Independent Foreign Policy: Big Navigating
Part 6 / 9 in a series by Terence O'Brien
This is Part Six of an unpublished series by Terence O’Brien from 2016 posted here posthumously nominally titled: Independent Foreign Policy? See Parts One (Intro), Two (Some basics) Three (Outlook), Four (Trade & Flag), Five (Contributing to Peace). Terence was a prominent New Zealand diplomat until 1993 and then an academic at Victoria University of Wellington as founding director of the Centre for Strategic Studies (CSS:NZ) for eight years. Terence was then an analyst of international relations for over fifteen years.
This piece was written in 2016. Trump’s second term as US president has only accelerated some of the trends outlined.
Primacy - The US held primacy in the Asia Pacific region but clearly this is slipping, as is its moral authority, or soft power, and its sway as a global leader.
Hedging their bets - (or bamboo diplomacy) is the art of adapting, listening, and of not taking explicit sides in Sino-American rivalry but instead treating each issue on its merits. Countries across the Asia Pacific region are adopting this approach.
Friend but not ally - This moniker suits New Zealand in its dealings with both Washington and Beijing. NZ must cultivate relationships across and within regions with counterparts who may be at odds. Friends with different, different times on different issues
National security prioritisation - is counterintuitive for a country like New Zealand, with little hard power, to set up institutional arrangements along a national security model which prioritise hard power solutions.
Calibre of insight - With constant crises abroad in other regions (Middle East, Ukraine), and institutional disruption at home under Trump’s second presidential term, does the US have the capacity to analyse and find essential insight into China’s rise and regional interplay.
INDEPENDENT NEW ZEALAND FOREIGN POLICY? BIG NAVIGATING
Terence O’Brien (2016) - Part 6 / 9
The emergence of China in the 21st century with its economy as a transforming influence in a world of established American primacy will set the tenor of modern international relations. This indomitable fact means for NZ that the future conduct of an independent foreign policy will face challenges of balance and consistency unequalled by its 20th century experience. Like most small countries NZ does not want to have to choose between powerful partners if and when those partners disagree one with another. For this NZ needs therefore a quality of relationship with Beijing and with Washington that can survive those occasions whenever choice becomes unavoidable. That requires first and foremost independence of foreign policy thinking about issues that will shape the regional and global future.
The big questions are whether China and the US are predestined to view each other as strategic rivals or strategic partners; and will China integrate itself constructively into an American led system - both regionally and globally? NZ has invested substantially for decades in widening and deepening relationships with East Asia including China, whose history, culture and values differ appreciably from its own, but whose economic accomplishments provide vital opportunity to underpin NZ well being. As suggested earlier one principal lesson from the NZ experience of diversifying East Asian attachments is that well grounded political and diplomatic relationships are the indispensable prerequisite for trade and economic success.
Inside East Asia there is understandable circumspection in several capitals about potential consequences of China’s re-emergence. This is reflected by aggregated support for continued American regional engagement to provide a balance to China. China’s neighbours not for the first time in history are hedging bets. The US has itself reacted to China by enhancing its presence, including military presence, as part of an overall objective to re-energise and re-balance US leadership. The US led Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is part too of the American strategic design for Asia Pacific to reassert primacy. Inside the region however there is a distinction drawn between American engagement and American leadership. American military engagement is sought by East Asian regional governments so that they themselves can in effect feel comfortable engaging not isolating, China.[1] At the same time South East Asian governments cherish in particular a leadership role for ASEAN, which despite reservations in some foreign capitals has proven institutional durability; and provides an important doorstep for NZ into the wider region, so that ASEAN preferences matter in Wellington. For the US of course the idea of engagement but without leadership is contrary to reason.
Judgement about the implications of potential Sino-American rivalry for NZ foreign policy cannot ignore the power of coincidence. Washington’s adjustment to the re-emergence of China was forcibly shaken by the 2008/09 global financial crisis (GFC), the defining economic event in the opening years of the new century, triggered by wayward US financial and banking regulation. It provoked fully fledged global recession. It disclosed seismic change too in global economic power. It exposed the extent of US insolvency involving a huge current account deficit and immense public debt of $14 trillion (some 90% of America’s gross development product) with China holding some $1.2 trillion of US foreign debt in treasury bonds, while running its own current account surplus of $300 billion[2]. Respectable forecasts predict that the size of China’s economy will surpass that of the US in the decades immediately ahead.
The upheaval itself ironically reinforces however the measure of essential interdependence between China and the US. Both share goals for energising economic growth, maintaining an open global trade system, sustaining East Asian peace and stability and confronting the pervasive threat of climate change. They have moreover a track record in the modern era of managing a relationship and its sensitivities that extends back over 40 years.
Yet it is not clear how far the US is ready to treat with China on the basis of equality rather than as in the past, on the presumption of US “exceptionalism” and absolute
primacy[3]. One critical question is also whether Washington can devote the calibre of insight essential to responding adeptly to China’s re-emergence, given intense American preoccupation with anarchy in the Middle East, as well as confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. Those are serious distractions that will likely reverberate well into the future. In the 21st century world the US role of global leader is entailing significant social and economic cost, and despite unrivalled strength, the hard truth is that the US has for the most part not prevailed or achieved decisive results in those several military conflicts where it has chosen to intervene[4].
While the US capacity for renewal and potential for reinvention is legendary, the political process inside Washington is prey to extended gridlock between the executive and the legislature. There is distraction that is actually detrimental to a global leadership role. At the same time economic and social divisions inside American society, the consequences of embedded racism, of deluded gun ownership laws, of the militarisation of law and order, all combine to imbue America’s modern reputation. Serious thinkers inside the US itself believe harm is being done to US standing internationally[5], others remain sanguine that the problems are not at the bottom line, costing the US power or influence.[6] Some outsiders respectably conclude however that following the 2008/09 global financial crisis the US is losing economic clout and intellectual authority[7] at a time of gravitational change in world order. One can pay one’s money and take one’s pick amongst the crystal ball gazers.
On the other hand China’s success in securing and sustaining a bigger role in the world, will depend upon more than just striking economic wealth. It will need to nourish trust globally and regionally. In the absence of a political system that embraces a greater pluralism, allows more freedom of expression, involves transparent structures, the task of creating trust internationally will be a struggle if China is to turn its economic weight and accomplishment into external influence. As a rising (or re-emerging) power China is not expressly challenging military superiority of the established power nor striving to usurp the obligations and immense financial burdens of global leadership; nor to overturn norms and conventions of international relations which the established power has fashioned. China seeks respect for its primacy within its region and is augmenting military capability, while its economic influence is indeed existentially reshaping the international landscape. It is in effect behaving in many ways which actually discount conventional western strategic security wisdom concerning the inevitability of conflict between emergent and established powers – at least up until the present.
China can moreover present itself to the developing world, notably in Africa, as a country which has itself experienced the self same modern development challenges of economic and social improvement. It accomplishments offer a model therefore for others. On the particular the issue of climate change which infuses modern international relations, Chinese experience with clean energy strategy has obvious relevance to developing economies. China attaches fewer conditions to its aid giving. Its efforts reduce developing country dependence upon the World Bank, IMF and other traditional sources where tighter conditionality is the norm. A shift in Chinese priorities towards enhancing sustainable domestic development while reducing concentration upon double digit annual economic growth suggests greater external restraint may become a function of extensive China’s domestic reform agenda.[8]
It is prudent to anticipate that any NZ independent foreign policy will be obliged periodically at least, to navigate some choppy water in China-US relations. The restoration of NZ good standing with the US following 25 years (1984-2010) estrangement because of US disapproval of NZ non-nuclear policy, provides one propitious foundation for NZ navigation going forward. At the time of the non- nuclear policy decision there was concern in many places that NZ had somehow ‘lost its way’ by ill conceived misguided action. Inside the small NZ security policy community itself there were those who viewed the policy and way it was implemented as disreputable.
Yet the record after the non nuclear decision, under successive NZ governments, suggests the country navigates proficiently. Ever since 1990s and up until the time of present writing NZ persists with laying foundations for East Asian regional relationships and perseveres with diversifying more broadly its external trade economy; it fielded successful candidates for international leadership (in WTO, the Commonwealth and the World Court); won a UN Security Council seat twice in 1992 and 2014 against strong opposition; expanded participation in UN peace support operations; and, notably, brokered a peace accord on Bougaineville ending a conflict that had cost some thousands of lives. With others NZ pursued arms control treaties on land mines and on uranium depleted weapons. It leveraged new human rights law for handicapped people.
During a quarter century of disaffection between Washington and Wellington, NZ autonomous foreign policy succeeded in putting important “runs on the board” that cannot be subtracted from the its scorecard. While restoration of NZ relations with the US is propitious, the clock cannot be simply reset to where it once stood when US-NZ relations first took a turn for the worse. And in a world where the international security priority remains crucially to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapon ownership, so NZ’s non-nuclear policy constitutes the very logic of that goal. It sits on the right side of history.
The experience of stand off with the US offers evidence too of NZ ‘soft power’ as providing protection against severe retribution by the powerful. Inside the US Administration those angered by NZ’s action favoured strong punishment. Others conscious however that stringent sanctioning of a small, conscientious democracy for an exercise of democratic choice, however vexatious to the US, could rebound to America’s disadvantage. That view prevailed.
During the period of estrangement NZ strove throughout to re-cultivate its American relationship. In some areas like cooperation over Antarctica, it succeeded. The central plank for a restored relationship is the 2012 Washington Declaration which provides a framework for “ enduring defence and security cooperation partnership” endorsed by the US Pentagon and the NZ Ministry of Defence. The document is the result of American petitioning as much as it was of NZ entreaty, when the US was itself seeking to refurbish its external relations overall following the abrasive years of the George W Bush administration, the first 21st century US presidency. The Declaration pays due account to sovreignty, independence and self reliance of both parties but the purposes and scope plainly link NZ closely to US strategic design.
NZ politicians are adamant that the Declaration is not a revived military alliance (ANZUS). The fact it is a document linking just two departments of the respective administrations, and not a sovereign commitment as such by the two governments, provides substance to that claim but judgement about whether it therefore sustains a NZ assertion to independent foreign policy thinking remains a fine one[9]. When all is said and done, the challenge for independent NZ foreign policy implicit in the US-China relationship, indicates that a formal position of ‘friend but not ally’ with both Washington and of Beijing best suits NZ interests.
The margin for trade offs that is available to NZ foreign policy to preserve expedient balance in relationships both with the US and with China is narrow. Choices will be delicate. Support for US objectives in the form of military contingents despatched to the Middle East and Afghanistan can for example be problematic for NZ, but if viewed in terms of a trade off to maintain a freer hand in Asia, especially with China, where NZ has important ‘runs on the board’ and where the US has its own strategic agenda, provides a rationalisation for such NZ expediency. Announcing NZ membership in the new Chinese Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2015 in the face of US opposition to the Chinese initiative, at the very same time as NZ readied to despatch a military contingent to Iraq to support the US, provides a case in point.
The Washington Declaration would at the same time seem to augment the domestic influence of NZ defence/security policy makers as distinct from foreign policy advisers in shaping the tenor of NZs American relationship and broader international security responses. Reorganisation of NZ external political/security management with an expanded Prime Minister’s Office assuming a leading role under a new Director of National Security Policy, foreshadows a small cameo of US practice where the White House with the National Security Council and Pentagon holds sway over not just over security issues, but over the full range of external relations policy, including even the geopolitics of trade. Diplomacy in the shape of the US State Department, lapses meanwhile into secondary place.
Given NZ effectively possesses no hard power together with a low sense of threat to its own physical existence, there is something counter intuitive about tilting domestic institutional arrangements for external policy making quite so plainly in the direction of hard power calculation. That is the way associated with the so-called ‘national security state’ exemplified by Washington (and Canberra) – where threat mentality is traditionally paramount and the utility of hard power is prized. NZ foreign policy relies singularly upon ‘soft power’ in order to build trust internationally in particular with new partners. Domestic foundations for NZ policy making require therefore deliberate balance. As it is, seepage from the pool of professional experience following uncertain reforms at MFAT will take time to refurbish. That adds complexity to the business of sustaining the right correlation for independent NZ foreign policy between political/security factors and political/economic considerations, or between traditional dependencies and vital new relationships. NZ diplomacy must re-sharpen and amplify capabilities for home grown external political, economic and security judgement so as to provide relevant counter point for NZ ministers to the profuse analysis flowing into government from Five Eyes channels that accentuate a ‘national security state’ world view.
The test for NZ policy making in the Asian region is quintessentially diplomatic. Ongoing friction for example, over sovereignty and maritime boundaries between China and some of its South East Asian neighbours means that NZ must walk a very fine line between the contending parties, all of whom are valued by Wellington as regional partners. While urging peaceable diplomatic resolution NZ must not appear to take sides either through assertive words or action, even when traditional friends, like Australia, are disposed that way. Difficulties are compounded because the sovereignty disputes are conflated, purposely or not, with broader US-China maritime rivalry and in particular China’s objection to American claims to unfettered freedom of naval navigation (for close up surveillance and intelligence gathering) in China’s coastal seas. There is a perception behind much of the tension, that China’s real intention is to deny freedom of sea lines of communication. Yet the crucial role of imports/exports for China’s own economic well being (70% of China’s GDP is generated by trade, compared to 25-30% for the US) surely point to a critical Chinese interest in open sea lines.
Nonetheless it seems improbable China will simply accept a subordinate military position permanently along its maritime periphery, even though for reasons of cost and strategic expediency, it does not intend a naval build up to surpass the US.[10]NZ independent diplomacy must remain meticulously even handed. Both China and the US possess legitimate national security interests. One set of interests does not, or should not, trump the other if stability and moderation in the region are to prevail. Were the shoe on the other foot, it is unlikely the US would countenance equivalent Chinese activity along American coastal seas. NZ independent foreign policy will need the courage of conviction here.
Publically expressed animosity between China and Japan, and between Korea and Japan, compounds diplomatic awkwardness for NZ given its desire for friendly rewarding relationships with all three. While Japan is economically and commercially deeply connected with China, and senior Japanese policy makers concede it is unreal to contain China in a globalizing world, Tokyo believes it is essential to deter China. The extent to which Japan relies in any test of wills with China upon its revitalised US military alliance, and the way Washington responds, will impact both Japanese and American influence in the region[11]. China is the number one market and an important source of investment for every regional country. No East Asian government can be comfortable with the notion of military containment of China. Neither can NZ. But China needs constantly through words and actions to reassure its many neighbours of peaceable intentions and Japan to act circumspectly in a region where its 20th century record is still remembered.
[1] Dyer G. The Contest of the Century. Penguin. 2015. p.112
[2] Kupchan C. No One’s World. Oxford Univ. Press. 2012.pp.74-85
[3] Halper S. The Beijing Consensus. Basic Books. 2010. pp. 186-197
[4] Bacevich A. in The Short American Century. Harvard Univ. Press 2012. p.11
[5] Naim M. The End of Power. Basic Books. 2013. pp. 222-223.
[6] Nye J. The Future of Power. Public Affairs. 2011. pp153-204
[7] Economics;Making Sense of the Modern Economy. Ed. Datta S. Third Edition. The Economist. 2011. pp 165-166
[8] Jacques M. When China Rules the World. Penguin. 2009. p.381 etc.
[9] Ayson R. & Capie D. Part of the Pivot? The Washington Declaration and US-NZ Relations. Asia Pacific Bulletin. Number 72. July 17 2012. East- West Center
[10] Swaine M. The Real Challenge in the Pacific. Foreign Affairs. Vol.94. no 3. May-June 2015 pp.145-153
[11] Dyer G. op. cit. p.173.