The new Great Wall - in the
Pacific By Conn Hallinan
Some 370 kilometers north of Perth, at
Geraldton on Australia's west coast, the Americans
are building a base. When completed, it will
control two geostationary satellites that feed
intelligence to US military forces in Asia and the
Middle East.
Most Americans know nothing
about Geraldton, just as they know nothing about
other Australian sites such as the submarine
communications base at North Cape or the
missile-tracking center at Pine Gap. But there is
growing concern in Australia that Prime Minister
John Howard's conservative government is weaving
a
network of alliances, and US bases that may one
day put Australians in harm's way.
Once
the Geraldton base is up and running, it will be
almost impossible for Australia to be fully
neutral or stand back from any war in which the
United States is involved, according to Australian
Defense Force Academy visiting fellow Philip
Dorling.
Indeed, that may already be the
case. Australia, along with Japan, India, the
Philippines and South Korea, signed on to the US
anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which China
fears is aimed at neutralizing its modest fleet of
21 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
On
March 12, Australia signed a Joint Declaration on
Security Cooperation with Japan that, according to
Richard Tanter, a senior research associate at the
Nautilus Institute, is an "anti-China,
US-dominated, multilateral alliance system" that
"confirms the already accelerating tendencies for
both Japan and Australia to militarize their
foreign policies".
Certainly both
Australia and Japan have been flexing their
muscles of late.
Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe has put a strong nationalist spin on
Tokyo's foreign policy that has raised hackles
from Seoul to Beijing. Japan also sent troops to
Iraq and recently declared that it intends to
revise Article 9 of its postwar constitution.
Article 9 renounces war and rejects "force as a
means of settling international disputes". Japan
has the fifth-largest navy in the world and spends
more than US$40 billion a year on defense.
Australia, whose defense budget is
slightly more than half of Japan's, also has
troops in Iraq as well as the Solomon Islands,
East Timor and Tonga. Last August, Howard told
Parliament that Australia needs to prepare for an
even greater role in monitoring and assisting
troubled nations in the Pacific region. Howard has
also adopted some of the rhetoric of the current
US administration, calling for "preemptive"
strikes against "terrorist groups" in the region.
Twisting South Pacific
arms Australia, New Zealand and the United
States have moved forcefully to assert their
authority in the myriad island nations that make
up much of the South Pacific. Using a combination
of troops, aid, and control over transportation,
the three countries dominate the politics of such
places as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, the
Solomon Islands, Fiji and Samoa.
Many of
these island nations are almost totally dependent
on either international aid or money earned from
renting out their land for military bases. Some
60% of the Marshall Islands' gross domestic
product comes from US aid and the 50-year Pact of
Free Association that allows the US to use
Kwajalein Atoll for missile tests. The United
States only got the pact by engineering a change
in the Marshall Islands' constitution that allows
a simple majority of legislators to okay the
association. Before this change, Marshallese
voters had rejected the pact eight times.
When Solomon Islands Prime Minister
Manasseh Sogavare accused Australia's high
commissioner to the country of "unwarranted
interventionism" in the republic's affairs,
Howard's foreign minister, Alexander Downer,
warned ominously that "the last thing the Solomon
Islands government can afford is to get into
arguments with major donors who are helping to
keep their country afloat".
According to
United Nations cultural expert Mali Voi, the "big
three" use such devices as transit visas for in
effect "isolating small and poor countries of the
Pacific from each other, as well as from the rest
of the world. It is almost impossible for the
citizens of most Southeast Asian nations,
including the Philippines and Indonesia, to visit
their neighbors in Polynesia, Micronesia and
Melanesia."
Containing China The
North Atlantic Treaty Organization is elbowing its
way into the region as well. In talking about
Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea,
NATO general secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said
last November, "We all face the same threats, and
it is in their interests, as well as our own, that
we come closer together."
US Under
Secretary of State Nicholas Burns was blunter: "We
seek a partnership with them so that we can train
more intensively, from a military point of view."
But if there is a push to dominate and
militarize the region, there are countervailing
winds as well. On the one hand, Australia is part
of an ABM system that China sees as a threat. On
the other, China is Canberra's third-largest
trading partner with an insatiable appetite for
coal, uranium, gas, and oil. In 2006, energy
exports earned Australia US$33.9 billion, a figure
that is certain to rise steeply over the next
decade. "With the right policies," said Howard,
"we have the makings of an energy superpower."
Japan finds itself in a similar position.
While there is continuing tension between Tokyo
and Beijing over Taiwan and oil and gas fields in
the South China Sea, China will become Japan's No
1 trading partner by the end of this year. Trade
between the two countries topped $200 billion last
year.
The trade potential has made Japan
and Australia careful about tying themselves too
closely to some of the bombast about "Chinese
militarism" coming out of Washington. In April,
Japan and China pledged "closer cooperation". But
when Beijing made clear its unhappiness with
Australia's hosting part of the ABM program,
Downer was quick to state, "We are opposed to a
policy of containment of China. We believe the
best way forward is working constructively with
China."
Australia and Japan are caught
between "wanting to ride the Chinese economic
gravy train", writes Tanter, and at the same time
trying to "beat the drum about supposed [Chinese]
military expansionism".
Australia
rethinks? The Howard government's muscular
foreign policy has touched off a debate about what
role Australia should play in the region and how
closely Canberra should be tied to US designs in
Asia and the Middle East. Foreign policy,
particularly the Iraq war, has become a major
issue for the upcoming general elections in
October.
Polls indicate that two-thirds of
Australians want to withdraw from Iraq, and 70%
think Australia should be more independent from US
foreign policy. The Aussies were evenly split
between what constitutes a greater danger to the
world: the United States or Islamic
fundamentalism.
For now, Washington is too
bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay much
attention to the Pacific. But given the importance
of the region to the US, that it not likely to
last. Will the United States eventually move to
confront China? That may well depend on where
other nations in the region conclude their
interests lie, and whether most of them decide
that butter and trade trump guns and walls.
Conn Hallinan is a Foreign
Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) columnist.
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