This year's Boyer Lecture series explores the opportunities and challenges of Australia's engagement with Asia in the 21st century.
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series → explore → century
Keynote speaker Sam Roggeveen, director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program, gave his lecture Four Forces: Australia in the New Asia this evening.
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Roggeveen → give → Asia
This is an edited extract.
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This → edit → ?
Three forces are reshaping Asia and Australia's place in it: the decline of one empire, the rise of another, and the emergence of a powerful neighbour on Australia's doorstep.
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forces → reshape → doorstep
Amid this regional shift, a fourth potent force is at play: an unmistakeable change in the character of Western liberal democracy, including in Australia.
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force → include → Australia
These four forces present a challenge not just to our place in the world, but to our politics and identity; we are a Western nation perched alongside Asia as it enters a post-Western era.
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it → present → era
We can't stop these international forces, but we have a choice to make about how we meet the challenge, a choice about whether we leave our fate in the hands of others or take the harder road towards self-reliance.
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we → stop → reliance
The 'material dethroning of the West'
It doesn't take much persuading these days to convince Australians that China is an important part of their future, because it is already so conspicuous in our daily lives.
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It is a major source of immigrants, students and consumer products, our largest trading partner, and it is credited with keeping Australia out of recession during the global financial crisis.
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it → trade → crisis
But what China means to Australia is a fraction of what it means to the world.
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it → mean → world
China is the largest trading partner to around 120 other countries, too.
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China → trade → countries
Roughly a third of all the physical objects produced in the world today are made in China.
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third → produce → China
Its economy is now at least four-fifths the size of America's and may even be the largest in the world, depending on how you measure.
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you → depend → world
For the economic historian Adam Tooze, China's rise represents nothing less than "the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history".
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It was lifting hundreds of millions of its own people out of poverty, producing cheap goods for the world, and creating wealthy consumers for our goods and services.
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But China's rise was always going to create problems, including for our ally, the United States.
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rise → go → ally
When the Cold War ended, the US became Asia's uncontested leader.
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The hope, at the time, was that China would simply go along with that arrangement.
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China → go → arrangement
The plan in Washington was that even as China became richer, it would remain subordinate to the US.
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it → become → US
China would become something like Japan or Germany — economic powerhouses with no big independent foreign policy ambitions.
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China → become → ambitions
Clearly, that's not how things are turning out.
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China is building the world's biggest navy and quadrupling the size of its nuclear arsenal.
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It punishes American allies, including Australia, by imposing trade restrictions.
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Its behaviour in the South China Sea, where it has built artificial islands based on dubious legal claims, can be fairly described as territorial expansion.
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it → build → expansion
China is clearly not going to become a super-sized version of Germany or Japan.
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We should assume China wants to lead in the region, and that means subordinating the US and its allies, and even pushing Washington out of Asia altogether.
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that → assume → Asia
It is those things, and that makes China harder to deal with.
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China is big and big countries demand leadership.
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Now, nothing up to this point would perturb any mainstream foreign policy commentator.
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But here's where I swerve off the beaten path.
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Because the consensus in Australia is that, whatever challenge China presents to us, the Americans will help us face it.
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us → present → it
In fact, our entire national defence is built upon this premise.
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defence → build → premise
The US is weaker in Asia
China's rise has made America's position in Asia unsustainably weak.
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position → make → Asia
It used to be easy for America to make lavish promises to defend its partners and allies in Asia because no other country was strong enough to challenge it.
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country → use → it
It would now be incredibly costly for the US to meet the commitments it has made.
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it → meet → commitments
It is still assumed, on the Korean Peninsula and in Taiwan, and even in Japan and Australia, that the US will be willing to risk the lives of thousands of its troops, and perhaps even nuclear attacks on its own cities, to defend us.
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But the US simply has no vital reason to accept such risks.
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Now, it's important to stress: saying that America's position in Asia is weak is not the same as saying that America itself is weak.
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America → stress → Asia
In fact, the United States has a reasonable claim to being the strongest and most secure nation in the history of the world.
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America has the world's biggest military, a huge economy, thousands of nuclear weapons, and is separated from China by a vast ocean.
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…and 110 more, not listed.
The Aporia