Correspondence: Sleepwalk to war - Quarterly Essay

There seems to be an immutable law of Australian national security policy that the more challenging our external strategic circumstances, the more polarised, polemical and facile the debate becomes.

In the blue corner stands Peter Dutton from the Queensland Far-Right School of International Relations. His view: the more Australia could ingratiate itself with Donald Trump, ignore our immediate region and screech at Beijing every Monday morning, the more Australia’s national security would be enhanced.

And in the red corner, Hugh White from the Lord Halifax Appeasement Faction of the Green Left. With supreme self-confidence, White considers America already done for as a regional (and probably global) power; it should “gracefully withdraw” from Asia, leaving the keys for Beijing in the mailbox; and Australia should start chatting to our Marxist-Leninist friends in Beijing about our “role” in the new regional Sinosphere.

On any realist analysis aimed at safeguarding Australia’s territorial integrity, political sovereignty and national economic interests, Dutton is as strategically dangerous as White is strategically naive.

Dutton represents the reverse of Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum to “speak softly and carry a big stick” – instead, he tramples loudly through the jungle of international relations wielding no stick at all. That he departed office without a single new submarine (or even a contract to build one) after years of fulmination underscored how Morrison’s government saw foreign and security policy as little more than the continuation of domestic politics by other means. Nobody, apart from Beijing, took it seriously. Its shallow, shabby effort to discredit its political opponents in a fraudulent khaki election nonetheless had important real-world consequences for China’s long-term assessment of Australia as a potentially implacable enemy.

White leans heavily into the winds of political exhaustion, reaction and anxiety fostered by this egregious policy overreach to now paint a simplistic picture of a more benign future under what he accepts as an inevitable Chinese “regional hegemony.” A skilled political operator, White adduces selective facts and little reason in reaching this conclusion, but happily smears as “unthinking” anyone who challenges his word as self-appointed prophet of both the anti-American far left and the “never upset Beijing” Rio Tinto far right. It is therefore important to deconstruct both White’s analysis of our future strategic environment (whereby almost everything is headed Beijing’s way) and his six-point prescription for Australia.

White’s bottom-line conclusion, peering through a glass dimly, is that it is game over for America. As evidence, he claims the economic gap between the United States and China is unassailable, that Taiwan is indefensible and that America is domestically ungovernable. He further advances, ex cathedra, that China’s projection of power should not cause any real concern for our territorial integrity, political sovereignty or economic interests. America is declining and should withdraw, China will emerge as a regional hegemon, and these fundamentally altered strategic circumstances require an equally fundamental Australian adjustment towards a Whitean form of neutrality.

There are many factual problems with White’s intellectually arrogant futurology that demand a factual response. For example, White cites the “simple fact” China’s GDP is already larger and growing faster than America’s, but doesn’t disclose this is based on purchasing power parity (PPP) rather than market exchange rates. This is a big difference: US GDP is 30 per cent larger than China’s on market rates, but appears 16 per cent smaller on PPP. Why not acknowledge this important qualification? Because it does not support White’s narrative.

A further complication for White’s Chinese economic determinism is Xi Jinping’s ideological decision since 2017 to take China’s economy decisively to the left, radically altering its economic growth model by attacking the private sector in general, and tech, finance and property businesses in particular. Add to this China’s rapidly ageing population, contracting workforce, collapsing productivity growth and rolling “zero Covid” lockdowns. Long-held assumptions about Chinese linear economic growth have changed, and debates are erupting among non-partisan economists over what this means for its long-term growth (see, for example, works by Daniel Rosen and the Lowy Institute). But none of these doubts creep into White’s essay because, once again, they don’t fit his thesis.

Further, on technology, despite unprecedented public investment since 2015 to make China a world leader in all ten critical future technology categories, the evidence of real-world progress is at best mixed. Politically sanctioned state-owned enterprises are crowding out private innovators (particularly in semiconductors, where the United States and its allies, notably Taiwan and South Korea, remain decisively ahead). The core point: the jury is out on who wins the global race for economic and technological pre-eminence between China, and the United States and its closest allies. On current evidence, I’m not prepared to pick. But White breezily assumes it’s all over, red rover. Really?

On the military – an equally critical determinant of future great-power status – the jury is also out. White urges Australians to “get real” and abandon the comfortable consensus that “America’s position in Asia is invulnerable, that its armed forces are unbeatable, and that its commitment to Asia is unshakable.” Wow. Talk about the ultimate straw-man argument. For anyone who witnessed the fall of Saigon in 1975, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the reinstallation of the Taliban in 2021, these are not hidden truths. America regularly screws up. We know that. But its military remains the most formidable fighting force on Earth, battle-hardened and constantly modernising its doctrines and weaponry. By contrast, China last fought a major naval battle in 1895, which it lost. And, as the Ukrainians have demonstrated, it is impossible to prejudge the success of a “porcupine strategy” to defend Taiwan against a mainland invasion. Taiwan has 25 million people who have repeatedly told pollsters they would fight to the end for their democracy. Taiwan is already well armed, well trained and has greater capabilities on the way aimed at deterring attack or else fighting a bloody war of attrition. Furthermore, killing hundreds of thousands of Chinese on Taiwan would hardly be politically popular on the mainland. A full-scale maritime invasion would also involve the single biggest amphibious operation since D-Day. So I’d add a note of caution to White’s conclusion that conflict over Taiwan would be a lay-down misère for Beijing.

Another tranche of White’s argument is that, unlike communist China, the United States is politically divided and shows no appetite for reinvesting in the future pillars of American national power. Meanwhile, neo-isolationists, such as Trump’s America-Firsters, stand by to torpedo any consensus. White is correct that US politics is changing fundamentally, in significant part because our very own Citizen Murdoch has fused acute partisan division, the lunatic right and the dynamic that drove the 6 January insurrection into a successful business model for Fox News. But it remains far from clear that US politics are irredeemable. Unlike White, I have lived in the United States for most of the past decade, including through the Trump phenomenon. It is as probable as not that America’s democracy, like its economy, will successfully reinvent itself – as it did in 1776, 1812, 1865, 1917, 1932, 1941, 1945 and 1974–75. I’m not prepared to bet the house on it, though White apparently is.

From these unreliable foundations, White advances a six-point strategy to “get out of this mess.” Running to eleven pages, this is where dubious analysis degenerates into policy farce. His first three points go to nothing approaching rigorous policy, but rather pop psychology. The first is to “get real about the situation we face … stop underestimating China’s power and resolve, and overestimating America’s, because a correct assessment of their relative positions is essential.” White doesn’t explain how his “correct assessment” of China’s rising regional power accounts for Korea, Japan and India all turning decisively against China. While ASEAN remains the geopolitical swing state, Beijing’s only semi-reliable strategic partners in all of Asia are North Korea, Pakistan and Cambodia.

His second point is to “build a more balanced and realistic view of China” and “keep China’s power in proportion.” I have been examining Chinese politics and foreign policy for forty years. There have been profound changes under Xi that have turned China politically leftward and moved its nationalism more decisively to the right. My conclusion is that China will be increasingly assertive. Meanwhile, White’s “balanced and realistic” analysis is coloured by such bold but unsubstantiated conclusions that Russia will inevitably split from China because of their historical rivalry. He misses that Russia now has nowhere else to turn; that China is very happy with this new dependency; that it suits both parties’ strategic interests deeply; and that this is unlikely to change under either Putin or Xi, both of whom plan to remain in office for fifteen more years at least.

The third pillar of the White Doctrine is to “think seriously of war.” Some of us lesser mortals, Hugh, do think about these things too. I just wrote an entire book on the subject, titled The Avoidable War, which outlines a proposal to do just that through what I call “managed strategic competition” or MSC. It’s not rocket science, but has been positively reviewed by the likes of Graham Allison (author of Essence of Decision and Destined for War), Joseph Nye (“Soft Power” and “Smart Power”), James Stavridis (formerly NATO’s supreme commander) and Henry Kissinger. But White fails to take his own advice and, rather than thinking seriously, simply dismisses MSC as unworkable by lazily misrendering its core arguments, probably because they don’t suit his case. For example, White falsely describes MSC as a “compromise” proposal for both sides “sharing power” in Asia; in reality, MSC proposes vibrant strategic competition within a set of minimum guardrails to reduce the risk of escalation, crisis, conflict and war. White insists China won’t agree to MSC to limit the risk of war by, for example, dialling back its more daring military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, because it wants to change the status quo; but White entirely misses the point that such exercises heighten the risk of stumbling into conflict by mistake. White also criticises MSC for not resolving the “underlying differences” that sustain US–China strategic competition – something MSC explicitly does not attempt to do. MSC is designed to reduce the risks of strategic competition escalating into unintended war – not to eliminate strategic competition altogether, which is utterly unrealistic. The only reasonable explanation for White blatantly mischaracterising the core argument of MSC is to dismiss it as an alternative to his own capitulationist approach.

White’s fourth pillar is to “talk to America about its future in Asia” and, assuming we are unsatisfied, encourage Washington to abandon Taiwan’s democracy to Beijing and “withdraw quickly and gracefully” from Asia. This is perhaps the single most naive element of White’s grand schema. What does he imagine the impact would be on US allies globally? Every security guarantee involving America and its allies would be rendered worthless, while democracies as a genus would henceforth be regarded as politically and strategically expendable. Not to mention the real-world political response in the country that, rightly or wrongly, has seen itself as the world’s “city on the hill.” White’s admonition to tell the United States to cut and run is appeasement writ large, politically naive, morally corrupt and with profound geopolitical implications far beyond East Asia if Washington were to concur.

Point five is to recast our diplomacy to be more attentive to our neighbours. This is simply a motherhood statement. Regional political, diplomatic and economic engagement is essential whatever our strategic circumstances. Here, White dances around the bleeding obvious: that Liberal governments have treated most of Asia and the Pacific badly, and Labor governments since H.V. Evatt have done the reverse, as we are seeing once again under Albanese.

The lynchpin of White’s six-point plan is the final one: Australia should “start talking seriously to China” about our role in its regional hegemony. But he then slides off this core point after a mere ninety-three words. Talk about what? What White is squeamish about admitting is that this is code for Australia’s status under a new Pax Sinica. This goes to the heart of Beijing’s plan beyond the opaque diplomatic language of “neighbouring states diplomacy,” a “community of common destiny” and “win-win cooperation.” Despite China’s hints of a hardline, Leninist, realist edge (for example, through its recent coercive economic diplomacy against states it disagrees with), we simply do not know what a Sinocentric regional order would look like in practice. And as for White’s more immediate suggestion that Australia make concessions to restart bilateral negotiations (because the Chinese are “fundamentally … more important to us than we are to them,” and castigating Albanese as “weak” for delegating meetings with Chinese officials to Foreign Minister Wong), this singular piece of advice has already aged poorly. At the time of writing, Wong had already broken the ministerial freeze by meeting her counterpart, Wang Yi, in Bali without a single concession, and with Albanese stating resolutely that “Australia doesn’t respond to demands.”

In summary, White would bet Australia’s entire national security future on what is at best a couple of hunches: first, that China will inevitably prevail over the United States and its allies, and America therefore should seek early terms; and second, that Australia should “talk” to Beijing on what Australia’s role in this future Sinosphere should be. White argues both propositions with supreme self-confidence without, to my knowledge, ever having studied or read a word of Chinese, or graduated in Chinese history, or specialised in the Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the Chinese Communist Party. My argument is more modest: simply that the jury is out on White’s first proposition, where there is much history still to be written; and the second is a massive poke in the dark, given that the internal planning processes of the CCP on the future of the international order are still unclear. White’s written reply to this critique should provide substantial responses to each of these factual challenges, rather than resorting to the usual repertoire of caricature, polemic and diversion.

While these two historical questions are played out, I have argued a different framework for Australia–China relations built on five principles: first, be unapologetic with Beijing that Australia is a democracy that believes in universal human rights grounded in the Universal Declaration, which China has also ratified, and that this will remain a running tension in the relationship; second, our US alliance will remain fundamental because it has added to our national security under multiple strategic scenarios over the past century; third, Australia and China should maximise bilateral economic and people-to-people engagement to the benefit of both countries; fourth, Australia and China should also collaborate at the G20 and all forums of global governance on climate change, pandemic management and global financial stability; and fifth, if we disagree with Beijing, we should do so in partnership with our international friends and allies, rather than flying solo like Morrison and Dutton. Further, we should bring the rhetorical temperature of the relationship down because – despite what Dutton may believe – megaphone diplomacy achieves nothing in foreign policy and (as the last election demonstrates) precious little in domestic politics.

This five-point approach represents a rational middle course between the hairy-chested world according to Peter Dutton and the deeply analytically flawed, brave new world according to Hugh White.

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