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AFA2 Trump in Asia
Australian Foreign Affairs; Issue 2
Jonathan Pearlman, Jonathan Pearlman
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AFA2 Trump in Asia
Australian Foreign Affairs; Issue 2
Jonathan Pearlman, Jonathan Pearlman
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About This Book
'We've hidden behind a hope that American power and resolve will again prevail. Trump tears away any excuse for wishful thinking.' MICHAEL WESLEY The second issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines the United States' sudden shift from the Asia Pivot to America First. It provides insights into Donald Trump's White House and explores how his unpredictable approach to international affairs is affecting the volatile Asian region. Trump in Asia is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the issues facing Canberra as Australia's closest ally recasts its alliances.
- Michael Wesley explores the challenges and risks for Australia as it rushes to find a new plan for surviving in a post-America Asia.
- Kim Beazley and L. Gordon Flake assess the North Korean missile crisis and conclude the risk of war is real and rising.
- Andrew Davies analyses the Australian military's dependence on the United States and the trade-off for Canberra as it weighs the cost of self-reliance.
- David Kilcullen reports from the United States on Trump's strange mix of swagger, fury and orthodoxy, and the implications for Australia of this erratic president and his team.
- Anna Fifield examines the growing rivalry between China and Japan.
- Cynthia Banham explores the essential qualities for an Australian foreign minister.
- Hamish McDonald reports on the role of the Indonesian military in the mass killings of 1965â66.
Australian Foreign Affairs is published three times a year and seeks to explore â and encourage â debate on Australia's place in the world and global outlook.
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Asiaâs Reckoning: The Struggle for Global Dominance
Richard McGregor
Penguin Books
After enjoying a royal welcome in Beijing late last year â complete with a tour of the Forbidden City at sunset and a full military parade in Tiananmen Square â Donald Trump declared that he and Xi Jinping had âgreat chemistry.â
The Chinese president, for his part, was less magnanimous. Xi told his American counterpart that the Pacific was big enough for the both of them â a dismissive line that reflects his belief that he heads a rising power while Trump leads one in decline.
Flattery versus disdain. The remarks neatly encapsulated the seismic shift taking place in Asia.
The United States, the supreme power in the Pacific for some seven decades, is now run by an impulsive president who has shown little appreciation for Americaâs old alliances. China, meanwhile, is led by an increasingly authoritarian leader who sees his country as a global power with a glorious, millennia-long history that is returning to its rightful place in the world. Neighbouring North Korea is ruled by a ruthless dictator whoâs made astonishing advances towards having a deliverable nuclear arsenal. And in the middle is Japan, an American ally and a Chinese rival, a nation that modernised while China disintegrated but is now in denial about the countriesâ reversal of fortunes. Even amid a demographic crisis it has no idea how to fix, Japan still sees itself as an economic colossus and is unwilling to concede its decline.
In his excellent new book, Asiaâs Reckoning, Australian journalist Richard McGregor writes that the competition between these two Asian powers, exacerbated by Trumpâs unpredictability, should alarm the rest of us. âAny clash between China and Japan would not be a simple spat between neighbours,â writes McGregor. âA single shot fired in anger could trigger a global economic tsunami, engulfing political capitals, trade routes, manufacturing centers, and retail outlets on every continent.â That, of course, includes Australia, a country torn between its long-standing alliance with the United States and the commercial opportunities of a rising China.
McGregor is uniquely placed to draw together these themes. He spent two decades in Asia, reporting from Tokyo, Shanghai and Beijing, and was the Financial Timesâ bureau chief in Washington, D.C. (he was the bureau chief in Beijing while I was the paperâs correspondent in Seoul, and we worked together in Washington). Drawing on his experience, McGregor has written a magisterial book that combines old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting â he conducts interviews with major players in Japan, China and the United States â and extensive archival research to chart seven decades of relations between the three countries. These relations, he shows, are more complex than suggested by the prevailing view of China versus the USâJapan alliance. He recounts the line by Chinaâs first premier, Zhou Enlai, that China and Japan had enjoyed âtwo thousand years of friendship and fifty years of misfortune,â and recalls Henry Kissingerâs disdain for his Japanese counterparts, as well as Japanâs constant fear that the United States will desert it. âThe Japanese have always been paranoid that the United States and China are natural partners â big, boisterous continental economies and military superpowers that wouldnât hesitate to bypass Tokyo in a flash, if only they could find a way to do so,â he writes.
At the bookâs centre is the growing rivalry between China and Japan â and the risk of a confrontation that an overstretched America will struggle to deal with. Even before Trump came to office and disrupted the old way of doing things, Xi and Japanese prime minister ShinzĹ Abe, both fierce nationalists, were locked in a battle for influence and supremacy. They took office only a month apart, at the end of 2012, just after Japan had nationalised a group of rocky islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. Xi was radically different from his notoriously dreary predecessor, Hu Jintao, and had an ambitious plan to make China great again. One of the first things Xi did was to whip up antipathy towards Japan, recalling late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century events such as the Nanjing massacre.
In 2015, ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the âChinese Peopleâs War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist Warâ commemoration, as the end of World War II is known in China, I went to a special exhibition at the Museum of the War of Chinese Peopleâs Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing. It featured a display of Japanese wartime artifacts, including flags, under a glass floor. Chinese visitors were literally walking over Japan. âWe want to keep Japan under our feet,â Li Yake, a twenty-two-year-old college student doing a summer internship at the museum, told me.
At the same time as Xi began fuelling this anti-Japanese sentiment, Abe returned to power, hell-bent on achieving what he hadnât managed to during his first tenure as prime minister six years before: revise the pacifist constitution imposed on Japan by the American post-war occupiers.
Abe wants to free Japan of the restrictions that stipulate it must not maintain any âwar potentialâ and can defend itself only if under attack. He is making progress, with a vote expected on amending the constitution this year, and is simultaneously seeking relatively small increases in Japanâs defence budget. Of course, both moves are seen in Beijing as definitive proof of Japanâs âre-militarisation.â
In a visit to Tokyo in December, Steve Bannon, the arch-nationalist and erstwhile advisor to the American president, praised Abe for his efforts, calling him âTrump before Trump.â Despite such words â meant as a compliment â and the rapport between Trump and Abe, there is deep anxiety among Japanâs conservatives about the US commitment to the security alliance.
Abe was already worried about Chinaâs ascendancy when Trump started using Japan as an example of what was wrong with the United Statesâ foreign policy. Why was the United States defending a rich country that was cutting the USâs lunch when it came to trade? Trumpâs victory alarmed the Abe government, which had been sure of a Clinton win and had few contacts within the Trump camp. Senior officials told me that this was, in part, because they didnât want to risk Trump going out on the campaign trail claiming that the Japanese were begging to talk to him.
However, the Japanese prime minister has since skilfully handled Trump. Days after the 2016 election, Abe personally delivered a gold-plated golf driver to the president-elect in Trump Tower. On Trumpâs recent trip to Tokyo, Abe pandered to his counterpartâs tastes, serving him hamburgers and steak, and taking him out on the golf course. Not a sliver of raw fish in sight.
Still, despite the public jollity, Japanâs defence hawks are clearly worried. Now that North Korea has a demonstrated ability to send missiles to the mainland United States, will Washington â which is in the firing line â bother to defend its junior partner? Shigeru Ishiba, a hardline but nevertheless influential voice in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, has stated that Japan should have the freedom to build nuclear weapons. Trump himself has several times said the same. Given Beijing wants nothing more than for the United States to leave the region, Trumpâs talk of closing American military bases in Japan and South Korea must have been music to Chinese ears.
But Xi has not capitalised on Trumpâs isolationist rhetoric to try to seduce Japan. Instead, he has stoked hostility towards its neighbour. McGregorâs research underlines how much the foreign policy of both countries is driven by domestic considerations.
With Xi, Abe and Trump all set to enjoy several more years in power â not to mention Kim Jong-un in North Korea â these relationships will only become more toxic. That makes Asiaâs Reckoning crucial reading for our times.
Anna Fifield
Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir
Gareth Evans
Melbourne University Press
Gareth Evans, foreign minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, talks a lot about the centrality of âgood international citizenshipâ to his thinking on foreign policy. He defines this as a willingness to cooperate internationally to advance the public good. For Evans, prioritising âpurposes beyond ourselvesâ â today, one might think of improving the international response to refugees, or nuclear weapons proliferation, or rising sea levels in the South Pacific â can be reconciled with hard-nosed arguments about the national interest. He not only regards the instinct for good international citizenship as a characteristic of the governments in which he served; he also understands it to be part of the Australian national psyche.
Evansâ recent political memoir, Incorrigible Optimist, in which he lays out the key âingredientsâ for effective foreign-policymaking in the Australian context, prompts a revisiting of the concept. His book covers his career in domestic politics, the international sphere and the higher education sector (he is now chancellor of the Australian National University). But throughout, the animating idea is good international citizenship. Today, when global politics are in flux, this raises several questions. What does it mean to be a good international citizen in 2018? More pointedly, can we realistically expect Australia to be one at such a challenging moment in history?
Evans, as he notes, was foreign minister at a âheadyâ time in history, from 1988 to 1996, when almost anything seemed possible. During this period, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended, Nelson Mandela was freed after twenty-seven years as a political prisoner (the bookâs cover features a photograph of the two of them) and apartheid was abolished in South Africa. It was the start of a âgenuinely cooperative new era in international relationsâ and there was a âuniversal sense of optimism.â (Not that Evans mentions this, but Bobby McFerrinâs âDonât Worry, Be Happyâ won song of the year at the 1989 Grammys.) This was enabled by a changing alignment of international interests, which provided the openings and opportunities for Evansâ principled and ambitious style of active Australian diplomacy. His achievements included Australiaâs role in the Cambodian peace process â ending decades of violence â and in the international Chemical Weapons Convention. (The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the ASEAN Regional Forum, centred on regional cooperation, were also conceived during the Hawke and Keating governments.)
We live, of course, in a very different world today, where uncertainty is the defining global sentiment. The âtectonic plates are shiftingâ and âpower is moving from west to east,â as Peter Varghese, former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, put it. Donald Trump is tweeting from the White House, and the talk is about the need to protect Australian interests as Chinaâs ambitions grow and US power in the region declines.
Evans was a man âperfectly suitedâ to his times, Allan Gyngell, former director-general of the Office of National Assessments, observes in his book Fear of Abandonment. Evansâ passion for the foreign-affairs portfolio lights up a sometimes dry memoir: âBliss was it that dawn to be alive, but to be Foreign Minister was very heaven!â is his memorable opening to the chapter on diplomacy. Yet Evansâ ideas about good international citizenship are as relevant as they ever were â particularly for Australia. They emphasise constructive relationship building; they focus on the bigger picture and eschew policy driven by short-term, selfish gains; they demand principles, and a willingness to stand up for those principles.
Foreign policy characterised by such positions is in the national interest, according to Evans, because it invites two hard-headed returns: it enhances a stateâs international reputation and it engenders reciprocity. This vision, with its defining commitment to multilateralism, is most often associated with Australian Labor governments and inspired by H.V. âDocâ Evattâs postâWorld War II legacy. But no country, no political party, has a monopoly on such behaviour, and most possess various attributes of the good international citizen. For example, the Labor government in which Evans was foreign minister continued to recognise Indonesiaâs occupation of East Timor. Similarly, the Howard government despised multilateralism and blindly followed the United States into the disastrous Iraq War in 2003 (which undermined the very âinternational institutions and rulesâ of which the Coalitionâs 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper makes so much). Yet Alexander Downer convinced John Howard to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
It is difficult to reconcile Evansâ belief that being a good international citizen is instinctive with a public that accepts the inhumane treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru as the price for secure borders â policies pursued by both sides of politics. Could an Australian foreign minister prioritise âpurposes beyond ourselvesâ and succeed (even survive) in 2018 as, the world over, countries turn inward, suspicion of the other grows and long-term liberal democracies appear unnervingly fragile? Yet Australia must.
What attributes, what vision, would an Australian foreign minister prioritising good international citizenship need today? For Evans, an effective foreign minister must, at a personal level, understand how to manage the politics of foreign policy â especially the relationship with the prime minister, but also with the cabinet, the party room, Parliament, interest groups and the media, as well as their own department and personal advisers. At a policy level, a commitment to good international citizenship includes following international law, believing in universal human rights and the role of the United Nations, investing in overseas aid programs and committing (indeed leading) internationalist solutions to world problems, whatever their nature.
The Turnbull/Bishop government is lacking in some of Evansâ key ingredients. Julie Bishop is liked by her department; however, she is not regarded as a âconceptual thinkerâ of Evansâ ilk. She has other constraints, including Australiaâs three-year terms, which are frustrating departmental efforts at long-term foreign-policy planning. In addition, Bishop heads a department whose resources have flatlined, and she oversees a decreased aid budget, where the folding of AusAID into DFAT has left staff concerned about the role aid now plays in Australian foreign policy. Australian money, for example, is poured into propping up an internationally condemned offshore immigration detention regime, and Australia, rather than supporting democratic principles in poor countries in the South Pacific, is benefiting from and entrenching weaknesses in the rule of law in those countries. Australiaâs relationships in South-East Asia â more crucial than ever, given concerns about Chinaâs ambitions, a point the White Paper recognises â are unbalanced: they are too security-focused and not altogether positive (particularly in relation to Indonesia). Meanwhile, Bishop sits in a cabinet where resources â and with them the power to make decisions that affect how Australia perceives itself and how it is perceived â are being sucked, disturbingly and without the public debate such a move warrants, into the new super Home Affairs portfolio, run by the duo known for their oversight of Australiaâs cruel refugee policies: Peter Dutton and Mike Pezzullo.
On the other hand, the Turnbull/Bishop government implicitly accepts some of the virtues of good international citizenship. Its White Paper preaches the need for openness â an âopen societyâ at home, an âopen, inclusiveâ region, an âopen, outward-lookin...