Ms Park Geun-hye, a conservative leader, was elected as South Korea’s new president in a general election last month and is due to take office in a few days’ time. And, while Northeast Asia may seem outside Australia’s field of direct security focus, South Korea is nevertheless going to be an important partner for Australia, as flagged in the Asian Century White Paper and the newly released National Security Strategy. Park has been known in the past for a tough stance on North Korea, having demanded a formal apology from the North for former acts of aggression and once rejected the idea of holding talks with the North ‘just for the sake of having a meeting’. While she won by a narrow margin of just 3.5%, the win signalled that perhaps the majority of South Koreans would prefer a harder-line security and defence policy to manage the North Korean threat and address rising tensions with Japan. There’s no doubt that Park has her work cut out for her with those issues while guiding South Korea through a potentially turbulent period as China and the United States increasingly vie for influence in North Asia and beyond.

Some analysts believe that Park will try to walk a middle ground between the hostile and conciliatory approaches towards North Korea of former governments, and will attempt to blend elements of both. So far, Park has opened dialogue with the North and agreed to continue providing food and medical aid. But she’s also said that North Korea’s nuclear threats ‘will not be tolerated’. So, she’s tougher than Moon who lost the race for the Presidency, but she’s not so tough that she won’t continue dialogue and aid. We’re yet to see whether Park will be effective in reigning in Northern aggression—in response to recent tightening of existing sanctions by the UNSC, the North has threatened to conduct further missile tests as well as a third nuclear weapon test. How Park reacts to a third nuclear test will be a test of her character and her policy. Read more

Australia is right to use its seat on the UN Security Council to push for a tough response to North Korea’s most recent act of military provocation. Pyongyang’s successful launch of the Unha-3 rocket on 12 December 2012 has profound implications for peace and stability in our region, creating exactly the kind of high level threat that the Security Council was set up to address. Yet, in the month since the launch, the body’s only action has been to issue a statement condemning the launch and promising consultations on the issue. This came eight months after an earlier, failed rocket launch prompted the Security Council to declare that it ‘deplored’ North Korea’s behavior and was determined to ‘take action accordingly in the event of a further launch or nuclear test by that country’. It’s high time that these words were translated into action, and Australia is now well-placed to try to make that happen, starting with this week’s first substantive Security Council meetings of 2013.

Although it requires urgent action, North Korea’s missile program doesn’t pose an immediate or direct threat to Australian territory. A report in The Australian described the December launch as ‘chilling’ because, theoretically, it puts parts of Australia within reach of a North Korean nuclear-armed missile. This is misleading, to say the least, because Pyongyang hasn’t yet developed a re-entry capability or a nuclear warhead that would be small enough to fit on top of a missile, and is likely still years away from such a capability. The December launch was significant on a technological level because it demonstrated a successful separation of a three-stage rocket—an important technological step in the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but certainly not the final step, and arguably not the most significant one in terms of advancing North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. Read more

At the launch of the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, Lowy Institute Executive Director Michael Fullilove made an interesting observation during question time about the level of attention paid in Australia to developments in the United States versus developments in China. Specifically, he commented that the Australian public is told a lot about the US Presidential candidates—right down to the marathon running time of the Republican candidate for Vice President—but, despite the imminent leadership change in Beijing, we hear very little about the incoming Chinese President.

Perhaps part of the reason for our lack of interest in the Chinese leadership change is because it’s more or less pre-ordained, whereas in the US, Romney and Obama are engaged in a dramatic race to the finish, battling it out in televised debates. (Some prefer to imagine what a heated Chinese leadership debate would like). Yet, the Chinese leadership change is a once-in-a-decade event and, considering we know comparatively little about Xi Jinping, what should we know about this man and how his term might impact Australia?

Xi Jinping has been Vice President since 2007 and, at 59 years old, is one of the youngest members of the Communist Party leadership. His father was a revolutionary war hero who went on to become Vice President. However, in 1962 his father had a falling out with Mao and was jailed during the Cultural Revolution. Xi himself was sent to do hard labour in the countryside and ended up living in a cave, sleeping on bricks, and fending off fleas. Xi openly admits to outsiders that the Cultural Revolution was ‘a failure for the nation’—unusual candour from a Chinese leader. Read more

As the final post in this series on grand strategy, I’m going to apply the framework developed earlier to one of the day’s biggest challenges (and opportunities)—China’s emergence on the world stage. Ironically, despite the acres of newsprint devoted to the subject in the rest of the world, the clearest grand strategy is probably the one the Chinese themselves are pursuing, which reflects the core interests of the state (or at least the leadership), most notably political stability and preserving the leading role of the Chinese Communist Party. Achieving those objectives informs the way in which the Chinese state makes use of all instruments of national power, whether in defending territorial integrity, maintaining internal harmony or building linkages with other nations that can deliver the economic growth seen as essential to legitimising the Party’s role. Given this, for the rest of the world, the task becomes identifying the strategy that they should adopt to build the international relationship they would like.

Australia has a complex and diverse relationship with China today, but it has evolved through interactions at many levels of government and business without any overarching plan. If we were to pursue a grand strategy, the broad choices are denial, reform or engagement. A denial grand strategy seems problematic; there are currently no areas of our strategic interests threatened by China for which we would consider using military power (and increasingly no credible way our military power could sway China anyway). The relationship between the two countries has few areas of significant disagreement and is instead mutually beneficial, with both sides having an interest in making it more so. As a middle power, Australia isn’t in a position to choose this kind of strategy, but we could be a small part of a future American-led one which some are trying to convince the US to adopt, largely based on concerns about China’s political system. Read more