What the US wants from Australia on China

What the US wants from Australia on China

Originally published in The Saturday Paper

For an Australian foreign affairs minister worried about the re-election of a disruptive and unpredictable Donald Trump, Penny Wong’s first trip to Washington under a conservative administration could hardly have gone better.

Wong was one of the few to secure both a ringside seat at Trump’s inauguration and a meeting with America’s new chief diplomat, Marco Rubio, a day after he had been confirmed as secretary of state.

The former Florida senator had spent much of his confirmation hearings warning about the threat from China, as well as singling out AUKUS as a blueprint for leveraging United States alliances to counter Beijing, signalling the kind of policy continuity that Canberra wants.

A day after the inauguration, Rubio met with a handful of foreign ministers, including Wong, who represented Australia as a member of the Quad, along with India and Japan.

As reassuring as Rubio’s opening gambits might have been, can Wong and Canberra’s diplomatic and security establishment have any faith in his record and what it says about US foreign policy over the next four years?

In a word, no – because of the views and temperament of the president who appointed him.

Rubio got the nod from Trump only after enduring the kind of ritual humiliation that the Republicans’ king-like leader has visited on numerous once-powerful politicians in the party.

Rubio’s Trump moment came in the 2016 Republican primaries, when he was competing with the then presidential candidate for the party’s nomination, and Trump derided him as “little Marco”.

Rubio’s efforts to mock Trump in return fell flat, bringing further ridicule on the Florida senator. Rubio dropped out of the race, and Trump won the nomination, and the presidency.

Like others who prize advancing in the conservative movement, Rubio has kissed the ring and pledged his full loyalty to Trump. By the time of the 2024 election, Rubio was standing by to serve Trump, on Trump’s terms.

Supporting the [AUKUS submarines] project and promoting its contribution to industry policy, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese does, will not be enough. Rubio will likely also expect Australia to publicly tie it to US strategy on China.

More’s the pity, as Rubio himself has never been a hack. Once identified primarily with his origin story, as the son of parents who were fiercely anti-Fidel Castro’s Cuba, he has become a seasoned legislator after more than a decade in the Senate. He was elected in 2010 and took his seat in 2011.

As Wong doubtless noted, in an age of hyper-partisanship in US politics, Rubio is a Republican who has always been willing to work with the Democrats.

On Monday, the Senate voted to confirm him 99-0, a rare unanimous vote. One of those votes was Rubio himself; the absentee was J. D. Vance, now vice-president and who had yet to be replaced in Ohio.

Rubio’s ability to work across the aisle also applied in Tallahassee, where he previously served in the Florida legislature. Dan Gelber, a senior Democratic leader, said of Rubio: “He didn’t have an objection to working with the other side simply because they were the other side … To put it bluntly, he wasn’t a jerk.”

In any other era, Rubio might have been a Republican secretary of state from central casting – handsome, intelligent, preternaturally articulate, anti-communist and thus hawkish on national security, and an exemplar of the American story. But no other era has had a president like Trump in the White House.

On China, Rubio is naturally predisposed to a hard line because of his hostility towards communism through the prism of Cuba. As he said himself, he didn’t start out as “a China person”, but his views evolved in response to human rights issues and deindustrialisation in the US, and via his work on the Senate intelligence committee.

“All these roads kept leading me back to something the Chinese Communist Party was doing,” he told The Wire China magazine in a 2020 interview.

Rubio’s stance on China isn’t exceptional in Washington. In fact, the opposite is the case. In an era of calcified partisanship, China is often cited as the one issue that brings all sides together.

The one exception on China policy is Trump himself.

There is more than a little irony in that. In the words of Rush Doshi, a China adviser to president Joe Biden, Trump helped catalyse the current bipartisanship by upending longstanding China policy in his first term, but he “has never fully embraced the new consensus and now stands outside it”.

For all his bellicosity and loose, might-is-right talk, Trump is singularly focused on trade. He is not a traditional national security hawk. On China, Doshi says, Trump is at odds with the nationalist wing of his party, his own vice-president and numerous foreign policy advisers he has appointed, including Rubio.

Trump has long campaigned against the traditional hawks in Washington, whom he derides as the “forever-war” crowd. Ying Ma, a conservative blogger and Trump supporter, singles out Rubio as a “prime example” of this cohort, citing his longstanding support for the second Iraq war.

“Whatever Rubio may say to align himself with Trump today, his views on the most inept and inexcusable US foreign intervention of the 21st century do not inspire confidence in his effectiveness or inclination to help Trump prevent the next ridiculous endless war,” Ma wrote this week.

Within the Trump court, there are other faultlines on China that could flow through to allies such as Australia, notably between so-called “tech bros” such as Elon Musk and the likes of Rubio.

One of Musk’s biggest Tesla factories is in Shanghai – it makes electric vehicles for the China market, and for export to countries including Australia. (More than 80 per cent of the EVs sold in Australia are made in China.)

The multibillionaire is now lobbying Beijing to operate driverless cars in China, and so has every incentive to stay onside with the ruling Communist Party. For the moment, the Chinese government eyes Musk as a possible friend at court in Washington.

Whatever Trump might think about the differences between his various advisers on China, the president remains predictably erratic, as evidenced by his first term and his behaviour since winning the election.

In his first term, Trump’s China policy lurched through stages. Trump initially hailed Xi Jinping as a great leader and good friend, before moving to tariffs and a trade war. When Covid-19 took hold, China became the source of all America’s ills.

At the start of his second term, history is rhyming. Trump has again lauded Xi Jinping and given the Chinese-owned app TikTok a reprieve from a ban in the US that he initially supported and for which Rubio voted.

The honeymoon is likely to be over soon, once Trump starts adding new tariffs. In the longer term, however, his China policy is anyone’s guess. “Everyone has been trying to work out what Trump will do on China policy, but no one has any clue,” says one Washington insider.

On AUKUS – the policy area most sensitive to Australia – Trump and Rubio could well be aligned.

Senior Australian politicians and officials have long believed AUKUS is an easy sell to Trump. Their pitch is along these lines: the US has the best submarines in the world – not only does Australia want to buy them but we are investing in US industrial capacity to make them.

These arguments, combined with Australia’s large trade deficit with the US, hit Trump’s political sweet spot in a way few countries can replicate.

But Scott Morrison – who signed on to AUKUS as prime minister – may have been onto something when he told The Australian late last year that Washington wanted more from Canberra.

Supporting the project and promoting its contribution to industry policy, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese does, will not be enough. Rubio will likely also expect Australia to publicly tie it to US strategy on China.

Morrison has told The Australian that Republicans in particular support AUKUS “because it is a very successful partnership to provide a military deterrent to their biggest strategic rival”. He said the Australian government should “own” that fact, and “if owning it means the Chinese don’t like it, well, too bad”.

Peter Dutton will readily support this stance, but the Albanese government is unlikely to, having deliberately lowered the rhetoric on China.

Though the atmospherics of the US–Australia relationship are overshadowed by Trump’s antics, in reality it is dominated by the day-to-day interactions between diplomatic, defence and intelligence officials in both countries.

At Trump’s inauguration, the TikTok chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, was seated next to Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman turned Trumpist, who has long been sympathetic to Russia and Syria’s former president Bashar al-Assad.

Trump would have delighted at the proximity of two apparent loyalists. Rubio, and much of the US national security bureaucracy, would have seen something entirely different: a pairing of threats and traitors.

The Australian government will be similarly worried. Our system may be able to work with Rubio, but Trump’s anarchic disregard for US institutions could deeply damage their value to allies and, by extension, the bilateral relationship.

Areas of expertise: China’s political system and the workings and structure of the communist party; China’s foreign relations, with an emphasis on ties with Japan, the two Koreas, and Southeast Asia; Australia’s relations with Asia.
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