Australia’s ‘strategic infantilisation’ by the US is undermining our security in Asia

Agonising about Australia’s place in the scheme of things has been the principal pastime of policymakers since our notional independence.

As Michael Wesley argues persuasively in Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia’s Future, our “government and society suffer from a form of strategic long sightedness”. We reflexively identify with faraway members of the Anglosphere, such as the United States and the United Kingdom. But even more consequentially, we outsource responsibility for our foreign and security policy to one great and powerful friend or another.

This means, Wesley argues, that “our leaders seem to believe that whatever the challenge, the solution was investing ever more heavily in the alliance with the United States”.

Review: Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia’s Future: Quarterly Essay 101 – Michael Wesley (Black Inc.)

Trusting that another nation’s foreign policies will somehow automatically align with our own – even if we knew what “ours” actually were – is irresponsible and pusillanimous at the best of times. When Donald Trump is rupturing the rules-based international order and acting like a “predatory hegemon”, it is a foolhardy form of wishful thinking.

Wesley describes this a process of “strategic infantilisation”. Little wonder that many in Southeast Asia view our efforts at “engagement” with scepticism. Like China, they view us as an appendage of America’s grand strategy, with little capacity for independent thought, much less action.

We are where we are

We are a perennially anxious nation, seemingly unable to come to terms with the reality of our geographic position. As an island continent a long way from the world’s trouble spots, we might be forgiven for thinking we really are the “lucky country”. As far as Australian policymakers are concerned, however, this means we are also a long way from our “natural” allies and adjacent to countries that might threaten us.

Even Wesley subscribes to a version of this idea, albeit a very sophisticated version: “we are difficult to invade,” he writes, “but relatively easy to coerce if hostile forces gain access to the islands to our north”.

This is what makes our relationship with our immediate neighbours in Southeast Asia so important, he claims, especially when an Asian “great power” has emerged in our region.

When the great power in question is China, it is more accurate to say “re-emerged”. China dominated East Asia for centuries before European imperial expansion plunged it into a “century of shame”. The resumption of its former role has a certain inevitability.

Wesley characterises this process as Beijing seeking to create a “sphere of deference”. This means, in effect, that Southeast Asian states will “agree to abide by Beijing’s wishes in both domestic and foreign policy, where these are deemed by China to affect its regime security”.

This is a nuanced and novel take on the fashionable “spheres of influence” debate, which has gained traction in the wake of intensifying competition between China, the US and, to a lesser extent, Russia.

Wesley observes that our less powerful Southeast Asian neighbours are especially vulnerable to China’s threats – and blandishments – at this historical juncture, because their “governments are as disoriented as any by the Trump revolution”.

Or as disoriented as any country except Australia, it seems. Even when the US violates international law, slaughters innocent civilians and assassinates or kidnaps leaders it doesn’t like, our government remains remarkably unperturbed. It has suggested it “supports” the bombing of Iran, for example.