Exorcising the ghosts

Australia’s new, old foreign policy

by James Curran

Nearly fifty years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson decided to begin scaling down Washington’s disastrous war in Vietnam, the Australian Minister for the Air, Peter Howson, confided to his diary that ‘to my mind it’s the first step of the Americans moving out of Southeast Asia and … within a few years, there’ll be no white faces on the Asian mainland’.

Johnson’s decision, followed by Richard Nixon’s statement in July 1969 on the tiny Pacific island of Guam that the United States would never again get involved in a land war in Asia, seemed to spell American withdrawal from the region, or, as the then head of External Affairs in Canberra put it, from ‘West of Hawaii’.

It was geopolitical shorthand that sent shivers down the spine of officials, especially coming so soon after the British government’s decision to wind back its military presence in Asia, or what London referred to as ‘East of Suez’. One local newspaper likened Whitehall’s decision to the serving of a ‘Far East death warrant’. Taken together, it appeared that Canberra’s Cold War nirvana – having its ‘great and powerful friends’ engaged in the region to keep the threat of Asian communism as far away as possible – was coming to an end. Australia was on its own. It would have to fend for itself as never before.

As the record shows, it did.

When it was clear in the 1970s that neither Europe nor the United States offered Australia a sense of security, the country energetically embraced the countries and cultures of Asia in a new way. The process had its agonies – who can forget Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s warning in 1980 that Australia was destined to be the ‘poor white trash of Asia’ – but it also prompted a period of as yet unrivalled creative Australian diplomacy.

Yet even after more than a half century of engagement with Asia, the fear that Australia’s ‘white’ heritage continues to make it the odd one out in the region persists. This despite the end of ‘White Australia’, the adoption of multiculturalism as the national orthodoxy of the country’s self-definition, not to mention a range of initiatives – among them the creation of APEC, the Cambodia Peace Agreement, membership of the East Asia Summit, and countless Free Trade Agreements with regional countries – that have been so central to successive governments’ foreign policies.

But in late 2022, Foreign Minister Penny Wong lamented that over the previous decade of Coalition governments ‘we allowed old narratives to re-emerge that positioned Australia as the other’. Where from the late nineteenth century Asia had been the ‘other’ for Australia, its psychological nemesis, Wong now lamented that Australia had again been placed on the wrong side of this cultural equation.

Unpacking that one line is crucial to understanding the unfolding story of the Albanese government’s foreign policy. The older narrative to which Wong refers was revealed most powerfully in the surreal afternoon light bathing Scott Morrison’s trip to Cornwall in June 2021 to hold preliminary discussions on what would become the AUKUS agreement. Like Robert Menzies, Morrison sought warmth with great and powerful friends at a time of great uncertainty in the region. And like Menzies, he chose to stop in Asia only briefly along the way. Under the auspices of AUKUS, Australia will cooperate with Britain and the United States to build nuclear-powered submarines and cooperate on a whole range of other security-related initiatives.

Conceived by Morrison, the arrangement has nevertheless been backed – with as much, if not more, enthusiasm – by Prime

Minister Anthony Albanese and especially Defence Minister Richard Marles. Albanese even told the Guardian’s Katharine Murphy earlier this year that had Labor been in office at the time, he too would have initiated AUKUS. Labor leaders are wont to credit their own party with conceiving what later became ANZUS in the crucible of World War II: now Albanese is clearly at pains to convince voters he is every bit the co-author of AUKUS. A scion of Labor’s left who once decried the US war on Iraq now comes to render homage at the altar of the alliance.

The initial reaction to the announcement from some regional countries, especially Indonesia and Malaysia, was swift. Already piqued by the lack of consultation from Canberra, they expressed concern about AUKUS’s potential to feed a regional arms race and its implications for Australia’s obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation regime. For some in the region, it added more turbulence to already choppy strategic waters, and the deal seemed the return of an older story – that when a threat from the north disturbs Australia’s psychological equilibrium, its strategic impulse is to huddle in the collective bosom of London and Washington.

Since the federal election in May 2022, it has been a key ambition of Wong to counter this ‘older’ narrative in regional perceptions of where Australia stands. The foreign minister backs AUKUS – but worries about the perceived cultural opprobrium (the white man’s club reconvened) that comes with it. If former Whitlam Immigration Minister Al Grasby said in 1973 ‘give me a shovel’ to bury once and for all the White Australia policy, Wong is on a personal mission to explode the myth that somehow, Australia still doesn’t belong in Asia. Talking about Australian multiculturalism abroad, she said recently in an interview, ‘confounds negative narratives about us’. And the lodestar of her approach has been to consistently stress that Australia supports ASEAN centrality, and that it comes to listen to the region, not lecture it.

The problem, however, is that at the same time the government not only defends AUKUS but projects its importance in the rhetoric of ‘shared values’ with America and Britain. That doesn’t play well in Southeast Asia. Wong’s mission is to keep those tensions – between the dominance of AUKUS in Australia’s strategic imagination and the rhetoric of reassurance required for regional audiences – manageable.

Wong began this task in Fiji at the end of May 2022, a visit that took place only days after the election win and against the backdrop of a concerted Chinese attempt to secure a ten-nation

Pacific security agreement. She said Canberra would consistently proclaim to its neighbours and others ‘Australia’s full identity’. She explained that the 270 ancestries represented in the Australian population give Canberra ‘the capacity to reach into every corner of the world’. It is, she added, a ‘vast untapped power in modern

Australia’. Wong also declared the adoption of a ‘First Nations approach to foreign policy’, a move later defined as having both positive and defensive elements: positive in reaching out to a region ‘where traditional power structures and traditional owners are a very important part of cultures’, defensive so as to ‘remind people, when they dismiss us, of the fullness of who we are’.

Not since the Whitlam and Keating Labor governments has Canberra made so clear a connection between its Indigenous heritage, multicultural reality, and foreign policy posture. But it is not yet clear what the policy implications are of a ‘First Nations foreign policy’ – indeed, it is not clear at all that the term has been properly thought through.

Wong has been at pains to bring these two sides of Australian foreign and defence policy together, to blend the older US alliance with the new patchwork quilt of regional coalitions such as the Quad (with the US, Japan, and India) AUKUS and the Reciprocal Access Agreement with Tokyo. The attempt to do so was also on show late last year during a major speech in Washington.

When Wong discussed the Quad on that occasion, albeit to a sympathetic audience at the Carnegie Institute for International

Peace, there was no whiff of containment on the foreign minister’s breath. Rather, her concern was to ensure the Quad works ‘alongside ASEAN and other regional architecture to advance our shared interests with the countries of Southeast Asia’.

And while the US alliance system remains central, for Wong Australia’s relationship with Washington and its regional engagement are mutually reinforcing. Burnishing her credentials in Southeast Asian eyes, Wong pressed the Americans to do more to reduce the risk of conflict with China and make economic engagement in the region a ‘core alliance priority’. Her remarks reflected the reality that America’s Asian economic footprint remains patchy. Its ‘Indo-Pacific Economic Framework’ is a start, but its denial of market access to Southeast Asian partners rankles. And there is continued disquiet over Washington’s absence – unlikely to be reversed anytime soon – from the region’s bigger multilateral trade arrangements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)

Conscious of Southeast Asian countries’ longstanding distaste for great power rivalry in the region, Wong stressed that Canberra is ‘meeting the region where it is’. The message is significant, since Southeast Asian capitals have consistently said they do not wish to become pawns in US–China strategic competition.

Wong’s strategy is necessarily complex. This new-old Australian foreign policy, which attempts to weave the US alliance with new regional coalitions and a deepening relationship with Japan, will face its own headwinds. Some Southeast Asian countries still raise more than one eyebrow over the Quad and AUKUS. And it will be AUKUS that dominates debates over Australian foreign and defence policy for the foreseeable future.

At the AUKUS announcement in San Diego, the politics for all three leaders was pitch-perfect, the occasion heavy in symbolism and high on the rhetoric of ‘brothers in arms’. But the questions will be whether the path Australia has chosen is credible and affordable. None of these leaders will ever have to be held accountable for what will likely be major slippages in delivery, let alone cost blowouts, over the longer term. But the Americans have gained from Australia what they have sought since the signing of the ANZUS treaty in 1951, namely for Canberra to share in the responsibility for the defence of Taiwan.

Not that ASEAN leaders will wake every morning to fret or fixate on Australia’s fraught debate over nuclear powered submarines: they have their own substantial areas of focus. These include the ongoing strife and instability in Myanmar and supporting Indonesia’s ambitions for an activist role in its chairing of ASEAN this year. But it may be, too, that Wong does not wish yet either to confront Marles in Cabinet or to argue against a policy – AUKUS – which is not only running strong but has firm bureaucratic backing. AUKUS is not yet causing Albanese embarrassment here or in Washington, but it has the potential to do so, especially should the Defence Department’s less than glittering record in procurement and production affect this project too. The government talks a big game in delivering on AUKUS as a ‘whole of nation’ effort, but the pitfalls ahead are many. And like its predecessor it has done little, if anything, to explain to the general public how it is all meant to work.

Never has so much been so meagrely explained by so few.

Wong’s effort to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism have also had their more curious manifestations. It is not clear why, for example, during a visit to London in January, the foreign minister believed it necessary to remind the British of their own colonial legacy in the Pacific, as if it continued to be an albatross around London’s strategic neck. It flew in the face of decades of decolonisation and the fact that Britain was genuinely multicultural well before Australia adopted the term as its definition of national community. Little wonder that this effort to score trifling points at Britain’s expense left its Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, himself of African background, somewhat bemused.

There is, then, a certain defensiveness emerging here not only from the optics of AUKUS but from Wong’s determination to make up for what she believes was a decade of drift in the presentation of Australia’s international image. Her concern is clearly that through policies enacted by Morrison, Canberra was starting to once more be identified with attitudes of the 1950s. It is not a burden Ms Wong wishes to see Australia shoulder now.

Because at the height of the Cold War it was indeed a load Australia carried. And it was an approach Indonesian President Sukarno saw straight through when he accused Canberra of acting, along with Britain and the United States, in a ‘neo-imperialist plot’ to encircle Indonesia at the time of Malaysia’s creation in 1963. This is where AUKUS could be problematic for Australia in so far as British participation is concerned. In September 1964, during that very crisis with Jakarta over its ‘Confrontation’ with Malaysia, Canberra had to insist that London not authorise the return passage of a British aircraft carrier, HMS Victorious, through the Sunda straits, lest its presence further inflame Indonesian ire.

Of course, the strategic equation has changed fundamentally since that era. If the ‘China threat’ narrative of the Cold War was shown to be somewhat artificial, it is the centrepiece now, and for good reason. China might have dropped its wolf warrior diplomacy for the moment, but its reactions to criticisms from abroad remain sharply ideological. Furthermore, its nationalism flexes worrying strategic muscles that continue to challenge the strategic equilibrium.

In her first substantial interview since taking up the foreign affairs portfolio, given to the Australian Financial Review last month, Wong hinted – though she did not say so explicitly – that her emphasis on multiculturalism and a First Nations heritage was aimed at countering Chinese whispers that Australia’s white British heritage makes it a regional oddity. These tussles over narrative suggest that, like it or not, we are now very much in a ‘new Cold War’. And Canberra might find it increasingly tricky to speak one language to Southeast Asia, and another to its American ally. g

James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and the author, most recently, of Australia’s China Odyssey: From euphoria to fear (NewSouth, 2022).

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.