Here’s an excerpt of Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s speech yesterday.
A great power like China uses every tool at its disposal to maximise its own resilience and influence – its domestic industry policy; its massive international investment in infrastructure, diplomacy and military capability; access to its markets.
This statecraft illustrates the challenge for middle powers, like us and our partners in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Yet we need not waste energy with shock or outrage at China seeking to maximise its advantage.
Instead, we channel our energy in pressing for our own advantage.
We deploy our own statecraft toward shaping a region that is open, stable and prosperous. A predictable region, operating by agreed rules, standards and laws. Where no country dominates, and no country is dominated. A region where sovereignty is respected, and all countries benefit from a strategic equilibrium.
…Our diplomats cannot do it alone, nor can our military. And what we do in the world needs to reinforce and be reinforced by who we are and what we do at home.
It takes investment in all elements of our national power.
…As I said at the outset, strategic competition is not merely about who is top dog, who is ahead in the race, or who holds strategic primacy in the Indo-Pacific.
It’s actually about the character of the region. It’s about the rules and norms that underpin our security and prosperity, that ensure our access within an open and inclusive region, and that manage competition responsibly.
It’s clear to me from my travels throughout the region that countries don’t want to live in a closed, hierarchical region where the rules are dictated by a single major power to suit its own interests.
Instead, we want an open and inclusive region, based on agreed rules, where countries of all sizes can choose their own destiny.
Countries want a prosperous, connected region, trading together at the epicentre of global economic growth, through a transparent system, where economic interdependence is not misused for political and strategic ends.
…A balance where strategic reassurance through diplomacy is supported by military deterrence.
It is why Australia is so invested in the idea of guardrails to manage great power competition, so it does not career into conflict.
Guardrails where the major powers have reliable and open channels of communication at all levels to minimise the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation. Where limits are established on each country’s security policies.Our view and the view of the Pacific Islands Forum is that the Pacific family is responsible for Pacific security.
…When the Prime Minister welcomes Prime Ministers Modi and Kishida and President Biden to Australia next month, we will acknowledge the critical contribution of the Quad and also the power, weight and influence of Japan and India, which in their own right are contributing to strategic balance.
And AUKUS represents an evolution of our relationships with the US and the UK, helping make Australia itself a stronger partner for the region.
…There is no greater turning point in Australian history than Curtin’s wartime turn to America.
The United States is our closest ally and principal strategic partner.
The Indo-Pacific would not have enjoyed its long, uninterrupted period of stability and prosperity without the US and its security guarantee to the region.
The whole region benefits from US engagement, from their contribution to the region’s strategic balance.
America has often been talked of as the indispensable power. It remains so. But the nature of that indispensability has changed.
As we seek a strategic equilibrium, with all countries exercising their agency to achieve peace and prosperity, America is central to balancing a multipolar region.
Many who take self-satisfied potshots at America’s imperfections would find the world a lot less satisfactory if America ceased to play its role.
Having said that, we cannot just leave it to the US.
All countries of the region must exercise their agency through diplomatic, economic and other engagement to maintain the region’s balance – and to uphold the norms and rules that have underpinned decades of peace and prosperity.
And this balance must be underwritten by military capability.
“America balancing a multipolar region” is a bit weird. Perhaps Wong means America balancing China to sustain a multipolar region.
I am still skeptical of all this talk of balance. It reeks of Kevin07 drivel. Beijing is coming for Taiwan. Its failing economy gives the CCP little choice. Having a stationary enemy aircraft carrier off its coast isn’t viable for a Chinese Great Power, either.
All we are really talking about is how Australia will react when Beijing invades, given it would very likely constitute only a first step into wider Asian dominance, for similar reasons.
In this sense, the black-and-white nature of the conflict is real. We should be making contingency plans for when it happens, not pursuing Kevin07’s grandiloquent fantasies as policy.
Anyways, the speech is equal measures encouraging and unsettling. On the one hand, it indicates how deeply Australia is still embedded within the US sphere of influence. On the other, it shows how captured ALP imaginations are by the illusion of choice within that sphere.
As for Keating, he leaped upon Wong with his usual ahistorical recalcitrance. Here is an excerpt from his reply.
In facing the great challenge of our time, a super-state resident in continental Asia and an itinerant naval power seeking to maintain primacy – the foreign minister was unable to nominate a single piece of strategic statecraft by Australia that would attempt a solution for both powers.
Instead, Penny Wong actually went out of her way to turn her back on what she disparaged as ‘black and white’ binary choices, speaking platitudinally about keeping ‘the balance of power’, but having not a jot of an idea as to how this might be achieved.
…never before has a Labor government been so bereft of policy or policy ambition.
During the address she said she was ‘steadfast’ in refusing to talk about regional flashpoints; that is, refusing to talk about the very power issue which threatens the region’s viability.
She told us she will turn her back on reality, speaking only in terms of ‘lowering the heat’ and the ‘benefit from a strategic equilibrium’, without providing one clue, let alone a policy, as to how that might be achieved.
Oddly, it is Keating himself that has repeatedly demanded Australia shut up about China. Our deranged former PM seems remarkably unaware of himself.
I suspect what really irked Keating is that Wong’s speech focussed heavily on the benefits of US engagement.
Thank heavens he is not PM. The Australian democracy would be doomed.
