Australia is not destined to become a sovereign partner, however “America’s military launch pad in Asia”.
UnHerd19 April 2024
The United States may be losing ground to new global powers in many ways, but when it comes to sowing conflict around the world, the country remains unsurpassed. While the US is slowly leaving Ukraine to its own fate, having played a decisive role in triggering this conflict in the first place, and while contributing to the dangerous escalation in the Middle East, it is also laying the groundwork for a future war with China in Asia.
For much of the past half-century, the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific have shied away from a collective NATO-like approach to security in the region, opting instead for a so-called hub-and-spoke system: with the United States as the hub and various bilateral and multilateral alliances that advocate for an ideal “safety wheel”. In recent years, amid rising tensions with Beijing, these initiatives have multiplied, with overlapping political, military and economic agreements that have created, with The Economists word, “an increasingly thick grid in China’s periphery”.
However, the US now seems determined to take this approach a step further, transforming its patchwork of arrangements into a full-fledged military alliance: an Asian NATO. The first significant step in this direction was the establishment, in the early days of the Biden administration, of the Australia-UK-US (Aukus) pact, a new trilateral military partnership that included, as its central pillar, the provision of nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) submarines to Australia. The project was initially met with skepticism and hostility – particularly, as might be expected, from China, which said the partnership risked “serious damage to regional peace”.
Although this led to a slow start for the new alliance, Aukus has picked up speed in recent months. The three countries recently announced the launch of Pillar II of the pact, which will see members collaborate on next-generation military technologies – including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons and undersea capabilities – and decide whether to invite new members, such as South Korea, Canada , New Zealand and Japan. Earlier this month, the US ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, wrote that Japan was “about to become the first additional Pillar II partner”.
Over the past year, the United States and its allies in the region have emphatically denied that these moves are aimed at establishing a “Asian NATO”. However, such assurances do not carry much weight these days – especially in China. After all, the US is very open about the fact that it considers China to be its biggest “imminent threat” – and several senior US officials have https://twitter.com/battleforeurope/status/1709220739012817139 that they consider a war between the US and China in the coming years to be virtually inevitable. In fact, NATO itself has declared China to be one “systemic challenge”. Meanwhile, America’s allies in the region are deepening their ties with NATO itself, through so-called Individualized Partnership Programs (ITPP), and the leaders of Australia, Japan, Korea and New Zealand were invited as guests to a NATO summit in Lithuania last year, where the communique mentioned China more than a dozen times for coercive and destabilizing military and economic actions.
The Western narrative is that the military build-up in the Asia-Pacific is only a response to China’s increasingly assertive stance in the region – and is therefore about deterrence, not escalation, and should not be perceived by China as a threat. But should we expect China to take our word for it? Indeed, Beijing has made it very clear that it views Aukus, and the growing US military presence in the Asia-Pacific, as a threat – especially in light of new US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell’s admission that “Aukus submarines are intended for a potential war with China over Taiwan”.
In this context, Campbell’s argument that Aukus will works “strengthening peace and stability more generally” in the region, at best naive, and at worst fraudulent. Indeed, it is hard to see how pouring military machinery into an already unstable region will not lead to the escalating spiral that Auku’s strengthening and expansion is purportedly aimed at preventing: all-out war between the US and China.
If this all feels familiar, that’s because it is. In many ways, what is happening with Aukus in the Asia-Pacific is reminiscent of NATO’s expansion towards Russia’s border after the nineties. Even then, Nato argued that the expansion was defensive in nature and should not be seen as a threat by Russia. Yet countless American politicians and diplomats, including George Kennan and Bill Clinton, understood that NATO expansion would become a self-fulfilling prophecy: regardless of Western assurances, it would create a security dilemma for Russia, and at some point invite a retaliatory response from the latter, and thus creating the very security threat that NATO expansion supposedly defended against. This, of course, is exactly what happened, ultimately leading to the tragic events that are still unfolding in Ukraine.
“If this all feels familiar, that’s because it is”.
Today, a similar self-fulfilling prophecy is unfolding in the Asia-Pacific. As for the expansion of Aukus, the US is again using the same incremental, or “salami” tactic, that it did during NATO’s expansion: it is slicing off thinly gradually – moving in small steps – so that no single action can be used by it on the other hand to justify a greater response, while over time they achieve the desired (and officially denied) result.
Through NATO’s gradual expansion, this strategy enabled Washington to deflect any accusation and portray Russia’s response as disproportionate. A similar argument is used today to dismiss Chinese concerns about Auku’s Pillar II: The latter, the US argues, simply involves greater military technology cooperation between allied countries, not the establishment of a full military alliance. But of course is increasing “common capabilities and interoperability” between countries – just as the US did in Ukraine in the run-up to Russia’s invasion – a step in that direction.
Another tactic plucked from NATO’s playbook is “the deterrence-cooperation dichotomy” – a term coined by the Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen, to describe how NATO expanded while continuing to promote cooperation with Russia in several areas. A similar approach today has been adopted in countries such as Australia and New Zealand: while deepening their relations with the US and NATO in the context of avowedly anti-China military security alliances, they continue to express their eagerness to maintain solid economic ties with China.
Now this may seem understandable: China today is the top trading partner of most US allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand. But it also speaks to the irrationality of this approach to China. After all, it is unclear exactly how China represents a “threat” to these countries—unless one interprets an end to American dominance in the Asia-Pacific region, and the emergence of a more polycentric order with multiple centers of power, to be an inherent threat, which indeed seems to be the case. As Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, https://twitter.com/TheZeitgeistNZ/status/1779349801601278279 on reports that the government is considering joining Aukus:
“Why do we need a military alliance, supposedly designed to defend us from our most important trading partner? This does not seem to be completely connected”.
In response, local politicians can tell themselves – and their citizens – that military alliances like Aukus do not compromise their country’s sovereignty, and that they remain responsible for foreign policy. However, NATO’s history tells a different story: US-led military alliances of this type create a path of dependency, which makes it very difficult for individual members to detach themselves from the foreign policy decisions made in Washington, even if they disagree with them. Again, the history of NATO expansion is instructive here. When President Clinton attempted to promote the deployment of strategic missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, he faced strong opposition from several European countries. But Washington, as the de facto head of the dominant security system in Europe, methodically used the requirement of “alliance solidarity” to quell criticism from allies. Eventually, NATO allies lined up – just as they did after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In this sense, countries like Australia and New Zealand would be naive to think they could avoid being drawn into a future conflict between the US and China. Aukus effectively means surrendering its foreign policy to the United States. After all, Americans have been quite open about the fact that they see Aukus as a NATO-like means of asserting American hegemony over the region. Campbell, the chief architect of Biden’s Asia strategy, has openly admitted that Aukus is about “lock [Australia] in for the next 40 years” – i.e. subordinate the country to the US’s geopolitical strategy.
The article was published by UnHerd.
A war is brewing in the Pacific
Translated for steigan.no by Espen B. Øyulvstad
