The Sydney Morning Herald
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton waves to the media upon her arrival at the Noi Bai airport for the 17th ASEAN Summit in Hanoi October 29, 2010. The 17th ASEAN summit runs from October 28 to 30. REUTERS/Kham (VIETNAM – Tags: POLITICS)
AUSTRALIA has been ”spooked” by its deepening strategic ties with the United States, prompting senior ministers to play down progress on the American military build-up on our shores, a leading defence analyst says.
Peter Jennings, head of the government-funded think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said Australia lacked confidence and sophistication in its approach to China, which is at the heart of the US strategic ”pivot” to Asia, including the stationing of US marines in Darwin.
His remarks followed this week’s Australia-United States Ministerial Consultation in Perth, where Foreign Minister Bob Carr and Defence Minister Stephen Smith met their US counterparts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (pictured) and Defence Secretary Leon Panetta.
The meeting discussed progress on rotating US Marines through Darwin – announced last November – and the use of airfields in northern Australia, as well as future use of navy bases by the US.
”There’s a bizarre dichotomy of language that’s being used by the Australians on one hand that talks about ‘slow’ and ‘measured’ and ‘incremental’ and the Americans who say, ‘We’re getting on with it’. I think the Aussies are spooked. They’re actually surprised at the substantive outcomes they’ve achieved in co-operation with the US,” Mr Jennings said.
Senator Carr stressed at the beginning of Wednesday’s post-meeting press conference there was ”no language of containment” – that is, of China – in the communique and insisted the meeting was ”business as usual, steady as she goes, [with] no new strategic content”.
Mr Jennings, a former deputy director for strategy in the Defence Department, said the Americans, by contrast, were keen to press the fact that they welcomed the rise of China provided the emerging giant played by international rules.
”I think the Americans tend to have a more sophisticated view of China than we do,” he said. ”If you look at Clinton’s comments, I think she actually sketches out a mature understanding of China’s place in the region, which is that there’s room for all of us … but we can’t allow China’s rhetoric on American and Australian security co-operation to prevent that from going ahead.
”But I frankly don’t think Australia’s thought through a confident enough approach to the China relationship.”
Lowy Institute China expert Linda Jakobson said both the US and Australia needed to be franker with the Chinese about the purpose of the US pivot to Asia. The US and Australia – and many officials in China – are unsure of how exactly China will use its growing power. The US is trying to manage this uncertainty by maintaining its own status as the maker and overseer of international rules – such as shipping routes – and getting China to play by them.
”Both Washington and Canberra keep repeating that, for example, the Darwin decision, which has become shorthand for this strengthened defence co-operation, is not about China,” she said. ”Everyone knows it is about China. The Chinese know it, and it would be better to speak more openly about what strengthened defence co-operation is about and the concerns that China’s rise evokes.”
Brendan Taylor, head of the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, said that any caution on Australia’s part did not diminish its role in the pivot.
”I think the US will be happy with progress,” he said. ”My sense is that for the US it’s as much … the expression of support. Any contribution that Australia or other potential partners in the region, such as Vietnam or the Philippines or Singapore, [make is] not that substantial. It’s more the symbolic support.”
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RELATED STORY:
US seeks deeper military ties
By Brendan Nicholson, Defence editor
The Australian
March 28, 2012
The Australian
March 28, 2012
THE expanded US military presence in Australia is likely to include giant unmanned patrol planes using the remote Cocos Islands and aircraft carriers, and nuclear-powered attack submarines based in Perth as part of efforts to refocus American defence resources in the region.
Top US defence officials are considering Australia’s major naval base, HMAS Stirling, south of Perth, as a “sorely needed” place for the US navy to refuel, re-equip and repair its surface warships and submarines in the Indian Ocean.
The US Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, is due to visit the base and facilities in Darwin shortly, and reports suggest Australia might have been encouraging the US to increase its military presence. Mr Mabus told The Washington Post: “It’s fair to say that we will always take an interest in what the Australians are doing and want to do.”
The Pentagon planners are considering basing manned and unmanned spyplanes in the Cocos Islands – about 2750km northwest of Perth – to carry out patrols far out over the northern oceans.
US and Australian officials quoted in the article say these arrangements are being considered as part of the major expansion of military ties between the two nations discussed in confidential talks over the past year.
A spokesman for Defence Minister Stephen Smith last night confirmed Cocos Islands was a longer-term option for closer Australian-US engagement but not one of the three priority levels of engagement.
They were the rotation of US marines through the Northern Territory; greater use of RAAF bases in northern Australia for US aircraft; and, in the longer term, the prospect of enhanced ship and submarine visits through the Indian Ocean Rim through HMAS Stirling.
No decisions had been taken, the spokesman said.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard last night confirmed discussions were being held about plans to fly drones from the Cocos Islands but said no “progress” had been made on the issue.
The first company of about 250 US marines is due to arrive in Darwin within days.
Over the past year, US and Australian officials have stressed a key focus of the military build-up was to have the necessary resources to provide humanitarian aid for natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
The Post said while US officials insisted that the “regional pivot” was not aimed at any single country, analysts believed it was a clear response to “a rising China whose growing military strength and assertive territorial claims have pushed other Asian nations to reach out to Washington”.
It is not clear what roles aircraft carriers and nuclear-powered submarines would play in humanitarian missions.
The newspaper noted that the content of last year’s talks between Ms Gillard and US President Barack Obama reflected how Washington was turning its strategic attention to Asia as it wound down the war in Afghanistan. It said the Pentagon was reviewing the size and distribution of its forces in northeast Asia, where they were concentrated on Cold War-era bases in Japan and South Korea.
Its goal was to reduce the US military presence in those countries while increasing it in Southeast Asia, home to the world’s busiest shipping lanes and to growing international competition to tap into vast undersea oil and gas fields.
The initial draft of Australia’s military force posture review, released in January, noted that “the South China Sea remains a potential flashpoint in the region”.
The Post quoted an unnamed Australian official saying that, in terms of overall US influence in the Asia-Pacific zone, the strategic weight was shifting south. “Australia did not look all that important during the Cold War,” the official said. “But Australia looks much more important if your fascination is really with the Southeast Asia archipelago.”
The review reportedly urges a “major expansion” of HMAS Stirling, which could be used for “deployments and operations in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean by the US Navy”.
“Specifically, the review suggests that Stirling be upgraded in part so that it could service US aircraft carriers, other large-surface warships and attack submarines,” the newspaper said.
US and Australian officials said the remote Australian territory of the Cocos Islands could be an ideal site for manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft, such as the latest version of the ultra long-range Global Hawk, known as the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance drone or BAMS. The Cocos would be well positioned to launch surveillance flights over the South China Sea.
In November, the Prime Minister and Mr Obama announced the deployment of 2500 US marines for training in Australia and indicated more plans were being considered. The first deployment of troops from the Hawaii-based Third Marine Regiment is expected to be based at Darwin’s Robertson Barracks.
The marines will spend several months training through the dry season at the Australian Defence Force’s Bradshaw and Mount Bundy training areas in the Northern Territory. The force, which will be rotated annually for training, is unlikely to reach its full strength until 2016.
By then the marines will have considerable equipment, including amphibious assault ships similar to the two giant landing helicopter docks being built for the Royal Australian Navy, along with Harrier jump jets and troop-carrying helicopters.
Mr Smith stressed Australia did not have a policy of containing China.
“It is not possible to contain China,” he said. “What we do want to ensure is that China, as it emerges as a great power – to use a phrase coined by (World Bank president and former US deputy secretary of state) Bob Zoellick – is a ‘responsible stakeholder’ or, as the Chinese themselves describe it, ‘a harmonious environment’.”
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