It was never going to be easy following David Marr's effort, but Hugh White's Quarterly Essay is a game-changer. As Crispin Rovere points out, it's a piece which is bringing Australia's most important strategic debate down from the ivory tower and into Australia's public consciousness. Yet for all its prescience, there is, I think, a tension in Hugh's analysis that casts real doubt over the practicability of the 'concert' model he espouses. Let me explain.
Hugh's essay divides into two parts: the first concerns itself with why and how Australia should encourage the formation of a concert of Asia; the second with how Australia might adjust its strategic policy to insure itself against the possibility that the region's major powers do not reach a durable accommodation.
The assumption here is that simply hoping for a concert does not constitute a prudent basis for Australian strategic policy. The US might fight for primacy, for example; China might attempt to overshadow Japan; or Japan could try to cling to the US – any one of which would undermine the concert and produce a more dangerous environment. Canberra, then, while doing its utmost to bring about such an arrangement, must also, in Hugh's judgement, hedge its bets strategically.
That seems reasonable to me. The problem, however, is that the same logic applies to everyone, not just Australia, and is especially relevant to the prospective concert's major power participants.
Take the US: even if it was prepared to relinquish its primacy to preserve stability, how could it be sure that China would reciprocate? It couldn't, of course, and this inherent uncertainty means that each side – China, Japan and the US – would have no choice but to try to limit their own liability by accumulating greater increments of power, whether through the acquisition of military capabilities or the formation of alliances.
This is an inescapably zero-sum process — a prisoner's dilemma resolving itself with a security dilemma — which before long would produce precisely the kind of competitive order we're hoping to avoid.
For Hugh, this isn't inevitable. A shared understanding of the costs and risks of escalating competition should, in his view, create strong incentives for systematic cooperation. Yet in the hierarchy of bad outcomes, although a competitive balance of power may be bad, being taken advantage of is even worse, and it is this fear which makes his concert unworkable.
As I argue in the Lowy Institute's latest Strategic Snapshot, a paper which echoes many of Hugh's concerns:
Canberra has nothing to lose by using its good diplomatic standing to encourage Chinese moderation, American accommodation, or Sino-Japanese rapprochement, some coalescence of which is needed to lay the foundations for a benign future in Asia. However, it is only realistic to acknowledge that competition among Asia's major powers is deeply entrenched in the structure of the international system, and as such, may prove impervious to even the most adroit diplomatic efforts.
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