If Australian politicians are certain about one thing regarding the future, it’s that ‘we do not have to choose’ between the US and China. This panglossian optimism is easily mocked, though a small industry of scholars has devoted itself to deciphering whether Australia has already chosen, or whether a series of ‘mini-China choices’ rather than one big decision is a better way to view it.

Yet, as Voltaire points out in his novel Candide, where he mocks poor Professor Pangloss—who endlessly repeats ‘this is the best of all possible worlds’ while everything around him burns and collapses—debates about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic don’t do us much good. Like the good Enlightenment figure he was, he urged readers to instead ‘cultivate one’s garden’ and focus on practical and everyday steps.

A similar caution could be offered to the current regional security debate. Not only is it largely pointless to debate the distant future of our choices, but the debate itself is probably harmful. The very terms of the ‘China choice’ suggest that countries Australia’s size can only respond. Or that they are simply acting as the big states force them to act. For many, this is now all the explanation needed to explain Australian foreign policy.

The harm of this explanation taking root around our region or at home can hardly be overstated. It’s time therefore to move beyond the White papers—the Hugh White papers.

Rather than Australian officials merely refuting (the strawman version of) Professor White’s work, we need to hear our policymakers offer clear and practical guidance on how Australia is managing the challenge of our changing regional order.

In an otherwise eloquent speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Malcolm Turnbull clunkily said:

some commentators argue that Australia has to choose between Beijing and Washington. It is an utterly false choice … Nothing constrains us in our dealings with the other, neither constrains us in our dealings with the other—our foreign policy is determined in Australia’s national interest and Australia’s alone.

Yet this is a formless statement. It doesn’t give any evidence that this is occurring. It can also be easily misinterpreted. Ely Ratner, a well-informed scholar of Asian security issues at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted at the time that Turnbull’s line sounded like ‘Australia first’.

Rather than saying that we don’t have to choose, Australia’s leaders should be saying what they’re doing.

They should be providing an explanation that makes clear why we would support the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and yet worry about artificial islands in the South China Sea, and why we would protect our alliance with the US, and yet refuse to conduct naval freedom of navigation operations.

Without an explanation, our recent behaviour could look incoherent. Indeed, many assume it is, believing that Australia chases dollars when engaging China and seeks sanctuary when engaging the US.

As I argued in a submission to the foreign policy white paper (PDF), building a narrative for how we have acted and will act is a task ideally suited to that forthcoming document. Having a story that’s easily understood and persuasive, and that explains how and when the Australian government acts internationally, will go a long way towards improving both our international diplomatic impact and domestic support for the costs and challenges of active engagement with the world.

In the 1980s, we had the story of ‘engagement’ with Asia. Though Australian officials and businesses had been engaging with the region for several decades, this idea achieved several things. It provided transparency that allowed onlookers to understand our behaviour. It legitimated and justified that behaviour in the face of critics, and it helped the various arms of government coordinate their efforts. For a country of our size, every bit helps.

The idea of engagement was later trotted out in various forms by the governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, but it no longer worked. Our major trading partners are almost all in Asia. We’re a member of the proliferation of regional governance forums. And there are growing business, people, social and cultural links.

I wish I could end this blog post with a magic formula that could be as intuitively appealing and useful as a new narrative for our foreign policy. But I can at least offer what I think are the questions we need to have answers to in order to find a useful story:

• What does Australia want Asia to look like in 2030?
• What role will Australia play to help the region achieve that vision?
• What are the right pathways, tools, partners and other mechanisms to achieve that vision?
• How important is it to Australia that this ambition is achieved?

If we can answer those questions, we can have a sense of the purpose of our nation’s foreign policy. Saying you want to achieve your national interests isn’t being purposeful. It’s just a generic claim to want good things over bad things. Instead, we need a specific and public purpose, set out in terms of what we want to achieve. After several years of simply dismissing the challenge posed by Hugh White’s choice thesis, it’s time to provide an explanation of our own.

It’s good to see that the ‘Option J’ paper Ben Schreer and I wrote is generating responses. Hugh White and Sam Bateman raise concerns about a closer relationship with Japan: both of them argue that it’s possible to get too close to Japan in a security sense, leading to unwanted outcomes, and that a submarine deal would do that. Both of them think there’s more in a sub deal for Japan than for Australia. And both argue—Sam explicitly and Hugh implicitly—that we should be less active in trying to maintain a liberal democratic order in the Asia–Pacific.

We’ll concede one point: of course it’s possible for two countries to get too closely entangled, where one is inexorably drawn into the other’s bad judgement and misadventure. (WW1 comes to mind.) But it’s also possible to do too little, and the notion of an ‘inverted U curve’, is a useful tool for this discussion. Basically, it’s a model of phenomena in which both small and large values of an input parameter produces low outputs, but intermediate inputs produce a larger effect. Think about a therapeutic drug: at low doses it won’t have much effect at all but at high doses it’ll do more harm than good, or even be fatal. In between there’s a dosage that produces the best clinical outcomes. Here’s a schematic:

Inverted U curves also appear in economic theory and other applications—Malcolm Gladwell sees them at work in school class sizes.

Applied to the Australia–Japan relationship, the ‘low dose’ part of the curve corresponds to the two countries doing little or nothing together in security terms, so missing out on benefits to be had by combining resources to meet common security threats. The ‘high dose’ regime is what Sam and Hugh worry about—getting in so deep that we’d be forced to follow when Japan pursues its interests even if the outcomes for us are worse. By ‘worse’, they mean getting embroiled in Sino-Japanese competition to our detriment, in a world where China is economically and militarily more powerful than today and the US less so.

As we said in our paper, we don’t buy that. We argue that we’re still on the upswing of the curve, and that a deeper security relationship will take us to a better, not worse, place. (A to B in the figure below.) That conclusion’s based on two key judgements. First, that China’s leverage over Australia is much weaker than is commonly supposed. Second, that it’s too early to give up on the order that has provided security and prosperity for the entire region—China included. We thoroughly explain the point about Chinese leverage in the paper.

But even if those judgments are wrong—i.e. if China does hold significant coercive power over Australia and the liberal democratic order much valued by Australia and Japan is doomed by the rise of China—we’re still not convinced that throwing up our hands and letting concerns about Chinese reactions effectively dictate Australia’s security policy is the right approach. That’s what we think the practical effect of Sam’s prescribed ‘even-handed neutrality’ would be—even if Australia could affect neutrality given its long and dearly held alliance with the US.

Simply put, if we let China dictate the regional order, we’ll get what China wants, and it’s unlikely to be what we want. Even with American power in relative decline it’s still formidable, especially when reinforced by like-minded allies. The downside risk is an escalation of tension, perhaps to the point of war. That’s a risk that certainly has to be taken into account, and the outcome could be dire, though a mitigating factor is that American military power is backed up by nuclear weapons, which should put a brake on most adventurism.

The democratic states mightn’t call all the shots any more (and shouldn’t) but we’d certainly still have a vote. The resulting compromise is more likely to be acceptable if we negotiate with resolve from a position of solidarity. The future will probably have features we’d prefer not to have, but we should try to minimise those. Giving up now and eschewing partners like Japan could take us down into the left-hand part of the curve to a bad outcome.

Finally, Hugh and Sam argue that there’s more in Option J for Japan than Australia. That’s probably true, because Japan’s circumstances are more fraught than ours. But that actually strengthens our argument, because it means that there’s little incentive for Japan to withdraw support for Australia’s subs. We’re never going to be on the other side of a Sino-Japan conflict—at worst we’ll be bystanders—but we’ll always be potential partners, so why would Japan choose to undercut us? Like China, but for different reasons, Japan has little leverage over Australia.

This energetic debate began with Peter Jennings taking issue with Hugh White’s gloomy prognostications about where Australia’s enthusiasm for closer strategic cooperation with Japan might lead. For Peter, the basic structure of the current order remains the best way of stabilising the region now and it’s durable over the longer run because China’s interests are served by those arrangements. In its simplest form, the central question in this debate is whether the regional status quo is sustainable over the medium-to-longer term. Hugh thinks not, almost everyone else seems to think it is—albeit with subtle differences of emphasis.

Hugh thinks China’s scale, ambition and capacity can’t be incorporated in the current order; China requires accommodation in a new setting. Somewhat surprisingly, Rod Lyon makes a more normative argument: the liberal qualities of the current order are crucial and shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of power politics. Andrew Phillips focuses on China’s lack of options. As he puts it, China’s capacity to transform, undermine or leave the current order is much more limited than many imagine. Read more