…Insecure, but compulsively feisty. Facing a disturbing period of prolonged peace, the George W. Bush administration, as it took over from Clinton in 2001, began by looking for new enemies. The country was suffering a bout of “enemy deprivation syndrome”, according to Owen Harries, an Australian academic who became editor of The National Interest magazine in the US.
…The foreign and security establishment in Canberra will take some time to face the radical notion that America in a distraught, bruised, unhealthy state could be a danger to us. But it’s hard for them. Signs of US decline are a trauma for Australia, with our permanent fear of abandonment. Hence we shift to a proxy debate about China. If America looks wretched, then you can beat up on the country that’s creeping up on the US with an economic success that a mere five years earlier could not have been guessed at: China’s transition to a service economy, its lead in robotics, artificial intelligence and fintech; the boldness of constructing a dialogue with the world based on infrastructure. All the while being — entirely offensive to Western instincts, including mine — some version, some variety, of an authoritarian state.
…Paul Keating spoke about the challenge China presents to America in August 2016: “In its economic and strategic history, the United States has never met a power with an economy and a society as large as its own. And it’s an affront to everything that is represented by American exceptionalism and the American mission of the propagation of US social and political values.”
…Malcolm Fraser warned that America, in his view, was capable of fighting a land war against China and losing it. And then leaving Asia. And by implication us. I found this dystopia far-fetched. But that was before Trump, of course.
Well, of course, we simply don’t know. But someone in Canberra should be speculating about the future, even if it involves facing a big, disturbing idea: an America in befuddled, angry dotage might be a danger to Australian security, not a guarantor of it.
…China is pulling off the audacious journey: it’s becoming a modern economy where 70 per cent of its people are middle class, driven by services and consumption, and is on its way to having a bigger economy than the US.
We should continue saying to China what we’ve done since Gough Whitlam, letting the Chinese know we are part of the US alliance system and the alliance is not directed at them. But we should also let the Americans know that our alliance commitment with them does not preclude us from a positive and pragmatic policy towards China.
There is a mysterious gap in Beijing Bob’s timeline of American history. He discusses the wonders of Bill Clintom, the failures of George W. Bush and the risks of Donald Trump. But he leaps over Barack Obama and his “pivot to Asia” which, among other things, installed US marines in Darwin. America is not all Republic paranoia and “military industrial complex” though Beijing Bob certainly seems to want us to see it that way. President Obama was the embodiment of US liberalism but he was much more hawkish on China than was George W. Bush. Perhaps that’s because he saw China for what it was, an illiberal threat to the US and its allies.
The arguments in the piece are not bad and should be a part of our foreign and strategic policy considerations. But the omission of Obama’s pivot to Asia highlights the problem. It emphasises that Beijing Bob is not writing from an objective vantage point. He is the head of a pro-China think tank that was founded with equally biased dough. It’s not good enough for Beijing Bob to argue, as he often does, that there are equally well-funded US think tanks in the marketplace of ideas. That’s simply hypocrisy. Moreover, the payment of China shills across the Australian political economy is now so widespread that it’s hard to find a pro-China analyst not compromised by funding. They may hold such views anyway but the cash amplifies their viewpoints. On top of that, China critics are being sued into silence left, right and centre. This is a co-ordinated Chinese pincer movement on Australian debate that Beiing Bob is a part of. Such manipulation is not apparent on the pro-US side of the debate. Beijing Bob is most often published in the pro-US Murdoch Press.
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China legend Richard McGregor made a similar point on the weekend with reference to Huawei:
In today’s world, all manner of once garden-variety government and commercial decisions, like Huawei, are taking place in a kind of clash-of-civilisations cauldron, pitting China against the West.
But is this Canberra’s fault, the result of outdated “Cold War thinking”, as China’s state media says, and many in Australia seem to agree?
…China’s own National Intelligence Law, passed last year, dictates that “all organisations and citizens” must co-operate in the country’s espionage work.
Huawei, like all state and private companies in China, cannot escape the long hand of the ruling Communist party, be it through the formal committees inside their operations, or any ad hoc orders that might come their way.
“Team China” is very much a living, breathing reality, with the ruling party able to dictate terms to state and private companies when it believes its national security interests are in play.
This goes to the nub of things. The US is, at times, a paranoid power and it’s martial tendencies do not help that. But it is still in the broad sweep of history a liberal empire. Even Donald Trump derives from a US political tradition of intermittent Jacksonianism, not just the radical outbursts of a crazy narcissist, Beijing Bob would have us believe. The US tends to spread rather than retard freedom and democracy. Even when it’s stupid and does it in self-defeating ways (as in Iraq). China is the complete opposite in its foreign relations. In Xinjang, Tibet and increasingly in Pakistan and Hong Kong, it is in various phases of dismantling democracy and freedom. It is already working hard to do the same in PNG and across the Pacific. Indeed, Domainfax showed on the weekend how pressing is the Chinese encirclement of Australia:
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Department officials were blunt this month in a Senate hearing about China’s ambitions. It wants to dominate the region, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Australia’s interests, by contrast, lie in a “multipolar” region where Chinese power is balanced by a continued US presence and the rise or maintenance of other powers – India, Indonesia, Japan.
Narrowing the lens on strategic concerns, Australia is also worried that small countries such as Pacific island nations will be vulnerable to coercion by being saddled with unsustainable debt.
Beijing Bob is a part of that encirclement, in a psychological sense, to his and Labor’s shame.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
