Asia posturing. At least the Americans discern no contradiction in Australian strategic policy, but the government continues to contort its messaging.

At least the Americans call it as it is.

Over the past few weeks, Washington’s language has again revealed the raw power equation in US-Australia relations. And it has overwritten the government’s consistently careful script about wanting to deal with Southeast Asia free of the prism of great power rivalry.

Remember this the next time you hear the resident American stooge in Australia say that Canberra is more important to the US than ever. They’re right; but only because successive recent Australian Governments have readily and steadily agreed to a greater US military presence in the country with neither public nor parliamentary debate.

It began with US congressman Michael McCaul’s visit to Australia in mid-August. McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, put the capstone on just what the rotations of marines and the network of American airfields and facilities across northern and Western Australia really mean.

He said Australia had become the ‘‘central base of operations’’ in the region for the US military’s plan to ‘‘counter the [China] threat’’. Just don’t expect to hear an Australian prime minister or minister say it.

Then, at a Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga, US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell spoke as if he were an imperial proconsul to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Albanese, lacking again the gravitas of the office he holds, boasted to his ‘‘mate’’ of the regional policing agreement he had just steered to conclusion. He even asked Campbell to foot half the bill. What he got instead was American power. ‘‘We have given you the lane’’ in the Pacific, Campbell said, as if a puppeteer coordinating Albanese at the end of a string, so ‘‘take the lane’’.

These statements carried more than a faint echo of how previous US officials have talked about Australia. As Henry Kissinger remarked privately to Nixon in early 1972 after truculent criticism of Washington’s Vietnam policies, the ‘‘Australians will need us one hell of a lot more than we need them’’ at war’s end.

Or when John F. Kennedy’s adviser Bob Komer asked pointedly a decade before, ‘‘how long will Australia’s resentment last’’? That was after Washington intervened in the dispute between Indonesia and the Dutch over West New Guinea, telling Canberra that support for Indonesian nationalism took precedence over bolstering Indonesian Communists.

The McCaul and Campbell comments lent almost the perfect, if ironic, backdrop, to Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s speech at last week’s Australian Financial Review Asia Summit.

Because in a room of Asian policymakers, business figures and policy wonks, Wong commenced her remarks saying that Australia above all had to ‘‘prioritise its relationship with the United States’’.

Yet Wong chafes at an Australian debate she says is obsessed by the US/China binary rather than what happens in the region outside that framework. But this is the very binary that defines her ‘‘priority’’, manifest by AUKUS and creeping US basing.

Wong is also exasperated that Australian business has not yet taken up in sufficient numbers the urging of the Moore report to plant a firmer commercial tread in Southeast Asia.

Exasperated that as a result, Australia looks like it will be left behind, she pointed out that Canada quadrupled, and the US and China doubled, their investment into the region between 2016 and 2020. As former DFAT secretary Peter Varghese laments, ‘‘governments have done a reasonable job of Asian engagement but business and the broader community have lost focus since the Asian Century White Paper of 2013’’.

Varghese worries too about the trend towards reductionist policy thinking, but his laser beam is more trained on what the outcomes might be, not what is being talked about. He warns of the ‘‘real risks of overreach in securitising economic policy and forcing trade and investment into a zero-sum framework which hugs the contours of a bipolar world’’. Australia ‘‘needs to find a way’’, he says, ‘‘to reinvigorate regional institutions notwithstanding the strategic fault line in the region’’.

Wong’s frustration stems partly from the lack of a coherent framework for assessing the world. One moment it is a region ‘‘where no one country dominates’’, the next she recalls former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s positioning of America as the ‘‘indispensable nation’’. Regional capitals are long used to the rote articulation of ‘‘ASEAN centrality’’ in Australian speeches being drowned out by more boisterous language on the Quad, AUKUS and NATO’s Indo-Pacific imaginary.

Former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo has noted this very contradiction at the heart of Australian strategy.

Current Australian foreign policy, he notes, says the region should not be ‘‘defined by great power rivalry’’, a noble goal. But he says, ‘‘Our defence policy presumes not only that great power rivalry is something we need to engage with, but we’ve picked a side in great power rivalry and we’re quietly, incrementally and arguably, in a way that’s not fully transparent – putting in place essential building blocks of what US congressman McCaul said when he visited here’’.

The importance of what Pezzullo is saying is obvious. Here is the first China hawk to call out without equivocation the choice Australia has made and stress the consequences that come with it.

The US military aircraft are ‘‘not going to come here with anything other than their assigned war load, the load that they would take into battle’’, Pezzullo notes. It’s also that Australia is now even more of a target for the Chinese than at any point since the establishment of the US intelligence facility at North West Cape in 1963.

Shared from the Financial Review eEdition, September 09, 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/forked-tongue-foreign-policy/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

The US and Chinese navies are taking part in joint military exercises led by the Brazilian Armed Forces for the first time, the South China Morning Post cited Brazil’s navy as saying. 

“Operation Formosa” is one of Latin America’s largest military exercises; it has been held since 1988 near the city of Formosa, Brazil. The monicker is unrelated to the historical name for Taiwan.

About 3,000 military personnel from countries including Argentina, France, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Republic of Congo and South Africa, have been taking part in the drills, which kicked off last week and will conclude on September 17.

A Brazilian Armed Forces spokesperson told the SCMP that this year’s exercise includes 33 personnel from the Chinese Navy and 54 from the US Navy.

Last year, the US sent troops from its Southern Command, while China took part as an observer.

“It is customary to invite friendly nations to participate in these exercises,” the Brazilian Navy was quoted as saying. “The importance of such invitations is directly linked to the opportunity to promote greater integration between the Brazilian Navy and the forces of friendly nations.”

The purpose of the exercises was reportedly to simulate amphibious operations in which warships conduct attacks on a hostile coastal region and plan to land on a designated beach.

The report pointed out that Chinese and American militaries haven’t held joint military exercises since 2016, when Washington invited Beijing to the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, also known as Rimpac. China sent five warships and about 1,200 troops.

The Pentagon, however, halted further invitations over China’s “continued militarization of disputed features in the South China Sea,” according to its then-spokesman Christopher Logan.

The South China Sea is the subject of numerous overlapping claims by countries in the region. Tensions have been aggravated by the activities of the US and its allies, which routinely send so-called ‘freedom of navigation’ missions through the area claimed by Beijing as its exclusive economic zone.

Aside from taking part in Brazil’s Formosa exercise, the Chinese are currently also participating in Russia’s ‘Ocean-2024’ drills.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the launch of the country’s biggest naval drills in its modern history. Ocean-2024 is expected to be held simultaneously in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as well as the Mediterranean, Caspian and Baltic Seas. The maneuvers involve more than 400 battleships and submarines as well as auxiliary vessels, some 120 aircraft and over 90,000 personnel.

Four vessels and 15 aircraft of the People’s Liberation Army have joined the exercises, Admiral Aleksandr Moiseev, Acting Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, has said.

Representatives from 15 other nations were also invited to the drills as observers, according to Putin.

https://www.rt.com/news/603783-us-china-joint-drills-brazil/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

The world doesn’t see an “indispensable nation” in America, only one that is ‘dysfunctional at home and pursuing naked self-interest abroad’

Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, and his State Department colleague Jose Fernandez think the United States has created a successful playbook to help other countries resist China’s economic coercion. So say two representatives of a nation which has imposed two-thirds of the world’s total number of sanctions with 60% of low-income countries being so targeted. Even the International Criminal Court has been on its hit list.

Recommended readings: “America is losing Southeast Asia: Why US allies in the region are turning toward China.” That’s the title of an essay in the current edition of Foreign Affairs.

“When many Southeast Asians look at the United States now, they see a country that is dysfunctional at home and pushing a nakedly self-interested agenda abroad,” it said.

“Chinese investments are generally welcomed in Southeast Asia … The United States should avoid overstating its convergence with Asian partners. Stressing the convergence narrative suggests, at best, that Washington lacks an awareness of the United States’ declining position in Southeast Asia and, at worst, that Southeast Asia is being overlooked in US foreign policy.”

As has been widely reported, the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute this year found 50.5% of respondents across Asean countries chose “strategic alignment” with China against 49.5% for the US. In 2020, it was 50.2% for the US and 49.8% for China.

The month before, the same premier US foreign policy journal ran another essay with a similar title: “America is losing the Arab world and China is reaping the benefits.” It must be easy writing headlines for the publication.

“Few Arab leaders now want to be seen openly cooperating with Washington, given the sharp rise in anti-American sentiment among the populations they rule,” it said, mostly because of the brutal war in Gaza.

“In nine of the 10 countries in which Arab Barometer asked about US favourability in 2021, at least a third of all respondents said that they held a favourable view of the United States. In four out of the five countries surveyed between December 2023 and March 2024, however, fewer than a third viewed the United States favourably.”

The US loss has been China’s gain: “Arab citizens’ views of China have warmed in our recent surveys, reversing a half-decade trend of weakening support for China in the Arab world.”

After Southeast Asia and the Middle East, what about Africa? It’s hardly a contest there on the continent.

More than 50 African leaders just gathered in Beijing for a summit that showcased their ever closer ties. (There are 54 countries in Africa.) Beijing has pledged nearly US$51 billion in aid and investment over three years to the continent. It will exempt import tariffs from 33 African nations and expand their access to the Chinese domestic market.

The ninth Forum on China–Africa Cooperation included influential leaders such as Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and William Ruto of Kenya. President Xi Jinping has travelled to Africa five times since entering office in 2012. No US president has set foot on the continent since Barack Obama. Nowadays, when African nations need investment funding, they most likely go to China first.

It’s true that Western allies have mostly fallen in line with the US since the Ukraine war. Australia has mortgaged its future on the costly multi-generational AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal it can ill afford. From Huawei to electric cars, Canada has faithfully followed Washington’s blacklist for sanctions and tariffs.

NATO countries have recommitted to spending 2% of GDP on the military, with Germany already exceeding that target. But war weariness, immigration, rising costs of living and falling living standards have given rise to the far-right and the far-left, not to mention Donald Trump and the Republican far-right. These are symptoms of the collapsing post-war US-led liberal international order.

It seems Burns and Fernandez have been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid.

Republished from South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Edition, September 08, 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/the-loss-of-global-influence-by-the-united-states-is-chinas-gain/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.