the most bizarre presidential follow up to an allegedly historical alliance agreement in US presidential history.
The Biden guys think of themselves as the polar opposite of Donald Trump’s administration.
But the AUKUS sequence reprises a recurring motif of the Trump years.
The President says something weird, disobliging or just unfathomable, and then the senior officials scramble around to say, no, what the President actually meant was just the opposite of what he said.
This has happened more than once in the Biden administration.
Sullivan also refused to say whether it was Australia, or his own officials, that Biden had in mind when he talked about how clumsy the AUKUS process had been, and how he, Biden, had been misled about the treatment of France.
Reports are that it was Sullivan himself, and Indo-Pacific Co-ordinator Kurt Campbell, who caught the lion’s share of Biden’s wrath, but Sullivan’s determined failure to exempt the Morrison government from Biden’s criticisms leaves a lingering suspicion that the President thought Canberra had messed up as well as his own officials.
Sullivan and Campbell both are great friends of Australia and we are lucky to have them in the Biden administration. But nothing counts as much as the President’s own words.
There was also a singular lack of specifics in Sullivan’s vision for AUKUS. It’s about nuclear propelled subs and other emerging technologies, he said.
But as the Morrison government keeps insisting these notional nuclear subs will be built in Adelaide, we know they are decades away from delivery at best. And we already have the closest partnership imaginable with the US on military technology.
So where’s the beef, Jack?
Nonetheless, Sullivan’s speech indicates the Biden administration has at least the rudiments of something the Morrison government completely lacks – a communications strategy for AUKUS. That is to say, at least one senior official has made one speech with some AUKUS material in it.
The Biden/Xi joint statement on climate is hopeful, in that it shows the two superpowers talking, and having some wish to co-operate at least on a statement, but it is also the kind of statement which makes people cynical about international politics.
The big story of COP26 is that it failed because the big emitters ether didn’t show up – China, Russia, Brazil – or didn’t make any significant change to their old positions, as in the more understandable case of India.
Here’s an undeniable truth – if the countries responsible for the majority of emissions don’t reduce them, global emissions overall won’t reduce. And China continues to increase its emissions. The dance by both Xi and Sullivan around the terminology of “Cold War” followed well rehearsed, deeply familiar, long-choreographed lines.
Beijing wants to get US forces out of Asia so it opposes “outside interference” in the region. And it wants to weaken US alliances so that it can bully its Asian neighbours one-on-one, so it demonises US alliance structures as “Cold War thinking”.
At the same time, Washington doesn’t want to be blamed for regional conflict so it frequently repeats the mantra that it doesn’t want a Cold War.
There is not now a Cold War between the US and China. The term Cold War arises from US/Soviet Union tensions and includes mutual economic disdain if not isolation. US/China trade, by contrast, is still huge.
Nonetheless, both countries are decoupling in critical hi-tech areas. Intensified Chinese authoritarianism is scaring away many foreign investors. And the US and its allies are trying to create secure supply chains in critical areas, which means supply chains that don’t involve China.
It’s not a Cold War yet, but it’s not a warm peace either.
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