Australia and Japan in the same boat

After being criticized at home (and, supposedly, in Tokyo) for failing to visit Japan on a swing through Asia in March, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will be in Tokyo this week for meetings with Prime Minister Fukuda.

Andrew Shearer, a fellow at Australia's Lowy Institute for International Policy, has an excellent op-ed in The Australian (H/T to JG) putting Mr. Rudd's visit in perspective and proposing a framework for Australian foreign policy that balances relations with China and Japan.

Without denying the importance of the Sino-Australian relationship, Shearer argues that a strong relationship with Japan — Australia's largest export market — is an indispensable asset for Australian foreign policy. He gets at the important point that Australia and Japan share concerns. Both have deepening economic ties with China, but at the same time they fear China's growing heft and want the US — each country's most important ally — to remain engaged in the region. But "engaged" is not a code word for containing China. As Shearer argues, "It doesn't mean Australia and the US should not pursue realistic, constructive relations with China. Calm dealings between Washington and Beijing, in particular, are important for Japan's deep relationship with China and for vital Australian strategic and economic interests."

The challenge for not only Japan and Australia but for India, South Korea, and China's neighbors in Southeast Asia is balancing their ever more important economic relationships with China with their security relationships with the US, a US that is unfortunately prone to militarized overreaction that could undermine economic relationships with China. (To be fair, US bluster is matched by a China that is rapidly modernizing its military and looking to bolster its power projection capabilities). The countries on China's periphery, especially Australia and Japan, clearly value the US hedge against a belligerent China. The challenge for all of these countries clustered between the US and China is to moderate the behavior of both powers; these mid-sized players must ensure that the US is around and engaged but not overly aggressive or prone to crusading, and that China is a "responsible stakeholder" and force for stability in the region.

Accordingly, the value of cooperation between India, Australia, and Japan is not as a democratic ring around China but as a force for restraint acting on both China and the US.

In light of Mr. Fukuda's recent remarks on Japanese foreign policy, I think that the prime minister would be sympathetic to this vision of the region. Is Mr. Rudd capable of achieving this balance in Australian foreign policy?

I'm optimistic that he will. The need to balance the economic relationship with China and the security relationship with the US is bound to push Canberra in the direction of closer relations with other countries in the region that share this predicament.

In Asia's future, flexibility first

In the week since Prime Minister Abe called for an organization of democracies that would implicitly encircle China, his proposal has been met with deafening silence from the capitals of the countries that would be involved, illustrating just how out of touch with new realities the prime minister's foreign policy thinking is.

As I've argued before, the future of Asia is flexibility: each power in the region will work to expand its options, constantly hedging (even with allies) and looking to secure interests by whatever means necessary. In the four countries that would Abe would like to include in his community — India, Australia, Japan, and the US — there are manifold signs that these governments are interested in expanding their options and thus are less than willing to be bound to an organization like that proposed by Mr. Abe.

In Australia, for example, a recent poll by the Lowy Institute recorded declining support for the ANZUS treaty, driven perhaps by fears of entrapment in the wake of the Iraq war. It is difficult to conceive of hostility between the US and Australia, but perhaps the ANZUS treaty should be included in any discussion of the end of alliances, as Australians begin to question whether the alliance with the US still serves their interests.

India, meanwhile, has long distrusted its neighbors and fears encirclement and international ostracism. While American commentators tend to view the pending US-India civilian nuclear agreement as the doorway to a strategic partnership in Asia, this editorial in the Times of India argues that the agreement could result in India's playing a more active role in the regional balance of power. That would facilitate greater cooperation between the US and India, as well as India and Japan, but it would be opportunistic cooperation, dependent on the vicissitudes of the regional balance — hardly the great alliance of democracies envisioned by Mr. Abe.

And the US? Washington has given no signs that it is on board with Mr. Abe's scheme, and the to do over Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte's criticism of the planned Taiwanese referendum on UN membership suggests that stability, as ever, remains Washington's primary interest in Asia.

Even the feared partnership between China and Russia is exaggerated, as argued by the Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer. While I disagree with Bremmer's conclusion that "China is well on its way to becoming a status-quo power" — unless "well on its way" means decades — his assessment that Russia's and China's strategic interests over the long term are at odds is spot on.

China, in particular, knows that its interests demand cooperation with the region's powers, which makes it, if not a status quo power, than at least a pragmatic power. Hence the Sino-Japanese defense summit, in which the Chinese and Japanese defense ministers concluded final agreements on exchanging port visits for warships and setting up a Sino-Japanese hot line.

Even if existing alliances persist, it is unlikely that new exclusionary organizations and partnerships will be established within the region. The US hub-and-spoke alliance system, established in the early years of the cold war, will not be transformed into the kind of organization envisioned by Mr. Abe.

Australia plays the game

A day after reports that Australia is set to join the US and Japan in researching missile defense — an agreement reached at the first Australia-Japan 2 + 2 meeting — Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has, in the words of The Australian, "defend[ed] China's military build-up."

Readers can probably imagine that I have no problem with Mr. Downer's "defense." Some could accuse me of doing the same as Mr. Downer.

There is good sense in not exaggerating China's defense modernization, which is still overwhelming concerned with Taiwan, and even as China looks further afield for a defense role, there is no guarantee that a great regional security role for China will necessarily be hostile to the US and its allies.

This idea is, of course, controversial in certain circles in Washington and Tokyo (just ask Mr. Downer's Japanese counterpart). But Australia is not in a position to join a grand coalition to contain China, and thus Australia's involvement in missile defense research seems to come with major caveats, bearing in mind Australia's relationship with China. Does the Japanese government really think it can afford to act differently?

So I must raise the same objections I raised back in March, when commentators burdened the Australia-Japan security declaration with meaning that it was not designed to bear. Rather Australia, like its ASEAN neighbors, is playing — and ought to play — the great game, maneuvering among the region's great powers to maximize its advantage.

Trilateral alliance or limited hedge?

With Australian Prime Minister John Howard set to arrive in Japan today for a four-day visit, Australia and Japan have reportedly agreed to a new security declaration that will likely (I say likely because it hasn't been released to the public yet) enhance bilateral cooperation on a range of defense issues, including intelligence sharing, PKO, and humanitarian relief. Prime Ministers Abe and Howard will meet on Tuesday.

It is probably a mistake -- for both Beijing and Washington -- to overestimate the value of this agreement, because Australia is especially trapped between the prospect of an antagonistic China and a cooperative China.

On the one hand, relations between China and Australia have enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years (see this speech from 2004 by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer). The economic relationship has been particularly strong, with China hungrily importing a range of primary products and services from Australia, as this overview of the relationship provided by the Australian government as background to a China-Australia FTA attests.

At the same time though, under Prime Minister Howard, Australia has strengthened its alliance with the US, acting as the third partner in a kind of global Anglosphere posse (the activities of which are, to say the least, distinctly at odds with China's vision of the global order).

Howard captured Australia's unenviable position in this mealy-mouthed comment in a joint press conference with Vice President Cheney during the latter's recent visit to Australia:

In relation to China, Australia, as you know, has striven over the last decade to build a very close relationship with China. But we've always done it against a background of being realistic about the nature of political society in that country. We have no illusions that China remains an authoritarian country. We have sought to emphasize in our relations with China those practical things that we have in common. And we do, I hope, with appropriate modesty regard it as one of the foreign policy successes of this country over the last decade that we have simultaneously become ever closer in our relationship with our great ally the United States, but at the same time built a very constructive, understandable relationship with China.

But we always look at these things from a practical standpoint. We have no false illusions about the nature of China's society. But we see positive signs in the way in which China and the United States have worked together, particularly in relation to North Korea. And nothing is more important to the stability of our own region at the present time than resolving the North Korean nuclear situation. And I think the way in which China and the United States have worked together on that is wholly positive and is obviously to the credit of both of those countries.

So to view this agreement -- together with last year's US-Japan-Australia Trilateral Strategic Dialogue -- as anything more than a slight hedging option in the midst of very real cooperation between all three countries and China is overblown. Each is trapped in its own way by mutual interdependence with China.

As overblown responses go, that includes China's, which, according to The Australian, has voiced reservations of the Australia-Japan declaration. If Australia, Japan, and the US are bolstering their hedge against Chinese belligerence, it's because China has given them enough reason for concern: hedging by these countries is a sign of Chinese policy failure, not belligerence on the part of the trilateral partners. If China were to sound slightly more conciliatory and look slightly less like a country eager for regional hegemony buttressed by military power, each party to the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue would be less likely to push for a hard hedge.

I can't help but wonder what post-Howard Australia will look like in terms of its Asia-Pacific policy. Will Australia, in some sense like post-Koizumi Japan, compensate for Howard's emphasis on strong ties with Washington by reorienting to continental Asia and placing less emphasis on the nascent tripartite maritime hedge?