Asia–Pacific Archives - Page 9 of 10

Should India be a priority for PM Abbott?

11 September 2013

Last week over on The Interpreter, Danielle Rajendram criticised what looks like the absence of India from PM-elect Tony Abbott’s priorities in Asia. China, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia are at the top of the list of countries for the new PM to visit, and India isn’t. But the PM can’t go everywhere first, and it’s hard to think which of these countries should be bumped further down the list to make room for India.

India is eminently deserving of attention. It’s the world’s 10th largest economy. It’s also a democracy, so we feel more confident that New Delhi wants the sort of world that Canberra and Washington want, and it abuts the world’s most important maritime trade route. It looks like a natural partner for Australia, which is why we have a reasonably strong diplomatic and economic relationship with India.

But we aren’t asking ‘Is India important?’—of course it is. What we’re asking is which countries should be the highest priority for the new Australian PM. That means identifying those countries that can provide us with the greatest opportunities, or where we can seek to mitigate our most serious risks. It’s hard to make the case that India should be in that top bracket. Read more

Singapore’s qualified support for the US rebalance

28 July 2013

Over the last year and a half, it’s been evident that Washington’s defence and security relations with Singapore are a lynchpin of the Southeast Asian component of the US rebalance to the Asia-Pacific. But Singapore’s interest in encouraging the United States to remain closely involved in Asia-Pacific security predates the contemporary US rebalance to the region by several decades. Even in the late 1960s, it was clear to Singapore’s leaders that the city-state should do its best to prevent the regional dominance of any power.

Since then, encouraging and—increasingly—facilitating a continuing strong US regional security role have been key to Singapore’s foreign and defence policies. So it was unsurprising that it should help lend substance to the rebalance by providing what is, in all but name, a base for US Navy Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), the first of which (USS Freedom) arrived at Changi Naval Base this April. Current plans call for four such ships to be forward-deployed in Singapore by 2017. Read more

Beijing and Washington: share first, trust later

11 July 2013

The gathering’s theme was ‘Security and Cooperation in the Asia Pacific Region,’ yet the US–China relationship dominated. The symposium run by the China Institute for International Strategic Studies was free of academic mumbo-jumbo. The sessions, at which Bob Hawke and I were the two Australian participants, seemed under a spell cast by Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping. Even the Southeast Asian voices adopted the Eagle–Dragon focus, though not willingly. Said a Malaysian scholar: ‘Why do you Chinese engage with the US all the time and never with us, especially at the military level? The result is we don’t really know where China is headed.’

The Chinese were frustrated that their goals came across as unclear. But ‘peace and development’ is a vague definition of a rising superpower’s aims. The real goal was implied by a smart Chinese military officer: ‘Security mechanisms in the region have the mark of the Cold War and are exclusive and not conducive to trust’. The message is clear: China wants US security pacts in the Pacific ended or weakened. Kevin Rudd will find Beijing tougher on this matter now than during 2007–2010. Read more

China and the US: hopeful times

19 June 2013

Hope is blooming with the summer flowers in Beijing after the Sunnylands meeting between Presidents Xi and Obama. The hope is that the two leaders—Xi just installed and Obama secure in his second term— will find the personal rapport needed to build a ‘new kind of great power relationship’. We don’t know what that really means yet, but the atmospherics of US China relations are more positive than in years. This will come as news to Australia’s doom-sayers, determined to see Washington and Beijing in a death-spiral that forces on Canberra the terrible choice of alliance or trade. Get thee to Beijing for some warmth and pragmatism.

ASPI has just completed its tenth annual 1.5 track dialogue with the China International Institute for Strategic Studies (CIISS), and we also met with a number of Chinese international security scholars. A decade long investment has generated a frank and friendly exchange. A couple of meetings can never convey the surprising diversity of Chinese opinion on security matters, but the views of China’s elite think-tanks aren’t casual or to be dismissed. Read more

Asian gazing (part V): Australia & Indonesia on boats and jokes

6 June 2013

Tony Abbott’s ‘stop the boats’ promise is going to test Australia’s relationship with Indonesia in several important ways. Not least in this looming test will be the issue of which side has the ability to impose its priorities and define the norms in play.

Electoral timetables also matter. The polls say Abbott is cruising towards a big win in Australia’s September election. These days, though, elections also change things in Indonesia. And next year’s presidential poll in Indonesia is an all change moment as SBY departs the scene.

The uncertain politics of Indonesia mean this is not a great time for Australia to be seeking wink-and-nod deals on issues that Indonesia’s politicians, press and people will see as sailing close to Indonesia’s sovereignty and status. Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, used the Asia Pacific Roundtable in Kuala Lumpur to again push back at any Australian shift to push back boats carrying asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. Read more

Asian gazing (part IV): the logic and consensus of the US pivot

5 June 2013

Washington’s political deadlock and partisan bloodletting has reached the point that a former US diplomat compares the Congressional confirmation hearings for ambassador appointees to a hostage siege in Beirut. The observation is from Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs for Bush’s administration, speaking at the Asia Pacific Roundtable in Kuala Lumpur.

The hostage siege comment was an aside in speech on the US pivot that carried the headline ‘Continuity and Change in US engagement with Asia’. The lack of much bipartisanship on almost any subject in Washington underlines the significance of the fact that there is a solid US consensus on the rebalance. The consensus is for the facts and force of the policy shift, even if there’s some argument about what the policy should be named.

Hill’s speech title goes to one of the key arguments in Asian strategic star gazing at the moment: Is the pivot just more of the same with a bit of re-badging, or does it mark a significant shift in the weight and focus of US grand strategy? As an official from the previous administration, it’s no surprise that Hill saw much continuity in the rebalance. Read more

Asian gazing (part III): pivot to pirouette and prioritised posture

3 June 2013

The United States is doing a pirouette on its pivot. Or, to use preferred Pentagon prose on the pivot, the US is offering more detail about how it is shifting the pieces of military kit involved in the rebalance to Asia. The rule of 60% going to Asia is to be applied beyond the Navy to the Air Force and to US capabilities in the cyber and space domains.

Last year at Shangri-La, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta announced that 60% of the US Navy would be deployed to the Pacific by 2020:

By 2020 the Navy will reposture its forces from today’s roughly 50/50 split between the Pacific and the Atlantic to about a 60/40 split between those oceans. That will include six aircraft carriers in this region, a majority of our cruisers, destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, and submarines.

Japan’s emerging amphibious capability

3 June 2013

What a change in threat perception can do: for years, Japan’s strategic establishment discussed the need to readjust the nation’s military posture to meet a changing external security environment, with nothing much coming from it. Enter China, and Japan has found a new resolve. Beijing is steadily building up its missile arsenal capable of hitting targets in Japan, including US bases. The dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands from Tokyo’s view demonstrates a Chinese ‘probing’ strategy aimed at testing Japanese and American resolve in territorial conflicts. Recent claims by Chinese quasi-officials that even Japan’s Ryukyu Islands historically belonged to the Middle Kingdom have only exacerbated Tokyo’s concerns.

While Japan still heavily relies on US protection, it has started to shift its military posture towards what it calls a ‘Dynamic Defense Force’. One goal is to reorient the Ground Self-Defense Forces (GSDF) armoured forces, still largely based in the country’s north and geared towards resisting a ground invasion, towards operations in the southwest to help defend the islands against Chinese maritime assertiveness. While Japan has debated the development of an amphibious capability for over a decade, there are now signs of progress. Decision-makers in Tokyo have realised that the current GSDF contingent based on Yonaguni Island would be insufficient against a determined Chinese operation. Read more

Asian gazing (part II): the US jabs China

2 June 2013

One of the many complications of the US approach to China is the balance that has to be struck between caress and kick; between the language of engagement and estrangement. The Shangri-La speech by the new US Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel was notable for its specific kicks at China. This was a robust way to help set the scene for a summit between a re-elected US President and a new Chinese President.

Over the dozen years of the Shangri-La dialogue, the first-up speech by the US has become a tradition. Having heard most of those speeches, I’d venture a quick guess that the actual wordage devoted to China was a bit down this year, but the content was even more pointed. Hagel was not taking refuge in the usual US request for greater Chinese transparency. The phrase now used is a call for ‘clarity and predictability.’ Read more

Why does China spook the world?

15 May 2013

Former foreign minister Hayden said, “As Labor came to office in 1972 ‘China’ had become a symbol of a broad judgment of the need for change in many areas”. Stephen FitzGerald recalled of the atmosphere when Whitlam chose him as the first ambassador for Beijing: “I felt part of a movement for social change”. China is often erected as a symbol of a progressive golden age. And occasionally, by Americans, also as a symbol of adverse forces. Such abstraction is a perilous approach to the reality of China.

Japan helped pioneer China as a symbol in the 18th century, portraying it as giving non-Western meaning to Japan’s own existence. Russian thinkers in the same century took China as a symbol of virtue on the grounds that the Western Enlightenment esteemed Confucian China and therefore Russian intellectuals should too.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s and even today, the left in the west has erected China as a symbol for western guilt over imperialism (a stance useful to Beijing). In Japan, the left’s massive (unsuccessful) struggle against the US alliance in 1960 elevated China as the ‘anti-US’, and thus as brother to a Japan smothered by the American embrace. Today, China is popular among American intellectuals as a symbol of the west’s decline. Such declinists embrace the absurd Martin Jacques’ notion (in ‘When China rules the world’) that ‘China’s past is a symbol of the world’s future’. Read more

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