He does it for a reason. While this ambiguity remains official policy, the US in particular has had several surprisingly clear moments of siding with Taiwanese sovereignty. Most spectacularly, this has involved repeated statements by President Joe Biden that the US would intervene militarily if China attacked Taiwan, even calling Taiwan “independent”.
White House officials were then forced to walk back those comments, becoming increasingly unconvincing. In particular, once you add the fact that US marines have been openly training with Taiwan’s military and that Donald Trump lifted restrictions on contacts between US and Taiwanese officials, he emphasized the commitments to Taiwan and sent it advanced weapons systems.
Meanwhile, Australia’s stance towards China has been more aggressive, sometimes provoked but sometimes not, as we saw when the Morrison government publicly called for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. And while the Albanian government was clearly not enamored of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, it would never criticize her publicly.
All of this underscores the Chinese ambassador’s emphasis that “China and Australia should make independent judgments … free from third-party interference.” Translation: Stop outsourcing your position to the US. And don’t choose the United States over China in the growing conflict between the two.
Again, China is identifying a position that Australia will not state, but that everyone knows to be true. Australian politicians might repeat the mantra that we don’t have to choose between China and the US, but we have to push, we have.
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This is exacerbated in Taiwan by a question no Australian politician will want to answer until they have no choice: if China invades and the US decides to send in its military, do we join them? Our approach to the US alliance says we probably would.
But the real debate would be whether or not this would be in our national interest. And that will depend on what consequences we are happy to bring. Are we happy that our economy is at a standstill? Are we going to risk an invasion, assuming the US will defend us? Will it change things if Trump is elected in two years?
Circumstances raise the question of a century. My reading of the Chinese language is that they really see us as US representatives in the Pacific. He would prefer that to change, and he will press to that end, but otherwise he is quite prepared to engage with us on these terms. In the meantime, we are accepting this role. In doing so, we are inevitably pointing to the kind of unknowable future that foreign policy so often presents. We basically assume that American power will continue to dominate, that Chinese power will remain in check, and that in the event of open conflict we will be safer behind American shields.
This is becoming a hotly contested debate in foreign policy circles, between those who insist we get even closer to the US and those who think that, like it or not, China’s rise is inevitable and we must respond with pragmatic to this fact. a bit like New Zealand.
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But whatever debates are taking place in foreign policy think tanks and universities, there is no democratic debate on the horizon. Our increasingly pronounced tilt in America is bipartisan, so the pros and cons of that position are never publicly agitated. Even doing so would seem vaguely seditious at this point.
I understand why. But the problem is that the Australian public has no idea what we’re getting into or what calculations are being made on our behalf. A doubling of the US alliance may be the right way forward.
But even if that’s true, we’re entering an era where that will come at a cost. what are they Or more precisely, who do they think will be our political leaders? What consequences do you intend to accept? It is hard to think of a more important political judgment to be made in our lifetime. And it is extraordinary that if the public can be said to do it, we do it in the dark.
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