Beyond unipolarity

Asia is seeing the emergence not of one great power but two — China and India — or even three, if Indonesia’s growth continues. Given the unlikelihood that America can maintain its strategic primacy in the Western Pacific, Australia and New Zealand must adjust to the new situation and adapt their defence policies. They have big choices to make about whether, and if so how, they might prepare to defend themselves independently from attack by a major Asian power.

In this article I am going to address the big choices that Australia and New Zealand face about how best to navigate the very difficult strategic environment we both face in our wider region today. In doing so I am going to take the liberty of using plural pronouns like ‘our’ and ‘we’ to mean both Australia and New Zealand together. I will do that not because I believe our two countries’ strategic perspectives, interests and policies are, or should be, identical. On the contrary, precisely 40 years’ experience has taught me that despite our closeness in so many ways, Australia and New Zealand often differ, and at times differ quite sharply, on these matters. That experience has also taught me how important it is for Australians to recognise these differences and understand their deep roots in our different geographies, histories and outlooks. Nonetheless, I am going to use these pronouns collectively here because I think that, in the circumstances we now face, our differences will become less important as the demands of a new regional and global order drive us closer to each other. We face a new era in which our two countries will be more alone, together, than we have ever been before.

One might say that this convergence is already happening. On both sides of the Tasman, national debates about how best to respond to our more dangerous strategic situation has be- come focused on the same awkward acronym — AUKUS. Of course, AUKUS means different things in our two countries. In Australia the Pillar 1 plan to buy and build nuclear powered sub- marines looms very large, while here in New Zealand Pillar 2 takes centre stage. But, in fact, AUKUS is much more than either of its two ‘pillars’. Most fundamentally, and most importantly for both Australia and New Zealand, commitment to AUKUS is a declaration of strategic alignment with America in Asia over the years ahead. While it does not embody the kind of formal strategic commitments that are found in ANZUS, signing up to either pillar of AUKUS does signal strong support for America’s approach to its strategic contest with China, and to the US vision of global and regional order that underpins that approach. That is certainly the way it is seen in Washington. In fact, for them, this is the whole point of AUKUS.

It is, therefore, very important that any decision about whether to join AUKUS should pay a lot of attention — prima- ry attention, in fact — to the merits of America’s approach to China’s challenge and of its vision of global and regional order. We need to decide whether we agree with Washington that the only acceptable response to China’s challenge is to resist any substantive accommodation of Chinese ambitions, and insist on the perpetuation of the long-standing unipolar US-led order in Asia and globally. And we need to decide whether we agree with Washington that it should be willing to go to war with China if necessary to achieve this outcome. These are big and difficult questions, and they deserve careful thought.

Considering order
We face these difficult questions today because we confront a major crisis in global and regional order. They are unfamiliar questions because we have not confronted this kind of crisis for many decades. We have enjoyed a series of orders which have been generally very stable and benign — even if we have not always appreciated this. It is now 35 years since the end of the Cold War saw the emergence of a unipolar global order under US leadership which was strongly aligned with our values and largely served our interests. It is even longer — over 50 years — since America’s opening to China effectively ended the Cold War in Asia and inaugurated an era of unparalleled peace and prosperity throughout East Asia and the Western Pacific. And it is almost 80 years since the defeat of the Axis powers brought to an end the last serious war between major powers, and began the establishment among Western nations of the kind of international order based on democratic politics and market economics that we have always seen as consonant with our values and conducive to our interests, and have always hoped to see flourish more broadly. It is thus a long time since we have faced serious questions about the kind of international order we would like to live under, and the costs and risks we are willing to incur to help create and defend that order.

Today we face such questions again. At both the regional and global level, the US-led order based on those congenial values — what we sometimes call the ‘rules-based order’ — is being challenged by powerful states in three key regions of the world: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. Our initial reaction to this challenge is anger and resolve — anger that any country should seek to overturn an order which seems so obviously to be in everyone’s best interest, and resolve to defend it by whatever means are necessary. This response is entirely natural and predictable. Writing about the challenges to international order in the 1930s in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, E.H. Carr observed how readily we attribute unique moral status to an international status quo that suits our interests, and condemn those who seek to change it as inherently evil. And as he went on to say, ‘It becomes almost fatally easy to attribute the catastrophe solely to the ambitions and the arrogance of a small group of men, and to seek no further explanation.’1 He was right, of course. We blame the Kaiser and Hitler, Hirohito and Tojo for the disasters of the two world wars, but there are always deeper forces and issues at work — the place Germany in Europe, the place of Japan in Asia — that needed to be addressed and resolved. It was in this spirit that A.J.P. Taylor wrote, in his starkly controversial account of the causes of the Second World War, ‘This is a story without heroes; and perhaps even without villains.’²

Taylor was thrown out of the British Academy for that, but he had a point, and his insight matters for us today. We, too, easily believe that today’s challenge to our preferred regional and global order arises from the ambition and arrogance of leaders like Xi and Putin. In fact, there are much deeper factors at work today, as there always are in any sustained and serious challenge to the international order. In Asia, where our attention is naturally most focused, the primary underlying factor is one we are all aware of but still struggle to quite comprehend: the economic rise of the region’s — and the world’s — biggest countries, China and India. This is the biggest and fastest shift in the global distribution of wealth and power in history, and it simply cannot leave the regional and global international order unchanged. It would be a cardinal mistake to assume that the only or the best response to the challenge we face today is to try to preserve the old status quo, and to go to war to do so, even if we do believe that the status quo is morally superior to any alternative. As Carr noted,

If a change is necessary and desirable [or, one might add, inevitable], the use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo may be morally more culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it.3

A little later he makes the same point even more starkly:

It is a moot point whether the politicians and publicists of the satisfied Powers, who attempted to identify international morality with security, law and order and other time-honoured slogans of privileged groups, do not bear their share of responsibility for the disaster as well as the politicians and publicists of the dissatisfied Powers, who brutally denied the validity of an international morality so constituted.⁴

The lesson to draw is a simple one: when we face a challenge to the existing international order, fighting to preserve the old order is not the only, or necessarily the right, policy response. Our aim should be to seek the outcome which best protects our interests and preserves peace in the radically new circum- stances in which we find ourselves.

China’s challenge
Let us look at what these thoughts mean in relation to Asia today. The essential feature of the regional order in East Asia and the Western Pacific which America seeks to defend is US strategic primacy. China aims to overturn this order and replace it with one based on Chinese primacy, and in which America plays no significant strategic role. It is as simple, as stark and as momentous as that. The world’s two strongest states are competing over which of them will be the predominant power in the world’s most prosperous and dynamic region, and the outcome of that contest will have profound implications for the global order as well.

To understand where this rivalry is heading and how it will end we need to explore how it actually works in practice. There are many dimensions to the rivalry — economic, technological, diplomatic and even in a minor way ideological. But as always when great questions of international order are at stake, the ultimate contest is strategic: it is a contest of military power and resolve. Taiwan is its primary focus, but that is not because of the intrinsic significance of Taiwan’s political future to either party — even to China. It is because since 1949 Taiwan has been, for both rivals, the primary test-site for their relative power and resolve. There are others — contested territories in the South and East China Seas — but Taiwan remains the most important by far. As long as America can deny Taiwan to China, its position as the primary strategic power in East Asia and the Western Pacific remains relatively secure. If China can take Taiwan in defiance of America, then America’s strategic position in the region becomes untenable.

The reason is simple enough. America’s regional strategic position depends on its key alliances, especially on its alliance with Japan without which it could not hope to sustain a strong strategic position in the Western Pacific. Its alliances depend ultimately on the credibility of America’s guarantees to defend them against China. America has always understood, accepted and acknowledged that its willingness to defend Taiwan is a critical test of the credibility of its alliance commitments else- where in East Asia. That has become clearer still as Washington has in effect abandoned ‘strategic ambiguity’ through President Biden’s repeated unconditional promises that America would defend Taiwan if it is attacked. If America fails to fulfil that promise, the credibility of its Asian alliance commitments would be fatally compromised, and the alliances themselves severely, and perhaps fatally damaged.

This presents China with an alluring opportunity. If America can be deterred from intervening to defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan, then Beijing will take a giant step towards realising its goal of pushing America out of the region and taking its place. Conversely, the more Beijing believes there is a significant chance that America will fight for Tai- wan, the more likely it is to be deterred from trying to exploit this opportunity by attacking Taiwan.

The key question, then, in assessing the trajectory of this rivalry concerns the robustness of each side’s deterrence of the other. The answer is not reassuring. We might start by recognis- ing that we have already seen in Eastern Europe a major failure of America’s capacity to deter a direct military challenge to America’s strategic position in a key part of the world. There are good reasons to fear that the same could well happen in Asia. The primary reason is that America has allowed its previously overwhelming advantage over China in conventional air and naval capabilities to erode as Chinese capabilities have grown dramatically, while America’s have not. There is now no realistic chance that it could win a maritime war against China in the Western Pacific over Taiwan or anything else. That really matters because it is hard to convince the Chinese that America is willing to fight a war it has no serious chance of winning. For many years now, Washington has increasingly relied on US nuclear forces to provide the deterrent instead. But as Chinese nuclear forces grow in scale and sophistication, US threats to go nu- clear in a war over Taiwan become less and less credible too.

America has tried to offset these trends by enlisting other countries to bolster its deterrence by supplementing its declining relative power. Hence, all the talk from Washington of strengthening US alliances and creating new coalitions like the Quad. AUKUS is very much part of this effort. But none of this has materially improved America’s declining deterrent, for two reasons. First, none of America’s allies or partners are clearly committed to support America in a war with China, not even its closest allies, Japan and Australia. There is almost no chance that its most powerful new partner, India, would do so. This means that America’s network of alliances, coalitions and partnerships in Asia have nothing like the deterrent effect that, for example, NATO had in its heyday. Second, even if some of them did join the fight, none of America’s potential supporters have armed forces that would materially affect the outcome. Not even Japan’s forces would give America a real chance of decisively defeating China. Why then would these uncertain allies do much if anything to help deter China?

America’s imperatives
How has this situation arisen? How has America allowed its capacity to defend its strategic leadership in Asia to deteriorate so far? The answer is to be found in the simple balance between cost and benefit. Americans — or at least most of those in the US elite circles that talk about foreign policy — might want to perpetuate the strategic primacy in Asia that America has exercised since the turn of the last century. But they will not accept the costs and risks of doing so against a rival as formidable as China. Today US defence spending as a share of GDP is at its lowest level since the late 1990s, when America faced no great power rivals. Although they identify China as a uniquely power- ful adversary, American leaders have not been willing to ask US taxpayers to fund the major increases in defence spending to levels that would be needed to restore US deterrence against it — levels comparable to those of the Cold War. Nor are they willing to explain to Americans that resisting China’s challenge entails accepting the risk of nuclear war, just as they did during the Cold War.

There is a robust underlying reason for this which goes be- yond mere talk of a resurgence of ‘isolationism’. The fact is that the imperatives for America to resist China’s challenge in Asia today are not nearly as strong as those that drove America to its exceptional efforts in the Cold War. Containing the Soviet challenge was a truly vital US interest because if Moscow’s ambi- tions were not resisted there was a very real chance that the Soviet Union, surrounded as it was by weak and vulnerable neighbours, could come to dominate the whole of Eurasia, and American strategists had always held that a power that dominated Eurasia could pose a mortal threat to America itself in the Western Hemisphere. China today poses no similar threat. It has no serous chance of achieving Eurasian hegemony, be- cause the distribution of wealth and power in Eurasia is very different today than it was in the decades after 1945. Unlike the Soviets, it would face resistance from at least three formidable Eurasian powers — India, Russia and Europe. China today is stronger than the Soviet Union ever was, but it does not enjoy the preponderance of strength over other Eurasian powers that the Soviets enjoyed at their height. Hence, they do not seem capable of posing the kind of existential threat to America that the Soviets might once have done. And that means that Amer- ica has little to fear from a China that achieves it ambition by dominating East Asia and the Western Pacific. That would not give China the power to threaten America itself, which means America does not have the imperative to shoulder the costs and risks required to prevent China taking its place in East Asia and the Western Pacific. And that explains why they are not do- ing so, and why there is little chance that America will win the contest with China over the future strategic leadership of East Asia and the Western Pacific — nor, more broadly, will it find a way to perpetuate the unipolar US-led global order of which its primacy in our region is such a central plank.

Multipolar order
There is, of course, a clear disconnect between what America — at least under Biden — has been saying about its determination to preserve the US-led order regionally and globally, and what it has actually been doing. As I have suggested, the lack of concrete action reflects the true underlying strategic dynamics of America’s situation and the lack of any direct threat posed to its vital interests by the revisionist authoritarian powers that confront it. Washington’s bellicose ‘new Cold War’ rhetoric is, on the other hand, underwritten by the conviction that if the global US-led unipolar liberal order is not preserved, then its place will be taken by a unipolar global authoritarian order led by China, from which America’s and other democracies’ political systems and values would face a mortal threat. But this is a most unlikely scenario. It is far more likely that the post-Cold War US-led glob- al order will be replaced by a multipolar global order dominated by a number of great powers — five at least and possibly more in time — manifesting a wide range of different political systems and values. Such an order is unfamiliar to us but not to history. Such an order kept the peace in Europe and framed the global order throughout the 19th century. And it was just this kind of or- der which the architects of the United Nations envisaged for the post-war world in 1945 — reflected in the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — before it was superseded by the bipolar order of the Cold War. Future historians may well judge that this multipolar order has already materialised — we in the West just have not understood and accepted this yet.

A key feature of such an order is that each of the major powers seeks to exercise some degree of hegemony in its own near region. For us, then, one key question is what this means in Asia. Many assume, and fear, that it means an Asia dominated by China. But that overlooks the fact that Asia is seeing the emergence not of one great power but two, or even three. India is already the third biggest economy in the world in PPP terms, and it will overtake America to become the second biggest within a couple of decades. There is no serious chance that China will be able to assert primacy over such a powerful rival. Instead, the most likely outcome is that two Asian giants will sit at the top table in the global multipolar order, and each will establish a sphere of influence over their nearer regions. Asia will be divided between them, with India dominating South Asia and the Indian Ocean and China dominating East Asia and the Western Pacific.

This would not be an easy or restful region for Australia and New Zealand to navigate, but two blessings of our geography would make it easier than we might otherwise assume. One is that we would remain relatively distant from the great powers themselves. The other is that we would sit on the boundary line between their respective spheres of influence, which would give us ample scope to play them off against one another to avoid falling too far under the sway of either of them. What complicates this picture in the longer term is the very real possibility that Indonesia will emerge as a third Asian great power, powered by an economy which is set to become the world’s fourth largest by mid-century. How it would fit into the Asian strategic order is one of the biggest uncertainties in Asia’s longer-term future. And for Australia at least, how we would manage relations with a great power right on our doorstep may well turn out to be our biggest long-term strategic challenge.

Nonetheless, as long as we can adapt to these changes and rise to these challenges there is no reason to assume that our two countries could not survive and thrive in this kind of Asian order — an order framed and shaped by Asian great powers rather than outsiders. That is not to say there will not be painful adjustments for us and potentially much worse for others. One must realistically expect, for example, that if this is indeed Asia’s trajectory then Taiwan has little or no chance of avoiding absorption by China, just as in Europe it is hard to imagine that Ukraine will escape Russia’s shadow. The hard questions we must face, as others have faced so often before, is whether the alternatives are worse. At Yalta in 1945 Roosevelt and Churchill acquiesced to Stalin’s demands for primacy in Eastern Europe in order to avoid a new war with the Red Army. It is easy to recognise the tragic consequences of this decision for the peoples of Eastern Europe: it is hard to argue that the probable alternative of another full-scale war in Eastern Europe would not have been much worse.

War risk
There is no doubt, in my mind at least, that the post-Cold War, US-led regional and global order has been very good for us, and that our interests would be best served by its preservation. But history strongly suggests that that if we do not accommodate changes to the international order to reflect major shifts in the distribution of wealth and power, we will face a very real risk of major war — and in this era that means nuclear war. So our task, and indeed our duty, as we face today’s crisis of global and regional order is to balance the very real costs and risks of accommodating a new order against the costs and risks of resisting it. This is the choice that the West faces today in Ukraine. It has always been clear that failure to decisively defeat Russia’s invasion would mark a historic shift in Europe’s strategic order with clear implications for the global order too. It is now clear that Russia cannot be decisively defeated without direct military intervention by NATO forces. It is also clear that this would carry a very real risk of nuclear war. The question is simply whether the risk of nuclear war outweighs the cost of failing to defeat Russia.

Today America and its allies and partners in Asia face a similar question, because the risk of a US–China war over their respective future roles in the Asian order is very real. The temptation for China to test America’s resolve by moving militarily against Taiwan — or by provoking a confrontation in the South China Sea — is great. The more convinced Beijing is that America is bluffing when it promises to defend Taiwan or sup- port the Philippines with armed force, the more likely they are to call America’s bluff. China has good reason to think they are bluffing, because it has seen how little America has done to prepare to fight and win a war with China in the Western Pacific. An America which was really serious about that would have be- gun to prepare a decade ago with major increases in defence spending, doubling the size of its submarine fleet and creating an Asian NATO with real strategic and operational teeth. None of that has happened, so there is a real risk that Beijing will draw the natural conclusion. That risk is all the higher because the payoff for China — and for today’s Chinese leadership — if they can show America is bluffing is so great. As we have seen, by fatally undermining US credibility they can take a big step towards pushing America out of East Asia and taking its place.

What happens if Beijing rolls the dice? How would America respond? The reality is that no one knows — including US leaders in Washington. They themselves do not seem sure whether they are bluffing or not. The danger is that when confronted with the choice in the Situation Room at 3 am they would suddenly decide they were not bluffing after all, and take America into the first great-power war since 1945, a war that it cannot win and that has a very high chance of going nuclear, and a war they would expect us to follow them into.

AUKUS choice
These somber observations bring us back to the choices we face about joining AUKUS. We cannot make those choices with- out deciding whether we support the idea that America should go to war with China if necessary to try to preserve the US-led order in Asia and globally. That is not because AUKUS would necessarily oblige us to go to war with them. It is because our participation in AUKUS would be seen by Washington — and would be intended by Washington — as an unambiguous statement of support for that idea. That is what AUKUS is really all about. My belief that AUKUS is a bad option ultimately rests on my conviction that this idea should not be supported. Not just because that is a war that America could not win, but because, more fundamentally, the profound shift in the global distribution of wealth and power makes it impossible for America to remain the primary power in Asia or globally.

What then is the alternative for New Zealand and Australia? First, we should accept that we live in a multipolar world, and instead of trying to deny that, focus on helping to build a new order and institutions to make that new or- der work as well as possible for small and medium powers like us. That is what we did the last time we had a chance to help reshape the global order, at the end of the Second World War — witness the 1944 Anzac Pact, whereby we sought to frame the post-war order in the South Pacific, and our work at the 1945 San Francisco Conference to shape the United Nations. We need some of that vision and ambition again.

Second, we need to recognise and accept that Asia will no longer be dominated and made safe for us by Britain or America. Instead we will have to make our own way in a region dominated by Asian powers. As I have noted, that need not be disastrous for us, but it will make new demands on us, and we need to do a lot more to prepare to meet those demands. For our diplomacy, it means recognising that now, more than ever, our Asian neighbours are more important to our future than our old Anglo-Saxon friends. Above all, we have a vital opportunity to build on the fact that between us and Asia’s two great powers lie a constellation of middle and smaller powers with interests and objectives very like ours. They, too, want to find a way to live in peace with the great powers while avoiding falling too far under their shadow. We have done far too little so far to cultivate these opportunities.

We also need to adapt our defence policies. Asia’s great powers do not threaten us militarily today, but the risk that they might in future will be higher in an Asia without a preponderant US strategic presence. That means we have big choices to make about whether, and if so how, we might prepare to defend ourselves independently from attack by a major Asian power. I have argued elsewhere that this is not impossible, but that it is demanding. It would require us to rethink our approach to de- fence quite fundamentally, just as we have to rethink our diplo- macy and indeed reimagine our place in a world which is very different from the one we expected at the turn of the century 25 years ago. But that should not surprise or dismay us. What we have come to realise in that time is that with the rise of the Asian great powers we are witnessing the biggest shift in our inter- national setting since European settlement of our islands. The adaptations we will have to make are correspondingly large. And, as I suggested at the outset, one consequence is that we will face these challenges, increasingly, together.

Prof Hugh White AO is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University. This article is based on the address he gave to a NZIIA meeting in Wellington on 7 August. His visit to New Zealand was sponsored by Helen Clark and Don Brash.

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NOTES
1. E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis [2nd edn] (London, 1946), p.xi.
2. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), p.40.
3. Carr, p.191.
4. Ibid., p.208.