What If Australia and New Zealand Exit Pax Americana?  

As the US piles on pressure in the Asia-Pacific region in its attempt to contain China it is increasingly drawing Australia and New Zealand deeper into what many perceive as an anti-China military alliance: AUKUS.  The trilateral pact that links the US, UK, Australia – and potentially New Zealand – is presented as a partnership “to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable”.

With hundreds of billions of Australian dollars already ear-marked for nuclear attack submarines, with US B52, submarine other bases multiplying Down Under, and discussions around cyberwarfare, hypersonic missiles and other weapons, a growing number of Australasians are questioning the wisdom of hitching their wagon to a belligerent US that appears hell-bent on pursuing a doomed mission to retain primacy in the region.

New Zealanders and Australians are slowly coming to terms with the momentous changes coming their way. For a couple of centuries both have been outposts of a Western empire that is now losing its dominance of the region.

Singaporean Kishore Mahbubani, twice President of the UN Security Council, says Australia – and this applies equally to New Zealand – is going to have a very difficult time in the Asian century if we do not adjust our headsets:

“Australia has benefited enormously from the 200 years of Western domination of world history. The West will remain strong but will no longer be the single dominant civilization. So Australia, psychologically, has got to accept that it is in a multi-civilizational world. Australia will have to adjust and adapt to Chinese power and live with that reality. It means a psychological adjustment first before you carry out your other adjustments.”

Professor Hugh White, Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, is one of Australia’s sharpest defense analysts. He says the Western preeminence that has framed the political and economic order in Asia for centuries is facing the most severe challenge it has ever faced.

Our two countries will be hugely impacted by how the US deals with the rise of China and the other Asian powers.  Few people, for example, are even aware that our close neighbor Indonesia will be the world’s fourth largest economy and with it a significant power by the middle of this century.

Professor White set out the three options open to the US, each consequential for Australasians.  It could seek to contain China and maintain its regional hegemony (doomed to fail, or worse).  It could accept a role as “one of the gang” and stay involved (White’s preferred scenario) or the US could eventually be pushed out of the region (the scary-sounding option for Australasians).

AUKUS, however misguided it is, could at least be a way into a much-needed debate about how Australia and New Zealand position themselves going forward. This has big implications for US power projection in the region.

Current thinking in Canberra and in Wellington has reflexively signed us up for Team America.  Leaders and promoters of the alliance talk of our “shared values”.  Opponents ask what values we share with the most violent country on the planet.  A sounder template, opponents of AUKUS argue, is for our foreign policy to center around close adherence to UNSC resolutions, and not joining up to things that don’t have such authorization, including military adventures in the Red Sea or South China Sea.

Recent moves by the New Zealand government to move New Zealand into the anti-China camp have been lambasted by former Prime Minister Helen Clark and ex National Party leader Don Brash. What is being abandoned, they argue, without any public consultation, is our relatively independent foreign policy.   They sounded a warning about where real danger lies:

“China not only poses no military threat to New Zealand, but it is also by a very substantial margin our biggest export market – more than twice as important as an export market for New Zealand as the US is.”

“New Zealand has a huge stake in maintaining a cordial relationship with China.  It will be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain such a relationship if the Government continues to align its positioning with that of the United States.”

Influential former Aussie PM Paul Keating says his country should be celebrating the rise of China not turning itself into a US protectorate to confront China. The country he says needs to recognize which region it lives in and find its security “in Asia” not “from Asia”.

It is more than a little mystifying why Labor under Prime Minister Albanese is allowing an expansion of US bases that many see as virtually handing over the country’s strategic decision-making to Washington.  The US neither confirms nor denies if, for example, nuclear weapons are on board a sub.  They are equally unlikely to consult should they ever choose to launch these weapons.  The presence of the US bases turns us into targets should things get out of hand.

New Zealand’s government also seems increasingly captured by Pentagon-think. Will Kiwis be pressured to move away from the long-held anti-nuclear policy and drift further from a US-friendly-but-relatively-independent approach?  If the US has a brain explosion and pushes the region into a proper war, our long-held assumption that we are far away and safe may evaporate in a flash.

“If the risk of war is high, then the risk of a nuclear war is high,”Professor White says. “This may seem a bit melodramatic, but we cannot avoid a discussion of whether our countries believe we should go to war with China, if necessary, to try to preserve the US-led order in Asia. Because that is the big choice we potentially face.”

Rather than upping military budgets, allowing our countries to be turned into US protectorates, and preparing to kill Chinese people, it would be wiser to invest in deepening our relationships with all our neighbors.

Professor White says the emerging world order will demand more of us; but we shouldn’t catastrophize.

“What we need to do is to prepare for it. The heart of it is that our neighbors will be much more important to us than our old, distant friends – and we can’t be sentimental about that.”

If that perspective gains traction amongst the populations of Australia and New Zealand, it could lead to an astonishing event: two pillars of the old white, English-speaking order could gently peel off from Pax Americana and align their foreign policy with an emerging reality: Like it or not, mate, we now live in a multi-polar world.

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