The reluctant deputy sheriff
Australia's skilful foreign policy has made it many friends. Keeping them all happy will not be easy
ON TWO successive days in October 2003, Australia's two houses of Parliament met in joint session to hear first President George Bush and then President Hu Jintao of China. Though many Australians, and not just of the left, found it hard to decide whether it was the warmonger or the tyrant whose presence they found more objectionable, the visits proved one point: Australia has become a country of disproportionate consequence in world affairs. It has achieved the unlikely feat of close friendships with both the world's most powerful state and its most populous one, friendships that are being turned into hard cash. Last year Australia signed a free-trade agreement with America; in April it opened negotiations on one with China. These days, Alexander Downer, Australia's effective if prickly foreign minister, can plausibly say that “there is no need to trade off America against Asia”: Australia has managed to have both.
This has not, however, been easy or straightforward. After John Howard took office in 1996, Australia's priorities seemed to swing back clearly in the direction of America and the West, and away from the enthusiastically pro-Asian sentiments of his predecessor, Paul Keating. On the very day on which the new government was sworn in, America dispatched two aircraft-carrier battle groups to the Taiwan strait after China started lobbing missiles towards the island. Mr Howard endorsed the deployment, to Chinese fury.
The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 caused a certain amount of Schadenfreude among Australians, who still remembered the warning issued in the 1980s by Singapore's prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, that they risked becoming the “white trash of Asia”. It also led directly to the collapse of General Suharto's regime in Indonesia, which in turn led to the event that most alienated Australia from its Asian neighbours: its intervention in East Timor, after that wretched Indonesian province voted for independence and then descended into mayhem. In 1999, Australia organised and headed a multinational peacekeeping force to which it contributed 5,700 of its own troops, half the total. Though this was done with the acquiescence of the Indonesian government, it was hugely resented, especially by the powerful Indonesian army. Throughout the presidencies of B.J. Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid, and well into that of Megawati Sukarnoputri, relations between Australia and the largest and most powerful member of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) remained glacial.
At the same time, ties with America improved, especially following the election of George Bush, whom Mr Howard found much more congenial, personally and politically, than Bill Clinton. But the biggest change came on September 11th 2001. Mr Howard felt the terrorist outrage deeply, all the more so because he was in Washington, DC, on that fateful morning. Australia invoked the right of collective self-defence under the ANZUS security pact to pledge its support for America. Along with Tony Blair, Mr Howard has proved one of America's most steadfast allies in the war on terror, volunteering to send Australian troops for the invasion of Iraq even though the war was deeply unpopular in his country. Although several Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines, later sent troops too, Australia's two Muslim neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia, were strongly opposed. Mr Howard did not help matters by agreeing with an interviewer that he was America's “deputy sheriff” in the region.
Good out of evil
Two tragedies have helped to reshape Australia's relations with South-East Asia. The first was the Bali bomb of October 2002, which counted 88 Australians among its 202 victims. In its wake, the police forces of Indonesia and Australia embarked on a programme of close co-operation that worked, and has gone on working, surprisingly well. Some 30 people suspected of involvement in the attack have been rounded up. Jemaah Islamiah, the al-Qaeda offshoot held responsible, may not have been eliminated, but it has been badly weakened. The Australian intelligence services now work very effectively with their counterparts in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, and this practical co-operation has given a boost to the relationship at higher levels. For example, Mr Howard last year attended the swearing-in ceremony for Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a courtesy he had not extended to previous presidents.
A further sign of Australia's rehabilitation in the eyes of ASEAN came last November, when Australia (along with New Zealand) was invited to attend ASEAN's summit meeting in Laos. Shortly after that came the second tragedy that profoundly changed Australians' and South-East Asians' views of each other: the tsunami of December 26th. The response by ordinary Australians was magnificent. They donated about A$300m ($235m), to which the government added A$1 billion. But even in such adversity old habits die hard: the troops Australia sent to the devastated province of Aceh were viewed with suspicion by the Indonesian armed forces, which are suppressing a secessionist uprising there.
Plainly, there are still tensions: Mr Howard caused offence by refusing to sign up to ASEAN's “treaty of amity and co-operation” which he instinctively feels is anti-western. In general, he has preferred bilateral arrangements to multilateral ones. This has its drawbacks: driven mainly by concern about China, Asia is moving fast towards some form of regional institution-building, with a planned “East Asian Community”, consisting of the ten ASEAN nations plus China, Japan and South Korea, being its most promising form. Mr Howard must do much more to ensure that Australia is moving in the same direction. In the end, he will probably have to back down and sign the treaty.
The use of bilateralism as a political and economic tool is also much in evidence. Last year, Australia completed negotiations on a free-trade agreement (FTA) with America, which took effect on January 1st. It has also signed FTAs with Thailand and Singapore, and is studying one with Malaysia. The real prize, though, will be the proposed FTA with China, potentially the first that China will sign with a developed country.
If ever there were two countries that were made for each other, at least economically, it must be Australia and China. Australia has the raw materials—coal, iron ore, gas and even oil—that China needs; China makes all the manufactured goods that Australia needs to import.
A graph of a country's demand for raw materials, as it happens, looks a bit like a boomerang (see chart 5). At a certain stage of development, as with, say, Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, demand for metal and coal becomes intense as rail networks are built and demand for cars, fridges and other materials-heavy goods soars. Later on, as the country gets richer still, demand switches to less weighty goods: financial services, music, movies and holidays. Australia's good fortune is that, not long after Japan began its backswing, China started booming. And it could be a long time before China's demand for raw materials starts to ebb. Once the rift caused by the Taiwan crisis in 1996 had healed, Mr Howard started courting the Chinese and never stopped. This year's statistics are likely to show that China has become Australia's second-biggest trading partner, taking over from America (see chart 6).
If it could, Australia would go on happily being friends with both China and America. But there is one obvious problem, notes Hugh White, head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. In the past, Australia's biggest trading partner, Japan, was a close ally of its closest ally, America. The America-China-Australia triangle is a different construct altogether.
Before September 11th 2001, China was regarded as a “strategic competitor” in Washington—and as the engagement in Iraq winds down, it is sure to become so again. Already, tension between America and China over Taiwan has been ratcheted up a few notches. And Australia has already been drawn into Sino-American rivalries by an American demand that it help lobby European countries not to lift their arms embargo against China.
This unwanted loyalty test will seem as nothing compared with what will happen if America has to assert itself again in the Taiwan strait, and asks—as it surely will—for Australian support, citing the ANZUS pact. The difficulty of being all things to all men would rapidly become apparent.
The near abroad
These storm-clouds aside, one unsung success of the Howard years has been its willingness to take up the burden of the South Pacific, a collection of dysfunctional island nations that no one else wants to grapple with. The first instance was the Australian-led intervention in East Timor, in 1999: but that involved two dozen countries and was blessed with a full-scale UN Security Council resolution. More recently, Australia has found itself drawn into much smaller-scale operations with a big civilian component in the Solomon Islands, in Papua New Guinea and even in Nauru: all countries that became independent only in the late 1960s or 1970s, and have signally failed to prosper. Elsina Wainwright, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who has written on Australia's “near abroad”, sees September 11th as instrumental: it helped to focus minds on the dangers of failing states.
The Solomons, a collection of 1,000 islands wracked by civil war and political and economic breakdown, marked a key departure for Australia. Little more than two years ago, the Australian government was still insisting that it could not “presume to fix the problems of the South Pacific countries”. But as the situation in the islands, a three-hour flight from Brisbane, continued to deteriorate, the government performed a complete U-turn. In July 2003, it established and led a multilateral, but overwhelmingly Australian, regional-assistance mission. The Australians are now training the Solomons' own police, and have brought in a team of civil servants to help rebuild the country's economy so that it will eventually be able to function on its own.
But what really spooks Australian planners is Papua New Guinea. It is far bigger than the Solomons (5.8m people rather than 500,000), very much closer, and was an Australian colony until 1975. It has an appalling AIDS problem, a history of attempted secession and abortive coups, and an economy that has stagnated since independence. In the hope of forestalling its collapse, Australia has long thrown money at it: now it is throwing people.
In an exercise modelled on the Solomons intervention, but without the military component, Australia in December 2003 launched its “enhanced co-operation programme” for Papua New Guinea, sending Australian police officers and civil servants to work there. Something similar, but on a much smaller scale, is happening in Nauru. The jury is still out on the new doctrine of “co-operative intervention”, but at least the Australians are trying.
If only they could show the same imagination in their relations with East Timor, which they bravely helped create in 1999. Australia and the world's newest country are still locked in a nasty argument over the share-out of revenues from oil deposits in the Timor strait.
The original deal, based on a carve-up going back to the time of Suharto, when Australia was one of the few countries in the world to recognise the occupation of East Timor, was extremely favourable to the Australians. It should now be renegotiated, because on any reasonable reckoning most of the oil lies in Timorese waters. Australia has offered big concessions, but not yet big enough. Its continued meanness to East Timor is a blot on its otherwise shining foreign-policy record.