Tag Archive for: China

ASPI suggests

Robot wars!Could future wars be fought between robots? CNAS’ Paul Scharre has a new report that examines how swarms of ‘cooperative, autonomous, robotic systems have the potential to bring greater mass, intelligence, coordination, and speed to the battlefield.’ Part II of his Robotics on the Battlefield report sees Scharre delve into each of those attributes as well as swarm C2 models and countermeasures. For more on unmanned systems, Scharre and Daniel Burg look at how they can save costs over at War On The Rocks.

We haven’t heard much in world news about Myanmar lately … CSIS has compiled the observations of a delegation that travelled to Myanmar to assess health and development, political reform and governance, and conflict resolution with the country’s minority groups. The resultant report concludes that active US engagement is critical to supporting further transition. Meanwhile, New Mandala features a two-part series by Josh Wood on Myanmar’s Special Economic Zones.

Also from New Mandala, a round-up of their blog posts on Indonesia’s newly inaugurated President Joko Widodo as well as the performance of Yudhoyono’s administration, the state of Indonesia’s democracy, economic challenges and political reform. Read more

Gough’s remaking of foreign policy

Gough Whitlam 1973Gough Whitlam helped Australia think about finding its security in Asia, not to seek security from Asia.

Not least of Whitlam’s achievements was to make Australia colour-blind, in both word and deed. Harold Holt’s government, in 1966, started a quiet—almost covert—dismantling of the White Australia policy with camouflage language about ‘flexibility’. Whitlam’s government used trumpets and drums to kill the White Australia policy as loudly as possible. To the enduring chagrin of Liberals, Labor has claimed the policy honours, based on Whitlam’s characteristically emphatic and emotionally-charged embrace of non-discriminatory immigration.

As the Vietnam War edged to its bloody end, Whitlam’s thinking didn’t retreat from the region along with Australia’s troops. He wrote in his memoirs that ‘forward defence’ was based on the ‘xenophobic belief that Australia was best defended from Asia’. That ‘defended from Asia’ line reflected several layers of Oz nightmare. Read more

ASPI suggests

Parade

We’re kicking off today with an interesting question: can diplomats be interdicted as part of new screening measures to detect Ebola? This is just one issue of many raised by Lawfare blog’s Paul Rosenzweig on the law and policy of Ebola interdiction.

Kobane, a Kurdish town on Syria’s northern border, is under attack by Islamic State militants. Although airstrikes alone are unlikely to save the city, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has stated ‘It’s not realistic to expect that Turkey will lead a ground operation on its own.’ The New Republic examines the Islamic State’s challenge to Turkey’s multiculturalism, as well as the relationship between the ruling Justice and Development Party and the Turkish Kurds.

CNAS’ Alexander Sullivan has a new report on US–Malaysia security cooperation. Read Sullivan’s work for its useful overview of Malaysian interests and defence policy as well as its discussion on how US cooperation can address the country’s priorities in an evolving security environment. Read more

Playing the long game: the demise of China’s ‘strategic ambiguity’ in the South China Sea

U.S. 7th Fleet flagship USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19), right, and the Royal Australian Navy frigate HMAS Ballarat (FF 155) transit the South China Sea

China continues to play a long game in asserting its territorial claims and hegemonic ambitions in the South China Sea (SCS). After its confrontation with Vietnam over the Haiyang Shiyou 981 oil rig in May this year, Beijing has recently announced that it intends to build lighthouses on five islands in the SCS, two of which appear to be in waters also claimed by Vietnam. Indeed, China’s traditional position of ‘strategic ambiguity’ regarding its willingness to compromise on its territorial claims within what it calls the ‘nine-dash line’ looks increasingly obsolete.

Its assertiveness in the SCS needs to be seen as part of a new framework of Chinese foreign policy emerging under President Xi Xinping. China watchers point out that the new leadership appears to have conducted a reassessment of China’s security environment, its relative position and policy responses. Predecessor Hu Jintao’s description of the international environment as a ‘harmonious world’ has disappeared. So too has Deng Xiaoping’s guideline to ‘hide our capabilities and bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile and never claim leadership.’ Instead, the security environment is assessed to be ‘under a new situation’ and according to Xi, China ‘needs to protect and make the best use of the strategic opportunity period to safeguard China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests.’ Read more

Can the status quo last in Asia?

Can the current regional order in Asia last?Well, this has been an interesting exchange and I thank Peter Jennings for launching it, the team on The Strategist for hosting it, and distinguished colleagues for taking the time to contribute. The exchange has helped to clarify the most important underlying points of difference between us about Australia’s interests in the Asian order. And I’m grateful for the chance to offer some brief concluding thoughts.

In fact Nick Bisley put his finger on it: the key difference between my view and many others’ lies in our different ideas about the future of the regional order. I think the strategic status quo in Asia will not last, while others believe it will.

Let me recap why I think the order is going to change—indeed, is already changing. It’s simple. Asia has been stable since 1972 because China has accepted US primacy as the foundation of the Asian order. China did so because it believed it was too weak to contest it effectively. Now China believes it’s strong enough to contest US primacy, and it’s doing so. Read more

Choosing not to choose

Sparta

Hugh White writes ‘I don’t believe that Australia must make a choice between America and China’ and adds another perilous twist to his ‘China-Choice’ journey. Well, you could have fooled me! Hugh and I agree that the future great-power balance in the Asia-Pacific is critical to Australia’s interests, but it’s dismaying that there seems so little else about which we might find ourselves on the same bus. While this debate is enjoyable there’s surely a need at some point to quit the word-play and aim for a common understanding about what the correct policy settings should be for Australia and the great powers. In that spirit, I appreciate Hugh setting out as clearly as he can the differences between his thinking and mine. Here are my thoughts about the limitations of Hugh’s argument.

First, I can’t find an empirical basis for Hugh’s claim that a US–China clash is inevitable unless we accommodate Chinese aspirations for more power and influence. In The China Choice the closest Hugh comes to demonstrating the inevitability of a US–China confrontation is to refer to Thucydides: ‘the growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.’ Hugh says ‘we may wonder at the power of these beliefs and motives but we cannot dismiss them.’ True, but the remarkable thing about ‘inevitability’ is that it’s impervious to fact. The reality of US–China relations is that they are overwhelmingly positive. Hugh’s answer to that is simply to reassert that the logic of great power competition means that sooner or later hostility will break out unless America starts accommodating China. But when will that happen, 2015, 2020? There’s no compelling analogy between Athens–Sparta and Washington–Beijing. Read more

Analysing the China choice

Choices ...

The recent posts by Peter Jennings and Hugh White outline an interesting set of thoughts about Australia’s strategic policy options in a transformational Asia.

If I can summarise the argument bluntly, Peter says we don’t need to choose between the US and China, nor even between Japan and China—explicitly making the case that ‘countries in the Asia Pacific stickily persist in cooperating with each other’, and implicitly making the argument that zero-sum strategic competitions come along a lot less frequently than many people suppose. Just as well too, says Peter, since the choice Hugh outlines is one between ‘subordination or incineration’. Read more

Reader response: Wrong turn on the White road

A choice?

Peter’s sprightly post leaves no room for doubt: he doesn’t buy the argument that he thinks I’m making about how we should respond to China’s rise. I’m glad to hear that because I don’t buy the argument he thinks I’m making either. Like him, I don’t believe that Australia must make a choice between America and China—or at least not the kind of once-and-for-all, all-or-nothing choice he has in mind. On the contrary, like Peter, I think the key aim of Australian policy should be to avoid having to make that kind of choice.

Where we differ, I think, is over what we should do to avoid being forced to make that ‘big choice’ between America and China. Peter would, I expect, agree that whether we can avoid making the big choice depends mainly on the trajectory of the US–China relationship. If they get on okay with one another, we can get on okay with both of them. But the worse they get on, the starker the choice we’ll face between them. And in the event of a conflict we would face a big choice indeed. Read more

Response to ‘The road to Tokyo, via Washington DC’

If I understand Iain Henry correctly, he says that it’s okay for Australia to have a ‘limited’ defence relationship with Japan, which includes buying submarines, but nothing more should be done out of a concern that this would buy us into a conflict with China over the Senkakus. However, a ‘military alliance’ with Japan ‘might be wise’ ‘if America fully commits to using diplomatic and military means to coerce China into accepting an international society governed by rules and laws.’ He isn’t sure though that the US is as committed to the defence of Japan as all that, and on those grounds Australia has to sit on its hands.

It takes a little while to sort through this argument. What I understand is that Canberra and Tokyo have signed an agreement on defence industrial cooperation similar to agreements Japan has with the US and the UK. Submarine cooperation may emerge from that, but it’s some way off. Other defence engagement will continue much along the lines it has for years. The only people talking about alliances—a formal treaty commitment to act in each other’s defence—are those who apparently don’t want them.

Australia’s positive engagement with Japan over the last half century helps to provide some context for understanding why and how it’s possible for the two countries to decide to work more closely on defence. That bilateral relationship isn’t a football to be kicked between Beijing and Washington or amended to take account of every change of tone in Chinese editorials or John Kerry’s commentary. Read more

Wrong turn on the White road

Wrong way?

A journey even more remarkable than the Chinese Ming Dynasty fleets’ discovery of Australia in the 1420s (at least according to Hu Jintao in 2003) is Hugh White’s journey of discovery on the China Choice road. Readers will be familiar with the bleak landscape of this voyage: confronted with a growing China determined to dominate its region, Australia must choose between its biggest market or its American ally. The choice is either to give China breathing space to manifest its destiny or ultimately go to war to stifle Beijing’s ambition. The prospect of war is so terrible that Australia’s only sensible option is not to cooperate with Japan or, most likely, any other partner in the region, because to engage with others is to encroach on Chinese breathing space. And that will take us to war.

The latest staging post on the China Choice road, is an article in the Fairfax broadsheets lamenting Tony Abbott’s commitment to closer defence and economic cooperation with Japan. This is a bad thing, Hugh argues, because Japan’s interest is to gather around it countries that will fight alongside it against China. In the White world of international security, where countries behave like the planets set on their immutable orbits, there’s no other outcome than that China and Japan will go to war over rocks in the sea while the US, Australia and any other country silly enough to limit China’s breathing space will be drawn into the conflict. So obvious is this desolate outcome, Hugh concludes, that either Tony Abbott just doesn’t understand the celestial movements of countries in White’s world, or:

A second possibility is that Mr Abbott is just pretending not to understand. He does understand what is going on in Asia, and has decided that, as regional strategic rivalries escalate, Australia’s best move is to spur them on—not just by strengthening our alliance with America, but by becoming Japan’s ally against China.

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