Why we can’t rely on our alliance with the US
A new book by Sam Roggeveen is bound to profoundly unsettle the Australian national security policy consensus.
James CurranInternational Editor
Sep 27, 2023
Late last year Michael Green, who advised President George W Bush on Asia policy, observed that of all the United States’ regional allies, none but Australia exhibited so vigorous a public debate over its alliance with Washington.
“We’ve never had a former Japanese or Korean foreign minister or prime minister question the alliance” he said, shocked. And he conceded it occasionally rattles White House nerves.
But this renders Australia more intriguing. Public opinion consistently backs the alliance, and Australian political culture has, at least since 2001, sanctified it as holy writ.
Yet, as a new book by the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen shows, the local debate over the future of the US alliance, and what that means for Australian defence and foreign policy, shows no sign of abating. That is welcome.
It is important that entrenched assumptions in the national strategic culture are contested and Roggeveen’s book, The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace, casts a rock in the policy pool when he forecasts the end of the American alliance. It is a view that will unsettle and probably even enrage those who swim within set strategic flags.
Roggeveen acknowledges that “the prospect of a diminished US alliance and a more independent Australia remains inconceivable, even disloyal”. It is a sad reflection on the temper of our times: indicating a return to the rancour that characterised debates over Vietnam in the 1960s and conscription in 1916-17. The resulting miasma in both cases left Australia ill-equipped for what followed.
Nevertheless, the propositions that animate this book shake the firmament on which the Australian strategic orthodoxy rests. Taken together they amount to nothing less than a US-style declaration of independence; the book concludes by invoking that very document, suggesting that Australians might well come to the “same conclusion America’s founders came to about their ties to Great Britain”.
Withdrawal from Asia
Roggeveen’s stance is not anti-American, nor is he isolationist. But he contends that the United States is unable to remain the leading power in Asia; that Australia can no longer rely on the US; that the US military would not come to Australia’s defence in the event of a Chinese attack and that Australia can, in the event of Sino-US conflict over Taiwan, elect not to participate, a move he knows would effectively “bury the alliance”. It would be a “grave step”, he says, “but the risk of being dragged into a US-China war is much greater than the risk of going it alone”.
The book is a self-styled “dialogue” with the work of Hugh White, but it also rests squarely upon arguments previously articulated by former prime minister Paul Keating, former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby and others.
It is a weakness of the work that Roggeveen does not situate himself within, or even acknowledge, that broader literature. At the very least it would have highlighted the originality of his argument: his approach blends what he calls “reluctant conservatism” – preferring “moderation over extremism, tradition over ideology” – and a version of radical nationalism, in which the country finally grasps the nettle of independence.
Roggeveen argues that American withdrawal from Asia is already unfolding before our eyes. Since neither America’s physical security, trade, nor its institutions face an existential challenge from China’s rise, it will eventually retreat, leaving Australia defenceless. This won’t happen overnight: instead, there will be a “long sunset of American power in Asia”.
Despite this emphasis on a “long in-between”, he believes that the “moment for preserving American dominance has already passed”. Washington is being “slowly drained of resolve”. All that remains is its exceptionalism, which Roggeveen hopes is deep if it is to withstand the logic of such events. He is assuming, in essence, that the United States will eventually be rational in withdrawing from confronting China. That is some assumption.
Another lacuna here is Trump and Biden’s renewal of America’s Asian alliances – and the idea that Washington sees maintaining its primacy as achievable not via unilateralism but through those relationships.
Roggeveen is not alarmed by his forecast for dimming American power. He sees the “baffling reluctance” in Canberra to “nail down the exact nature of China’s military threat to Australia” as an invitation to undertake that very task. Although he is no Pollyanna on Chinese military power or Beijing’s ambition, the possible scenarios of Chinese hostility towards Australia are subjected to searing scrutiny: bombing, blockade, invasion: and with meticulous logic, he dismisses the plausibility and viability of each.
Concert of powers
He is, though, more alarmed by the prospect of a Chinese hostility towards Australia “if the US were using Australia as a base to attack China”, and he sees this as precisely what Canberra and Washington are now doing. Still, Roggeveen views distance and relative size as Australia’s biggest asset – not so much a tyranny of distance as the precious reality of it: “Our relative smallness protects us because it ensures we will never loom large enough for China to throw its entire weight at us,” he writes.
The book is not short on ideas for how Australia might deal with a post-American Asia in which China is the dominant power.
The answer lies as much in Roggeveen’s argument for an “echidna” style defence strategy – in which Australia does enough to make itself so prickly as to render the costs of an attack too high by any potential aggressor – as it does in a re-energised Australian tradition of statecraft to create more regional architecture. He wants Canberra to sign a “new security treaty with Jakarta of unprecedented intimacy”, inaugurate an EU-style economic and political pact between Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands, and fashion a new “conservative order for Asia”, comprising the US, China, Russia, Japan, India and Indonesia.
Roggeveen’s treatment of Indonesia’s central importance to Australia’s future is the most valuable part of the book. He draws directly on the approach that underpinned Paul Keating’s 1995 agreement for maintaining security with President Suharto. It should “nag at Australian policymakers”, he writes, if Jakarta gets so powerful that it considers Australia irrelevant to its strategic aims.
His “new regional order” to preserve peace will boast a common set of institutions, laws and customs to “tame the power contest”. Like Hugh White before him, Roggeveen’s thinking here flows from the idea of a “concert of powers”, based on the strategic equilibrium achieved in 19th century Europe that essentially guaranteed a 100-year peace from 1815-1914. But he does elaborate on the differences between the security domain then as opposed to now.
Even though Australia, as a mere middle power, cannot make the cut in this new order, Roggeveen suggests Canberra not only midwife it, but encourage the others to “manage the US out” so that a stable balance is created “in which China’s place is secure but where it has no realistic hope of achieving dominance”.
By the end, however, Roggeveen concedes this new order will serve “merely as the framework within which states pursue their own objectives”, “moving power politics and the threat of war to the background”. That too is a noble, but heroic assumption. According to this theory, the pursuit of the national interest in the world system is like the classical economists’ view of the pursuit of individual interest in the domestic economy. Somehow an invisible hand appears from behind the scenery to produce harmony and the common good.
Roggeveen sets this agenda for statecraft against successive Australian governments’ decisions for higher defence spending – decisions, he contends, made “in a state of near panic” deriving from doubts about American resolve and fear of China.
Sobering conclusion
Thus, he sees AUKUS as a “project of vaulting ambition that is out of step with Australian tradition as a military middle power, wildly at odds with our international status and, most importantly, a wasteful expenditure of public money that will make Australia less safe”.
The point here, too, is that this agreement – much like ANZUS itself, and Australia’s commitment to the Vietnam War, was not thrust upon a reluctant Canberra: Australia was its driving force. Still, Roggeveen is a sceptic on whether a nuclear submarine capability will ever be delivered. AUKUS’ “sheer sluggishness is also its virtue”, he writes because it means “there is time for Australia to change course”.
Roggeveen’s conclusion is sobering. Australia’s alliance true believers are now more American than the Americans, more committed to the US alliance and US leadership in Asia than the Americans themselves. It is a haunting echo of how a previous generation of Australian policymakers proclaimed themselves “more British than the British”, working feverishly, even after the fall of Singapore in 1942, to ensure London saw the defence of Australia and the defence of the empire as mutually reinforcing.
That idea ultimately foundered on the rocks of divergent British and Australian material interests in the 1960s. Roggeveen hears the same melancholy roar now, this time from America’s coast.
The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace by Sam Roggeveen (Black Inc).