Choosing ahead of time? Australia, New Zealand and the US-China contest in Asia.

• Author: Ayson, Robert
• Position: Report

Like most other medium and small powers in the Asia-Pacific region, including the countries of Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand face one foreign policy challenge above all others: how to best position themselves in terms of the growing contest between China and the United States. There are differences of course in the outlooks of the two Australasian countries. Australia's strategic geography (including its proximity to maritime Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean), its larger size, (1) and the greater maritime reach and power of the Australian Defence Force, will continue to mark out Canberra as a more important strategic player in Asia. New Zealand's smaller place in the regional military equation and the relatively stronger role that commercial considerations and South Pacific affairs play in the determination of its foreign policy, suggest that Wellington has a smaller part to play in the region's future strategic order.

But those contrasts can also be drawn too sharply. The warming of New Zealand's security relationship with Washington and the intensification of Australia's already strong alliance with the United States, suggest an important parallel. Indeed both countries are strengthening their respective strategic connections with the United States at the same time as they are enjoying strong commercial ties with China. Yet this similarity does not necessarily connote a common wisdom. It is less important for policy-makers in Canberra and Wellington to know whether they are taking convergent approaches to the managements of their respective relations with the two largest powers in the Asia-Pacific region. It is more important for them to ask whether they are getting that management right, and especially whether any choices they are signalling today will come back to make life more difficult tomorrow.

This article provides a contribution to this necessary analysis by first considering Australia's enthusiastic response to the United States which is focusing increasingly on its strategic interests in the Asia-Pacific region. It then explains the growth in the security relationship between the United States and New Zealand, including the acceleration in Asia-Pacific defence cooperation between the two countries as reflected in their recently signed Washington Declaration. While confirming that this trend cannot bring the New Zealand relationship to the level that Australia has been maintaining with Washington for many years, the article shows that the latter relationship will not be without its challenges: Australia's commitment to defence expenditure will be ebbing just as America's expectations are likely to increase.

All of this will be occurring as Australia and New Zealand seek to build their own relationships with a rising China, the second main area of consideration. Having explored some of the noticeable steps in New Zealand's relationship with China, which from Wellington's current perspective is firmly based on economic factors, the article notes the relative absence in New Zealand of the sort of debate which has been occurring in Australia about alignment and choices vis-a-vis the two great powers in the region. Having considered how Australia and New Zealand might still be able to pursue their interests as Sino-US competition intensifies, the article closes by considering what this strong focus on managing relations with China and the US on the part of Wellington and Canberra could mean for their own bilateral alliance.

Australia's American Choice

The Obama administration's Defense Strategic Guidance, published in early 2012, maintains that:

... while the US military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region. Our relationships with Asian allies and key partners are critical to the future stability and growth of the region. We will emphasize our existing alliances, which provide a vital foundation for Asia-Pacific security. We will also expand our networks of cooperation with emerging partners throughout the Asia-Pacific to ensure collective capability and capacity for securing common interests. (2) Australia and New Zealand are both participating in that strategy, which initially was known as the "pivot" and which is now more commonly referred to as "rebalancing" towards Asia, but are doing so with differing levels of intensity. But Australia's involvement is deeper and more obvious. The high profile announcement during President Obama's visit to Australia in November 2011 that US Marines would be rotationally deployed to Darwin (3) is the obvious tip of a more interesting strategic iceberg. More significant is the prospect of increased access by US naval vessels and aircraft to bases in Australia's north and west, the latter a sign of the growing importance of the Indian Ocean in both American and Australian strategic thinking.

This access may one day extend to the deployment of US aircraft (possibly surveillance drones) to the Cocos Islands, an Australian territory which is much closer to the Indonesian archipelago than the Western Australian coastline. This would fit in with America's desire to maintain a clear edge in the Indian Ocean, part of the maritime highway between the Middle East and North Asia. This also corresponds with notions of a wider area of strategic interest which have been evident in Australian thinking. For example, Australia's Chief of Defence Force, General David Hurley, told an audience in May 2012 that: "The Pacific and Indian Oceans are emerging as a single strategic system that is straddled by the South East Asian archipelago. This is our neighbourhood." (4) This is also a neighbourhood of priority for the pivot, not least as the costs are rising for US forces wishing to maintain open access closer to the Asian mainland because of the rising capabilities of China's armed forces. America's military posture as a consequence is not just rebalancing towards Asia as Washington refashions the spread of its global commitments and resources. America's posture is also rebalancing within Asia, increasing the importance to Washington of a number of regional partnerships which happen to be closer to Australia's neighbourhood.

This is of course more than happenstance. America's regional military posture depends on much more than the weighing of risks, threats and opportunities in Washington. It depends as well on the calculations, responses and intentions of allies and partners, current and prospective. In Australia's case, the alliance relationship with the United States has been very close for decades. Valuable cooperation in training, procurement and intelligence, as well as America's use of joint facilities in Australia, has all been part of that package. Successive Australian governments have committed themselves strongly to the alliance. John Howard, the most recent centre-right Liberal Party Prime Minister, was in Washington D.C. during the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2011. Almost immediately Australia invoked the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) Treaty for the first time since its establishment in 1952 (a symbolic but nonetheless significant act) and swiftly directed Australia's participation in the US-led military intervention in Afghanistan. Howard's Cabinet then committed Australia to a much more controversial conflict by sending forces to participate alongside the United States and United Kingdom in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings--which killed eighty-eight Australians--Howard appeared to endorse what had become known as the Bush Doctrine by indicating that he would use force pre-emptively against a terrorist group threatening Australia from Southeast Asia if there was no other option available. (5) The identification of Australia as America's "deputy sheriff", a problematic phrase which had first appeared in a 1999 interview with John Howard, gained significant traction as a representation of the close relationship between Washington and Canberra. (6)

Prime Minister Howard had also, without too much fanfare, developed Australia's relationship with China, whose economic significance was becoming increasingly noticeable as a driver of Australia's modern prosperity to the point where Canberra was lauding a "strategic economic partnership" between the two countries. (7) Howard's successor, Kevin Rudd, promised a special relationship with China, but ultimately gained a reputation for producing the opposite. As well as presiding over a 2009 Defence White Paper which was commonly seen to depict China as a regional security problem and the United States as an essential ally, (8) it became known through Wikileaks that Rudd had privately told the Americans that they might need to pull their gloves off to deal with a rising China. (9) Julia Gillard, who ousted Rudd as Labor Party leader and Prime Minister, has continued to endorse America's claims to regional strategic leadership. More significant than the emotion she displayed in a speech to the US Congress in March 2011(10) is the unreserved support her government has given to Australia's hosting of US forces as part of the rebalancing strategy.

There is a significant bipartisan consensus around this point. During President Obama's visit to Australia in 2011, Gillard's main political opponent, Tony Abbott endorsed the stationing of US Marines in Darwin and added that the Liberal-National Party coalition he leads would "be happy to see the establishment of another joint facility so that these arrangements could become more permanent". In the same speech he praised John Howard for demonstrating that "it's possible to deepen Australia's military alliance with America and simultaneously to build our trade and cultural links with other countries such as China". (11) The following year, in a speech to a leading conservative think-tank in Washington D.C., Abbott indicated that "The...