Edward 'Weary' Dunlop Lecture and Dinner
Speech delivered by Peter Varghese at the Edward 'Weary' Dunlop Lecture and Dinner
Date: 8 October 2024
Thirty-five years ago, Asialink was established to promote a deeper understanding of and engagement with Asia.
Then, as now, of course there was no single, unified Asia. Engagement with Asia was a proxy slogan for something larger: a recognition that Australia’s future would be shaped more and more by what happened in the region around us.
In 1989 this was not a novel concept. Asia had lurked in the background of Australia’s strategic imagination since the early days of European settlement. And in the years that followed our focus on Asia waxed and waned, mostly between the poles of Asia as threat, Asia as a place of reckoning and around the time Asialink was established, a very different story of Asia as opportunity.
Today we have to face an uncomfortable truth. Despite decades of exhortation about the need to know Asia better, despite seminal reports about economic opportunity, despite heralding the Asian century and despite the obvious reality that Australia could only ever find security in a stable Asian region, we have largely failed on the Asia literacy front.
Worse than that we seem to be going backwards. As the Foreign Minister said in August, the number of university students studying an Asian language fell 30 per cent in the decade to 2022.
There are fewer Australians studying Indonesian today than there were 50 years ago when Gough Whitlam was in the Lodge and our population was half the size. And when it comes to our most complicated relationship in the region, our 42 universities graduate a meagre total of 5 students a year with honours degrees in Chinese studies with Chinese language.
Some argue that this can be turned around if we taught more Asian languages in schools and universities. But worthy though that call to action is, we face a deeper problem. Put simply, there is little value placed in Australia on Asia literacy and therefore little incentive to acquire it.
Despite 7 of our of our top 10 export markets being in Asia, Australian business does not seek out much less reward Asia literacy except in niche areas. There are of course honorable exceptions. The Myer family was a co-founder of Asialink and I acknowledge the presence tonight of Sid Myer.
But more generally Australian business has done little to promote a deeper understanding of Asia. And unless the demand signals shift and knowledge of Asia is more valued in our business community, it is hard to see from where the uplift in Asia literacy will come.
The slowing of Asia literacy is occurring at a time when the need for Australia to have a deep pool of Asia expertise is more urgent than ever. The geoeconomics of our region is changing profoundly and to navigate those changes will require a sustained understanding of the region around us and the diverse countries which constitute the Indo Pacific.
The central strategic axis of the Indo Pacific is, and for the foreseeable future will remain, bipolar; a competition for primacy between the US and China. And while Australia has made its choice on where it sits, most of the region is determined not to choose either. They do not buy the line that they have to choose and they certainly do not buy the line that we are engaged in an epic struggle between democracy and autocracy.
There is currently an unresolved tension in Australian strategic policy. On the one hand, our foreign policy looks to a multipolar future where no country dominates. Our defence policy, on the other hand, conflates US leadership and US primacy and is increasingly fixed around doing what we can to ensure the retention of US strategic primacy.
That includes, it would seem, aligning our force posture to fit into the overarching US strategic objective which is to deny China primacy by doubling down on US primacy.
With AUKUS we are also beginning to see a move away from the Defence of Australia within an alliance context, which has been the conceptual underpinning of our defence policy for five decades, and an unarticulated drift towards Forward Defence 2.0. Forward Defence 1.0 was what we had prior to the Vietnam War and it assumed that Australia could never defend itself and so was better off dealing with threats a long way from our shores and under the leadership of the United States.
Some now even argue that the very idea of finding security in Asia is hopelessly naïve and made redundant by the authoritarian character and, it is asserted, the expansionist ambitions of China.
But finding security in Asia was never premised on an expectation that all the countries in Asia would find common strategic ground, or that Asia could become a region devoid of competing strategic ambitions.
Rather, finding security in Asia means finding the structures and strategic logic to create a stable and sustainable balance of power in the region. For Australia that currently means finding the best means of both engaging China while also constraining China’s ambition to recreate the Middle Kingdom where hierarchy was harmony, China sat at the top and other countries pre-emptively conceded the primacy of China’s interests.
Striking this balance will likely be the work of at least a generation. It will inevitably be a collective endeavour and for the foreseeable future it will be built around a US-China fault line.
The Quad is one expression of this emerging collective balance, although it has a long way to go as a serious strategic coalition, weighed down as it is with a broad and distracting public goods agenda.
A new strategic equilibrium in the Indo Pacific is likely to take an organic form rather than the two fixed and competing alliance systems which characterised the Cold War. And while the competition for primacy between the US and China will shape its contours, a stable balance does not require any one power to hold primacy. Indeed, it may well work best if no single power holds primacy.
Australia of course has no problem with the retention of US primacy. After all we have been its beneficiary. But constructing a stable China-constraining balance does not turn on the retention of US primacy, although it certainly requires the US to be a keystone of that balance.
There is a difference between US leadership and US primacy. US leadership signals a powerful United States which remains actively engaged in the region and which is the lead balancer of China. Without the US there can be no effective balancing of China.
US primacy however goes beyond leadership and balance. Its starting point is that the US cannot tolerate a peer competitor and its ensuing logic is that the US will therefore do whatever it takes to prevent such a competitor emerging. US global primacy is now deeply embedded in the strategic culture and national identity of the US.
Some assert that the US has already lost its primacy but that underestimates the breadth of US power, its capacity for renewal even amidst political dysfunction and the structural challenges facing China.
There is moreover a large difference between recognising the benefits to date of US primacy and fixing Australian policy around the retention of US primacy. However desirable US primacy has been for Australia, it is not a vital Australian interest. Or to put it another way, the loss of US primacy may be regrettable, but it does not pose an existential threat to Australia. To assume it does, is to handcuff ourselves to whatever the US decides it must do to retain its primacy.
Those strategies may make sense for the US but they might not always be in Australia’s national interest. Going to war with China would be the starkest example, although that is something all of us would want to avoid.
I raise these points to underline a broader one, namely, that our region is only going to get more complex, more nuanced, more complicated to navigate and more open to shifting coalitions of interest.
So we will need a fine grained understanding of the region, its underlying dynamics, and the historical, cultural and geographical shapers of individual countries: an understanding deeper than any we have had so far. And while our progress towards that end may have been fitful and uneven, it must remain the enduring quest of Asialink.