Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – American-led security and economic partnerships are integral to confronting ambitions of the People’s Republic of China, said Australia’s former foreign minister Julie Bishop in a recent conversation with Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow H. R. McMaster.
The discussion featuring Bishop was part of the Hoover Institution’s Battlegrounds series, hosted by McMaster, which seeks to gain insight about challenges faced by America’s allies. Prior to her current role as chancellor of Australian National University, Bishop served as a member of parliament for Australia’s Liberal Party for over two decades. She has held various party leadership and ministerial positions and was foreign minister from 2013 to 2018.
Bishop told McMaster that she is concerned that growing moods of retrenchment in the United States are forcing Washington to retreat from the international rules-based order it helped create at the end of World War II.
“The United States was the instigator, the defender, the guarantor of the framework that guided how nations would behave,” Bishop said. “Let’s face it, it has prevented a third global conflict [and] has enabled the rise in economic prosperity of hundreds of millions of people around the world. We always look to the United States for that leadership.”
She explained that this framework persisted into the twenty-first century, when Australia and other nations followed America’s lead in responding to global terror threats after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and in mitigating the fallout of the global economic crisis in 2008–9.
Bishop argued that as COVID-19 spread beyond China’s borders, the United States was largely missing in action as a result of disengaging from international institutions. She noted the risks associated with US retrenchment, including China’s subversion of the World Health Organization to act in favor of Beijing’s interests rather than toward unbiased scientific conclusions about how to best manage the pandemic crisis.
Bishop is concerned that traditional partners of the United States are hedging their bets and becoming less vocal about Beijing’s abuses and aggressions in order to avoid the risk of economic retaliation. Meanwhile, leaders in other countries have become attracted to what they have come to believe is China’s efficient authoritarian governance model and have been enmeshed in billion-dollar infrastructure projects under Beijing’s One Belt One Road initiative.
Bishop argued that policy proposals in the United States and other countries that involve an economic decoupling from China would have severe unintended consequences. Instead, she explained, a US-led partnership between like-minded nations including Australia would help ensure that Chinese companies that offer advanced technologies, such as 5G networks, would respect the sovereignty of countries in which they operate. A complete ban on these companies, absent effective enforcement, will embolden China to operate outside traditional international norms and export technologies on their own terms.
Australia possesses many strategic advantages in the Indo-Pacific region. In large part because of its abundance in natural resources, Australia is a net exporter, especially relative to China. Beijing’s threats to ban imports from Australia, including its most lucrative resource, iron ore, have underscored the need for countries throughout the region to further diversify their trade relationships. Although the Trans-Pacific Partnership was not ratified, Bishop said, adopting parts of that agreement piecemeal would greatly benefit economic security in the Indo-Pacific.
Bishop also underlined enormous opportunities for security cooperation in Asia. As an example, she said that following his election in 2016, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was skeptical about security assistance from the United States. However, after a 2017 terror attack in the country’s southern Marawi City, Duterte enlisted reinforcements from both the United States and Australia for a counterterrorism offensive against Sayyaf militants. Duterte has also recently supported a 2016 United Nations arbitration ruling that dismantled China’s “nine-dash line” sovereignty claim in the South China Sea.
Bishop noted, positively, that the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) between the United States, Australia, India, and Japan has been elevated to the foreign minister level. This strategic partnership has been strengthened primarily to curtail China’s ambitions and secure stability and a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific.
“Countries in our region don’t want to live in a world where only China calls the shots,” Bishop said.
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