Facing Fragmentation in a Fragile World

The Australian Institute of International Affairs held its annual national conference in Canberra on 11 November. An event for Australia’s foreign affairs observers, practitioners, and critics, it’s occasion, coming on the heals of the American presidential election, provided for sober analysis of the trajectory ahead.
Headlines matter. And the headline arc is dark.
When the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA) annual conference was held in Canberra in 2019, its headline was “New agendas for a new era.”
As headlines go, optimistic enough. Then, the plague came. Covid meant no conference in 2020 or 2021.
We gathered again in 2022. Conference headline: “New frontiers in Australian foreign policy.” Still, possibly, relatively positive.
Then last year’s conference title: “Navigating the perfect storm: Australian foreign policy and the polycrisis.”
And this year’s headline: “Facing Fragmentation: Possibilities and Partnerships in a Fragile World.”
Over six years and four conferences, we have gone from new era and new frontiers to perfect storm, polycrisis, and the fissures of a feverish time.
Add in another AIIA headline: “A Return to great-power rivalry.” That’s the book title of Australia in World Affairs 2016-2020. Launched at the conference, this is the 13th volume in the AIIA’s series on what Australia sees and does in the world. The world affairs series, covering the period from 1950, is a growing monument of great scholarship created by the institute.
The headline expressions of rivalry and crisis got a sober treatment in the Facing Fragmentation speech from the Opposition leader in the Senate, and shadow foreign minister, Simon Birmingham. He comes from South Australia. So that matches him at many levels to another South Australian, the government leader in the Senate and foreign minister, Senator Penny Wong.
The mirror effect in Birmingham’s conference speech was that almost all of what the shadow foreign minister said could have been used in a speech by the foreign minister. The small portion of politics was when Birmingham kicked Labor for running down defence spending under Julia Gillard; the political point scoring was about what happened more than a decade ago. Birmingham even gave a positive shout-out to our ambassador in Washington, Dr Kevin Rudd.
One judgement from this is that tough times drive Australia’s governing parties closer together on foreign policy. Pressure can compress and enforce consensus. Another judgement is that both parties will point at China, but are careful how much they poke the panda.
Birmingham said Russia and China showed a “rising disregard for the peaceful ambitions and rules that followed the aftermath of World War II and with that, growing global consequences.” He said “Chinese components and funds also help to sustain Russia’s war effort. China has chosen to use its very welcome economic growth, which has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, to also pursue the fastest military build-up of our time. Under Xi Jinping, China has crushed freedoms in Hong Kong, aggressively pursues territorial claims in the South China Sea, and sought to militarily intimidate Taiwan, inn a signal that can hardly be read as well-intentioned.”
The shadow foreign minister offered this striking observation on the impact of fragmentation: “All nations should be brought to stand against what is happening to Ukraine or the Philippines lest the same ever occur to them.” That’s pointing at China without poking the panda by name.
Surveying the election of Donald Trump, Birmingham said Trump will be “less predictable” and a proud disrupter “who is prone to making and pursuing less conventional policies and making bolder pronouncements. But we should not instantly catastrophise.” On that “catastrophise” point (don’t present a situation as worse than it actually is) he cited our Washington ambassador, Dr Rudd, on the need to “chill out” on the fears about Trumpaggedon.
The shadow foreign minister was followed by the AIIA’s national president, Dr Heather Smith, who offered typical Smith truth telling. As China’s leader Xi Jinping has visited every Australian state, she observed that no Australian politician has an understanding of China that Xi has of Australia.
Other Heather truths:
- Our region is the epicentre of global competition;
- Economic policy is weaponised;
- China’s economy is seriously unbalanced;
- The United States will accelerate international fragmentation as it retreats from multilateralism;
- National security has become the dominant priority. The economic and foreign policy boundaries have blurred, and economics no longer rules the roost.
Heather’s critique of her fellow economists is that they’ve been naïve or late to recognise how much our strategic circumstances have deteriorated. Her critique of the strategists: too prone to see the world in black and white.
At the launch of the latest volume in Australia in World Affairs, A Return to Great-Power Rivalry, one of the editors, Professor Baogang He, had some optimistic notes about what Trump will mean for China, whatever the drums of trade war. Trump is pragmatic and transactional. He will take a lot of ideology out of the struggle. No lectures from the next US president about democracy.
Baogang thinks Xi will look forward to an ideology-free bilateral relationship with a Trump White House. A peace dialogue between Xi and Trump next year, he suggested, will be the most consequential exchanges for the course of this century. For Australia, Baogang judged, great power rivalry shrinks the space for Australia to operate as a middle power.
The South Pacific session had familiar lessons for Oz. Turn up, turn up. Listen, listen. And, of course, drink the kava. Not least of the kava benefits, I always say, is that it deadens the lips of the Australians for a while, so they can’t talk and can hear more.
Good policies to help the South Pacific can have unfortunate side-effects. Australia, rightly, is opening its doors for Pacific Islanders to work and live here. Yet the South Pacific session heard of the brain-drain problem, as Islanders stay in Australian and don’t return home.
Climate change and the need for Australian minerals will cause tensions between Australia’s relations with the Islands and the resource needs of Asia. The Asian message to Australia is dig, dig, dig. Asia wants those minerals. The vivid story the conference heard was of a village on the Papua New Guinea (PNG) coast that has to move because of rising sea levels. The great problem is where do the displaced people of that village move to? The central place of land ownership in PNG society means other villages don’t want to give up any land for resettlement. Describing those impacts, Dr Henry Ivarature, deputy director of the Pacific Security College, told me that “PNG is where the greatest climate catastrophe will happen in the South Pacific.”
Discussing Australia in Asia, Dr Amy King lamented how fear of China has warped Australian debate. As an academic, she finds that her efforts to understand China expose her to all sorts of question and suspicions from the Australian system, and inquiries about her students. Understanding, King argued, does not translate to support for China.
My aside on what Amy King described is that we are indeed in a new cold war when the spooks start forcing universities to do loyalty tests, question the academics, and check on the students.
Professor Anthony Milner said that many in Southeast Asia are puzzled by why Australia is so antagonistic to China. Why does Australia go so hard, given the massive economic benefits it draws from China? And Australia doesn’t actually live beside China the way ASEAN does.
Dr James Chin commented that ASEAN doesn’t want to do neutrality so much as refrain from having to talk too loudly about difficult options (the familiar plea, “Don’t make us choose.”) ASEAN works to maintain ASEAN centrality, however that’s defined. But the judgement from James Chin is that ASEAN centrality will be one of the many victims if things blow up in the South China Sea. For Australia in the Asia, Chin says, our image is back to that old label: “America’s deputy sheriff.” That’s the meaning the region draws from AUKUS and the Quad.
The conference heard a wonderful definition of the different strategic personalities of Australia and Indonesia from Dr Gatra Priyandita. Why have Australia and Indonesia responded so differently to the rise of China? Gatra’s answer is that for Indonesia the big issues of insecurity and instability are always internal. Australia is lucky enough to see all its challenges as external and coming from outside our borders.
The zinger from the multilateralism pane is that we are back to living in a Westphalian world of states, but we don’t have a Treaty of Westphalia to help us navigate. That sage judgement on fragmentation was from Dr Shashi Tharoor.
The closing plenary offered roundup thoughts from:
Dr Peter Dean: The US did not vote for Trumpism. Americans voted on their economy and their lives, not on issues of political cohesion. The only way to play baseball with Trump is to take it one pitch at a time, because even he doesn’t always know where he will throw the ball.
Michael Pezzullo: The US will remain the most powerful nation in the world. Xi Jinping is strangling Chinese capitalism. And the former secretary of Australia’s Home Affairs Department made the biggest call of the day, saying that Xi Jinping might be China’s Gorbachev, the man who blows up the system.
Hugh White: Doing Pezullo push-back, White said that a rich China is not a poor Soviet Union. And Australia faces the biggest shift in its international circumstances since the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788.
The most lyrical response to the return of the Trump era came from Melissa Conley Tyler. She gave a rap description of what Australia faces:
How does a faithful AUKUS ANZUS ally and a
Qual pal, dropped in a geopolitical
hot spot in the antipodean by providence, a liberal middle power
deal with a man consumed with choler?
Prez47 – capricious, meretricious –
he’s a climate change denier, establishment pariah
tariff-slapper in chief, MAGA hatter belief
100 years of mateship don’t bring much relief
And every day we watch him carry the country away
Alliances are spurious, strongman-idol curious
Welcome folks, to the Second Trump Administration!
Melissa’s rap captures the times, but what music will go with it? My suggestion for the headline for next year’s conference reaches back more than 400 years to the title of Middleton’s cynical and amoral play about Jacobean London:
“A Mad World, My Masters.”
Graeme Dobell FAIIA, a journalist writing on Australian foreign policy and defence, is a fellow of the AIIA.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.