Military tensions flare on the road to stability

“Beijing is not so much contemptuous of Australia as contemptuous of the rules and norms that allow Australia, and other foreign navies and air forces, to legally sail and fly where we do in the South China Sea and north Asia,” says Lowy Institute Senior Fellow for East Asia, Richard McGregor.

“Beijing has a longstanding aim of forcing all foreign militaries, most of all the Americans, but also their allies, away from its shores, whatever their missions, and push them back beyond Japan and the first island chain. That won’t stop no matter how good bilateral ties are.”

US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, Daniel Kritenbrink, says China’s confrontations with foreign militaries has been “deeply concerning” for some time.

“China’s approach, I think, generally speaking, has to be, has been to be more aggressive and assertive, in its operations. And unfortunately, it’s led to these kinds of incidents,” he said during a visit to Canberra this week.

“Unfortunately, this is a phenomenon this is probably going to be with us for many years because that’s the long-term nature of the challenge.”

McGregor believes another factor may have come into Beijing’s calculation.

“There is another obvious context which Australia commentary has mostly missed, and that’s the government’s decision last year to join the US and Japan in standing by the Philippines in its dispute with Beijing in the South China Sea,” he says.

“That would have infuriated Beijing, and this kind of incident, in part, is payback.”

While Kritenbrink downplayed suggestions it was an “up yours” from Beijing, it was notable that Defense Minister Richard Marles and his counterparts from the US, Japan and the Philippines had announced in Hawaii a day before plans to step up defense cooperation among the four militaries .

The new grouping has been dubbed the Squad by US officials, a nod to the Quad between the US, Australia, Japan and India. The Quad seems to have ebbed for now, with uncertainty about when leaders will have their next face-to-face meeting and uncomfortable questions about India’s intelligence activities in western countries, including targeting of Sikh communities.

Certainly, Australia seems to be tacking more closely to the Philippines, which finds itself on the front line of pressure from China.

While in Hawaii, Marles pointedly referred to the West Philippine Sea, the diplomatic nomenclature that Manila has used since 2011 to describe its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

And Chief of the Defense Force, Angus Campbell, this week lavished praise on his Filipino counterpart General Romeo Brawner, who “knows up close and personal what the angry end of a water cannon means”, referring to the Chinese coast guard targeting Filipino vessels around disputed islands.

“We should call it what it is. And General Brawner and his senior colleagues in the Filipino security community describe it as ICAD – illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive,” Campbell told a military conference.

Last month’s National Defense Strategy also charged China had “employed coercive tactics in pursuit of its strategic objectives, including forceful handling of territorial disputes and unsafe intercepts of vessels and aircraft”. For a report written by the government, it was a notable hardening of language.

Nevertheless, Albanese was critical of his response to the latest incident. The Coalition labeled it “weak”, with Opposition leader Peter Dutton going Albanese to call Xi Jinping and personally chastise him.

“Even if the phone is not picked up, he’s done that on behalf of our uniformed personnel and that’s a really important signal,” opposition defense spokesman Andrew Hastie said.

“It sends a signal that he’s got their back in moments like this. The Chinese government is giving us a masterclass at the moment in gaslighting, flipping the tables and accusing us of spying.”

Australian Strategic Policy Institute chief Justin Bassi, a former national security adviser to Malcolm Turnbull, says China’s actions require a straight condemnation without qualifications.

“China has made a very aggressive move and put our people’s lives at risk,” Bassi says.

“Australian leaders should talk about broader policy on other occasions – there are plenty of opportunities for this. Malign activity by regimes like China’s should simply receive condemnation – yes in private but also in these circumstances in public to ensure Australians understand the true nature of the threats our nation faces.

“To do otherwise, including to respond to aggression without unconditional condemnation, is not effective in deterring malignant behavior but actually incentivizes more of it.

“And while shouting rarely gets you anywhere, the idea that our response needs to be tempered so as not to upset Beijing into giving us the silent treatment or some other form of punishment unfortunately already means that their coercion against us is working.”

The incident comes ahead of Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Australia next month.

Li’s trip, the first by a Chinese leader since 2017, was meant to be another milestone in the repair of bilateral relations, and a hook to hang the removal of Beijing’s remaining trade sanctions on Australian beef and lobsters off.

But by its actions, China has ensured the helicopter incident will feature prominently.

After Albanese’s obfuscation of “did he or didn’t he” raise with Xi last year China’s sonar pulse attack that injured navy divers, the Prime Minister promised to complain to Li about the helicopter incident.

In the two years since Albanese took power, there has been a welcome improvement in relations with China. The rhetoric has been dialed down, and trade has by and large normalized and dialogue at political and bureaucratic level has resumed.

But points of friction remain, beyond just military matters.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong, accompanied by her opposition counterpart Simon Birmingham, traveled to Tuvalu to shore up a new security agreement, the latest chess move in the battle for strategic influence between China and the west in the Pacific.

The government is also ring-fencing sensitive sectors from Chinese investment on national security grounds. There is also concern Beijing is trying to undercut Australian miners, such as through their bankrolling of Indonesian nickel operations.

“The rhetorical ‘stabilization’ narrative, which seems to get under the skin of so many of the hawks in Australia, obscures the fact that the government’s China policy is forward-leaning and assertive, and that carries risks,” McGregor says.

“The best response that the government can make to this kind of intimidation is to stick to the policy.”

The lines between the government’s mantra of “cooperate where we can, disagree where we must” with China are getting sharper.