AFA6 Our Sphere of Influence: Rivalry in the Pacific

Contributors

Elizabeth Becker is a former New York Times correspondent and the author of When the War Was Over.

Alison Broinowski is a former Australian diplomat and academic.

Sean Dorney is a Walkley Award–winning journalist and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute.

Bill Farmer was Australian ambassador to Indonesia from 2005 to 2010.

Euan Graham is executive director of La Trobe Asia and former director of the international security program at the Lowy Institute.

Jenny Hayward-Jones is a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute.

Robert E. Kelly is a professor of international relations at Pusan National University in South Korea.

Kayleigh Long is a journalist who worked in Myanmar between 2013 and 2018 and is now based in London.

Katerina Teaiwa is an associate professor in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University.

Hugh White is a professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University and a former deputy secretary in the defence department.

Editor’s Note

OUR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

On 2 June 2019, Scott Morrison landed at Honiara International Airport in Solomon Islands for his first overseas visit since winning the federal election. This airport, on the northern coast of the island of Guadalcanal, was built in 1942 by Japanese troops as they tried to cut off supply lines between Australia and the United States, potentially allowing for an invasion of Australia. US troops eventually captured the airfield in a battle that marked the beginning of the Allied victory in the Pacific.

In April 2014, the airport was left underwater following the worst recorded flooding in the country’s history. At least twenty-three people were killed and 50,000 were affected as the deluge – 73 centimetres of rain in three days – caused mudslides that destroyed villages, roads and livelihoods. The next year, Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare addressed the United Nations and declared that the threat of climate change to his country was existential.

When Morrison arrived at Honiara, he was not there to discuss climate change. His concern, shaped by the legacy of World War II, was to prevent Solomon Islands again becoming a staging point for an attack on Australia. This is the unstated motivation for the Pacific step-up, his signature foreign policy – to ensure that a foreign military presence is not installed in Australia’s sphere of influence in the South Pacific. Today, this threat comes from China.

But this longstanding goal of Australian defence and foreign policy is now being challenged. Chinese aid and influence are spreading southward, just as Australia’s diplomatic clout in the Pacific is coming under strain. Solomon Islands, whose largest trading partner is China, has recently signalled it may shift its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China. And countries such as Papua New Guinea – a former Australian colony – are welcoming an increasing flow of Chinese funds. The prospect of a nearby Chinese military base is causing anxiety in Canberra, but Australia is still the largest Pacific donor, and presumes that recipients will see it as both a benefactor and a protector.

As part of his step-up, in 2018 Morrison visited Fiji and Vanuatu, the first diplomatic trip to either country by an Australian leader. This renewed Australian interest has been largely well received by Pacific states. The problem is that Australia and its neighbours currently view these two world-changing phenomena, China’s rise and climate change, so differently. The success of the step-up will depend on whether Morrison can overcome this impasse. Even then, the future of Australia’s sphere of influence will depend on whether – or for how long – China can be kept out of the region.

Jonathan Pearlman

IN DENIAL

Defending Australia as China looks south

Hugh White

Let’s be honest: Australians have never had much time for our South Pacific neighbours. The island nations that lie to our north and northeast, stretching from Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands to Vanuatu, Fiji and beyond, may be close to us geographically, but we have not found them especially interesting, important or profitable. With a few honourable exceptions, and tourism aside, Australians have been indifferent to our nearest neighbours’ dramatic landscapes, their rich and diverse cultures, and their general welfare, and we have seen relatively few opportunities for trade. Only their strategic significance has attracted us: the islands scattered widely across the north of our continent are critical to our protection from armed attack.

Our closest neighbours are crucial to the defence of our continent simply because of their proximity. Military operations are governed by distance, as distance defines what is operationally possible and what is affordable. Whether you can sink a ship, bomb an airfield or seize a town – and, critically, how much it will cost – depends on how far your forces must operate from their bases, and how far the enemy must operate from theirs. This has been true for as long as wars have been fought, and it remains true today. Cost and difficulty rise swiftly as the range at which forces must operate increases, because it means, for example, that aircraft must be refuelled mid-flight, or ships must operate beyond the range of land-based air cover, or larger and larger missiles must be fired at an exponentially increasing cost. Only cyberattacks seem capable of breaking the nexus between geography and conflict, but it remains unclear whether they can match the strategic effect of actual violence. War remains a very physical business.

For much of our history, distance has worked to Australia’s advantage. We have been secure because we are remote. None of the countries close to us has been strong enough to pose any serious threat, and the great powers that might have threatened us have been too far away to do so. But we lose this advantage if a potentially hostile great power can operate from bases close to our shores. This allows it to bring its strength to bear against us much more directly and effectively. We realise then that remoteness cuts both ways. It makes us feel vulnerable because we presume that the only credible reason for a major power to deploy forces to our remote corner of the world is to threaten us. It reminds us that we are far from our friends, too, and they may not be willing to come to our aid. And it means we must be prepared to meet such a threat by ourselves – something we have long assumed was beyond our capacity to do.

Another rising and ambitious Asian power seems bent on intruding into our backyard

All this was clear to the British colonists who settled Australia in the eighteenth century. They brought with them an instinct for strategy distilled from centuries of experience. Britain’s security had always depended on keeping the ports on the other side of the English Channel from the hands of powerful rivals who might use them to launch an invasion. They soon understood that Australia’s security likewise depended on preventing any potentially hostile great power from acquiring bases in the arc of islands that stretches across Australia’s north and out into the South Pacific. The western end of that archipelago was under Dutch control, which suited these British settlers fine: the Dutch were not strong enough to keep others out but not so strong as to threaten Australia. But until quite late in the nineteenth century, the islands east from New Guinea were, to English eyes, ungoverned territories that could be easily occupied by any great power who chose to do so.

This didn’t matter much as long as Britain remained the unchallenged arbiter of strategic affairs globally, and especially in our corner of the Pacific. It mattered a lot more when the Pax Britannica started to fray in the 1870s and 1880s, and European powers such as France and Germany began to look for colonies in our backyard. Australian political leaders became concerned that such outposts in the South Pacific would provide these continental powers with bases from which to attack Australia. A new sense of Australia’s distinct strategic interests and imperatives emerged as our leaders tried, and generally failed, to convince London to block these intrusions. It became clear that the colonies should do more to prepare for their own defence. Thus, the putative threat from French and German intrusions into the South Pacific played a large part in promoting the movement for Federation.

The threat from France or Germany never materialised, of course, and it disappeared completely when the cataclysm of World War I decimated these nations and their ability to project global power. But the strategic insight that underpinned these early anxieties was vindicated in 1942, when a rising, ambitious Asian nation brushed aside the remnants of British regional primacy, seized bases in the islands on Australia’s doorstep and used them to threaten Australia directly for the first (and so far only) time in our history since European settlement. And now another rising and ambitious Asian power seems bent on intruding into our backyard, so all those anxieties are flaring again.

Adrift in the Pacific

We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries and neighbours of ours. That was then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in April 2018, responding to press reports that China might establish a naval base in Vanuatu. But it could have been Henry Parkes writing to the British government in London in the 1870s, or Billy Hughes at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, or Doc Evatt at the United Nations’ inaugural meeting in San Francisco in 1945. All saw this as Australia’s primary strategic interest. And they all believed that