Last September, the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) Pact formalized a security component to check China’s world-leadership quest.
Until then, economic competition dominated China’s scramble, though between the lines, a cultural strand lingered. China and others responded raucously, but rechristening this divide a “Cold War” misses a crucial point: The original Cold War relied on hard power with two dominant competitors, but today’s multiple contenders bringing in soft-power credentials imperils identity -- arguably more than the military.
China felt insulted when Australia proposed investigating the December 2019 Wuhan pandemic. It slashed barley, coal, and wine imports from Australia just when another Anglo-Saxon country, Great Britain, explored Asia for trading partners after exiting the European Union. For a third Anglo-Saxon country, the United States -- a no-win US departure from Afghanistan meant reinforcing its no-lose stand against China elsewhere in Asia.
The importance of commerce
Commerce underpins China-US relations. It flowered when President George HW Bush embraced Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation proposal in 1989. Bill Clinton’s US-China Relations Act of 2000 gave China most-favoured-nation status, followed by Barack Obama’s 2009 Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Though flustered by a secret 2009 Air-Sea Battle doctrine brewing within his own military, his security-laced “Asian Pivot” isolated China in the December 2018 Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which Donald J Trump hammered home by harping on China being “communist” and for allegedly releasing a “China virus” to generate the pandemic.
Progressive developments were ensnared. Australia, which signed a free-trade deal with China, its largest partner, in December 2015, arrogantly quashed a Chinese Belt Road Initiative project last year even as China courts Australia for CPTPP membership.
Though Asian countries invite both Anglo-Saxon friends and Chinese economic incentives, their Western preference may keep dimming against a ghastly emergent populism just as China’s prosperous Shanghai Cooperation Organization accents shift away from the West.
After 15 years, Japan’s mini-NATO outfit, called QUAD, still blows with the wind, rather than sail. India had skirmishes twice with China in the Himalayas, yet shares a $100 billion trade relation with it. South Korea’s relationship with China seems to be suddenly diving without seriously impairing commerce.
New priorities
Thus, Cold War rumblings in the air are matched by trade-based ground realities (trade was not a Soviet-US Cold War priority). China boasts a favourable annual balance with the United States of about $300bn (true in 2018 and 2019), with India just under $60bn, and with the United Kingdom about $33bn.
Hefty deficits also exist, as the $60-70bn with Australia, even higher with South Korea, and the approximately $30bn with Japan. Since this trillion-dollar network speaks for 5% of total global trade, crying “wolf” about China subtracts from exploring possible benefits and mutual collaboration, while bottling up Anglo-Saxon gains.
Inherent dangers will not evaporate automatically. Artificial South China Sea islands make Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan depend on US defense. By postulating 2049 to reabsorb Taiwan, China’s single-minded global drives instill global fears, albeit silenced by multiple and overlapping China-based networks.
New Zealand, for example, dropped out of the “Five Eyes” Anglo-Saxon intelligence-sharing partnership with the four “AUKUS” members (it receives all intelligence reports, but supplies only 1% of those reports). It hopes economic priorities will help make it what it wants to be: Asia’s Switzerland.
The wind is changing
Fissures within the Anglo-Saxon community may be the tip of the stiffest populist iceberg in a century. The diminishing weight of Anglo-Saxon population proportions within Anglo-Saxon countries worries Anglo-Saxon countries more. Barely half the Australians support keeping the Queen of England as Chief of State: 45% wanted to become a republic in 1999.
In 1901, 58% of Australia’s population reported a UK birth, in 2001 only 25%, and in 2016, merely 17.7%. More than half of all Canadians were Anglo-Saxons when the confederation began in 1867, yet the 2016 census reported only 18%. Similarly, the United States shifted from an 80% in 1776 to under 10% today.
Immigration and inter-marriages feed this attenuation. Though politicians fan one side or another, Anglo-Saxon ears listen when history speaks: France’s challenges of the 18th-19th centuries; Germany’s and Japan’s in the early 20th century; and the Soviet threat from the 1940s-1980s. Today’s dominant fear is China, and China’s most formidable weapon is culture.
The French connection
France is the key “left out” country. Its need for Asia is as crucial as Britain’s, but reasons differ. Whereas Britain prioritizes economic salvation, President Emmanuel Macron elevates security. His Indo-Pacific Doctrine is built upon a Canberra-Delhi-Paris security Axis.
It seeks to contain China, cultivate US relations, and keep Beijing-Washington contestation. It enjoys more sovereign claims from its Pacific island-possessions than other countries in the Pacific. With Australia scrapping multi-billion dollar submarine orders from France, French vulnerability against China cannot but spiral. Its foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, realistically dubs the AUKUS Pact a “stab in the back.”
What of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson?
Biden is caught between the rock of a detestable Trump legacy and the hard place of an economy resting upon gigantic public relief money and immense infrastructural plans. Delivering his “America is back” promise needs jobs, even if constructing submarines.
Worrying about his country’s oldest ally, France, is not in the cards. Though he is not a populist, Biden is locked in a populist climate, thus must cultivate domestic audiences, not foreign friends.
Boris Johnson carries congruent tasks:
(a) Regenerate the fading Anglo-Saxon brotherhood to buffer his European exit
(b) Rebuild pre-World War II relations across Asia, this time more symmetrically
(c) “Trump” China more convincingly with policies than Trump could with populist rhetoric.
This isn’t the 1940s
Could the AUKUS military-industrial “sound and fury” sustain this more complex global Anglo-Saxon leadership? Bluntly, the AUKUS Pact is not today’s “Atlantic Charter” -- the 1941 Anglo-America blueprint to construct post-World War II order, democracy, and multilateralism.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Winston Churchill observed in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” No “Stettin” or “Trieste” has been identified within the AUKUS compass, nor can an “iron curtain” be drawn from colossal oceanic and commercial flows.
Churchill’s “continent” of concern spanned the transatlantic, a thorny expanse then, but the AUKUS playground is wider and thornier: Asia’s local conflicts and concerns demand greater attention of Asian countries than global sparring; Europe’s introversion dismisses brawls half a planet away, especially as European global controls weaken; and economic resurgence outscores foreign saber-rattling across the Americas.
The “British Century” from 1846 (its Corn Law ushered free-trade), became the “American Century” from 1945, both under Anglo-Saxon stewardship. The diplomatic boycott of Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics was led and dominated by all Anglo-Saxon countries (plus some Baltic, continental European, and Scandinavian), as if adding a cultural window to the AUKUS caucus.
Taiwan’s possible 2049 rendezvous with China and destiny marks the 100th NATO anniversary, but also Communist China’s birth centennial (October 1). Is world leadership transition being scheduled to greet these landmark moments?
China could do what it wants from its huge foreign transactions, but its great Silk Route history suggests it will not be the first to draw its sword. Building Pacific islands or imposing a Taiwanese sine qua non threatens, yet over-dormant Asian cultures, jerked by Western colonization and world leadership, may look for more partners and options than substitute the horse they currently ride for another.
We may be familiar with the cliché “the more, the merrier,” but in leadership language its implicit subtitle, “the greater the confusion,” rarely gets recognized. Adding that to enrich our conversations may be the recommended way.
Professor Imtiaz A Hussain is Founder, Global Studies & Governance Department, and Executive Director, Center for Pedagogy, Independent University, Bangladesh.
