Friends Or Enemies At The Gates?

Crushing The Hegemon: What will/can the USA do to avoid becoming the sick, old man of the Indo-Pacific?

THEY WERE CALLED THE “WINGED HUSSARS”. In 1683, at the gates of Vienna, these elite Polish cavalrymen, sporting feathered “wings” designed to give them the appearance of avenging angels, provided the vanguard of the largest cavalry charge in history. Emerging unexpectedly from the forested heights above the capital city of the Hapsburg Empire, they swept down upon the besieging Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed IV and swept it from the field.

Never again would the Ottoman Empire threaten the security of Christian Europe. Over the next two centuries, what had been the dominant power of the Mediterranean world would decline to the point where it could be described, by Tsar Nicholas I, as “the sick old man of Europe”. And, as it declined, the hungry powers of the West extended their sway to encompass the entire planet.

There will be those in Beijing who look at the United States of America and see the Ottoman Empire. Not the Ottoman Empire that existed after the Siege of Vienna, but the Ottoman Empire that might, with a bit more luck, and better military leadership, have taken the city and put the whole of Europe in play.

But, those same Chinese geopolitical strategists will also see in the USA of 2024 what was doubtless equally clear to Western European leaders in the 1600s. That, for all its strategic reach, the hegemonic power of their age was over-extended militarily and fatally wounded economically.

The maritime triumphs of Portugal and Spain had opened alternative routes to resources which had previously flowed from East to West through Constantinople. Paradoxically, winning control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles would end-up proving disastrous for the Ottomans’ long-term prospects.

Similarly, the Americans’ dominant global position has been undermined by the dramatic resurrection of China, and looks set to be further weakened by the rapid growth of India. Perceiving this, the geo-strategic thinkers of both nations are perfectly aware that their leaders need only watch and wait.

Looking to their defence (so that the US cannot do in the Twenty-First Century what the British did to India and China in the Nineteenth) and continuing to broaden and deepen their economies, these rising powers have no sound geopolitical reasons for attacking the USA. Global power has always been zero-sum. The bigger and stronger the Asian tigers grow, the weaker the American Eagle becomes.

The most important question, therefore, is what will/can the USA do to avoid becoming the sick, old man of the Indo-Pacific?

For the moment, at least, the answer would appear to be AUKUS. Two increasingly decrepit former global hegemons have succeeded in ensnaring a much younger and more vigorous regional power in a confused and, almost certainly, fruitless attempt to reassure themselves that their imperial writ still runs in the Indo-Pacific theatre.

Not that Australia has ever played hard-to-get in these increasingly forlorn adventures. It gaily traduced the UN Charter in 2003 alongside its American and British confederates, committing Australian forces to the same “forever wars” that did so much to weaken the military capacity of all three nations. Undeterred, Australia has now cheerfully agreed to put the “A” into AUKUS. Mostly, this entails spending impossible sums of money on a force of Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines, vessels which the Australian geostrategist, Hugh White, is quietly convinced will never be delivered.

Hitherto declared “off-limits” to every other nation on earth, this formidable weapons-system is now being made available for sale – if not to the highest bidder, then certainly to Uncle Sam’s self-proclaimed “Deputy-Sheriff”. The deal may be seen as proof of the USA’s and the UK’s increasingly evident willingness to let others do the fighting – and dying – for them. What’s been good for the Ukrainians is now, apparently, doubleplusgood for the Aussies. In the unlikely event that China does decide to force the issue over Taiwan and/or the South China Sea, however, Uncle Sam will, as White argues persuasively, move swiftly to bring all his nuclear subs under strict American control.

So, why have the USA, the UK and Australia embarked on this AUKUS course? And why are Canada and New Zealand giving serious consideration to joining them?

Much of the explanation undoubtedly boils down to a failure of geostrategic imagination, made worse by the UK’s former colonies’ more-or-less instinctive Anglocentrism. (The less forgiving observer might attribute the five nation’s behaviour to the pernicious legacy of old-fashioned, white supremacist, imperialism.) Bluntly, none of the present AUKUS partners, nor those thinking about signing up for “Pillar 2” of this glorified arms purchase, can envisage a world in which English-speaking white people are not setting the pace, and calling the shots.

In the case of Australia and New Zealand this failure of imagination is especially egregious. Both nations are, to slip into antipodean, “a bloody long way from anywhere”. Except, of course, from Asia. Both countries have always known this, but resisted strongly the obvious conclusions to be drawn from their extreme geographical isolation from the metropolitan power that created them.

For a few terrifying months in 1942 that isolation from the “Mother Country” was brought home to Australians and New Zealanders in ways impossible to ignore. But then the deus ex machina of the American Pacific Fleet at Midway restored Anglophone supremacy – albeit with an American accent. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sealed the deal. In a matter of milliseconds, Asia had, once again, ceased to be a problem.

Except, as the Ottomans discovered, nothing stands still. Even successful attempts to enlarge their power only end up lumbering expanding empires with more peoples, more territories, to defend. And all that effort, as the UK learned in the Boer War, and as the USA discovered in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, is not only economically draining, but it also saps the citizenry’s willingness to go on footing the bill – in blood and treasure – of imperial greatness. That’s when making your country great again means telling the rest of the world to go to hell.

Which way New Zealand elects to jump in this geopolitical game will not trouble China greatly. Its diplomats and spies have doubtless already explained to their bosses in Beijing the present New Zealand Government’s curious conviction that the certainties of the past are recoverable and durable. That Australia’s Labour Government is as convinced of this as its National Party-led trans-Tasman ally merely confirms the unwillingness of both nations to see clearly the nature of the global reality that is fast emerging.

Hugh White has noted how easily Aussies and Kiwis slipped into the comforting assumption that “America would keep us safe, and China would make us rich.” For a while, it even appeared to be true. Now, however, the Americans are at our gates, determined that their hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region remains unchallenged. Exactly what shape the Winged Hussars of the Twenty-First Century will take is yet to be seen. But that they will come should not be doubted.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 5 August 2024.

Picking Sides.

Time To Choose: Like it or not, the Kiwis are either going into AUKUS’s  “Pillar 2” – or they are going to China.

HAD ZHENG HE’S FLEET sailed east, not west, in the early Fifteenth Century, how different our world would be. There is little reason to suppose that the sea-going junks of the Ming Dynasty, among the largest and most sophisticated sailing vessels ever constructed, would have failed to make landfall on the Pacific coast of North America half-a-century before Columbus. The colonisation of the Americas, from West to East, would have consolidated China’s global hegemony irreversibly. The cramped and fratricidal states of the European peninsula would have remained minor players in a Chinese world.

In the worst geopolitical nightmares of the United States and its Pacific allies, a China grown as powerful as the empire which sent forth Zheng He’s mighty fleet, threatens to transform the Pacific into a Chinese lake.

Technologically and militarily superior to the internally-riven United States, this China of the future regularly stations elements of its fleet off the Californian coast – in much the same spirit as the United States Navy currently navigates the waters of the South China Sea.

In a diplomatic reversal of the USA’s “island-hopping” strategy of the Second World War, an expansionist China will already have brought the tiny nations of the Pacific under its sway. The naval and air bases located on the territory of Beijing’s new “friends” will have extended its strategic reach alarmingly.

Completing this American nightmare would be the transformation of New Zealand into China’s unsinkable aircraft carrier and nuclear submarine base. Handily located off Australia’s eastern seaboard, China’s military resources would have strategically neutralised Australia’s eye-wateringly expensive fleet of Virgina-class nuclear submarines.

Beijing’s heavy investment in New Zealand’s failing infrastructure, coupled with her role as the principal consumer of its exports, made Wellington’s detachment from the West a much easier project than would have been the case if Washington’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy” had run to offering the Kiwis a generous free trade deal to replace their economically-critical FTA with China.

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IT IS ONE OF THE KEY DISADVANTAGES of always being on the winning side of history’s great encounters: not being able to grasp the sheer contingency of such victories.

Had America’s carriers not been at sea on Sunday, 7 December 1941, and gone down in Pearl Harbour alongside her battleships; and had Japan’s bombers eliminated the USA’s Hawaiian-based fuel supplies; then an enemy fleet off the Californian coast would not have been the stuff of strategic nightmares; it could, very easily, have been the reality.

Certainly, with America’s fleet either destroyed or out of action, there could have been no Battle of the Coral Sea, no Battle of Midway, to save Australia and New Zealand from Japanese invasion and occupation.

Preventing the Pacific Ocean from becoming a Japanese lake in the 1940s required the expenditure of an awful lot of blood and treasure – and an awful lot of luck. Had things turned out differently, the Americans, desperate to secure their eastern flank, may have been forced to let the Pacific go. And, if J. Robert Oppenheimer had been run over by a Los Alamos bus in January 1942, then they may never have got it back.

What we New Zealanders need to grasp is that America can no more allow the Pacific to be dominated by China in the 2040s than it could allow it to be dominated by Japan in the 1940s. Global hegemony is a zero-sum game. For every step America takes back, its rival/s will take a step forward.

While China was content to remain the world’s factory, all was well. But, the moment Xi Jinping committed his country to building a blue-water navy to rival Zheng He’s great fleet; the moment his Belt & Road project threatened to link the Global South inextricably to Chinese capital and technology; all bets were off.

That brief geopolitical respite, when the Russians were on their knees, and the Chinese were still getting up off theirs, was squandered by Washington in a profoundly compromising series of adventures in the Middle East. Twenty years of “forever war” in Iraq and Afghanistan has left America’s armed forces physically and morally exhausted, and its ruling class dangerously lacking in fortitude. What better symbol of America’s decline could there be than two old men swinging ineffectually at each other for the custody of an angry and divided nation?

The USA’s weakness at the top notwithstanding, the dice of geopolitical hazard cannot remain uncast indefinitely.

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THE NEW CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE for the rebuilding of the USA’s global strength is its Indo-Pacific Strategy. To understand the theatre-shift, from “Asia” to “Indo”, one has only to study the actual voyages that Admiral Zheng He undertook in the early decades of the Fifteenth Century.

He’s great fleet swept south and west from coastal China, through the Indonesian archipelago, past Sri Lanka, long the coast of India, rounding the Arabian Peninsula, to journey’s end in East Africa – distributing gifts and collecting tribute all along the way. The economic and political logic was as strong for the Chinese then as it is now. Recognising that logic, the Americans have no real choice but to prevent it from unfolding.

There was a time when the USA could have done it all alone, but now it seems that the retention of American hegemony in the Pacific requires the diplomatic mobilisation of the English-speakers who invaded Iraq in 2003 – the US, the UK and Australia. Hence AUKUS – also known as “bringing the old imperialist band back together for one last tour of an ungrateful and increasingly uncooperative world”.

Can New Zealand stay out of AUKUS? Should New Zealand stay out of AUKUS? The answer to the first question, sadly, is: Only if its people are happy to turn their country into a battleground, upon which Beijing and Washington will wage a protracted ideological war for the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of what both superpowers recognise as a critically important piece of strategic real-estate. Which, even more sadly, answers the second question.

Helen Clark may have got away with keeping New Zealand out of the invasion of Iraq, but that was because, in Iraq, only American pride was at stake. In the looming struggle for the Pacific, the option of “sitting this one out” will not be on offer. Washington will insist that blood is thicker than milk, and Beijing will remind us that milk is New Zealand’s life-blood.

Like it or not, the Kiwis are either going into AUKUS’s “Pillar 2” – or they are going to China.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 May 2024.

Dining With A Long Spoon.

Divided Loyalties: Can the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, be relied upon? That’s what the boys and girls at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon needed to be reassured about. Because, from the perspective of Washington, it’s looking more and more like Jacinda Ardern and her Labour Party comrades are getting ready to sell their souls for a pile of soybeans (or milk-powder!) and forgetting all about their duty to protect the interests of their “very, very, very good friends” – in the United States and Australia.

AT ROUGHLY the same time as the police presence at Ihumatao was suddenly and inexplicably boosted (5/8/19) New Zealand’s Deputy-Prime Minister, Winston Peters, was sitting down to dinner with the US Secretary of Defence, James Esper. This high-level diplomatic tête-à-tête took place at the Deputy-Prime Minister’s home in the swanky Auckland suburb of St Mary’s Bay. It’s a safe bet that Mr Peters’ American guest talked about mustering coercive forces far greater than those then arriving at Ihumatao.

That Secretary Esper was there at all is, in itself, remarkable. The US Senate’s stamp of approval has barely had time to dry and the politician charged with responsibility for the greatest aggregation of military might in the planet’s history is on his way to Australia and New Zealand. Not to the United Kingdom and Europe, it is worth noting, but to Australasia, the crucial pivot-point of the United States’ brand new “Indo-Pacific Strategy”.

The change of  nomenclature – from “Asia-Pacific” to “Indo-Pacific” is important. It betokens a critical shift in emphasis. From the straightforward projection of American power to the farthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean: a constant of US foreign and military policy since the heady days of Teddy Roosevelt and his “Great White Fleet”; to the vastly more ambitious goal of “containing” the growing power and influence of the Peoples Republic of China by asserting American hegemony over both the Pacific and the Indian Oceans.

To make this work, the United States requires the active support and cooperation of Japan, Australia and India. Together, these nations form what to Chinese eyes must look like a profoundly threatening arc of offensive military capability. Japan stands at the arc’s eastward extremity, India at its western end, while Australia, at the arc’s base, straddles the two great oceans that give the strategy its name. With these three powers holding the perimeter, the other powers of the region: the Philippines, Indo-China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and Thailand have little option but to go along for the ride.

For the geopoliticians in Washington, New Zealand also has a role to play – albeit a negative one. If Australia is going to fulfil its strategic obligations to the north and west, then it cannot afford to have anyone but a friend protecting its crucial eastern and southern flanks. As far as Washington is concerned – that’s us. Under no circumstances can New Zealand be allowed to fall any further under the influence of China. In the memorable phrase of the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who travelled as far as Australia with Secretary Esper, the nations of the region could either “choose to sell their souls for a pile of soybeans, or protect their country.”

This, I strongly suspect, occupied a large part of the American agenda at St Mary’s Bay. Secretary Esper would have been anxious to know exactly where New Zealand’s loyalties lie: in Washington, or in Beijing?

Not that he entertained the slightest doubt about Mr Peters’ loyalties. His recent speeches, delivered on American soil, have made his feelings about Chinese influence in the South Pacific crystal clear. Nor had it escaped the notice of New Zealand’s ‘Five Eyes’ partners that Mr Peters had retired the outdated formulation “Asia-Pacific” in favour of “Indo-Pacific”. It was great to have New Zealand’s Deputy-Prime Minister and Foreign Minister on board and with the programme.

But what about New Zealand’s Prime Minister? Could she be relied upon? That’s what the boys and girls at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon needed to be reassured about. Because Secretary Esper may well have suggested to Mr Peters that, from the perspective of Washington, it’s looking more and more like Jacinda Ardern and her Labour Party comrades are getting ready to sell their souls for a pile of soybeans (or milk-powder!) and forgetting all about their duty to protect the interests of their “very, very, very good friends” – in the United States and Australia.

As the desert plates were cleared away at St Mary’s Bay, and the whiskey liberally dispensed, did the US Defence Secretary seek to discover how the Leader of NZ First would react if push came to shove – in Hong Kong, for example – and his coalition partners declined to break-off relations with Beijing? Did the American remind Mr Peters’ that he, uniquely, enjoyed the political privilege of choosing his country’s bosses?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 August 2019.

Dances With Elephants.

When elephants dance, the wise mice stick to the wall.  - Swahili Proverb.

IT BEGAN so positively: wreathed in smiles and full of promise; a government of kindness and transformation. It hasn’t lasted. In a depressingly short period of time, the poetry of campaigning was replaced by the harsh prose of governing.

It was clear, from the moment David Parker told us that the Labour-NZF-Green Government would be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, that beneath all the glitter and shine lay the dull gleam of administrative brass. Smiles and Stardust are Jacinda’s brand. Reality is much scarier.

Over the past fortnight New Zealand has played host to gatherings of spies. The first batch arrived from the United Kingdom and the second from the United States. In the midst of these secretive arrivals and departures the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) issued its finding that the Chinese IT giant, Huawei, had failed to pass the “national security” test, and that, as a consequence, its involvement in the roll-out of Spark’s 5G communications network must cease.

Interestingly, the presence of so many foreign spooks was matched by the absence of a select band of journalists. Whisked away to Hawaii by the Orwellian-sounding “Indopacom” (the United States Indo-Pacific Command) they were brought up to speed on what one of the participants described as China’s “expansionist military strategy in the Pacific”.

One of the more accurate and justifiable criticisms of the current Chinese Government is its treatment of its Uighur population. President Xi and his administration have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent the Muslim Uighurs from embracing the radical Islamicist doctrines so familiar to us now in the West. Human rights groups report that as many as a million Uighurs may have passed through the regime’s “re-education camps”. These are not happy places.

It would seem, however, that the Uighurs are not the only population for whom “re-education” has been deemed necessary. New Zealanders, too, have been singled out for ideological rectification. Seemingly, this country has grown too fond of the Chinese regime and is in urgent need of being re-oriented towards a more reliable combination of “friendly” powers. No less a think tank than the “moderately conservative” Hoover Institution has opined that New Zealand is “particularly vulnerable” to Chinese influence.

Served up as a “test case” in a report bearing the interesting title “Chinese Influence & American Interest”, New Zealand is described as “a small state of 4.5 million people with strong trade ties to China.” These have, according to the report, led us to pursue “closer ties with China than many other nations.”

Too close, apparently, for our largest trading partner, Australia, which has, we were informed by an investment specialist interviewed for TVNZ’s “Q+A” programme, come to the view that New Zealand has allowed itself to stray too far from the accepted anti-Chinese/pro-American path laid down by Canberra.

Jacinda Ardern and her Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, have become something of a problem for the Australians. There is a slippery quality to both of them that irritates New Zealand’s oldest friend and ally. Just when they’re convinced that the Kiwis have stepped over the line – by refusing to condemn the Russians fast enough over the Salisbury chemical attack, for example – they somehow manage to skip back over it with dutiful promises of a “Pacific Re-Set”. Time for Wellington to stop playing silly buggers, says Canberra, and not in a nice way.

Hence the influx of hard men from the UK and America. Hence the sudden rise to prominence of Professor Anne-Marie Brady – New Zealand’s very own “international expert” on the diabolical cleverness of Beijing and its “magic weapons”. No coincidence, surely, that the Hoover Institution’s fortuitously timed warning about Chinese influence draws heavily on Professor Brady’s alarming academic research. Her even more alarming personal experiences, involving burglars and deflated car tyres, lends cinematic emphasis to their concern.

Our re-education, from a nation with delusions of independence, to one which knows its place in the geopolitical scheme of things, will proceed apace, although not as rapidly as with our leaders. The Huawei decision signalled to our Five Eyes partners that from now on it is their preferences, not China’s, which will dictate the shape of New Zealand foreign policy.

The Swahili have a proverb: “When elephants dance, the wise mice stick to the wall.” Or, in our case, scamper back onto the American elephant’s back.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 December 2018.

The Case Of The Problematic Professor.

Disturber Of Dragons: Were Professor Brady’s antagonists from any other nation but China the problem confronting Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters would not exist. Unfortunately the Peoples Republic of China is New Zealand’s largest trading partner after Australia. Pissing-off China could be extremely injurious to this nation’s economic health.

ANNE-MARIE BRADY presents this government with a rather large problem. Her alleged harassment by agents of Chinese national security has all the makings of a cause celebre. Were Professor Brady’s antagonists from any other nation but China the problem confronting Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters would not exist. One has only to recall Helen Clark’s response to the discovery of an active Israeli spy mission underway on New Zealand soil to appreciate the political capital to be made out of being seen to take the defence of New Zealand sovereignty seriously. Unfortunately for Ardern and Peters, however, the Peoples Republic of China is not Israel – it’s New Zealand’s largest trading partner after Australia. When Israel gets angry it cannot threaten to undermine the New Zealand economy. Pissing-off China, on the other hand, can be extremely injurious to this nation’s economic health.

The latest chapter in the Brady saga, a letter from a group of academics, journalists and activists demanding a more aggressive defence of academic freedom, can hardly have improved the PM’s mood. Her hopes of the whole matter quietly disappearing have been dashed. People want answers – not evasions.

But do “people” have any right to answers in a matter as delicate as this one? Is the public entitled to push aside all the geopolitical and economic factors impinging on their government as if they are of no importance?

Prattling on about being the “critic and conscience” of society is all very well, but when New Zealand’s universities are so dependent on the continuing inflow of international students, is it really all that wise to antagonise one of the largest contributors to this country’s educational export trade? It would be interesting to see how the nation’s vice-chancellors would react if equivalents of Anne-Marie Brady started popping up on their own campuses. Each academic activist launching equally uncompromising attacks against the Peoples Republic. How would all that criticising and conscientising affect their bottom-line I wonder?

And what about all that Chinese investment in New Zealand’s agricultural sector: all those massive milk treatment plants springing up around the provinces; how keen would the government be to see all that brought to an end? How would Shane Jones respond to the loss of so many well-paying jobs? And David Parker, how would he feel when New Zealand’s perishable exports started piling-up on China’s docks? How would Federated Farmers react to a Chinese freeze-out? Or the Dairy Workers Union, for that matter?

New Zealand lives by its agricultural exports - which is why the New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement was so important when the Global Financial Crisis struck. Without it, this country would have had significantly less to come and go on. Chinese consumers saved us from the sort of vicious austerity measures that afflicted the people of the United Kingdom and Greece. The nature of the Chinese system has not changed since 2008. If we were happy then to be given access to the huge Chinese market, are we not happy now? What’s changed?

We all know the answer to that question. What has changed is that the United States is no longer prepared to see China assert its “hard” (military and economic) and “soft” (cultural and propagandistic) power unchallenged. In concert with its principal regional allies, Japan and Australia, the US is pushing back against Chinese expansion into the Pacific – once an American lake but now the location of intense great power rivalry. Try as it might (and it tried very hard under John Key and his foreign minister, Murray McCully) New Zealand is finding it increasingly difficult, in the age of Donald Trump, to keep its distance from this looming fight between the Eagle and the Dragon.

Professor Brady is an acknowledged expert on the production and delivery of Chinese soft power – its “magic weapons”. The good professor is not, however, above advancing a little soft power on her own account. Is it no more than a coincidence that she has been called upon to present her ideas to the Australian parliament during the “China Panic”? Or that her academic articles and speeches are followed closely, and receive considerable approbation, in Washington DC? That the name of Anne-Marie Brady started appearing in our news media at exactly the same moment as the rivalry between the USA and China ratcheted-up several notches – was that nothing more than serendipity?

Much has been made of President Trump’s extraordinary statement concerning America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. What made it extraordinary was its brutal honesty. For once naked American self-interest was presented to the world shorn of its hypocritical vestments. “It’s about America first”, said the President, truthfully. He then informed the world that if putting America’s interests first means turning a blind eye to cold-blooded, state-sanctioned murder, then so be it – that’s what his administration (like all its predecessors) will do.

Jacinda can’t really say “It’s about New Zealand First” – that could be misinterpreted, but if she were to say something similar in defence of her continuing silence vis-à-vis Anne-Marie Brady, then she would earn the respect of Beijing and Washington alike. With considerable relief, the advisers to both President Xi and President Trump would be able to tell their bosses: “This New Zealand prime minister, at least she knows how the game of geopolitics is played.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 27 November 2018.