Malcolm thinks the picture I paint of Australia and its place in Asia is not the Australia he knows and loves. He is absolutely right. At the core of my Quarterly Essay is an argument that China's rise is the biggest change in Asia's strategic order, and hence in Australia's strategic setting, since 1788. Big claim, but how else to describe the emergence of an Asian power as the world's richest (and therefore strongest) country for the first time in 200 years?
Asia will not be the same, and neither will Australia. We need to get used to that, and ask the next question: how can we make whatever follows as good for us as possible?
As Malcolm says, my starting point in exploring this question is the judgment that China's growing power does not per se threaten Australia. This simple statement embodies two rather distinct judgements. The more obvious one is that there is no reason to assume or even expect that China will use its power directly to attack or intimidate Australia. Of course, there is no reason to rule this possibility out either. Indeed, I argue that addressing this possibility is a central issue for our defence policy, and limiting the risk that China might become threatening is a key requirement for the design of a new Asian order.
But whether or not China does use its power in ways that threaten Australia and others directly does not necessarily depend solely on China's choices – it also depends partly on the choices we make. We can help make China a threat, if we are not careful.
The less obvious but equally important sense in which China's growing power doesn't threaten us per se is that the adjustments we might need to make to live with China's power need not undermine our national identity or fundamental values. This is not self-evident by any means. China's rise and the adjustments it may require of us will challenge our sense of who we are, and some of the less temperate commentary on my essay shows how edgy this makes people.
I understand that, but as I have said in an earlier post, Australia's identity and values are big enough and strong enough and flexible enough to survive the coming transformations.
Of course, much depends on what you think the core of our national identity is, and that is a debate for another time. But the many people who think accommodating China is incompatible with our identity need to say what they mean to do about it, and what price they are willing to pay to preserve those aspects of Australia's identity that might be incompatible with adjusting to China's rise. Resisting that adjustment would come at very high cost indeed to regional order; peace is a value too.
Those (not Malcolm) who counsel heroic resistance in defence of their vision of Australia's values need to reflect on what that might mean in terms of real policy, involving real human lives and happiness. This is not a debate about abstractions.
What about other East Asian states? Malcolm thinks many of them are more anxious about China than we are, and therefore would not support my idea of urging the US to share power with China. Well, I agree that many states closer to China have more reason to fear it directly, and they are therefore at least as keen as Australia for the US to stay engaged to constrain Beijing's power.
But they also have more to fear if US-China relations become too adversarial, because they are closer to the battle. So like us, they want the US to play the biggest role in Asia possible, consistent with avoiding US-China conflict — unless China's conduct becomes so flagrant as to make it unavoidable. Therefore, like us, they will want the US to seek the maximum accommodation with China that is consistent with Chinese adherence to reasonable norms of international conduct. Hence my hope that, with adroit diplomacy, we could build a regional coalition to support cautious accommodation.
Photo by Flickr user betta design, used under a Creative Commons license.
