The shock of Donald Trump has prompted Australia to become shriller about China. Struck dumb by The Donald, Canberra can at least find its tongue about China.

‘Shock and awe’ is probably too grandiose a term for the Trump effect in Canberra so far. ‘Shake and appal’ better catches the feeling.

Shake and appal drives Canberra to play nice with The Donald, and say nothing publicly that is critical of Trump. The discipline is dressed with great swathes of affection for the alliance. If you can’t say anything nice about the 45th president, please talk about all the wonderful things America has done in the past and could do in the future. It mightn’t be much of a template for policy, but it helps structure the speeches.

One knock-on effect of shake and appal has been the sharper language Australia is using about China. In quietly questioning Washington, Australia doesn’t want to be seen simultaneously moving towards Beijing. Instead, the approach is to question gently in one direction while pushing loudly in the other.

Strong words about China’s threat to the rules-based system can serve a dual purpose: speak to Beijing about the value of the system while implicitly pleading with the US not to abandon the system it has built and policed—and mightily profited from.

See the Trump-China dynamic in two Australian speeches in Singapore to the International Institute for Strategic Studies: The Fullerton Lecture in March by the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, (entitled ‘Change and Uncertainty in the Indo-Pacific’) and this month’s keynote to the Shangri-La Dialogue by the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

First, the China shrillness. The scene was set by Bishop’s depiction of China ‘rising as an economic partner and geo-political and geo-strategic competitor with the US and other nations’.

The tone was even more striking when Bishop got to values and rules:

‘The importance of liberal values and institutions should not be underestimated or ignored. While non-democracies such as China can thrive when participating in the present system, an essential pillar of our preferred order is democratic community.’

From Bishop’s democratic backhander, Turnbull then put in the strategic boot, offering a ‘dark view’ of a ‘coercive’ China wanting ‘to impose a latter day Monroe Doctrine on this hemisphere in order to dominate the region, marginalising the role and contribution of other nations, in particular the US’.

My column from Singapore on Turnbull’s speech carried a big chunk of his China bashing. The strength/shrillness of Turnbull’s words on China made it eminently quotable. But the China stuff wasn’t what Asian and American delegates in the room were parsing after the speech. The interest was in Turnbull’s frantic semaphoring towards the US as he spoke of what Asia must build for itself—particularly the PM’s line that we can’t merely rely on the superpowers to protect our interests. And that the Oz alliance with the US isn’t a ‘straightjacket’. Australia couldn’t abrogate responsibility for its own destiny.

Turnbull’s Shangri-La speech is one of the most important foreign policy readouts of his leadership. It’s strong on how Asia has got to where it is now, firm on the things we don’t want to happen, and very strong on the importance of the US. It’s not so sure, though, on what to do next. And then there’s the silence on Trump, which a lot of people in the Shangri-La ballroom heard as the mute companion wail to the China shrillness. There was no criticism of Turnbull for any duality. Everyone is struggling.

Trump wants to dominate. If he can’t dominate, he disrupts. And amid the disruption, he reaches for a better deal. How to plan or predict with such a leader? It’s tough to talk values and rules to a man who works better at disruption and deals.

The shake and appal fears about what Trump might do—or fail to do—shape the silences and the gaps in Canberra’s Asia discussion. By contrast, the language on China rings louder. Look for Trumpian shapes in the spaces.

The coming Oz Foreign Policy White Paper is going to be a symphony, notable for the absence of Trump-et solos. There’ll be lots of stuff about the strength and vitality of the US alliance, along the lines of the AUSMIN talks with Defence Secretary Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson in Sydney last week. The peak Oz-US ministerial had a ‘retro’ feel, and not just because it was held in the wonderful historic ambience of Government House. The ‘adults’ from Washington were visiting; but how much weight to put on their assurances about the great disruptor in the White House?

The questions the Americans directed at the Australian side could draw point from the 2017 Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment, released at Shangri-La by IISS. One of the 12 chapters on ‘key developments and trends’ considered ‘Australia’s uncertain regional security role’.

The key judgment offered on Oz was that it’d be logical to expect that a challenging regional order will cause Canberra to play a more active role, yet ‘doubts remain about its capacity and willingness to do so’. IISS judges the Turnbull government ‘cautious’ about any regional initiatives: ‘The considerable prevailing uncertainty over the depth of commitment of the new US administration to Asia-Pacific security may have contributed to Canberra’s strategic holding pattern.’

Expect more shrillness. The silences will be harder to maintain.

President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has caused much discussion about China’s vision for engaging the world economically. In many ways, it can bring ‘win–win’ opportunities for China’s economic partners, but there’s also potential for less desirable, unintended consequences arising from this ambitious plan.

China’s rise has seen its footprint of personnel and commercial interests overseas expand at a bewildering pace over the past two decades. Many Chinese continue to leave their shores in search of wealth and resources, either as individuals or as members of large commercial organisations. Chinese communities overseas, estimated at 35 million nine years ago, have become valuable assets in connecting China to the outside world, but they are also a potential liability. While this growing presence and influence can develop strategic interests beyond the original design, a growing subset of them are increasingly at risk from natural disasters, breakdowns of civil order, acts of terrorism, and exposure to war zones.

This growth in overseas Chinese communities has been accompanied by the continued expansion of military capability to protect China’s interests abroad and the development of a substantial middle class that expects the Communist Party to protect the Chinese diaspora. Such a development of risk accompanied by the means and expectation to address it generates a perceived obligation to act in self-defence overseas.

China’s first declared overseas military base, in the port of Obock in Djibouti, is an example of what can follow the development of commercial interests. The base will support counter-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden, enable China’s deployment of combat troops on peacekeeping operations on the African continent, and provide protection for Chinese oil imports from the Middle East at a strategic node in the BRI.

This combination of trends in growth, interests, capability and obligation is demonstrated by the recent phenomenon of Chinese evacuation operations. Referred to in China as ‘overseas citizen protection’, they have been conducted since 2006. At the turn of the century, China didn’t have the capacity, or policy, to conduct evacuation operations, and seemed content to ask other countries to evacuate its citizens.

In 2004, when 14 Chinese workers were killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the domestic reaction caused China to review its overseas citizen protection system, acknowledging that large numbers of Chinese were living in high-risk environments overseas. China started to conduct small evacuations using civilian means to extract citizens from Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Tonga and Lebanon in 2006, Chad and Thailand in 2008, and Haiti and Kyrgyzstan in 2010.

The largest evacuations occurred in 2011, during the Arab Spring uprisings, when China retrieved 1,800 citizens from Egypt, 2,000 from Syria and 35,860 from Libya, along with 9,000 from Japan after the Tohoku earthquake. The 48,000 Chinese evacuated in 2011 were more than five times the total number evacuated between 1980 and 2010.

This was the first such operation to significantly involve the PLA in more than decision-making and interagency coordination in Beijing, providing surveillance, deterrence, escort and evacuation by air in the operation itself.

More recently, between 30 March and 2 April 2015, a Chinese flotilla of three PLAN naval vessels was diverted from its counter-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden to evacuate Chinese citizens from the port of Aden in Yemen. Some 563 Chinese citizens and 233 foreign citizens of 13 other nationalities were evacuated by the PLAN to Djibouti.

This was a significant development, as it was performed exclusively with military assets and was the first time the PLAN had evacuated citizens of other countries.

According to one analysis, the requirement to protect nationals abroad is much more likely to cause Chinese foreign policy to become interventionist than the protection of energy interests, largely because of public and government attention. There’s a risk that as China acts to protect its interests in areas perceived as of lesser strategic priority, such as the Southwest Pacific, its actions will generate unintended second and third order effects, with undesirable strategic consequences. This possibility has been referred to as ‘accidental friction’.

There’s evidence of an anti-Chinese mindset in Melanesian societies, associated with a belief that the ‘new Chinese’ are taking away local jobs. This perception is reinforced by negative media coverage of Chinese commercial ventures in the Pacific. Such tensions occasionally boil over into anti-Chinese violence, such as that seen in Solomon Islands and Tonga in 2006 and PNG in 2009. However, public and government opinion in China is not always sympathetic to the Chinese who are targeted in these riots.

Given the potential for anti-Chinese riots in the South Pacific, the requirement for Chinese ‘overseas citizen protection’ may become a reality in Melanesia in the near future.

If Australian and Chinese military contingents were to find themselves involved in an evacuation operation in a difficult or threatening environment, and without prior preparation, the consequences may be undesirable. A lack of understanding of each other’s techniques, control measures and rules of engagement could be quite dangerous to all involved. Such unintended consequences could be mitigated by engaging, understanding and cooperating well before this happens.

John McCain’s speech in Sydney this week offered an emotionally-appealing restatement of the orthodox, establishment view of Australia’s alliance with America. In doing so the veteran Republican senator showed quite plainly why that view is inadequate as a basis for our thinking about the future of the alliance and Australia’s place in Asia over coming decades. We’d be wise to pay more attention to Angela Markel’s remarks in Bavaria last weekend.

At the heart of McCain’s speech was a simple and familiar argument. It is that America and Australia are allies not because we share interests and objectives—what he called ‘narrow materialism’—but because we share history and values. He spoke eloquently about our shared history, recalling his family’s long connections with Australia as a military partner. And he spoke very directly about the role of shared values in underpinning and motivating the alliance.

‘Why are we allies?’, he asked, and offered this answer: ‘The animating purpose of our alliance is that we are free societies…who put our faith in the rule of law, and who believe that our destinies are inseparable from the character of the broader world order.’

He spoke of ‘the rights and independence of the weak’, the right ‘to sail the seas, and fly the skies, and engage in commerce freely’, and the need to resist those ‘bent on injustice, and aggression, and conquest’.

‘These are values that time does not diminish,’ McCain concluded. ‘These are ideas that truly are worth the fighting for. This is why we are allies—and why we must remain so.’

One can see the appeal of this. History and values are, by definition, enduring and unchangeable—‘time does not diminish’—so those who passionately want the alliance to endure naturally give weight to them rather than to the shifting sands of interests and objectives.

But reality must be allowed to intrude, and the reality is that alliances only endure when they demonstrably serve clear contemporary national objectives on both sides, and when the costs they impose are worth the benefits they bestow.

Those who really care about the alliance and its future should look beyond the warm generalities of history and values and examine the cold facts. How far do our strategic interests and objectives converge with America’s in the decades to come?

This isn’t an abstract question. Each country needs to ask what exactly is—in McCain’s words—‘worth fighting for’ in Asia. Talk of values is cheap, but fighting for them against an adversary as powerful as China, as McCain seems to be suggesting, is not. Over the past few years it has become less and less clear that America is willing to accept the costs and risks of defending the regional order from China’s challenge.

That was so even before Americans elected Donald Trump, and it is much plainer now. McCain urged us to ignore Trump as an anomaly. He wants us to believe, as he does, that the real America remains committed to upholding its global leadership at any cost. But all the evidence from last year’s election—on both sides of US politics—points the other way.

Trump may be unprecedented, but he isn’t an anomaly. His election is the clear consequence of long-standing trends in US politics. And while Trump might not last long, the trends and attitudes he represents, including his ‘America First’ isolationism, will persist.

And why not? Traditionalists like McCain talk tough, but they have no credible ideas about how America should perpetuate its leadership in today’s world. In particular, they have no idea what to do about China. McCain’s ‘Asia-Pacific Stability Initiative’ is little more than a rebadged ‘Pivot’, and would fail just as the Pivot did, because it doesn’t commit anything remotely approaching the massive resources required to meet China’s challenge.

There’s a reason for that. No one believes that Americans today would support a policy which commits the resources required. That means we would be very unwise to expect that America will sustain its leadership in Asia, and if it doesn’t, then—history and values notwithstanding—it won’t need Australia as an ally.

Nor is Australia’s commitment to supporting America nearly as clear-cut as our alliance rhetoric suggests. For all our tough talk, Australian governments haven’t been willing to support America in pushing back against China in any way that might damage our standing in Beijing. And how much weight would our shared history and values have if we ever do have to choose whether to support America in a war with China?

We aren’t alone in facing these questions. Around the world America and its allies are struggling to understand what their alliances mean in a changed world in which America’s relative power and resolve are much depleted, and it confronts major challenges in several key regions.

This is the reality that Angela Merkel has acknowledged so frankly. It isn’t just about Donald Trump. Under any president, how credible is it that America would risk a nuclear war with Russia to save Estonia from Vladimir Putin? Or Poland, come to that?

The difference is that Merkel has the courage and candor to acknowledge the problem, which is the essential first step towards doing something about it. Senator McCain doesn’t, and neither do we.

Beijing’s great celebration of the Belt and Road Initiative was a lavish display of China’s promise and power. All those nations paying court to Xi Jinping’s celebratory circus confront the conflicting emotions captured by a fine journalistic phrase-maker who won a day job as Australia’s Prime Minister. Asked by Angela Merkel in 2014 what was driving Oz China policy, Tony Abbott got it into one vivid phrase: ‘fear and greed’.

Abbott’s zinger resonates across Asia as it does in Australia. Power shifts riding on huge wealth effects naturally produce avarice and apprehension. ‘Power’ can be both a plural or singular noun; and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is dollar power dancing with soft power while holding hands with hard power.

Just as the Beijing Olympics was a moment of greatness, Beijing’s BRI bonanza is another magnificently-staged moment: China reaches out to 60 countries with infrastructure, trade, finance—and ambition.  Exporting China’s model will be extremely difficult. Lots won’t work. Plenty of cash will gurgle away. Factor in many failures as China tries to build big in foreign climes.

Yet if Beijing delivers only half of its BRI promises, that’s a lot of power created, an even bigger leadership role for China, and a greatly enhanced web of bilateral and regional relationships.

Xi’s dream is of the dominant Asian power cementing its dominance with cement. The world’s second biggest economy in dollar terms—and since 2014 the world’s biggest economy in purchasing power parity—is rolling out mountains of dollars. While Donald Trump looks inward to make America great again, Xi reaches out to make China great again on the world stage.

Watching it all in Beijing, Rowan Callick saw a party with lots of power dimensions:

‘China under Xi has moved into the space left by Washington, as a can-do, big-picture, global-scale economic mover and shaker—with geopolitical strings attached.

No one can afford to ignore or underestimate China, the only country with the economic grunt to carry this off. The timing for BRI is fortuitous and impeccable.’

Australia’s former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, says Beijing has three BRI imperatives:

1. Economic: diversify holdings of foreign assets away from US Treasury notes, as part of China’s ‘Go Global’ strategy; plus foreign infrastructure provides a vent for China’s growing excess capacity as its own infrastructure needs are built out.
2. Internal stability: developing the poorer remote border provinces.
3. Strategic: ‘China is presenting a new narrative to the world: that it has the will, resources and ideas to provide global leadership and it intends to reshape the international order.’

What China has already built in Asia this century is the model for what it wants to replicate on a larger scale. And what China has already done shows the pitfalls. Beijing’s major infrastructure build in Sri Lanka was based on President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his political machine. Rajapaksa’s election loss in 2015 was partly about Sri Lankans rejecting a Chinese embrace. The same story can be read into Myanmar’s 2011 decision to walk away from a giant Chinese dam project; Myanmar’s regime turned towards democracy as it turned away from Chinese dominance.

Evelyn Goh’s depiction of China’s rising influence in developing Asia shows a patron that doesn’t get all it wants from its supposed clients. In contrast to the US’s security-focussed approach, Goh sees China offering Asia an economic and development partnership with these characteristics:

• Beijing doesn’t try to make its developing neighbours do what they otherwise wouldn’t have done. Instead, China meets development imperatives with ‘quick and non-transparent bilateral investments’.
• China’s strategic intent is to invest in its influence in Asia, building goodwill as a hedge against future opposition.
• China doesn’t easily achieve what it wants—the extent of China’s influence tends to depend on domestic dynamics in target states.
• The systemic impact of China’s growing power in developing Asia is constrained by broader structural conditions, international institutions and rules still dominated by the West.

Goh describes Chinese blind spots that’ll be important in how BRI plays out. Beijing, she writes, downplays the autonomy of its neighbours/clients, seeing any deviation from Beijing’s vision as the dark machinations of other great powers. China overlooks the contradictions between its ‘benign modes of influence’ and its coercive behaviour in the South China Sea.

Chinese policymakers see the toughening stances of rival claimants in the South China Sea as being caused by the US, Goh writes:

‘rather than as nationalist responses to Chinese assertiveness in bilateral conflicts. Chinese analysts, policymakers and public opinion are experiencing a dissonance between their growing material power and their perceived lagging status, influence and effectiveness in the international realm. It is by no means clear that Beijing is easily able to win over developing countries to which it can promise quick credit and cheap infrastructure.’

A lot of those offered BRI largesse will take the money now and worry about Chinese influence later. Australia sits on the fence, attending the Beijing jamboree but not embracing the Initiative.

Canberra confronts the dilemma it struggled with when China created the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank. On AIIB, Australia pushed aside fear and embraced greed. Or, more politely, ambition trumped apprehension. BRI asks Australia the AIIB question on a bigger scale. The answer Canberra gives will be an important readout on how Australia’s sees the greed-and-fear balance involved in an ever-greater China.

Most discussions of ‘near-peer’ conflicts in the modern context include some reference to both a ‘resurgent Russia’ and a ‘rising China’. We thought it’d be interesting to compare the navies of the two nations as a case study of broader trends in their defence modernisation efforts. Similar analyses could be conducted for other military branches, but an abundance of open-source data on naval assets and the maritime nature of the Asia–Pacific theatre make navies a sensible place to start.

Figure 1 charts the age of the vessels currently in service with the Russian Navy, separated by category. The ‘large surface combatant’ category includes Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, and the ‘missile submarine’ category includes both nuclear-armed SSBNs and conventionally-armed SSGNs. (We omitted three ‘special purpose’ submarines.)

Figure 1: Age of the Russian Navy

It’s immediately clear that most vessels in service were built in the waning days of the Cold War; roughly two-thirds of Russia’s current surface combatants and submarines were commissioned between 1985 and 1994. There’s been a recent flurry of activity, but at well below Cold War levels.

Of 21 surface combatants delivered since 2000, 17 are corvettes and four are frigates. Further frigate construction efforts have been hampered since 2014, when Ukraine ceased exporting naval turbines to Russia in retaliation against Moscow’s role in the Crimean crisis. The Russian Navy will be lucky to receive another four frigates by the end of the decade.

Retaining large surface combatants in the fleet has depended on efforts to upgrade and sustain old Soviet-era ships. And Russia’s ambitions for the construction of a new large surface combatant (Leader-class) in the 2020s may never be realised, especially if economic conditions don’t improve.

Russia has commissioned just seven diesel–electric submarines (SSKs) since the end of the Cold War. Problems in the first Lada-class boat (Sankt Peterburg, 2010) resulted in production being suspended after just one launch. The remaining two are expected for completion by 2019, after which a new class is planned. To fill the SSK gap, the Russian Navy accepted six ‘Improved Kilo’ submarines between 2014 and 2016. Foreign sales of the Improved Kilo have provided steady work for shipbuilders: 18 boats have been delivered to foreign navies since the late 1990s.

Nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) production has been more troubled: since the last of 10 Akula-class SSNs was commissioned in 2000, only one new SSN has entered service: the Severodvinsk (Yasen class). The new submarine was so plagued by problems that the second boat in the class is designated as a new sub-class (Yasen M), and is expected to cost twice as much as the first. The new Borei-class SSBNs have been very successful by comparison: three were delivered in 2013–14, and another six are planned for completion by 2020.

As noted on The Strategist back in November, Russia’s trying to reconcile its plans for significant military modernisation with the harsh economic realities of low oil prices and continuing sanctions. Figure 1 paints a picture of a country that’s struggling to restore its naval industry to even a shadow of its Soviet-era glory.

China stands in stark contrast to Russia’s shipbuilding struggles. Spurred on by its economic growth and a growing maritime consciousness, China’s been building ships at a frenetic pace. Figure 2 shows the pace and scale of the growth of the People’s Liberation Army – Navy (PLAN).

Figure 2: Age of the Chinese Navy

Most of China’s recent builds are surface vessels of various sizes. Since 2000, China has built 19 large surface combatants (destroyers and aircraft carriers) and 63 small surface combatants (frigates and corvettes). Of the 124 surface vessels currently in service, 53% have been built since 2010, at an average of almost nine surface vessels commissioned per year. The PLAN has invested heavily in corvettes to replace its fleet of ageing coastal patrol craft, as well as larger air warfare vessels to enhance its ability to counter airborne threats—an area in which the PLAN has been deficient for decades.

Interestingly, the PLAN’s submarine fleet is adding vessels at a much slower pace. The bulk of its SSKs were built in the 1990s and 2000s, while its SSN and SSBN boats are coming back online after a production pause. While the exact cause or causes of the pause are unclear, it’s likely that they were to either implement new features into the design (the likely addition of a vertical launch system to the Type 093A), or to remedy known defects (China’s nuclear propulsion systems are notoriously underpowered). What’s clear is that China isn’t putting all its eggs in the nuclear-powered basket, as it’s continuing to build SSKs along with SSNs and SSBNs.

The data shows that China is modernising at an incredible rate, and that trend doesn’t appear to be slowing much. Reports suggest that a further eight Type 052D destroyers are to be built by 2020, along with the completion of China’s next aircraft carrier and the continuation of the Type 056/056A corvette line. That’s probably just a taste of what’s to come, although shipyard overcapacity (and subsequent consolidation) mean that it’s unlikely that PLAN shipbuilding will reach the heights seen in the 2010–2014 period.