Hugh White

Power shift: rethinking Australia's place in the Asian century

Australian foreign and strategic policy has not yet begun to address the implications for Australias international situation of Chinas growing power. China today already challenges the American leadership that has kept Asia peaceful and Australia secure for many decades. There are real and growing risks that Washington and Beijing will not find a way to work together peacefully as relative power shifts from one to the other. Unless they do, Asias future is bleak, and so is Australias. Australia therefore needs to work to promote a new order in Asia which accommodates Chinas power without conceding more than is necessary to keep the peace. This will mean encouraging America to forgo primacy in Asia in favour of working with China and others in a shared regional leadership. Australia also needs to start preparing for the possibility that Asia will nonetheless become a more contested and dangerous place over coming decades, and consider what its options would be. None of them appear attractive.

The limits to optimism: Australia and the rise of China

The Australian government optimistically expects that Chinas rise can be easily managed. They predict US–China relations will be cooperative, and reject concerns that Australia may face hard choices between them. This optimism seems to be based on the view that as China grows it will become increasingly integrated into a US-led global system. That overestimates Americas power, and underestimates Chinas ambitions. The best we can hope for instead is that China and the US will cooperate in a concert of power, but the US will be very reluctant to make the necessary concessions to China for that to happen. So there is a real risk of even worse outcomes: Chinese primacy, sustained US–China hostility, or war. Australia therefore needs to try to persuade America to work with China in building a new ‘Concert of Asia’.

Why War in Asia Remains Thinkable

For over 30 years, East Asia has been free of major wars. But East Asias stable order is based on a unique and remarkable triangular relationship among the regions three biggest powers, and that relationship is now under pressure from Chinas growth. Asias future peace will depend on the ability of the United States, China and Japan – and eventually India – to create a new regional order which reflects the emerging economic and power relativities of the Asian Century. Creating a stable new order will require major sacrifices from all three powers: America will have to concede primacy and learn to treat China and Japan as equals; China will have to forgo its own dreams of primacy and accept Japan as a legitimate major power; and Japan will have to accept the costs and complexities of strategic independence. We cannot assume they will meet these challenges successfully.

Australian defence policy and the possibility of war

The Defence White Paper of December 2000 declares that the main task of the ADF is to maintain the capability to defend Australian territory from any credible attack without relying on the combat forces of any other country. Australia is unusual among contemporary Western states in affirming such a policy. Most other states are reordering their priorities to put less emphasis on conventional conflict and more on tasks such as peacekeeping and border protection, while assuming that in the event of major conventional conflicts they are likely to be involved as subsidiary members of a coalition led in most cases by the United States. Should Australia follow this trend? The article reviews this question in the light of a number of scenarios for the use of Australias armed forces in the period ahead, and concludes that the arguments for change are not persuasive.

Coral Bell and the Concert of Power: Avoiding Armageddon

Coral Bell gave the title ‘A Preoccupation with Armageddon’ to the fragment of memoir found among her papers, and began it by recalling the moment she heard that the atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. ‘I can even remember the pattern of the hearth-rug on which I was standing when a colleague rushed in with the news’, she wrote. ‘Perhaps that moment is the reason why so much of my life has revolved around wars and crises; why I have had such a preoccupation with the possibility of Armageddon. Especially how to avoid it’.2