By Peter Varghese
The central strategic axis of the Indo-Pacific region is – and for the foreseeable future, will remain – bipolar: a competition for primacy between the US and China.
And while Australia has chosen where it sits, most of the region is determined not to choose either. They do not buy the line that they have to choose, and they certainly do not buy the line that we are engaged in an epic struggle between democracy and autocracy.
There is currently an unresolved tension at the core of Australian strategic policy. On the one hand, our foreign policy embraces a multipolar future where no country dominates.
Our defence policy, on the other hand, quietly conflates US leadership and US primacy, and is increasingly fixed around doing what we can to ensure the retention of US strategic primacy. That includes, it would seem, aligning our force posture to fit into the overarching US strategic objective, which is to deny China primacy by doubling down on US primacy.
With AUKUS we are also beginning to see a move away from the defence of Australia within an alliance context, which has been the conceptual underpinning of our defence policy for five decades, and an unarticulated drift towards forward defence 2.0.
Forward defence 1.0 was what we had before the Vietnam War. It assumed that Australia could never defend itself and so was better off dealing with threats a long way from our shores and under the leadership of the United States.
Some now argue that the very idea of finding security in Asia is hopelessly naive and made redundant by the authoritarian character and, it is asserted, the expansionist ambitions of China.
But finding security in Asia was never premised on an expectation that all the countries in Asia would find common strategic ground, or that Asia could become a region devoid of competing strategic ambitions.
A new strategic equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific region is likely to take an organic form rather than two competing alliance systems
Rather, finding security in Asia means finding the structures and strategic logic to create a stable and sustainable balance of power in the region. For Australia, that means finding the best means of constraining China’s ambition to recreate, at least in East Asia and the Western Pacific, the old Middle Kingdom where hierarchy was harmony, China sat at the top and other countries pre-emptively conceded the primacy of China’s interests.
Striking this balance will likely be the work of at least a generation. It will inevitably be a collective endeavour and, for the foreseeable future, it will be built around a US-China fault line.
The Quad is one expression of this emerging collective balance, although it has a long way to go as a serious strategic coalition, weighed down as it is with a broad and distracting public goods agenda.
A new strategic equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific region is likely to take an organic form rather than the two fixed and competing alliance systems that characterised the Cold War. And while the competition for primacy between the US and China will shape its contours, a stable balance does not require any one power to hold primacy. Indeed it may well work best if no single power holds primacy.
Australia, of course, has no problem with the retention of US primacy. After all we have been its beneficiary. But constructing a stable China-constraining balance does not turn on the retention of US primacy, although it certainly requires the US to be a keystone of that balance.
There is a difference between US leadership and US primacy. US leadership signals a powerful United States that remains engaged in the region and that is the lead balancer of China. Without the US there can be no effective balancing of China.
US primacy, however, goes beyond leadership and balance. Its starting point is that the US cannot tolerate a peer competitor and its ensuing logic is that the US will therefore do whatever it takes to prevent such a competitor emerging. US global primacy is now deeply embedded in the strategic culture and national identity of the US.
Some assert that the US has already lost its primacy, but that underestimates the breadth of US power, its capacity for renewal even amidst political dysfunction, and the structural challenges facing China.
Moreover, there is a large difference between recognising the benefits to date of US primacy and fixing Australian policy around the retention of US primacy. However desirable US primacy has been for Australia, it is not a vital Australian interest.
Or to put it another way, the loss of US primacy may be regrettable, but it does not pose an existential threat to Australia. To assume it does is to handcuff ourselves to whatever the US decides it must do to retain its primacy. Those strategies may make sense for the US, but they might not always be in Australia’s national interest.
Going to war with China would be the starkest example, although that is something all of us would want to avoid.
Peter Varghese is Chair of Asialink and Chancellor of the University of Queensland. This is an edited version of remarks to Asialink’s Weary Dunlop dinner on October 8, 2024.
This article was originally published in the Australian Financial Review