HMAS Sydney: Garden Island to Jervis Bay

New experiences are best broached with impressions fully formed. And my impressions of navy-life, as I shuffled aboard HMAS Sydney this week for a voyage to Jervis Bay, were as lurid as they were predictable. If the world of think-tanks is one of relative comfort, the Navy belonged to an altogether different class of institution, one inhabited by boarding schools, prisons and commercial law firms. Theirs is of course a more orderly world: formal, ritualistic, demarcated by clear lines of authority and respect.

In a few cases I was right. Sailors and officers eat and socialise separately, on different levels of the ship – like the manor-house in Gosford Park. The latter gather in the nautical equivalent of a club-house, a warm blend of tweed, carpet and timber; the former in more synthetic surrounds, a mess-hall reminiscent of an old hospital cafeteria, blue vinyl and linoleum broken up by the occasional glint of stainless-steel. Fleet Command has tipped its hat to greater equality in recent years: everyone is now supposed to get the same food. But the rolling eyes of the galley-hands - flashing quiet indignation - suggest a rule honoured more in breach than observance.

Aside from this, hierarchy does not stand out aboard the Sydney. Far more pronounced is the ship’s innate hostility to its human inhabitants. Down below, nausea and claustrophobia jostle for position. Every surface is hard, or jagged, every protuberance an invitation to concussion. And the human spaces – the office, the sick-bay, the cabins – feel like they’ve been allocated begrudgingly, as an inconvenient afterthought to the placement of sensors and weapons. They feel temporary, too, like they could be downgraded at a moment’s notice to an even smaller space, should the guns and radars demand a bit of extra leg-room. Forget the ranks, this is Sydney’s real hierarchy.

By contrast to its psychological animosity toward the human body, Sydney’s biology is an almost flattering homage to it. The ship’s vital organs - the bridge, the operations room, the engine plant – are inseparable and symbiotic, operating with unnerving synchronisation. This doesn’t prevent their respective teams from claiming absolute centrality, of course, which for some reason I found faintly endearing. But it does impart on the whole competition a kind-of comical futility.

The ‘Ops-room’, darkened for cinematic effect and crammed with back-lit consoles, is, according to its steely occupants, ‘the difference between Sydney and a cruise-liner.’ The bridge exudes similar self-importance, albeit leavened with the odd self-deprecating counterpoint. The centre-piece up there is an absurdly small steering wheel - three inches in diameter, shaped like an old fashioned helm and operated nonchalantly by the helmsman’s index finger. This one’s steering a guided-missile frigate, the one that came off the production line before it is surely dangling off someone’s key-ring.

There’s not much for me to say about the engine plant. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting. I was just so preoccupied down there acting out my own version of hyper-masculinity – grunting and nodding knowingly, pretending to understand the mechanical intricacies of gas-turbine engines - that I really couldn’t take it in.

It’s ok, though. Thankfully, I had my impressions to fall back on.

America's paradoxical China policy

Is it a conventional expectation in Washington that a stronger China will also be more cooperative, as I recently suggested? Sam’s doubtful, and in a number of respects, I can understand his skepticism. The notion that a more powerful country will be more deferential seems so counterintuitive, so at odds with the weight of historical experience, that you'd probably be hard be hard pressed to find anyone, let alone a serious analyst of international affairs, to agree with such a proposition.

And yet, strange as it seems, that is precisely the assumption that has operated at the heart of US China policy for two decades, and which continues to shape Washington’s largely bipartisan approach towards China today.

America’s policy of engagement towards China - with its emphasis on trade and investment, on facilitating China’s growth by assuming responsibility for regional stability and security, and on integrating China into the institutions that make up America’s international order – was always intended, or at least justified, as a means to an end. The objective, like American strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was nothing less the wholesale transformation of China itself.

Internally, engagement was intended to democratize China by creating economic conditions that would eventually necessitate political liberalization. Externally, it was just as paternalistic, designed to attenuate China’s great power ambitions by ensuring that Beijing’s interests were fundamentally enmeshed in, rather than arrayed against, the status-quo, a bit like Japan today. As China became more prosperous, so too, it was imagined, would its stake in the international arrangements that had abetted its rise become more deeply entrenched - to the point where its interests would be virtually indistinguishable from those of the US.

Thus, Robert Zoellick famously called on China to become a ‘responsible stakeholder’, a formulation in which ‘responsibility’ was defined not only by China’s willingness to acknowledge the conventions and institutions of international policy, as Sam suggests, but also its willingness to accommodate itself to US primacy in Asia (more or les indefinitely) and adhere to American preferences on a range of important international issues, including Iran, North Korea and climate change, among many others.

Of course, from Washington’s perspective, things haven’t exactly gone to plan. As Gideon Rachman recently noted, China’s economic miracle has not brought with it inexorable political change, and, strategically, China has not grown up to resemble post-Cold War Japan. By contrast, Beijing has a narrow, clear-eyed view of its national interests, which it is unwilling, especially as its power and wealth accumulates, to subordinate to those of the US.

The bumpy road ahead for Sino-US relations

Hold on to your hats people, US-China relations are about to get ugly.

Obama may have turned out to be something of a diplomatic masochist, but even he has his limits. Having been rolled in China and dragged through the mud by the Chinese in Copenhagen, his serenity in dealing with Beijing over the past year appears to be giving way to a combination of indignation and frustration, and a desire to reassert US dominance in the face of China’s new triumphalism.

Last week, Hillary Clinton was dispatched to Asia with a simple message for the region: ‘America’s back’. That wouldn’t have been music to Chinese ears, but of course the impact of her message was dulled somewhat by the fact that she cancelled her trip to attend to a more urgent matter on the other side of the world, and, ironically, never made it past Hawaii. Welcome back.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the administration is putting the finishing touches on a massive arms package for Taiwan. At the very least, the deal looks set to contain several hundred advanced Patriot missiles, which, once deployed, would represent a significant qualitative improvement on the Ballistic Missile Defence systems presently fielded by Taiwan. Whether or not the package also includes the advanced F-16 fighter jets that have long been at the top of Taipei’s wish-list, or the Diesel submarine components that Taiwan needs for its own limited area denial strategy, is as yet unclear. My guess is that it will depend on Beijing’s willingness to make a few juicy concessions of its own.

Finally, as if to underscore his newfound delight in poking the dragon in its ribs, President Obama is apparently also preparing to tee up a meeting with the Dalai Lama, a favourite old stunt in Washington that never fails to arouse the passionate, sometimes truly venomous, reproach of the Chinese government, and in particular, its indefatigable Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

With any luck, all of this will conform to recent historical experience and turn out to be no than a brief downturn in relations. Every President since Ronald Regan has had to contend with a crisis in Sino-US relations near the beginning of their term – Bush Senior had Tiananmen, Clinton had the Taiwan missile crisis, and George W. Bush had the EP-3 incident – before setting differences aside in the interest of a solid economic relationship.

But there’s also a risk that this episode might be the start of something new, the opening moves in a new era of rivalry and tension in Sino-US relations, which many have long been expecting. You don’t need to be Thucydides to recognise the potential for combustible political relations in the presence of an established hegemon and a rising challenger.

Indeed, the intellectual ground in Washington seems to have been shifting on China in recent months. Although we’ve been fretting about it for a while here in Australia, in the US, a number of prominent commentators –mainstream ones, not just the hard-cases from places like the American Enterprise Institute – have only just begun to question the bizarre but conventional expectation in Washington that a stronger, more prosperous China would also be more cooperative. As the true strategic insignificance of Afghanistan becomes more obvious, there are signs that many are beginning to reckon with the extent to which the growth of Chinese power has eroded, and threatens to further erode, America’s position in the regional and global order.

Paul Krugman is agitating for a trade war with China over its undervalued currency, and Congress is all ears. Roger Cohen, normally a starry eyed optimist, predicts 2010 to be a year of rising protectionism, suspended military dialogue, Iranian discord, human rights disappointments, and wars of words" Even Thomas Friedman, Globalisation’s biggest fan, thinks that the US should see China’s rise as its twenty-first century Sputnik moment, a challenge against which to define America’s own national project.

For Canberra’s sake, as much as anyone’s, let’s hope the coming months are no more than a passing chill, and not the beginning of a long cold winter.

Architectural fantasies

As close allies of the US, Australia and Japan have had it pretty good for a long time. Since the end of World War II, neither has faced any major challenge to its security and both countries have prospered greatly from the stability America has provided.

Strange, then, that Australia and Japan, arguably the two greatest beneficiaries of America’s alliance system, have in recent months become the most vocal advocates of a radically different regional system, one in which American power and leadership would no longer be the defining feature. Kevin Rudd has proposed an Asia Pacific community, while Japanese Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has called for an East Asian community.

While the details remain vague, both proposals appear to rest on the same largely unspoken belief: that US primacy in Asia is an unsustainable basis for regional order, and that multilateral institutions, either singly or collectively, are the best possible replacement. Both leaders envisage a benign security community comprised of member states bound together by a common Asian identity, a shared commitment to maintaining peace among themselves, and a general reluctance to engage in divisive power politics.

To some observers, all of this institutional star gazing is a bit self-indulgent, the kind of diplomatic grandiosity available only to the leaders of countries like Japan and Australia, whose wealth and security are relatively well assured. This criticism, however, though not entirely unfounded, belies the very real long-term dilemma that both countries face.

For decades now, Asia’s stability has devolved naturally from America’s unrivalled power, which has allowed Washington to be everything to everyone. The US has protected Japan from China and, more indirectly, it has reassured China about Japan. For Australia and the rest of the region, the US has prevented the dangers that would arise if China and Japan were allowed to resume their competition for Asian supremacy.

But all of this is changing as shifts in the distribution of power produce new strategic calculations. China, increasingly confident in its long-term ability to see off any threat from Japan, no longer depends on the US to the same extent to prevent Tokyo’s rearmament. Across the sea, as China looms large, Japan needs the US more than ever, despite being apprehensive – and resentful — about relying on a strategically preoccupied ally who owes Beijing almost a trillion dollars. Meanwhile, the US itself faces the difficult question of whether to confront a rising China, accommodate it at the expense of its own position (as well as that of Japan), or simply expect Beijing to indefinitely resign itself to US primacy.

Having lasted now for many decades, it’s become tempting to conceive of Asia’s peace and stability as a permanent and irreducible feature of the regional environment. But beneath the trade and investment and all the day-to-day diplomacy, Asia’s great power rivalries are once again beginning to simmer. Without the dominance of the US, stability cannot be taken for granted, and in a more unpredictable environment such as this, US allies like Japan and Australia will eventually face up to some tough choices. As US primacy fades, they’ll either have to do a lot more to support their alliances with the US, or learn to expect a lot less out of them – or both.

However, if the dilemmas that Rudd and Hatoyama face are real and serious, the diplomatic solutions they’ve come up with so far fall well short of the mark. Most of the debate about a new regional architecture has focused on which countries should be included and which should be left out. Should the region have an entirely new institution, or could we simply reform one of Asia’s existing institutions, the East Asia Summit perhaps, APEC, or the ASEAN Regional Forum – or should we instead consolidate them all into one umbrella organisation?

These might be important questions, but only if creating a new regional architecture, or revamping the old one, really is an appropriate response to the seismic changes underway in Asia today, and that is what Rudd and Hatoyama have failed to adequately explain. How, exactly, will a shiny new architecture mitigate the risks of a more intense strategic competition, encouraging the major powers of Asia to behave nicely towards each other, to renounce the use of force as a way of resolving disputes, and to calculate their interests according to what’s good for the region and not just themselves. In other words, how will this new architecture stop states behaving like states?

The uncomfortable reality, of course, is that it can’t and won’t. Multilateral institutions are never more than the sum of their parts. They grow up to reflect the preferences of the powerful states that create them, or else the balance of power out of whose shadows they emerge. Even with funding, personnel and an expansive membership, institutions do not transcend power politics, as Rudd and Hatoyama might imagine, nor do they have an independently moderating effect on the strategic outlook of their member states.

Rather, they become another venue in which the same old rivalries and political games are played out – very much like the UN today.

There’s a more general point to take away here. In a world of self-interested states — with all its uncertainty and danger, and with no one to call on if things get ugly — no institutions, no matter how well funded, can eradicate the unfortunate suspicion and mistrust, and resulting hostility, that shape international life.

This is the inescapable dilemma that Rudd and Hatoyama need to think about as they head back to the drawing board.