Australia-US: Is New Thinking Needed?

“We have to start thinking for ourselves.”’

That’s Dr Amy King, from the Strategic Studies Centre at The Australian National University, at this week’s Australian Institute of International Affairs conference in Canberra.

Dr King, like many of the speakers at this year’s conference, homed in on the state of the US-Australia relationship, as things start to change very quickly in Washington.

President-elect Trump was in many ways the spectre haunting this years event, which brought together some of the sharpest minds and safest hands in the field of Australian international affairs. 

The state of US democracy was of course a topic of debate, but perhaps more importantly, the discussion around how Australia deals with a more isolationist and alliance-shy administration in the White House was at the heart of the discussion.

Will Trump move to defend Taiwan? Will he actually force South Korea to pay for American boots on the ground? How will tariffs impact Australian producers? How does Washington propose to approach Beijing now?

The conference dealt with themes that have occupied the minds of politicians and bureaucrats in Canberra for decades. It was well over 150 years ago that the Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin made the first moves in what can be described as “foreign” policy, and he drew criticism for doing so without consulting his colonial colleagues in London.

He was also the first Australian leader to realise the strategic significance of the Pacific Ocean, and that Australia needed its own navy – albeit one that relied heavily on Great Britain and its ties of empire at the time.

In the past decades, Australia’s engagement with its Asian neighbours at all levels has been swift and beneficial.

But how is its engagement with Asia proceeding right now?

The Australian Financial Review’s James Curran summed it up like this:

“The reaction here to Trump’s election surpasses even the isolated pockets of panic that attended Britain’s military withdrawal from South-East Asia in the late 1960s. Then, some newspapers screamed that it was a “Far East death warrant” for Australia.”

Is there – as Curran warns – maybe not a lot more to Australian foreign policy than its relationship with the US? He is among those in media and academia suggesting now is the ideal time to re-evaluate just where Australia is going.

Australia has always had international affairs experts who warn that the country puts too much faith in the US empire, and that an America in decline – or one that actively seeks to reduce its footprint in Asia – could leave Australia not knowing which way to turn.

The ANU’s Professor Hugh White has been one of those sounding that warning, and he made the point that keeping Washington happy will extremely difficult.

“Trump will not be hawkish,” he told delegates. “He won’t be keen to spend money confronting China, he doesn’t really care about US leadership in Asia, and he’s less worried about his allies.”

Australian foreign policy in the last decade has been marked by what’s been described as the “politicisation of security”, in which geo-politics and economics has been revamped in response to outside economic threats, primarily from China.

China remains Australia's largest trading partner, both in exports and imports, and this relationship has been a cornerstone of Australia’s economy for decades.

Exports to China mainly include natural resources, such as iron ore, coal, and liquefied natural gas. Iron ore is vitally important, as Australia supplies a substantial portion of China's needs for steel production.

Agricultural exports are also significant, with beef, wine, barley, wool, and dairy all performing strongly.

All of these were of course compromised in the spat between China and Australia in 2020, when Australia called for an investigation into the origins of Covid-19. In response, China imposed a series of trade restrictions and import bans on key Australian exports, including tariffs of 80% on some products.

For Canberra, it highlighted the tight connection between economics and geo-politics, prompting urgent calls for increased trade diversification.

Associate Professor Amy King

For Associate Professor Amy King, also from the ANU, the way Australia thinks about the relationship between security and economics is a concern.

Speaking as part of a panel looking at ‘Australia in Asia”, Dr King urged new thinking on trade and the connections between trade and security.

“Australia ignores the fact that for many decades Australia’s Asian neighbours have made deliberate choices to trade with their enemies” she said.

“Japan for example has pursued a policy of comprehensive security dubbed “sogo anzen hosho”, and has doubled down on openness, and regional and international forms of multilateralism as a way to secure economic resources and prosperity.”

It’s a strategy that has had huge popularity across South East Asia, and Dr King pointed out that no South East Asian country has completely embraced the policies being pushed at them by both China and the US.

Instead, Asian nations make a strategic point of trading with their perceived or actual adversaries, a good example being the China-Japan relationship.

“Australia pays far too little attention to how its Asian neighbours are navigating these policy challenges, and far too much attention to the grand strategies of the US or UK, or even Europe” she said.

And while Dr King acknowledges that the current Albanese government in Canberra is seeking to rectify this issue, she believes the recent election result in the US is clouding the thinking far too much.

“We are already seeing political, academic and media attention subsumed by watching, and trying to anticipate, the policy moves in the US.”

The conference’s last panel returned to the theme of “Great and Powerful?”, an examination of the Australia-US relationship and whether the US has the ability and commitment to maintain its current positioning in Asia. Again it revolved around the role to be played by Donald Trump , and the impact Trumpism will have on US foreign policy in the next four years.

Melissa Conley Tyler from the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne echoed the concerns around a more isolationist US that will end up being counted out of vital international discussions on things like climate change.

But she reminded delegates that Australia has been here before, and again needs to strengthen partnerships with like-minded partners and a sustained and focused attention by Australia on Asia.

“See the world from the perspective of developing countries who are just trying to get by, while Australia angsts over how much Trump will engage” she said.

“Don’t spend the next four years glued to the Trump show, we have to focus elsewhere”.

Australian PM Albanese visited Beijing in November 2023

For the ANU’s Hugh White, the US election doesn’t change the fundamentals for Australia a great deal.

He believes that whoever is in the White House, the US doesn’t have the ability to resist the rise of China – because the imperatives for the US to remain engaged in Asia at the leading don’t outweigh the risks to the US in doing so.

“China, even with the most bullish assumptions, is not going to threaten the US at home, its not the sort of existential threat to the US that the Soviet Union was,” he said.

Professor White believes the costs to the US in standing against China in a similar way to the Soviet Union would require significant increases in military spending, and the implications of a nuclear exchange, neither of which are appealing to the US electorate,

He told delegates the Biden administration did very little when it came to China apart from the development of AUKUS and the Quad groupings.

“Trump has always been very focused on China as an economic rival to the US, but I believe there is very little evidence that he cares about preserving US leadership in Asia” he said.

Hugh White told delegates that Trump 2.0 sharpens the dilemma at the heart of Australian foreign policy, and he laid that out very simply.

“Australia looks to support the US as much as it can in dealing with China, while making sure not to damage its trade relationship.”

 A familiar scenario in New Zealand.

“But as the Trump administration expects more of us, we’re going to find it harder and harder to keep Washington happy, without irritating Beijing. And the basic problem remains – we are sitting in the middle of the biggest shift in international settings since colonisation, with the rise of China, and India, and Indonesia” he said.

“The fact is Asia’s future is not going to be decided in Washington, its going to be decided in Asia, and that’s where we need to do our work”.

For Australia, many attending this year’s AIIA Conference in Canberra believe that the work needs to start today.

-           Asia Media Centre