Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2020

2020; Wiley; Volume: 66; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ajph.12708

1467-8497

Daniel Baldino,

Global Security and Public Health

The coronavirus outbreak was a dramatic foreign policy game-changer in the first half of 2020. While alarm bells started to ring in January, the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic on 11 March. The animal pathogen introduced into the human world created an abrupt series of international security shockwaves that tested community resilience and compounded situations of uncertainty and division in a more multi-polar world order. Australia was not immune to this turbulence. The Morrison government's first year since the election was dominated by this extraordinary high-impact global event that placed great stress on political systems and fuelled worrying scenarios of military tension and geopolitical friction against the backdrop of declining US influence and intensified Chinese assertiveness. It also threatened widespread social and economic dislocation while boosting nationalist, populist and extremist impulses, both at home and abroad. Further, heightened disinformation and propaganda campaigns emerged as a profound national security threat. As Thomas Rid cautioned, “it is impossible to excel at both misinformation and democracy at the same time”.11 Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York, 2020), p10. In the wake of a horror bushfire season that had caused colossal devastation across a number of affected regions (and calls for a major change in policy settings to address “the existential nature of the threat to people and ecosystems”),22 See Matt McDonald, “After the fires? Climate change and security in Australia”, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 55, 3 (2020). the attention-span of the government found itself quickly consumed by a rapidly evolving public health emergency. This emergency that swept across the globe had a decisive and immediate impact on vulnerable populations and global geo-political and socio-economic realities. A June 2020 Lowy Institute poll also found that pressures to whole-of-government responses as well as the fragilities within international co-operation networks had been heightened by the pandemic as many Australians were feeling unsafe, anxious and pessimistic about navigating a more uncertain future.33 Natasha Kassam, Lowy Institute Poll 2020, The Lowy Institute, 24 June 2020 . This included the status of the economy and the scope of ties with China. During the period under review, this article will therefore predominantely focus on the impact and implications of the pandemic on the international system and Australia's response as a small but not insignificant actor in dealing with a knotty series of events. The dramatic deterioration of Australia-China relations will be a major theme in this analysis. This phase of heightened strategic competition directly cuts into multiple questions and concerns about new types of interdependencies, hastened regional instability and a volatile recipe of overlapping security, economic, diplomatic and cyber concerns. In short, Australia's relations with China worsened dramatically during this period. But perhaps most strikingly, and what will also be underscored in more detail below, is that the pandemic did not create an entirely new set of foreign policy problems. Rather, it acted to fast-track and augment a number of pre-existing dilemmas and fragmentary pressures that had been previously testing Australian interests and values. Notably, “the coronavirus has only hastened what was already underway”.44 Stan Grant, “Coronavirus has sped up changes to global order and sovereignty is making a comeback”, ABC News, 13 April, 2020 . This distillation of worrisome global trends and amplified problem spots included: the acceleration of great-power competition and wider geo-political instability; the increased complexity of cyber-management; the extension of disinformation and “grey zone” campaigns;55 Used to describe activities designed to coerce countries in ways that seek to avoid direct military conflict. and an upswing in re-empowered right-wing extremism. It is not surprising that interventionist measures and policy planning to deal with a “clear and present” crisis will always be broadly reactive in nature. Ambitious calls to develop stronger strategic foresight and actively re-shape the direction of Australia's foreign policy in a more future-oriented way will tend to be overshadowed by immediate and urgent pressure and time constraints — in this case, namely actions to reduce the overall severity of the pandemic. Unquestionably, a variety of circumstances did exert a strong gravitational push that disrupted the status quo in the Indo-Pacific region and, as mentioned, acted to heighten and amplify a number of pre-existing tensions and security dynamics. Yet, as policy-makers continued to grapple with uncertainty, predictions to understand the longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic, and associated second and third order effects, do remain highly speculative and range from a bleak and grim prognosis to a cautious optimism. In this sense, the pandemic is characterised by a multiplicity of ambiguities. The longer-term impacts will be varied and nuanced: the realities of the twenty-first century will continue to entail channels of contestation and opportunity; fragmentation and integration; conflict and co-operation all operating along a slippery continuum. At the very least, the pandemic underscored the significance of the political and intellectual struggle in which any reconstruction of foreign policy is involved. As a starting point, the emerging challenges of COVID-19 and its fallout did set in motion a series of urgent re-evaluations on Australia's capacity to mitigate security escalation risks and related resilience perspectives as well as the counter-productive undercurrents of self-help instincts in international systems. Managing foreign policy crises that cause significant public anxiety and global disorder will be a periodic challenge for policy-makers. In general terms, the creation of Australia's foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific region since the end of the Second World War has been guided by three principal factors in calculating a national interest argument: the need to maximize economic opportunities; the need to minimize security and strategic threats; and the need to build multilateral institutions through which states can cooperate, pool resources and resolve common problems. COVID-19 destabilized accustomed and anticipated national security settings, particularly those subject to short-term political considerations. Further, in efforts to set the conditions of international security in Australia's favour, Foreign Affairs minister Marise Payne correctly highlighted that “covid-19 is a shared crisis — a reminder that many problems are best solved or, indeed, can only be solved through cooperation […] Australia's interests are not served by stepping away and leaving others to shape global order for us”.66 Marise Payne, “Australia and the world in the time of COVID-19”, speech at National Security College, Australian National University, 16 June 2020. But with dramatic impacts on trade and travel and the foundations of an international relations system pushed into a more conflictual and volatile direction, the pandemic did force a rapid re-interpretation of perceptions of strategic and commercial risk, approaches to contestability, risk tolerance and threat assessment, and it tested the alignment of national and collective security determinants to shape and design of the optimal partnerships or outlets to ensure effective problem-solving. It is worth noting that in early 2019, Home Affairs Secretary Michael Pezzullo had ranked seven “gathering storms” for the 2020s.77 See Michael Pezzullo, “Michael Pezzullo's seven gathering storms: national security in the 2020s”, The Mandarin, 13 March 2019 . This hellscape list which was based on their importance and likelihood included developments such as the prospect of Great Power war and the extension of transnational and organised crime. Oddly, while he pinpointed extremist jihadist terrorism that would mutate and evolve, other forms of terrorist threat such as from white supremacists and their violent sympathisers were snubbed and overlooked. And the dangers of easily transmissible pathogens and under-investments to health security capacity were also absent — despite a mounting range of severe security incidents and associated warnings about the consequences of inaction by groupings like scientists, national security experts and global health officials.88 Lisa Monaco and Vin Gupta, “The Next Pandemic Will Be Arriving Shortly”, Foreign Policy, 28 September 2018. Unquestionably, many aspects of history are abrupt. The timing and scale of emergency crisis cannot always be easily predicted. Perfectly accurate forecasts about the future remain a tough exercise. But the COVID-19 virus was not an out-of-left-field “black swan” event. “Every Australian national security document of the past 20 years listed pandemic disease as a threat, yet Australia still found it hard to step from prediction to planning.”99 Alan Gyngell, “Australia in a Post-COVID-19 World”, Australian Institute of International Affairs, April 1, 2020 . The metaphor of black swan refers to unpredictable or even unimaginable events that have enormous consequences. Yet, for example, the SARS outbreak in 2002 that was transmitted from chickens to people or the Ebola outbreak in 2014 had produced fast-moving, country-jumping epidemics. Rather, COVID-19 was an “unknown known” and the advance of novel infectious diseases that are easily transmissible among humans remains an always-present policy dilemma. As Bill Gates had warned in 2015, “in fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic.”1010 Cited in Sinead Baker, “Here's what Bill Gates once said we needed do to prevent a crisis like the coronavirus, and what we need to do to stop the next pandemic”, Business Insider, 20 March 2020. In the backdrop of a closer interconnectedness of states and societies and a rapid transnational spread of COVID-19 virus, the Morrison government found itself having to rethink the scale and impacts of the “non-traditional” challenges like pandemic disease and associated concepts of human security. Economic recovery will also not be easy. “The pandemic has tilted the tectonic plates of the global economy, and countries are tumbling towards recession.”1111 Dmitry Grozoubinski, “The world trade organisation: an optimistic pre-mortem in hopes of resurrection”, The Lowy Institute, 6 August 2020 . At the same time, the building blocks of a functioning and stable international system remained in flux. For instance, the pandemic worsened patterns of strategic mistrust and competition and placed more strain on international structures and systems already in the midst of realignment. Strikingly, there was a complete absence of credible and mature global leadership by the two powerful mega-states — the US and China. To varying degrees, both countries simply went missing-in-action on the global stage. These profound dynamics and complications seeped into a variety of foreign policy and security governance concerns — outside the space of price-gouging and the hoarding of toilet paper — for Australia. Pervasive, fast-changing crisis that call for prompt reactions are a test of national leadership. But lurking in the background of the notion of Australia as a more engaged Indo-Pacific actor were the ongoing complications of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that stepped up its aggressive approach to foreign policy and an unreliable American administration that appeared distracted and indecisive about the maintenance of a US-designed post-Second World War international order. Brian Toohey noted that the US (along with the UK) had made an “abysmal hash” of “flattening” the COVID-19 curve.1212 Brian Toohey, “Five Eyes largely blind to COVID threat, so why deepen economic ties?”, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 July 2020. As the US faced one of the worst rates of COVID-19 infections globally, President Trump's inclinations became increasingly surreal as he appeared liberated from any obligation of good governance, civility and responsibility. There was the extraordinary claim such as he was self-prescribing an unproven miracle drug (hydroxychloroquine) to protect himself — despite clinical trials and academic research warning it was ineffective and unsafe for certain patients.1313 Teresa G. Carvalho, “Donald Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID-19. Is that wise?”, The Conversation, 21 March 2020 . Additionally, indicative of the US retreat from collaborate leadership on a global stage, the White House later announced that it would be terminating its relationship with the WHO.1414 Katie Rogers and Apoorva Mandavilli, “Trump Administration Signals Formal Withdrawal From W.H.O”, The New York Times, 7 July 2020. The Trump White House has been a stress-test for Australia's alliance management. As alliance assumptions and the dynamics of international cooperation were jolted, Australia faced the reality of an Indo-Pacific region without a consistent and reliable United States presence. Trump's erratic pivoting pointed to a devotion to a handful of rudimentary organizing principles for US foreign policy — xenophobia, cultural wars and his own personal self-aggrandizement. Given Trump's transactional nature and an indifference or even outright hostility to alliances and the benefits of multilateralism, the period exacerbated unease about past predispositions that had elevated ANZUS as the central cornerstone of Australian national security strategy. The Morrison government did appear to take some steps to cultivate a more self-reliant posture that did not involve Washington. For example, Australia backed the creation of a new voluntary trade umpire, the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, to help resolve trade disputes and reorganize the regional power balance (following Trump's move to dismantle the Word Trade Organisations Appellate Body).1515 Andrew Tillett, “Push for Japan, Korea to join breakaway trade disputes body”, Australian Financial Review, 16 June 2020. At the same time, despite explicit avenues of commonality and a host of mutual benefits, old habits regarding the over-enthusiastic pursuit of alliance security and an instinct for an alliance loyalty with the US did appear hard to shake. In late May, Trump announced that he was postponing the annual G7 summit (which was due to be hosted in the US in June) until September and planned to invite four additional non-member nations including Russia.1616 Jane C. Timm, “Trump says he is postponing G7 summit” NBC News, 31 May 2020 . In 2014 Russia had been expelled from the group, previously known as the G8, in response to its annexation of Crimea. Trump flagged that South Korea, Australia and India should also be invited to a possible expanded list of invitees. Some commentators immediately pointed out that the high-level expansion plan very pointedly aimed to dilute the influence of the EU as well as snub China.1717 David Uren, “Trump's expanded G7 could be good for Australia but bad for multilateralism”, The Strategist, 4 June 2020 . Others noted that extending an invitation to Russia remained highly contentious.1818 Jill Colvin, “Donald Trump says he wants Australia to join G7”, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May 2020. The UK responded by asserting that it would not support Russia being readmitted as a member of the group until Moscow “ceases aggressive and destabilizing activity”.1919 Charlie Cooper, “Britain would veto Russia's return to G-7”, Politico, 1 June 2020 . Boris Johnson instead proposed creating a D10 group of leading democracies, including the G7 members and Australia, South Korea and India. Canada also opposed Russia's return to the G7 and declared that it was not welcome.2020 Steve Scherer, “Russia not welcome at G7, Canada's Trudeau says”, Reuters World News, 2 June 2020 . German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would not attend.2121 Vladimir Petrovsky, “Enlarged G7 summit: Strange invitation”, Modern Diplomacy, 14 June 2020 . Alternatively, Australia avoided criticising the idea and instead stated it was eager to participate and would welcome an official invitation to the meeting — one that that would incorporate embracing a gangster regime like Russia back to the fold, in part, to seemingly help to manage the rise of China. As commented by Liberal MP David Sharma, “Russia has undoubtedly been a force for global disorder in recent years. But in the long term it is an ambitious and revanchist China, not a nostalgic Russia, which poses the larger threat to the global order.”2222 Cited in Anthony Galloway, “Bring Russia in from the cold to the G7 to handle China: Sharma”, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 June 2020. Daniel Flitton reflected that the US offer to bring Australia into the G7 was never going to be simple given the potential downsides and the fact that Australia's interests remained much more regional than those of the US. “What, exactly, would a G7+ intend to do? Does it have an economic agenda? Or a broader purpose, more akin to managing a world where the US has simply “cut off the whole relationship” with China, as Trump put it this month? Is it supposed to represent unity among leading democracies. But again, why Russia?2323 Daniel Flitton, “A G7 +?”, The Lowy Interpreter, 31 May 2020 . Laura Tingle also cautioned of Australia being unwittingly used for little more than a campaign crutch during an embattled Trump administration. “Donald Trump's past form at G7 meetings — and his use of them as political props for a domestic audience at the cost of international relationships — should have given the Prime Minister pause to at least say he would have to check his diary, because he has an economy in […] collapse, to deal with.”2424 Laura Tingle, “PM's Trump visit is a splendidly bad decision”, Australian Financial Review, 5 June 2020. COVID-19 not only accelerated a multi-pronged competition for global influence that incorporated the politics of maritime security but intensified other intertwined concerns such as the use of diplomatic brinkmanship, hybrid threats and coercive tactics. As a result, Australia's posture markedly changed as it, as previously noted by Ben Day, entered into a “new phase” in its relationship with China.2525 Ben Day, “Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2019”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 66, 2 (2020), pp.305-321. The space of co-operation with the CCP continued to appear to be limited and steadily tightening. “The way all this fits together marks the first time that Beijing has combined economic threats with a targeted disinformation campaign against Australia — suggesting a real step-up in China's strategic use of these tactics.2626 Ashley Townshend, “China's pandemic-fuelled standoff with Australia”, US Studies Centre, 20 May 2020 . In part, this broad-brush grey zone approach is where actors use “[…] ambiguity and leverage non-attribution to achieve strategic objectives while limiting counteractions by other nation states”.2727 Abhijit Singh, “Between War and Peace: Grey-Zone Operations in Asia”, Australian Institute of International Affairs, 13 February 2018. . Certainly, even before the pandemic, there were the ongoing complications related to China's assertive regional aspirations and a CCP that had been seen increasingly entering into a “rocky phase” with other nations as it socially distanced from trustworthiness, reliability and transparency.2828 Rahul Mishra, “China's Self-Inflicted Wounds in the South China Sea”, The Diplomat, 21 June 2020. So alongside a rise in sharpened opposition with Australia about trade issues and international responses to COVID-19, CCP retaliatory instincts and intensified patterns of diplomatic and political competition continued to contribute to rising tensions and concerns on the Chinese-Indian border, the imposition of new security measures targeting dissent in Hong Kong, the ongoing internment of Muslims in Xinjiang and multiple transgressions in the South China Sea. For instance, in regards to the South China Sea and while Australia has no direct territorial disputes with China, CCP “fighting spirit” in the region tested global norms and practices as well as interpretations of sovereignty, the global commons and the practice of rule of law. Provocative incidents included the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat in early April. Other island militarisation advancements included radar facilities, large runways, and missile defence aimed at both ships and aircraft.2929 Gregory B. Poling, “The conventional wisdom on China's island bases is dangerously wrong”, War on the Rocks, 10 January 2020 . And on April 23, Marise Payne condemned the logic of the CCP's unilateral actions stating that it was vital all countries adhered to international law and refrain from escalating tensions so they could focus on combating — rather than exploiting — the COVID-19 pandemic.3030 Cited in Anthony Galloway, “Marise Payne condemns Beijing's actions in the South China Sea”, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 April 2020. For some, such nationalistic outbursts and blunt power projection by China would ultimately be counter-productive and lacked credibility moving forward as it only alienated other foreign actors. “There are few limits on China's military and economic power — the notion that it is threatened by tiny Hong Kong and Taiwan is absurd — what the country really lacks is friends. But for a few craven and transactional partners (Pakistan, Cambodia, Serbia and, perhaps increasingly, Russia) it is a lonely power that lacks genuinely committed and trusting allies of that sort that underpinned America's long years of superpower-dom. China's aggression, ultimately, hurts one country more than any other: China itself.”3131 Jeremy Cliffe, “China's growing belligerence is only hurting itself”, New Statesman, 31 May 2020. At a national level, despite some early missteps, the Australian government initially adapted pragmatically and appeared to learn from other past disaster response mistakes in order to ensure a slowdown (albeit not an elimination) of the spread of COVID-19. Of course, the threat of a large-scale resurgence surge in coronavirus infections always did remain. Arguably, one the most notable failures in health protocols was the fact that passengers from a cruise ship called Ruby Princess were allowed to disembark in Sydney despite several travellers demonstrating symptoms of the virus in mid-March.3232 Rod McGuirk, “Coronavirus Cruise Ship Finally Leaves Australian Port”, The Diplomat, 23 April 2020. Note: The Walker Inquiry into the Ruby Princess debacle (delivered 14 August 2020) did not find systemic failures and cleared the Australian Border Force but found “inexplicable”, “unjustifiable” and “inexcusable” errors by New South Wales Health. Yet the pandemic not only spread political confusion and a web of procedural security problems, but created an economic crisis with looming dark global recession clouds as well. For instance, with the integrative mechanisms of globalisation stalled, there was a dramatic reduction in the flow and movement of people, investment and free trade across borders.3333 “Has covid-19 killed globalisation?”, The Economist, 14 May 2020. So a wave of additional pressures incorporated forms of economic and logistical challenges for Australian policy-makers, who had to quickly grapple with separate policy headaches ranging from stimulus packages to the diversification of export markets to efforts to ensure better buoyancy to disruptions in global supply chains. Thus the pandemic paved the way for a more interventionist standpoint as the Morrison government drew on the huge capacities of the modern state. The mushrooming health and economic emergency meant that the allure of a predictable platform of fiscal conservatism had found itself in sudden retreat. “The Government has junked traditional Liberal Party free market ideas for state control.”3434 Grant, “Coronavirus has sped up changes to global order”. As part of a general response to a direct threat to public health, in late March, the Prime Minister announced a national COVID-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC) that would draw on the idea of using business leaders and expert civilians — recruited from outside the political system — such as former Fortescue Metals chief Nev Power and the former chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company Andrew Liveris. The high-powered policy advisory group would coordinate advice to the Australian government on actions to, in part, assist in identifying resource, infrastructure and operational reform challenges.3535 Shannon Jenkins, “National COVID-19 Coordination Commission established”, The Mandarin, 25 March 2020. Yet a wide range of concerns remained unanswered about the NCCC, especially regarding a lack of clarity, the potential for direct conflicts of interest and its close ties to the fossil fuel industry. “The level of influence of the NCCC cannot be understated. To date the level of transparency and accountability of this influential body has been opaque and could weaken our democracy without checks and balances in place.”3636 Media Release, “Joint statement on Covid Coordination Commission”, The Centre for Public Integrity, 13 May 2020. Certainly, the mind-set of the NCCC membership did appear devoted to a distinctly short-sighted agenda that would undermine Australia's efforts under the Paris climate agreement.3737 Bill Hare and Ursula Fuentes, “A single mega-project exposes the Morrison government's gas plan as staggering folly”, The Conversation, 27 May 2020 <https://theconversation.com/a-single-mega-project-exposes-the-morrison-governments-gas-plan-as-staggering-folly-133435. Despite unique recovery openings to buil