AUSTRALIA’S ROLE IN THE INDO-PACIFIC’S SHIFTING POWER DYNAMICS David Morris Australia has become a flashpoint in the new geopolitical contest between China and the “West.” Alleged cyberattacks, political influence operations, and economic coercion by China provide salacious headlines. Australia is pushing back, banning Huawei, resisting China’s aid to the South Pacific, and adopting a more aggressive military posture. Trust in Australia’s continued economic interdependence with China is collapsing, but, at the same time, continuing to outsource its security to an increasingly erratic United States appears to be a risky bet. A new, more independent Australia may yet emerge from the current geopolitical shift, which will axiomatically require deeper partnerships with its regional neighbours to shape a more stable Indo-Pacific. Australia may not face a choice between the US and China as both major powers perceive it but may rather finally develop a grand strategy for living with Asia. This may require Australia to re-evaluate itself, as it is, rather than how it once wished to be. Australians have not traditionally given much thought to geopolitics. Despite being less than half a per cent of the world’s population, Australians have a whole continent to themselves at the end of the Southeast Asian archipelago, distant from the world’s traditional points of conflict, and are fortunate to have enjoyed almost uninterrupted peace in modern times. Australia was famously described as the “lucky country,”1 abundant in natural assets, wealth, and social capital, and generally well governed by high-quality institutions. The phrase was intended to be ironic, however, coined to reflect on Australia’s generally mediocre leadership. Despite presiding over 12% of the world’s surface, a territory rich in resources, and a remarkably successful social model based
on a blend of forward-looking egalitarianism and liberalism, Australia has never formed an independent identity or grand strategy to stake its position in the world. Initially, formed as a dominion of the British Empire, Australia waged no battle to create its nation, it evolved through democratic gradualism and continued to see itself as a cultural outpost rather than a new world. In the absence of a grand strategy to secure its good luck, Australia has consistently gone to war in support of its “great and powerful friends” to demonstrate its loyalty in the hope that such loyalty will be returned should Australia ever be directly threatened. So persistent is this loyalty that, even after the failure of the British Empire to defend Australia in World War II, loyalty was simply transferred to the US from 1941 onwards. This dependence syndrome, which has deep cultural and military roots, sustained a cultural gaze that skipped over the neighbourhood and remained firmly focussed on the United Kingdom and the US. After supporting independence for Indonesia in 1945, few Australians learned the language or did business with the fourth-largest nation in the world to its immediate northwest. After giving independence to its former colony, Papua New Guinea, in 1975, most Australians barely gave the young nation a second look despite a massive development aid relationship. From time to time in the post-war era, Australia demonstrated an appetite to play the role of “middle power,” engaging and partnering with a broader range of partners than its traditional “great and powerful friends” to pursue its interests. Australia formed coalitions that were influential in peacekeeping, arms control, trade negotiations, and in other areas that shaped its environment, with its influence, to be sure, bolstered by the US-led rules-based PARTNERS AND INFLUENCES
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