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Australia must get used to a new order with China as a major player
Michael Clarke and Matthew Sussex say Australia needs to consider the realities of a new arrangement in which China is a major power, rather than long for a bygone era of uncontested US supremacy. However, the new reality also gives Australia, as a middle power, fresh opportunities
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Why you can trust SCMP
Australia’s recently released Foreign Policy White Paper has been hailed as a “hard-nosed” document that correctly identifies an international and regional order in flux thanks to factors ranging from technological disruption to climate change and the rise of China.
But it does not offer a coherent blueprint for responding to such significant forces of change. Instead, it prefers to loudly trumpet the strength of Australian values and international “rules” in shaping the regional order, with little to explain how this will endure, or how China will be co-opted into adhering to them, given that this has clearly not worked so far.
Despite explicitly acknowledging that “China is challenging America’s position” in the Indo-Pacific, the paper chooses a backward-looking approach, clearly pining for an era when US-led power, and US-led rules, were uncontested. It also relies on something Australia has little to no control over: the extent to which the United States will commit to anchoring security and stability in the Indo-Pacific.
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Australia looks for balance to China’s rising power in Indo-Pacific region
Whatever the outcome of that internal debate by US security policy elites – which predates Donald Trump and will outlast him – it will lock Australia either into underbalancing or overbalancing with respect to China.
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