Why we must waltz with America and China at the same time

Australia, the great American columnist Charles Krauthammer once noted, is an “island of tranquillity in a roiling region”. We understand that peace and prosperity, he said, do not come with the air we breathe, but are maintained by power – once the power of the British Empire, now the power of the United States. Anything that disturbs the regional status quo is not in our national interest.

However, the cold hard reality is that as China’s power grows, its definition of national interest increases. As a result, it will seek a sphere of influence on which its future prosperity and stability depends.

Nothing odd about that; it’s what all rising great powers do. Think of the US in the 19th century when it pushed the European powers out of the western hemisphere.

Nor is it surprising that, in response to China’s rise, Washington will go to great lengths to stop Beijing from dominating East Asia and marshal a coalition of states to contain China. What, after all, was the point of Barack Obama’s “pivot”? Or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent visit?

Therefore, a more intense strategic and economic competition between America and China is inevitable. This is what, in essence, federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie said in these pages a week ago. For his pains, he was immediately disowned by some of his own government colleagues and has since been denounced as gung-ho by the foolish. But it is what many foreign-policy experts have been saying for years.

The question is what should Australia do?

Earlier this month, two intellectual global heavyweights debated this question in Canberra. According to ANU professor Hugh White, Australia’s economic future will be dominated by China as the US turns tail and runs from the region. As a result, Canberra would be unwise to support Washington in a confrontation with China that America probably cannot win.

According to University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, it’s naive to think we can sit on the sidelines and get the best of both worlds: unconstrained trade with China under the US security umbrella. If we don’t support Uncle Sam in an increasingly intense rivalry with China, Australia will become an enemy. The US, our most important security and investment partner, will ruthlessly turn against us just as it did to other nations that left the US orbit: think of China, 1949; Cuba 1959; Iran, 1979.

Both White and Mearsheimer agree with Pompeo’s observation at a Centre for Independent Studies event on August 4 that “the world has been asleep at the switch” as China converts its economic power into military power. However, we should not overlook China’s very real weaknesses and limitations. Just look at demography. As a new film, One Child Nation, highlights, the draconian campaign of population control from 1979 to 2015 means that China will grow old before it grows rich.

Even if Beijing can sort out its long-term demographic problems, other big challenges loom: endemic corruption, a large and growing debt burden, ethnic tensions, and pervasive and extreme air and water pollution.

Like most Australians, I have long believed we do not face a sharp choice between going with America or China (as dramatised in a brilliant new ABC comedy sketch of “International Bachelor”). We just have had to be much more agile, flexible and nuanced and ride two horses simultaneously rather than one. It is a bit of a trick, but it can be done.

Balance-of-power politics could work to our advantage and give us leverage in playing one off against the other. After all, as rivals, China and the US are concerned to gain support from third parties – and Australia is not a negligible presence in the south-east Asian context in which both powers have a deep interest.

Unlike the other US treaty allies, Australia is not involved in any territorial disputes with its neighbours. At the fulcrum between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, we offer an expanse of rich strategic and economic promise that Washington would like to influence.

We are also a critically important supplier of energy, raw materials and food to China, which adds a measure of leverage to US efforts to shape China’s economic and political choices.

Trade is important, but when the moment of truth arrives, security trumps prosperity. And although values are also important, interests always trump ideals.

As the British Victorian-era foreign secretary Lord Palmerston famously observed, a nation has no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies. Its interests are eternal and perpetual.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and a presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.