Australian Journal of International Affairs
ISSN: 1035-7718 (Print) 1465-332X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/caji20
Power shift: rethinking Australia's place in the Asian century
Hugh White
To cite this article: Hugh White (2011) Power shift: rethinking Australia's place in the Asian century, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 65:1, 81-93, DOI: 10.1080/10357718.2011.535603
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2011.535603
Published online: 15 Jan 2011.
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Download by: [203.219.87.178] Date: 04 July 2016, At: 18:39 Australian Journal of International Affairs Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 81 93, February 2011
Power shift: rethinking Australia’s place in the Asian century
1* HUGH WHITE
Australian foreign and strategic policy has not yet begun to address the implications for Australia’s international situation of China’s growing power. China today already challenges the American leadership that has kept Asia peaceful and Australia secure for many decades. There are real and growing risks that Washington and Beijing will not find a way to work together peacefully as relative power shifts from one to the other. Unless they do, Asia’s future is bleak, and so is Australia’s. Australia therefore needs to work to promote a new order in Asia which accommodates China’s power without conceding more than is necessary to keep the peace. This will mean encouraging America to forgo primacy in Asia in favour of working with China and others in a shared regional leadership. Australia also needs to start preparing for the possibility that Asia will nonetheless become a more contested and dangerous place over coming decades, and consider what its options would be. None of them appear attractive.
Since Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, Australia has enjoyed the longest period of prosperity and peace since the late nineteenth century. When peace lasts a long time like this, it becomes easy to take for granted. We see it as natural, indeed inevitable, that the misfortunes, mistakes, and malice that caused wars in earlier times could not recur now because the international system has evolved
beyond such things. We find the idea of war*/large-scale war directly affecting
Australia*/almost unimaginable. This affects our view of what foreign policy is Downloaded by [203.219.87.178] at 18:39 04 July 2016 about and why it matters. We come to believe that it is about maximising trade, expressing our values, and increasing our influence for its own sake. This essay contests these assumptions. It argues that Asia’s decades of peace have not resulted from fundamental and irreversible changes in the interna- tional system, but from the specific regional order which emerged in Asia as the Vietnam War ended. Now the circumstances which created and sustained that order are passing as China grows, and a new order will emerge. Its shape is still undefined, but it will quite probably be much less peaceful than the last few decades, and could pose very serious strategic risks to Australia. Australia’s foreign policy faces a major challenge to find ways to manage and minimise these risks, and especially to avoid the more catastrophic ones. This will require
*Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute. [email protected]