By Nicholas Stuart
The water sparkles.
I’m standing, this blissful morning, on the bridge of HMAS Adelaide, just off Hawaii. The tropical storm clouds have parted and the ships of a small Aussie flotilla (two frigates, this Landing Helicopter Dock, our fleet oiler and a submarine) are sailing across placid waters.
They’re here for RIMPAC, a huge naval exercise. Twenty-five nations are taking part although not China, which was ostentatiously disinvited a few months ago. Since then the US has regularly sailed through the Taiwan strait (most recently with last weekend) and kicked off a trade war with Beijing.
Of course, the idea of real conflict still seems impossibly difficult to even conceive of, particularly as one gazes over the Pacific, and so it’s tempting to dismiss this as little other than a pleasure cruise. Unfortunately doing this would be to ignore a massively destabilising problem.
The West (including Australia) finds the current world order quite congenial. China doesn’t. Something will have to change and it won’t be Beijing. And that’s why these naval exercises are at the sharp end of the current conflict.
What some hotheads (on both sides) are looking for isn’t actually a way of resolving these issues at a conference table. They parse the historical record differently, insisting that the old pattern of long, drawn-out negotiations have gotten nowhere. In the past we’ve always put a premium on finding a way to reconcile different approaches; today that’s not a given. China, in particular, wants to change the international system.
Every four years the Communist Party holds a key meeting to officially approve decisions and policy directions already chosen by the leaders. In the past these have been relatively bureaucratic conferences. Not this year.
Analysis (by Kevin Rudd, no less) suggests Xi Jingping’s speech to the closed session made two things dramatically clear. Firstly that the so-called “rules based order” of global governance that Julie Bishop keeps prattling on so enthusiastically about doesn’t actually suit China at all. It had no part in formulating those rules and insists they’re rigged against it.
Secondly, critically, Xi’s not an incrementalist. He’s (personally) insisting if there’s going to be a challenge, a fight, well then, “bring it on”. This guy didn’t climb to the top without demonstrating utterly ruthless efficiency, both in dispatching his opponents and embracing conflict. That’s why we need to pay careful attention when he insists this is a moment offering “unparalleled opportunity” for struggle and changing the world order.
So how can this happen? There are three sites of conflict and China is moving to act on each.
Internationally, the Belt and Road initiative has become an umbrella. It’s successfully embracing genuine projects that really are opening up new development routes and combining these with new ways of exercising diplomatic and military leverage. What makes this strategically concerning is that often, alongside traditional economic opportunities, money has become a means to back ruling parties and strengthen domestic political players who, in the words of one observer, “may not necessarily be committed to traditional democratic outcomes”.
Remember that China doesn’t believe in democracy – it believes in the role of senior cadres to ‘guide us forward’.
There are two other areas where real, serious, and violent clashes can occur. Both of these represent ungoverned spaces, the so-called global commons. One is the internet; the other the waters.
There’s been an understandable political reluctance to call out cyber conflict for what it is, just as neither side wants to risk starting a cyber-war. To merely continue functioning, at even the most basic level, every society today is utterly dependent on the internet. The prospect of it going down would bring government to a standstill, and that’s why no country’s willing to initiate a conflict. No country is certain of its superiority and the West dares not risk exposing its vulnerabilities.
In the meantime, China continues targeted attacks, penetrating universities (like the ANU here in Canberra) and hacking into systems as part of a carefully co-ordinated strategy. Russia, however, continues spreading a trail of malevolent destruction and chaos wherever it can. It’s a far more free-market despoiler of the system.
This leaves the oceans. China doesn’t like it when the US Navy decides to send a couple of destroyers into its seas but, at the moment, there’s little it can do. Beijing still doesn’t have the capacity to send its fleet to waters near the continental US, otherwise it would. It’s worth noting, however, analogies to periods before both the world wars. Navies were seen as ways of demonstrating national power and also offered opportunities for nations to demonstrate their resolve in ways short of total war.
During the Falklands War the British Navy drew an ‘exclusion zone’ around the islands, effectively quarantining the conflict to a specific location. Similarly today, it’s becoming possible to imagine (however horrific) a time and space limited conflict taking place, perhaps based around an ‘incident’ such as a missile exchange between naval vessels in the South China Sea.
That’s the deeper message of this RIMPAC. It’s not all about love, and sharing, and cooperatively demonstrating how well the ships flourish in the tropics. These exercises are deadly serious. The dangers are escalating.
This article first appeared in Fairfax Media on 11 July 2018.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/stand-by-for-a-khaki-election-20180710-p4zqnw.html
