Graeme Dobell and Matt Davies have both written engaging contributions respectively for and against Australia’s possible future membership of ASEAN. I’m grateful to Graeme for presenting so cogently the arguments for Australia’s seeking admission. But Matt reminds us of the difficulties involved—difficulties that Graeme’s most recent post on the topic seems to acknowledge, though he clearly still has more to say on the subject. Personally, I believe Australia should be trying to strengthen its relationships with key Southeast Asian states. But I’m unconvinced we have to join ASEAN to do that. We already have a close working relationship with ASEAN. And, I suspect our entreaties to Southeast Asian partners for closer strategic relationships are probably more credible if our motives are pure—that is, if we’re not simultaneously mendicants for admission to ASEAN.

As with most big questions related to strategic policy, it pays to come at this one from an understanding of Australian interests. What does Australia want from Southeast Asia? Good neighbours, certainly—and a shared sense of community is the foundation stone of a peaceful, interactive sub-region. We also want good trade relationships with regional states, a shared willingness to invest political and economic capital in addressing common challenges, and a stronger, more developed and more resilient sub-region. But there’s something else we want too, and it’s perhaps the most important of all our interests. We want a Southeast Asia that’s a positive contributor to a stable, liberal, prosperous Asian security order.

What do the adjectives stable, liberal and prosperous mean in that context? ‘Stable’ means we strive for an environment where guns are largely silent and where military budgets can be kept at small percentages of rapidly-growing GDPs. ‘Liberal’ means an order that’s inclusive and open and characterised by laws and rules; it doesn’t mean that all regional governments have to be democratically elected, though naturally Australia hopes that more will adopt that form over time. And ‘prosperous’ means an order in which all boats can rise, an environment in which development is a shared priority.

We’ve been the beneficiaries of such an order in the past and hope to continue our good strategic fortune in the future. But as US relative strategic weight in the region ebbs, and as we slide towards an Asia of skewed multipolarity, we’re hoping to see emerge a stable, liberal, prosperous strategic order that turns less on US centrality. Obviously the US is going to remain a strong player in the region for many years. But the US-centred order we’ve enjoyed in the past is buckling. So Australia’s looking for new sources of inputs to that order. Former Prime Minister Abbott’s interest in Japan, for example, seemed to derive from a belief that a regionally-engaged Japan would be an important contributor to such an order.

Still, Asia’s a big place. A more engaged Japan—even a more engaged India—wouldn’t offset a deficit of strategic leadership in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia needs to find its own local champions. We should aspire to work with those emerging players to help foster the notion that a sub-regional power core does exist in Southeast Asia, one that is a positive contributor to a stable, liberal, prosperous security order. We want an optimistic, future-oriented Southeast Asia. In the vernacular of the film Tomorrowland, we want a Southeast Asia that feeds the right wolf.

I doubt ASEAN can be the vehicle for achieving that. While it’s been a useful institution for building regional resilience, it’s typically been a responsibility-diffuser rather than a responsibility-enhancer in strategic terms. It was built for a different purpose—to strengthen intra-regional linkages in Southeast Asia. As such, it moves at the speed of its slowest members. It’s reluctant to adopt regional positions on contentious issues. It finds it hard to point the finger of blame even in relation to overt transgressions. And—especially noticeable in these transformational times—its members don’t share a single strategic vision of the regional future. As Donald Emmerson recently observed, if US–China strategic rivalry were to escalate, ASEAN could easily split into two camps—the China-defiers and the China-deferrers.

Our joining the organisation wouldn’t change those characteristics. So, horses for courses: we’ll probably get better mileage in relation to our current strategic ambitions to work with a more limited number of key players, like Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. After all, not all Southeast Asian countries want to be players in the bigger geopolitical matrix. Of those that do, not all share our goal. Let’s work with those who do.

Michael Auslin has called for a ‘new realism’ in US foreign policy toward China, one that ‘begins with an official acceptance that we are locked in a competition with China that is of Beijing’s choosing’. Moreover he suggests that Sino-US dialogue must be ‘reset’ and ‘conducted not as an unearned gift to Beijing, but only when there are concrete goals to be achieved’.

While some, such US National Security Advisor Susan Rice, may dispute the first claim as ‘lazy rhetoric’, the second admonition to structure the relationship through a focus on the concrete goals and interests of each party isn’t as easily dismissed.

The problem in the current climate of Sino–US relations, however, is to identify areas in which those interests overlap to ‘mutual benefit’ more than they diverge. China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) strategy is an area that holds potential.

According to John Hudson, where US officials see China’s resurgence and ambition in the Asia–Pacific as the core driver of regional insecurity, in Eurasia they see a ‘surprising convergence of US and Chinese interests’ that ‘boils down to one mutual goal: security’.

From this perspective, Beijing shares Washington’s desires to see a stable and secure Afghanistan and Pakistan due primarily to Beijing’s own concerns with Uyghur terrorism in Xinjiang.

The strength of this view is based on two major factors.

First, the OBOR itself, while growing out of a decades-long agenda to firmly integrate Xinjiang and overcome Uyghur separatism and terrorism through the delivery of economic development, looks set to engage China more directly in the problems of the region. With its focus on the development of trans-regional infrastructure links and investment, such as the ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’, the OBOR would give China a greater stake in the future security and prosperity of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama administration officials have approvingly noted that China’s plan mirrors the intent of its own aborted ‘New Silk Road Initiative’ of 2011. Indeed, the logic of that effort suggests some complementarity between US and Chinese interests.

Second, the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, which China has attributed to militants based in the Af-Pak tribal areas, has arguably revealed to Beijing that it can no longer rely on the partial ‘outsourcing’ of its security to the US military presence in Afghanistan nor the Pakistani military along the Af-Pak frontier. Instead, Beijing must revise its to-date largely ‘hands off’ approach to the security situation in Afghanistan as it pursues the OBOR strategy.

Yet deeper consideration of both of these factors suggests that the potential overlap between US and Chinese interests shouldn’t be overstated.

Afghanistan, in particular, is deeply problematic for China in terms of the security of Xinjiang, its geopolitical interests and its reputation. China’s aloof approach to the country since the US and NATO intervention began, as Andrew Small has noted, has been dictated by a conflicted mindset:

‘China sat out the conflict in Afghanistan. It wanted neither a Western victory that might entrench a US military presence in its backyard, nor a Taliban victory that would pose risks to Xinjiang and the wider region. As a result, its financial and political contributions to Afghanistan were at best tokenistic, the minimum necessary to avoid alienating anyone.’

Greater Chinese security engagement in Afghanistan promises not only to make it a more overt target for radical Islamists, impacting negatively in the security of Xinjiang, but also to damage Beijing geopolitically by bringing it into conflict with its ‘all weather’ friend, Pakistan. Beijing has emerged as an active proponent of a negotiated political settlement between the Taliban and Kabul—even brokering secret negotiations between the two—in the interests of ‘stability’, while Pakistan ‘has been keener to see a level of consistent instability in Afghanistan’ rather than a secure and independent Kabul. The scope for this divide between the ‘all weather’ friends to widen was underlined by the multiple bomb attacks in the Afghan capital on 10 and 12 August. The Ghani government explicitly blamed the attacks on Pakistan and Beijing offered to extend greater security assistance to Kabul in response.

Speculation that China would actively consider a more overt security presence or engagement in Afghanistan, however, ignores the reputational costs this would impose on Beijing. Much of Beijing’s diplomatic success throughout Eurasia over the past decade has been built not only on its undoubted economic weight but also its ability to counter-pose its doctrine of ‘non-intervention’ to that of the West’s recent record of direct intervention into the affairs of others. The continued strength of this particular peculiarity of Chinese diplomacy has been most recently exhibited in Beijing’s response to the NATO-led intervention in Libya and its approach to the ongoing Syrian crisis.

Despite recent developments on the ground in Afghanistan—including the possible fracturing of the Taliban in the face of the emergence of Islamic State, in the country—it appears that China’s approach to the country remains cautious. Indeed it is difficult to discern a fundamental shift in approach to that described by Beijing’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Sun Yuxi, when he noted in 2014 that ‘preserving Afghanistan’s stability is not a matter of adding troops but of helping Afghanistan to quickly rebuild’.

In the first instalment of this two-part series I reflected on the CCP’s anti-corruption drive as part of an effort to underwrite the long-term legitimacy of CCP rule beyond the Xi leadership. But if enduring legitimacy is the motivation, it’s often asked why the focus is on anti-corruption and not also on other aspects of national policy, like the economy and the environment? But that question overlooks the fact that anti-corruption is in fact not the sole focus of the Xi leadership.

In order to fully appreciate the role of anti-corruption in Xi’s new strategy of national governance, one must understand the so-called ‘four comprehensives’ theory proposed by the leadership early this year. The ‘four comprehensives’ are: comprehensively building a well-off (xiaokang) society, comprehensively deepening reform, comprehensively ruling by law, and comprehensively disciplining the party. The theory is now presented by the leadership as a new strategy for governing the country under the current circumstances. It’s almost a kind of grand strategy for CCP rule in China.

The ‘four comprehensives’ have logical connections with one another. Building a well-off society is the overarching goal, and deepening reform and ruling by law are two major means for achieving this goal. The CCP is the designer as well as executor of this strategy. But in order to enhance its legitimacy in this role, it must achieve self-restraint, self-innovation and self-development by comprehensively disciplining itself. Anti-corruption is a key strategic means of disciplining party members, and part of a broader—comprehensive—strategy for maintaining and enhancing CCP rule in China.

Viewed from the perspective of the ‘four comprehensives’, one can also detect an intriguing relationship between ruling by law and disciplining the party. In CCP politics, it’s often asked whether national laws or party rules take priority in practice. This is an extremely important question for understanding the nature of Chinese politics. But with respect to anti-corruption, the question is somewhat misleading. The CCP’s anti-corruption strategy is never about the rule of law: it’s fundamentally a political question about whether the party can successfully restrain its members and about the extent to which the leadership is willing to go to clean up the party.

Huge political risks and costs lie in wait, as is apparent from the arrests of top political and military leaders such as Zhou Yongkang and Xu Caihou. But the party is compelled to undertake the project, and even to elevate a specific strategy of anti-corruption to a comprehensive approach of ‘disciplining the party’. For, as Mr. Wang Qishan recognised, the legitimacy of the CCP as the sole ruling party of China requires it to discipline itself in order to gain and enhance the trust of the people. For this reason, party rules and regulations, and associated moral education programs, necessarily come before national laws, although laws can play a useful complementary function of punishing and containing the spread of corruption. To CCP members, however, party rules lay down higher and stricter moral and behavioral standards than required by national laws. The CCP must maintain its purity and keep itself in the vanguard.

Wang Qishan and the top CCP leadership should be applauded for deploying a political vocabulary that is conducive to international and cross-cultural exchange. Breaking the taboo of examining the legitimacy of CCP rule demonstrates the self-confidence and candidness of the leadership, as well as its sincerity to conduct a meaningful dialogue with the outside world. To make the narrative of a CCP accountable to the people more persuasive, however, the party must take the idea of the ‘endorsement of the people’ much more seriously.

How to deal with and respond to the ‘endorsement of the people’ is a huge challenge to the CCP. In essence, the CCP must create a mechanism or a set of institutions for measuring the degree of satisfaction of the Chinese people with a good degree of independence and fairness, and then to respond to public needs in a timely, creative and effectively manner. Only by doing so can the CCP build the long-term support of the people and maintain the legitimacy of its rule. Such moves will also help to foster a far more positive image of the CCP to the outside world than it is capable of projecting now.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) anti-corruption drive is of staggering scale, reach and audacity. From the powerful ‘tigers’ to the low-ranking ‘flies’, the anti-corruption policy of Xi Jinping’s leadership has targeted and frightened multiple segments of the party, government, military, and state-owned enterprises.

Many have since wondered about the motivation and nature of the wide-ranging and ambitious anti-corruption policy unleashed by President Xi and carried out by Wang Qishan, who is Secretary of the powerful CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and one of the seven members in the Politburo Standing Committee.

On 9 September, I attended a now-annual conference co-hosted by the International Department of the CCP Central Committee and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CCP Central Committee. This year’s theme was To Discipline the Party: Responsibility of the Party. It was appropriate that Wang—who’s in charge of the party’s anti-corruption drive and the broader strategy of ‘comprehensively disciplining the party’—agreed to offer his views to a select group of scholars and officials from China and abroad.

As I listened to Wang’s remarks at the Great Hall of the People, I realized that he was making a revolutionary statement in the history of the CCP. Wang raised an extremely provocative and hitherto taboo idea in CCP political discourse: he spoke of the legitimacy of CCP rule. Never before has the CCP leadership openly raised and even questioned the legitimacy of its own rule. Moreover, Wang actually set out to explain the legitimacy of CCP’s long one-party rule in China, which he pointed out to be the key distinguishing characteristic of Chinese politics. The legitimacy of CCP rule, Wang explained, is based on the ‘endorsement of the people’ and the ‘choice made by the people.’ He elaborated that the CCP depends on the people being satisfied and happy.

Through his comments, Wang was trying to imply that the anti-corruption effort was much more than a short-term expedient for the new leadership to win favor from the public or to establish political authority through factional or interest-groups-related struggles—just some of the hypotheses offered by outside observers for the push. He pointed out that anti-corruption isn’t a political campaign or movement—Mao’s Cultural Revolution taught the CCP that campaigns and movements eventually cease to exist. Anti-corruption, this time, will ‘always be on the road’, and ‘there is only a beginning, never an end’.

Those remarks, together with the invocation of the all-important concept of CCP legitimacy, suggest that Wang is seeing anti-corruption as a long-term strategy to maintain and enhance the legitimacy of CCP rule in China; it’s not just a temporary device for consolidating the rule of the new Xi leadership. Such an explanation would refute many existing hypotheses about anti-corruption. According to this view, what’s at stake in anti-corruption is nothing less than the legitimacy and survival of the CCP as the sole ruling party in China—something much more significant than the survival of the current Xi leadership, which, after all, has an implicit two-term limit of 10 years.

But is that explanation credible? Wang struck many of us in attendance at the meeting as a deeply impressive political leader and as an intellectual. His remarks on the many issues of dissatisfaction the Chinese people have with CCP rule left the impression that the current generation of CCP leaders face significant governance challenges in China. He spoke of the difficulties and complexities of CCP rule in today’s ‘extraordinary difficulty’ period, and he even said that the new leadership hasn’t taken rest for a single day since it took office.

His legitimacy-based explanation of the anti-corruption strategy would be readily comprehensible to a Western audience. The term ‘legitimacy’—Wang used the Chinese translation of hefaxing—is, after all, of Western origin. The difference between Wang’s narrative and many existing explanations for the anti-corruption effort comes down to the timeline: one takes a short-term tactical perspective, the other a long-term strategic view. While many Western analyses focus on the short-term interest maximization and political survival of the new Xi leadership, Wang takes a strategic view geared toward the long-term legitimacy of CCP rule beyond the expediencies of the current leadership.

A second, and final, instalment will look at CCP rule and legitimacy in the context of the party’s new ‘four comprehensives’ governing strategy advanced early this year.

Australia’s Defence Minster Kevin Andrews was in India this week, where he met with his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar as well as Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj. Andrews contributed an op-ed to The Hindu and delivered a speech to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (excerpted here). It was in the Q&A session of his address to IDSA that the Defence Minister raised the possibility of the Quad 2.0, which made the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald this morning (and is likely to have been well-received in India—at least in Modi’s office).

Yesterday saw China celebrate its role in the WWII defeat of Japan 70 years ago. As expected, Beijing put on a massive display of military muscle, with 12,000 troops goosestepping through Tiananmen Square alongside a veritable heft of tanks, choppers, drones and missiles. Head over to The Atlantic to check out photos of the parade. Chinese President Xi Jinping took the occasion to announce that military personnel would be cut by 300,000. Over at CSIS Anthony Cordesman and Steven Colley have released for feedback a draft of their 600+ page study on Chinese strategy and military modernisation, which you can access here.

IHS has this week estimated that China’s defence budget would swell to approximately US$260 billion in 2020, which is around double the amount spent by Beijing in 2010. The analysis comes as Japan’s Ministry of Defense requests its biggest defence budget yet, which if approved in December would mark the fourth increase in as many years. Both can be taken as signs that the temperature continues to rise in the Asia–Pacific.

The UK Ministry of Defence is currently soliciting options for their surface fleet of the future. The push is being led by Starpoint, a tech-focused procurement group in the MoD, under the title ‘Dreadnought 2050’—a nod to the UK’s 1906 battleship that completely disrupted naval warfare by outclassing all vessels then in the field.

US President Barack Obama this week secured enough votes to prevent a veto of his nuclear deal with Iran, effectively ensuring that it will pass Congress. While a DefenseOne survey found that only 26% of serving US military and civilian government employees think the deal is good for America, Michael Krepon of Arms Control Wonk thinks the deal is about as good as the US is going to get right now. CSIS’s Jon B. Alterman is thinking beyond the deal.

Bookmark this one for the weekend: A few days back, Brookings published William McCants’ longform piece charting the life and transformation of the man who now goes by the name of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL’s self-proclaimed Caliph. The essay is accompanied by a range of photos, videos, maps and recordings. Beyond that commendable effort, two pieces on the Islamic State caught our eye this week. A piece in The New Yorker looks at life after ISIS, drawing particularly on the experience of some former foreign fighters in Europe; and War on the Rocks asks which devil we need to dance with in order to deal effectively with ISIL.

And what is it about ISIL and Twitter? Beyond the erudite think tank contributions to our understanding of ISIL’s social media strategy, there’s a different, lighter side to the various online efforts to counter the group: first, the conversation between a BuzzFeed journo and an Australian official running the @Fight_DAESH Twitter account; second, a run-down on ISIS-chan, the kawaii anime character waging a meme-and-melon war on ISIL; and finally, @ISIS_karoke, which attaches well-known song lyrics to photos of jihadists. Of course, any effort to counter the potent #catsofjihad hashtag should be commended.

Podcast

With China’s weakening economy bringing more bad news for financial markets across the world this, Colm Quinn and Matt Goodman discuss China’s role in the global economy and its relationship with the US.

Videos

Brandon Valeriano, author of the new book Cyber War versus Cyber Realities, recently skyped-in to Robert Farley’s Foreign Entanglements program over at BloggingHeads.tv. The pair discussed deterrence, resiliency, restraint and the psychology of overhyped cyber fears.

Last weekend marked the 10th anniversary since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Vox speaks to some survivors about their experience, and the ABC has a striking set of now-and-then photographs.

20 years ago tomorrow, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton gave her famously forceful ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights’ speech in China, against the advice of some in the White House and many in Beijing. Watch it here.

Finally, Donald Trump on ‘China’ (h/t Daniel).

Events

Canberra: What’s there to learn from Australia’s efforts to support peace through the Pacific Islands? Head to the ANU’s College of Asia and The Pacific to find out, as Associate Professor Bob Breen examines our interventions between 1980 and 2006.                       

Melbourne: This Tuesday, the University of Melbourne will host Sir David King, the UK Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change, to discuss a recent report out of Cambridge which recommended climate risks be assessed in the same way as risks to national security, public health or financial stability. See here to access the report, and here to register for the event.

Sydney: The NSW branch of the Australian Institute of International Affairs will soon host Carlyle A. Thayer for a discussion on the implications of China’s land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea. Mark your calendars for 15 September.