Tag Archive for: Geopolitics

Covid rocks the status quo

‘Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Don’t want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
There’s gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time’

— David Bowie, ‘Changes’, 1971

The pandemic has forced us to turn and face the strange.

Covid-19 changed the way we work and live and how we think about health and travel and economics and government (especially competent government).

In the world of geopolitics, though, 2020 doesn’t rank beside the years when everything changed: 1914, 1939, 1989 and 2001. Nor, in the world of geoeconomics, does it rank with 1930.

Like Bowie’s phrasing of ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes’, the pandemic has been a stuttering time. Much has been shifted and buffeted, and much has been lost.

As always in geopolitics and geoeconomics, some have made relative gains (stress relative) among the changes. This column offers some relative winners, plus a big loser: multilateralism.

One big win for the world is something that failed to happen: we didn’t topple into another great depression (that’s why 2020 doesn’t rank with 1930). Governments and central banks seldom get thanks for what doesn’t happen, but this was a considerable achievement. So, thanks for spending all those billions.

As Australian financial journalist Alan Kohler argues, one reason to be optimistic is that ‘governments everywhere are spending whatever it takes and printing money to pay for it (although the debt is briefly laundered in private ownership before being bought by central banks, to preserve the fiction that central banks aren’t directly funding government spending)’. Macroeconomics has met modern monetary theory and so far the inflation monster hasn’t moved.

East Asia clearly ranks among the relative winners. Here was a further signal moment emphasising the end of the Vasco da Gama era of Western ascendancy over Asia. That era of Western intrusion and command had a neat 500-year span. Start date: July 1497, when da Gama left Portugal to become the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and reach India. End date: midnight, 30 June 1997, when Hong Kong reverted to China.

The pandemic polishes a point that’s now a truism: power is shifting from West to East.

Whether democracy or dictatorship, East Asia had the governments, social capital and technology to confront a threat that confounded Europe and the US. This was about competence, not ideology. Even East Asia’s worst public-health performers controlled the pandemic more effectively than the biggest and wealthiest countries in the West.

As The wake-up call argues, Covid-19 exposed weaknesses in the West:

[T]he East’s success with coronavirus is not a lucky accident: it is the result of a change that has been several decades in the making. Asia had the technology to deal with the disease—especially in its ‘intelligent cities’ that use smart infrastructure to manage urban life better. It had the trust of its citizens.

The West-to-East fact leads to a surprising winner: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. The country where the virus erupted has done okay on the geopolitical scorecard. And the latest forecasts predict China will overtake the US economy in real terms later this decade.

Yet at the start of 2020 it seemed possible that Xi and the party had lost the mandate of heaven. For a brief moment, popular anger at government cover-up and denial vented publicly. Xi was a rattled leader frantically doing damage control. But Xi’s ‘China dream’ didn’t turn to nightmare, and the leader-for-life looks to have a new lease of life.

Xi is a winner despite Covid. Joe Biden is a winner because of Covid. Without the pandemic, Donald Trump would now be in his second term in the White House. The brutal truth is that 400,000 Americans had to die to dispose of an incompetent leader.

The arrival of the 46th president sent me into all the Obama-era books for sightings of Vice President Biden. Most striking was the view from Robert Gates, a Washington insider who served as defence secretary for both Republican and Democrat presidents.

Gates jests that on a rare occasion when he agreed with the vice president, he immediately rethought his position. Here is Gates’s portrait of Biden:

Joe is simply impossible not to like. He’s down to earth, funny, profane, and humorously self-aware of his motormouth. Not too many meetings had occurred in the Situation Room before the president started impatiently cutting Biden off. Joe is a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.

Pray that Joe lifts his batting average, dealing with a global order that’s ‘slowly slipping away from the US’.

Coronavirus has turbocharged nasty trends already bashing against what Australia and others call the ‘rules-based global order’.

In 2016 and 2017, Canberra was loud and insistent—even a bit passionate—about rules and order. The tone now is a resigned nod to reality, as expressed in the 2020 defence strategic update:

Confidence in the rules-based global order is being undermined by disruptions from a widening range of sources. Major power competition has intensified and the prospect of high-intensity conflict in the Indo-Pacific, while still unlikely, is less remote than in the past.

The sage response from Singapore’s Bilahari Kausikan is that we’re returning to ‘a more historically normal period of a divided and contested international order’. As ever, he says, ‘rules-based order’ is a conditional term, dependent on the perspective of the user: ‘Still, no one will discard the term … It is a diplomatic tool rather than a term with an exact or stable meaning. It is useful as a diplomatic tool precisely because it is ambiguous.’

Covid-19, in the words of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has ‘accelerated the atomisation of international society’ as ‘multilateralism melted into competitive unilateralism’. The IISS strategic survey judges:

The pandemic will have enduring effects on geopolitics. International suspicion is rising and trust is in limited supply. Strategic adventurism by some states further unsettles the status quo. The world will enter a period of even greater strategic flux. Diplomatic and security crises will erupt regularly with only intermittent and unsatisfactory efforts to resolve them.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes … turn and face the strange.

Editors’ picks for 2020: ‘Geopolitics in the time of corona’

Originally published 1 April 2020.

In a world filled with think tanks, shrewd minds and an internet, interesting assessments of the geopolitical ramifications of Covid-19 appear almost daily. From Michel Duclos’s observation that the pandemic is ‘a crisis revealing a new world’, to Sven Biscop’s judgement that less will change, and less radically, than pundits now anticipate, to Allan Gyngell’s insistence that ‘the world before coronavirus is not returning’, analysts are clearly not of one mind.

That’s no surprise. On the traditional strategic agenda, pandemics and other health emergencies are generally listed in the same category as climate change and bushfires—that is, they pose security threats rather than change strategic orders.

The classic case usually involves a comparison of World War I with the Spanish flu (1918–1919). The latter likely killed more people—statistics vary widely—but it’s the former that history and international relations students study at school and university. Why? Because strategy and war are about politically motivated violence, not sickness and death. It was the war, and its subsequent settlement at Versailles—not the flu—that set in place the geopolitical order of the 1920s and 1930s.

But perhaps pandemics are geopolitical chameleons, and their effects are masked by the environments in which they arise. That would mean the geopolitical consequences of the Spanish flu were comparatively minimal precisely because the outbreak occurred at a time when a major shaping event—World War I—was drawing to a close, leaving largely status quo powers victorious. Similarly, perhaps the geopolitical consequences of more recent pandemics were diluted by unipolarity, or by the rigid bipolarity of the Cold War.

If that’s true, we could reasonably expect Covid-19 to accelerate changes that were already unfolding in 2019. And that was a time when the world was becoming more strategically competitive, when US global leadership was weakening and the US itself was in relative strategic decline, and when multilateral institutions were—metaphorically speaking—struggling for breath.

Even before Covid-19 came along, Western alliances were roiled by insularity and transactionalism. Even before it came along, China and Russia were both flexing their muscles in their grey-zone activities in the South China Sea and Ukraine.

Those changes were already undoing Australia’s vision of the ideal future, because they pulled against our long-term aspirations: for a world where great-power frictions are managed and contained, where US leadership and strategic clout remain purposeful and strong, and where multilateral institutions effectively dilute the importance of hierarchy in international relations.

If Covid-19 is accelerating those changes—magnifying their intensity and compressing the time taken for them to work through the system—we will emerge from this pandemic to a sharper, more competitive world, where our main ally is less influential and where multilateral institutions are increasingly under the sway of other great powers that believe in hierarchy, and not in equality.

Thus far, revisionist powers haven’t attempted a more serious rebalancing of the international order by exploiting the pandemic’s greater disruption of European and US economies and societies than of their own. Of course, we’re still in the early days of what might prove an 18-month battering of the international order. It’s possible that future opportunities—to create a sudden fait accompli in the Baltic states or Taiwan, for example—may look more tempting.

True, the degree of temptation depends on something we don’t currently know: are China and Russia really more capable of managing this virus than we are? If they aren’t, the opportunities will seem less enticing. But if they are, or perhaps more ominously if they believe they are, we have a problem.

The simple solution, of course, would be to keep Western militaries relatively free of both infection and virus-related commitments, but that’s probably not an option. If we can’t do that, we need to accept that, for the next 18 months or so, Western conventional military forces are not going to be at their peak in their ability to deter international adventurism.

That might mean the West needs to increase its reliance on nuclear deterrence during that window as a deliberate policy choice. Nuclear deterrence adds a strong dose of ‘ugly stability’ to the upper rungs of the existing order. It doesn’t stop change further down the international ladder, unfortunately, because the threats to use nuclear weapons are only really credible in relation to vital interests.

And, by itself, nuclear deterrence can’t prop up an anaemic international order.

Further still down the ladder, countries that depend on the presence of UN peacekeeping forces will be looking at how willing UN member states are to maintain and rotate such forces during a global pandemic. The UN may find it harder than usual to persuade countries to sustain their peacekeeping commitments abroad when their militaries are suddenly burdened with new challenges at home. That’s an issue that Australia confronts given the ADF deployments in South Sudan and the Middle East.

The issue is not just one for contributor nations. It’s possible some nations hosting those missions will push back more vigorously against them, or use Covid-19 as a justification for deciding which countries’ militaries to accept on their territory.

If that’s so, we’ll run into a set of problems centred on issues of state fragility, and there will likely be opportunities for revisionist powers to meddle down on those lower rungs of the ladder too.

Where does that leave us? Putting it briefly, in the short to medium term, we’re likely to be living in a world of greater strategic opportunism. That’s a worry—but a worry essentially about peripheral strategic interests. Over the longer term, Australia faces a larger concern: a strategically more challenging world. A world in which we probably need to power up, to lower our expectations that the US will be there to save us, to find partners where we can, and to reduce our reliance on ‘rules’. That’s not entirely the fault of Covid-19. It was coming anyway—go back and look at 2019.

Coexistence or war in the Indo-Pacific

‘A path can be charted between conflict and capitulation. The future is not solely in the hands of an authoritarian China or an unpredictable, self-centred America. In the end, the Indo-Pacific is both a region and an idea: a metaphor for collective action, self-help combined with mutual help. If things go badly awry, it could be the place of the first general and catastrophic war since 1945. But if its future can be secured, it can flourish as a shared space at the heart of a reconnected world, in ways its early voyagers could have scarcely imagined.’

— Rory Medcalf, Contest for the Indo-Pacific: why China won’t map the future

The Australian National University’s Rory Medcalf ends his impressive book on the Indo-Pacific with an upbeat flourish, yet he paints with dark colours.

‘Pride, blowback and rebalancing’ seem to accompany every empire that tries to rule the Indo-Pacific, he writes, because the super-region is too vast and complex for any country to succeed alone.

An Indo-Pacific that avoids the cataclysm of war, Medcalf argues, will be constructed on ‘multipolarity, solidarity and a confident kind of strategic patience’.

The future need not be defined by the hubris of China’s leader Xi Jinping or the arrogance of US President Donald Trump.

As the previous column noted, the Indo-Pacific is pushback aimed at achieving balance. The joining of two oceans is loaded with ambition and driven by power.

Australia doesn’t get too many masterworks on foreign policy, but we’re in a fertile period, as tough times bring forth books to define the era.

Medcalf’s opus sits beside Allan Gyngell’s Fear of abandonment: Australia in the world since 1942 on the fearfully pragmatic heart of Oz diplomacy, both offering magisterial views that highlight and explain.

Also on this literary peak is Hugh White’s How to defend Australia, calling for a massive remaking of the Australian Defence Force and an equally dramatic rethink of Oz strategy.

White presents Australia with a binary choice, while Medcalf sees a multipolar solution. White thinks without the US we’re on our own. Medcalf says there’s a whole region to partner with.

Three such important books in three years—each distinctly different—respond to an age that ponders US resolve, China’s purpose and the possible paths of the Indo-Pacific.

Medcalf sets out what the newly imagined region must achieve by describing the dangers it faces.

China is joining a race to establish military bases to do dual-use duty with its networks of trade, investment and infrastructure. The bases are ‘less mighty bastions of territorial dominance and more lightly fortified lily pads’, yet the race feeds the fears of a region ‘under the nuclear shadow of mutually assured destruction, and the cyber cloud of mutually assured disruption’.

Medcalf judges that this is not yet a region gripped by the prospect of total war, but neither is it business as usual in the military balance.

The Indo-Pacific, he writes, has become ‘the vast ground zero for nuclear deterrence and risk: it is the epicentre of a “second nuclear age”.’

A plausible security future for the region is ‘a state of permanent coercion’, where the shadow of nuclear war doesn’t discourage conflict but exacerbates it at a lower but still dangerous level.

As Medcalf pronounces: ‘If nuclear weapons become the lone pillar for deterring China in the ocean of ambiguity between peace and Armageddon, then the contest is lost.’

Nukes won’t deliver peace in a shifting system, prey to leadership ego and frightened nations, ‘especially when the new geopolitical motorway is being built faster than drivers can learn the rules of the road’.

The potential crash points proliferate. What’s crucial, and far more contestable, is Medcalf’s contention that in this giant contest, time isn’t automatically on Beijing’s side.

Widen the equation beyond the relative decline of the US and China’s rise.

Judged against the dynamic Indo-Pacific, Medcalf says, there’s good reason to think Chinese power ‘has already peaked’. He offers four factors limiting China’s ability to dominate or map the future.

First, China’s Indo-Pacific and Eurasian ambitions as expressed through the Belt and Road Initiative have a perilous momentum for Beijing. ‘Pushback is happening and more is inevitable’, Medcalf says.

Second, the rest of the Indo-Pacific is becoming wealthier and stronger too: ‘China’s power relative to its region may never be so great again.’

Third, America may be down, but it’s far from out. Rather than having to dominate, the US can work with others to balance China’s power.

And finally, China’s internal problems of debt, demographics, environmental stress, discontent and now the coronavirus crisis could well worsen, compounding the external challenges to China’s ‘imperial over-stretch’.

If fully fledged cooperation with China is unrealistic for the foreseeable future, Medcalf writes, we need to try to discourage confrontation and move the dial towards ‘competitive coexistence’.

Medcalf’s tools for constructing an Indo-Pacific to balance China will be development, deterrence and diplomacy. The qualities underpinning the instruments will be solidarity and resilience.

A US role in the region is vital—for investment, trade, alliances, technology and security—even if the US can’t or won’t lead. As important will be the ambition and action of ‘the middle’.

Medcalf prescribes a greater role for Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea and Australia:

[B]y the 2040s, the combination of Japan, India and Indonesia is projected to outweigh China in GDP, military spending and population. Add just one or two more nations and this would be a hefty coalition, especially given the natural advantages of geography, namely its combined oversight of much of the strategic waterways of the Indo-Pacific.

China will require a fresh, if fraught, regional order. The task will be to stop China ruling or writing all the rules.

The new Indo-Pacific Medcalf describes will be built by pushback against China, the rise and strength of the rest, and American endurance.

The recipe is for what he calls ‘a kind of full-spectrum staring contest’.

The vision is of a multipolar Indo-Pacific where lots of the poles line up together. The great staring contest will have myriad players. Protect the wealth, avoid the war. Lots of staring mediated by lots of sharing.

Hang together or hang separately. Hang tough or go hang.

Is the Middle East entering a post-sectarian phase?

The anti-government protests that have been raging in Iraq and Lebanon for the past several weeks have sent two strong messages.

First, the average citizen is fed up with corrupt ruling elites that engage in all sorts of manoeuvres to remain in power. Despite the existence of multiple parties in both countries, governing has become a rotating-door system with the same leaders alternating in office. Second, sectarian divisions are breaking down as members of all sects join hands in challenging established parties and the zaim (strongmen) who lead them.

Both these messages are welcome in a region known for endemic corruption, authoritarian rulers and sectarian bloodletting. The Lebanese polity has been divided along confessional and sectarian lines since the republic’s establishment in 1943. Government offices and representation in parliament are distributed on the basis of sectarian quotas.

This has given confessional-based parties and militias a strong foothold in Lebanese politics that has so far been impossible to shake. Hezbollah’s decades-long dominance of Shia politics is the primary example of this phenomenon, but Christian and Druze militias also operate on the same principle.

Iraq had been under brutal Baathist rule for decades until the American invasion of 2003 that ousted Saddam Hussein. However, the American occupation, by destroying the state structure in the country, spawned sectarian militias and parties that acted as security providers for their communities. Politics in Iraq became wholly sectarian, with all parties operating on a sectarian basis.

In both Lebanon and Iraq, the protest movements cut across sectarian lines, providing a glimmer of hope that both countries could be moving towards transcending sectarian divides and eroding the control of the traditional confession-based leaderships. The most remarkable example of this turnaround is the challenge being posed to Hezbollah, which is a political and military organisation with disciplined cadres.

Given Hezbollah’s image as the protector of the Shia, its political organisation, its military muscle, and Iran’s financial support for it, it was unimaginable until recently that a challenge to its position could arise from within the Shia community. But the challenge is not limited to Hezbollah. The Sunni Prime Minister Saad Hariri has also lost the confidence of his Sunni constituents and has been forced to resign. The Maronite President Michel Aoun is under pressure from his Christian constituency to do so as well.

There is also an international angle to these developments. If the upheavals in Lebanon and Iraq succeed in overthrowing the traditional sect-based leaderships, the biggest external loser will be Iran. Tehran has invested a great deal in building up Hezbollah in Lebanon and several Shia parties in Iraq. It has also helped create Shia militias in Iraq that have acted in support of Iranian objectives in Iraq and Syria. If Hezbollah loses credibility among its Shia constituents, Iran will lose much of its influence in Lebanon, which it considers essential both for confronting Israel and for providing support to the Assad regime in Syria.

Tehran perceives Iraq to be vital to Iran’s security. Given its bloody experience of the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88, Iran can’t afford to have a less than pliant government in power in Baghdad. What has Tehran very worried is that significant voices, including influential Shia ones, have now been raised demanding that the Iraqi regime emerge from under Iran’s shadow and that the latter’s influence be curbed if not totally removed.

Some of the largest and most virulent demonstrations against the Iraqi government and against Iran have taken place in the Shia-dominated cities and towns in southern Iraq. Shia protestors attacked the Iranian consulate in the holy city of Karbala and tore down the Iranian flag.

Such demonstrations have prompted Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to blame ‘foreign elements’ for inciting the protest movement. Tehran has several instruments it can use to prevent radical change in Iraq, including the Shia militias trained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. However, the deployment of these militias to crush the protest movement could lead to a confrontation between them and the emerging popular forces, thus further discrediting Iran in the eyes of the Iraqi population, including the Shia.

The question that continues to stymie observers is whether the protest movements in Lebanon and Iraq have the organisational discipline and the staying power to bring the current regimes to their knees. So far, the protests have been sustained by spontaneous action not by a tightly knit structure. It is anyone’s guess if such spontaneous action is sustainable in the long run. The experience of Egypt in 2011 doesn’t provide much cause for optimism on this score.

Equally important, it’s unclear whether the protest movements, given their amorphous and spontaneous nature, can provide viable and coherent alternative governing structures to Lebanon and Iraq. There is a possibility that one or both of these countries could descend into anarchy if the current power structures crumble and alternative structures aren’t able to provide governance and security.

Iraq and Lebanon seem to be on the cusp of far-reaching political change, but it’s still too early to predict the final outcome of the struggles for transformation. If the protest movements succeed, they will herald the beginning of a non-sectarian and democratic future for the Arab world. If they fail, the region will continue to be mired in the same dysfunctional mess it has been trapped in for the past several decades.

How China loses friends and alienates people

The Chinese folk saying ‘lift a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet’, or its English equivalent, ‘to shoot oneself in the foot’, perfectly describes the self-defeating inclinations of dictatorship. And nothing exemplifies such inclinations so much as China’s recent effort to bully America’s National Basketball Association.

The row began when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted (and quickly deleted) support for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong: ‘Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.’ The response was swift. China’s government blacklisted the Rockets, ordered the state-run television network to cancel broadcasts of two NBA preseason matches, and instructed Chinese companies to suspend their sponsorships and licensing agreements with the NBA.

As the NBA’s largest international market, China expected the league to scurry back into line, apologise for offending the Chinese Communist Party, and pledge never to repeat the mistake. And, initially, the NBA did just that. ‘We feel greatly disappointed at [Morey’s] inappropriate speech, which is regrettable’, the league said in a statement. ‘We take respecting Chinese history and culture as a serious matter.’

But that attempt to kowtow to China sparked outrage among US lawmakers, who accused the NBA of choosing money over human rights. ‘No one should implement a gag rule on Americans speaking out for freedom’, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted. The NBA threw Morey ‘under the bus’ to protect its market access, Senator Marco Rubio added, calling the move ‘disgusting’.

Under pressure, NBA commissioner Adam Silver then seemed to shift the league’s position. In an interview with a Japanese news outlet, he said, ‘Morey is supported in terms of his ability to exercise his freedom of expression.’

In the end, it was China that had to back down. The authorities allowed a previously scheduled NBA exhibition game to be played in Shanghai—to the cheers of thousands of Chinese fans—and ordered state media to play down the controversy. The lesson should be clear: bullying is a surefire way to lose friends and make enemies in the West.

China may be a lucrative market for the NBA, which has reaped billions of dollars in revenue through broadcasting and merchandise-licensing deals in the country. But the NBA is also a very valuable friend to China. Its relationship with the league is one of the great successes in its cultural and commercial relations with the United States, and a powerful example of Sino-American ‘sports diplomacy’.

Such diplomacy has a storied history in US–China relations. During the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Japan, the US player Glenn Cowan boarded a shuttle bus with the Chinese national team. Rather than avoid him, as the Chinese team had been instructed to do, its top player, Zhuang Zedong, initiated a conversation with the American (through an interpreter). The two players even exchanged gifts—an act of goodwill that garnered significant positive media attention.

Recognising the diplomatic opportunity, Chairman Mao Zedong invited the US team for an all-expenses-paid visit to China. The heavily documented trip—which included tours of important sites, exhibition ping-pong matches, and even an audience with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai—opened the way for the two governments to begin back-channel communications and, eventually, to normalise bilateral relations.

Mao and US President Richard Nixon didn’t squander the opportunity that sports diplomacy presented. But, by picking a fight with the NBA, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government could well have. At a time when Sino-American relations are in freefall, that’s the last thing China needs.

To some extent, China’s response was probably a hubris-induced miscalculation. The government has effortlessly bullied some of the world’s largest and best-known companies into submission after they offended its delicate political sensitivities. (Apple and Marriott International listed Chinese territories, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, as separate countries; Cathay Pacific Airways, Hong Kong’s flagship airline, didn’t prohibit its employees from participating in pro-democracy protests.)

China has used similar tactics to pressure Western governments into bending to its will. For example, it cut off high-level exchanges and curtailed business dealings with France, Germany and the United Kingdom when they hosted the Dalai Lama.

Similarly, after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010, China suspended salmon imports from Norway (though the Norwegian government has no influence over the Nobel committee’s decision). China ended up getting its way in nearly all of these showdowns, with Western actors expressing remorse and seeking to regain China’s favour.

But hubris is only part of the story. Chinese officials have strong incentives to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime, even at the expense of strategic objectives. The resulting modus operandi—called ‘ning zuo wu you’, which loosely translates to ‘rather left than right’—influences most official calculations. The decision to bully the NBA was more than likely taken by a party apparatchik eager to curry favour with CCP superiors.

With intimidation hardwired into the Chinese system, such self-defeating behaviour is likely to continue—and cost the CCP dearly. The more friends China turns into enemies, whether out of hubris or instinct, the easier it will be for the US to assemble a broad coalition to contain its power and ambitions. At that point, the Chinese bully’s favourite tactic for defending its interests will become even less effective.

From the bookshelf: ‘The great delusion: liberal dreams and international realities’

Policymakers are generally uninterested in, if not actively contemptuous of, the scribblings of academics. There have, of course, been some notable exceptions to this general pattern, and even some individuals who managed to be both. Henry Kissinger and the late Zbigniew Brzezinski spring to mind. The other thing Kissinger and Brzezinski had in common was that they were both ‘realists’, the one conceptual paradigm that has exerted a powerful influence on policymakers—whether they know it or not.

John Mearsheimer is probably the most influential realist in the world today. The great delusion demonstrates why: punchy, clearly written prose and a compelling argument. It’s one of the most important contributions to scholarly international relations literature. It’s also one of the most depressing for someone of my philosophical and psychological disposition, not least because its trenchantly argued central thesis looks all-too-plausible.

People familiar with Mearsheimer’s work—and anyone reading this probably is—will recognise some familiar themes in this volume. The international system is ‘anarchical’, always will be, and ‘great powers have little choice but to act according to realist dictates’. Realists have nothing but disdain for the lesser lights of the international order, and not just failed or micro states either: ‘middle powers’ don’t rate even a mention in a world governed by Mearsheimer’s realist principles.

There are, however, two major claims in this book that policymakers in Canberra—and everywhere else for that matter—would do well to chew over, even if their subsequent actions are unlikely to have any material impact on international outcomes.

First, and perhaps most comfortingly for Australia’s strategic elites, the United States really ought to stand up to China, Mearsheimer contends. Indeed, the US ‘will have no choice but to adopt a realist foreign policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia’.

This is a theme first outlined in Mearsheimer’s previous opus, The tragedy of great power politics. Anticipating the much-discussed ‘Thucydides trap’, Mearsheimer argued that not only is conflict with China more or less inevitable, but that all American policymakers can do is to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning by slowing down China’s economic ascent. In the realist universe, rich countries buy more bombs as that’s ultimately what counts in deciding which country calls the literal and metaphorical shots.

It’s doubtful that US President Donald Trump has read any of Mearsheimer’s work but I’d be surprised if at least some of his rapidly changing cast of advisers haven’t. It helps to explain the current zero-sum approach to trade disputes, after all. It may also help to explain the Trump administration’s equally disdainful attitude towards international institutions.

The feeble and ineffective nature of international institutions is another prominent feature of the Mearsheimian world view, and it gets a sustained airing in the current volume. Interestingly, however, Mearsheimer takes this argument one important step further and claims that misconceived liberal idealism (rather than realism) is actually the cause of many of the world’s current problems. On the one hand, this is because liberal idealism is delusional bunkum at best, outright hypocrisy at worst: ‘No liberal state has ever shown serious interest in helping other states to gain economic advantages at its expense just to fight global injustice, and there is little reason to think any ever will.’

On the other hand, the attempt to impose justice, encourage liberal values, democracy and all the rest of it is not just a recipe for ‘doing more harm than good’ (think Iraq), but even more worryingly ‘once unleashed on the world stage, a liberal unipole soon becomes addicted to war.’ While it’s certainly true that the US has been at war for over 90% of the time since its inception, this is not necessarily because it’s been a champion of liberalism.

On the contrary, the US has a history of supporting some fairly loathsome regimes who are decidedly illiberal—the Trump administration’s infatuation with Saudi Arabia being the most indefensible contemporary case in point. But Mearsheimer may be right in thinking that this reflects a fairly hard-nosed calculation of the national interest, even if he is wrong about the construction of more achievable ‘realistic’ foreign policy ambitions as a consequence. For better or worse, the Trump administration has demonstrated a continuing willingness to ‘engage’ with the world, albeit erratically and without any obvious overarching strategy or goal other than ‘America first’.

As Mearsheimer rather mournfully concedes, ‘realism does not inspire a hopeful outlook for the future.’ There will be little disagreement on that score, at least. Realists would argue that it’s their job and responsibility to ‘tell it like it is’ and wrestle with problems their delusional liberal counterparts would rather ignore or pretend they can address. Looking around today’s world, with its catalogue of ineffective institutions, rising authoritarian powers, failing democracies and international flashpoints, one can see his point.

The great crisis that Mearsheimer entirely neglects to mention, though, is the one problem that absolutely necessitates collective action and cooperation on an unimaginable and unprecedented scale.

I refer, of course, to climate change. Realists are probably right about the chances of doing anything about that, too, but they could at least have the intellectual honesty to tell us where we’re all headed if we continue to put ‘realistic’ national interests ahead of all others. Perhaps they should re-read Hobbes; no one does well out of a war of all against all. The great delusion is a book for the ages. If its central thesis is accurate, though, there may not be future ages to appreciate it.

Alliances and the malaise of the West

The geopolitical aspects of David Goodhart’s The road to somewhere have been raised by Paul Dibb. The changes taking place in domestic politics and societal norms in Europe and the US are likely to be far reaching. Dibb hits on some of the key consequences and it’s worth thinking through the implications.

Dibb writes that the domestic upheavals are ‘distorting political priorities in the West from where they should be focused’. That raises the question of whether the distortion can be corrected. It seems doubtful. His focus is on China and Russia, but the unilateralism of US President Donald Trump’s ascendency has been the most disruptive international dimension of the division Dibb describes. It comes as the structure of the international order is undergoing the final phases of the post–Cold War transformation.

In strategic terms, the ‘West’ had concrete meaning only in the presence of an antithetical and existential threat. The strategic connective tissue that was prominent at the height of the Cold War has been visibly dissolving. If the West is to be seen in a series of US-led alliances, and principally in NATO, it is being dismantled by pressures arising from reactions to the neoliberal internationalist globalisation described by Dibb.

The rearrangement of the global condition from a unipolar to a multipolar geopolitical arrangement may be the biggest strategic development after 1991. The number of great powers and their relationships has a major influence on the structure of the international environment. With the emergence of strategic rivals and competitors, and as power relativities change, alliance leadership opens up and alliance cohesion weakens.

As seen with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, alliances cluster tighter and are more manageable in a strong bipolar system. In a strongly hegemonic or unipolar situation such as prevailed immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, alliances are relatively simple and the leadership of the alliance falls naturally to the hegemon. In looser multipolar systems, where shifting balances of power can create opportunities for changing alignments, alliances are potentially less stable.

As neoliberal globalisation wanes before a rising wave of nationalism, nativism and xenophobia, and as the former hegemonic guardian and sponsor of the post–Cold War rules-based international order repudiates its former values and institutions, the world is reverting to a balance-of-power complex, and the issue of the future of alliances is surfacing.

The world will not become anarchic. Trade, investment and financial dealings across borders would wither without agreed governance arrangements and reliable mechanisms for arbitrating disputes. States will cooperate with corporations and business interests to facilitate and regulate shipping, air transport, communications and people movements. Too much of this activity is already deeply interdependent. And it is in states’ national interests. It’s difficult to imagine that, short of major war, states would not seek to shore up their prosperity.

But the multinational global web of trading and security arrangements will probably give way to smaller regional and even bilateral ones. A reasonable projection might be a multipolar world of strong military and economic states—perhaps regional hegemons or dominant centres of influence—seeking relationships and arrangements that guarantee both their trading and security interests against their rivals, competitors and partners. The US is already moving in that direction.

States in this environment would confront an international society that is differentially hierarchical. States with nuclear weapons will hold an important place. But a state possessing nuclear weapons without a large population, and therefore without a large conventional force, and without a high-tech economy would fall short of regional hegemony.

The US, China, the EU and maybe Russia, and perhaps eventually India, would be the brightest lights in this multipolar constellation. Nuclear weapons would, however, make Israel, Pakistan, the UK and North Korea feel more in control of their security, even if that didn’t translate into significant international influence.

The rate at which this new international structure emerges will be affected by the rise of nativism and nationalism domestically and of their corollary, unilateralism, in international affairs. The US has already demonstrated a preference for unilateral action and for confrontation with allies that is breaking down the previously strong alliance relationships. The NATO facade will increasingly front a hollow institution.

On the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and Huawei in 5G networks, the Europeans have found themselves at odds with the US and more aligned with Russia and China. The Europeans are nowhere near as mistrustful of Chinese intentions in the Belt and Road Initiative and are keen to become involved under the right conditions. They are more suspicious of the relationship between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Public ruptures like these would once have been unimaginable among NATO allies.

Beijing eschews formal security alliances and, in the more fluid international environment that’s emerging, the flexibility that provides might be an advantage. Likewise, Moscow’s security alliances amount to the modest Collective Security Treaty Organization, but through an agile and targeted foreign policy, military interventions and arms sales, Russia has become a force in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and a spoiler in South America.

Dibb suggests that in these new circumstances Russia and China will ‘expand their strategic space because the West is mired in domestic political introspection’. A serious weakening of the EU and a lessening of European coherence and cooperation would only accelerate this. Such a prospect is not improbable on current trends.

The phenomenon Dibb describes probably cannot be reversed. The cleavages in the democratic societies created by the recent dominance of the ‘Anywheres’, the globalising internationalists, are real and deep. The reaction of the ‘Somewheres’ is growing.

Australian leaders need to stand back and re-evaluate the suitability of long-held truisms about the US alliance. In the multipolar world, would Australia be better placed if it could find more degrees of freedom?

Policy, Guns and Money: Interns take control

In this episode, we speak to our interns as their time with ASPI comes to an end. Luke Courtois, Mali Walker, Genevieve Feely and Rhys De Wilde speak about their time at ASPI, how their research interests have evolved and the opportunities they’ve explored.

We also speak to ASPI HR manager Fiona Torline to get the low-down on how to apply for an internship, the qualities and passions that make a great candidate, and some tips for people thinking of applying in future. You can view links to the articles mentioned in this week’s episode here.

What are Australia’s strategic objectives?

In March 1950, Australia’s external affairs minister Percy Spender set out the Menzies government’s appreciation of the international situation in a parliamentary speech. The aims of Australian foreign policy, he declared, ‘are essentially the preservation of peace and our way of life’ and its practice is ‘to accomplish its aims in a peaceful manner’.

It was Spender’s prioritisation of peace that lends his words the quality of statesmanship. Spender rightly saw that foreign policy ‘must be principally and continually concerned with the protection of this country from aggression, and with the maintenance of our security and our way of life’.

He was no appeaser, believing ‘the democracies must accept the fact that any policy of appeasement is completely ineffective and even dangerous’. In his previous capacity as minister for the army between 1940 and 1941, he anticipated the Pacific War and urged the return of Australian troops from the Middle East. When Menzies withdrew his United Australia Party from the bipartisan Advisory War Council in 1944, Spender refused to resign—an action that led to his expulsion from the party.

At the same time, he was no militarist. While he recognised pragmatically that foreign policy must be ‘closely integrated with that of defence’, he also acknowledged that there were two instruments of foreign policy—‘one primarily economic, the other primarily military’. The ‘military strength of a nation’, he said, ‘may largely condition the means employed by foreign policy in seeking to achieve its purpose’. That is, small powers must rely less on military force. And if or when foreign policy proves ineffective in protecting against aggression, ‘the departments of war must take over’.

Australian policymakers of the time would have assessed the international situation as being at least as perilous as today’s. In the six months leading up to Spender’s speech, the USSR had tested a nuclear device and Mao Zedong had declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The fault lines of the Cold War were hardening in Europe and gelling in Asia. Across the globe, and particularly in Southeast Asia, the fragile post-colonial states were engaged in a struggle for independence.

Far from a sympathiser with communism, Spender laid the blame for prevailing global tensions unambiguously at the feet of Moscow’s expansionist and hostile foreign policy. He spoke of the ‘false ideological attraction which communism excites’ and foresaw that the emergence of communist China ‘fundamentally changed the whole picture in Asia’.

To Spender’s mind, however, differences in political systems were not a sufficient cause for war. He said, ‘I hope that I have not drawn too depressing a picture of the possible consequences of the Communist victory in China.’ Yet he held that ‘there is no logical reason why democracy and communism, as distinct from Communist imperialism, should not be able to live together in the world’.

It was Spender’s wisdom that diplomacy and economic cooperation should precede military action, and that maintaining peace was more crucial to the security of the nation and its people than winning costly and destructive wars. Spender was no Pollyanna. The Colombo Plan was diplomacy and economic policy in the service of national security, not altruism, and his enthusiasm for the ANZUS treaty was grounded in a realistic understanding of power.

That he placed the preservation of peace at the top of Australia’s strategic objectives was understandable. He was of the generation that had experienced the slaughter of World War I and the horror and devastation of World War II. It seemed sensible and obvious to him that aggression tied to expansionist policies was the real danger to Australia.

However, strategic policy formulation should always be informed primarily by an awareness of how wars start. Nothing else has the same potential to adversely affect the security of a nation. War, not skirmishes or interventions, is a discontinuity that potentially will have a transformative, even catastrophic, impact, both externally and domestically.

And while the minutia of past wars might fascinate historians, strategic policymakers might usefully look to broad shifts in global politics and power relativities, the emergence of new political ideologies, and upheavals in relationships or shifts in international norms. For Spender, these would be arguments for greater energy, innovation and purpose in foreign economic policy and diplomacy, accompanied by prudent and proportionate, but not provocative, military preparations.

The aftermath of each of the 20th century’s world wars was marked not by increased security, but by growing instability, crises and confrontation. Moreover, the former way of life, norms and values of many states disappeared post-war and their geopolitical situations degraded.

The political and economic upheaval of World War I led to the collapse of the imperial states in Europe and the emergence of bolshevism and dictatorships. After 1945, Europe was divided, China became communist, former colonial possessions became states, and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the US transformed global politics. The next major war cannot be expected to produce less unpredictable or dangerous disruptions.

As Spender declared, ‘The experience of two world wars has shown that authority which depends on force alone rests upon hollow foundations if it is not sustained by honesty of purpose, and a recognition of the value of individual human beings.’ But he knew that as a last resort a nation may have to fall back on war. He also knew that only in peace and not in war can a nation’s way of life be guaranteed. He knew that pursuing peace pragmatically and assiduously was the best form of security.

Confronted by the strategic circumstances prevailing today in the Asia–Pacific region and further afield, Spender’s response would not be to prioritise the military posturing that could bring about a ruinous war. He would have reiterated that the greatest effort should be put into avoiding a war that would result in the deaths of large numbers of Australians and bring economic ruin. There would be no Australian ‘way of life’ to preserve after that.

A contested Asia: What comes after US strategic predominance? (Part 2)

The concept of a balance of power has lost its appeal to many scholars and practitioners of international relations. But in my view it still matters. I take comfort that the late Lee Kwan Yew, a shrewd observer of our strategic environment, understood both the importance of a balance in Asia and the need to view it as more than just a military balance. Lee observed: ‘In the old concept, balance of power meant largely military power. In today’s terms, it is a combination of economic and military, and I think the economic outweighs the military.’

Already such a de facto balance is in the making through the shared desire of the US, India, Japan and others to balance China. Each has its own geopolitical and historical reasons, of which the non-democratic character of China is by no means the primary driver. This is not a classic balance-of-power grouping. It’s an organic, not an orchestrated arrangement.

Where Korea eventually lines up is an open question. The ROK is an ally of the US. But what would be the disposition of a united Korea? Would it lean towards China or the US? Or, more likely, would it seek an independent path with or without nuclear weapons? A united Korea is likely to be a democracy, which suggests it will at least lean towards balancing China. But no one knows which options will eventuate, which is one reason China doesn’t want to push the North Korean regime to the point of collapse.

China’s not comfortable with a nuclear-armed North Korea. But it wants even less to lose a buffer state or to see a collapsed regime on its doorstep. It probably judges that North Korea can be deterred from first use of nuclear weapons. After all, the driver of its nuclear program is the preservation of its dynastic regime and nothing would more clearly guarantee its end than a nuclear first strike at its neighbours or the US.

North Korea may be peculiar but it is not irrational. A regime preoccupied with survival is capable of being deterred.

ASEAN may remain on the sidelines of the strategic balance, but more and more of its members are being pulled into China’s orbit: not with enthusiasm or conviction but because they see that the economic cost of opposing China’s agenda is too high. Even Vietnam, which has a long and fraught history with China, will be constrained in how far it can support balancing China.

So the long-held hope that a non-aligned ASEAN would still lean towards the US and the West is looking less likely. The US is doing little to change this and its TPP withdrawal makes the problem worse. Japan and India understand the stakes but their efforts to balance Chinese influence may not be enough.

Indonesia is ASEAN’s strategic pacesetter. Its current leadership sees the world through an economic prism that favours China more than the US. This may not be permanent but nor is it likely to change soon. So where to position Indonesia in the evolving strategic balance is an open question. That has large consequences for Australia because Southeast Asia is at the epicentre of our strategic interests.

The two Asian powers committed to balancing China are Japan and India. Geography and history pull them to the other side of the China balance, which creates common strategic ground both are quickly building on.

Japan is no longer willing to contract out its strategic positioning to the US. It’s determined to use its economic heft to leverage its strategic interests and more willing to push out the boundaries of its constitutional limits on the projection of power.

India’s starting point is different to Japan’s, but both end up with similar conclusions about the perils of Chinese strategic predominance. Autonomy is the fundamental axis around which India’s strategic policy turns. It’s not about to become an ally of the US or anyone else. But India does see much more space to expand its strategic relationships with the West while hanging onto its freedom of manoeuvre.

The India–China relationship will have elements of both economic and strategic competition, not unlike the way in which those two elements thread their way through China’s relationships with the US and Japan.

India will want to maximise its economic relationship with China, but it will oppose any move by China to become the Indo-Pacific’s predominant power. And it will want to ensure that China’s expanding interest in the Indian Ocean is not given free rein.

Australia, Japan and India approach China from both different and common perspectives. We share an unease at the prospect of Chinese predominance. But the dynamics of our relationships with China are different. Australia and Japan are allies of the US. Unlike Japan and India, China is by far our largest trading partner, and we have a large Chinese diaspora. Australia has no territorial dispute with China and nor have we ever gone to war with China, unless you count the participation of Australians in putting down the Boxer Rebellion.

The key player in the organic balancing of China is the US, without which there can be no effective balance. The Trump presidency has complicated the situation but doesn’t fundamentally change it. Just as Australians draw a mature distinction between the persona of Trump and the alliance with the US, so also are US alliances in Asia likely to outlive the dysfunction of the Trump administration. I say ‘likely’ because no one can be certain about anything relating to President Trump’s policy positions. We can only hope that the strength of interests which underpin the US commitment to the region outlives the president’s character weaknesses.

It’s important that we present this emerging balance of power as a means of ensuring a measure of stability at a time of strategic churn. China will probably see it as a form of containment which it is not and should never become.

Australia can contribute by strengthening its strategic engagement with the Asian democracies, with priority given to Japan, India and Indonesia. We should do this bilaterally and through stronger trilateral arrangements such as Australia–US–Japan; Australia–Japan–India; Australia–Indonesia–Japan; and Australia–US–Indonesia.

Australia should also persevere with the hard slog of building inclusive regional institutions, of which the East Asia Summit is the most important. This signals that while we have close strategic relations with the democracies, we also want to work with China wherever we can to build institutions which can buttress strategic stability. And that these institutions should promote fundamental principles such as respect for sovereignty, the peaceful resolution of disputes and abiding by international law, the foundation stones on which the Indo-Pacific’s strategic culture should rest.

China tends to see some of these principles as aimed at it, but they also serve its long-term interests. China has benefited from the rule of trade law through the WTO. It has benefited from the UN charter through its permanent seat on the Security Council. China should see international law and international norms as an important part of the international system in which it has every right to seek greater influence to match its economic and strategic weight.

Our strategic environment is more uncertain than at any time since the start of the Cold War. We cannot be certain of either the strategic or economic trajectory of our region and beyond.

Navigating this terrain will require a clear-eyed view of our national interests, a forensic revisiting of the assumptions framing our foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, a recognition that the US strategic predominance is drawing to a close, and the imagination and diplomatic skills and resources to help shape a new balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

We should not be daunted by these challenges because we bring to them many assets as a nation and a community.

History and our geography have instilled in Australia a global perspective. Ours is a society shaped by the values and institutions of the West, intimately connected to Asia, with economic interests across all regions and a community united in the principles of a multicultural liberal democracy.

Australia does not have the power to bully or buy its way. We have to deal with the world as it is. It’s not in our interest to see a Manichean world split between the US and China. But neither can we ignore the fact that, for all the benefits it brings to Australia, the economic rise of China also shifts the strategic currents.

We don’t have to choose between the US and China, at least not unless one insists that we must. But we do need a sophisticated strategy for dealing honestly with the strategic uncertainties we face. At its heart must be a stable balance in our region which protects our interests and our values.