For many in the national security community in Canberra, the US alliance has become a way of life. But this is possibly the country’s greatest strategic gamble.
When in early 1976 Australia’s first ambassador to China, Stephen FitzGerald, wrote a series of dispatches from Peking back to the new Fraser government in Canberra, he faced up to harsh realities and difficult questions.
Surveying the first three years of formal diplomatic relations, FitzGerald admitted that for all the activity – a suite of ministerial and official visits, a trade exhibition and an embassy staffed with a large number of area specialists – his staff had “not scratched the surface of the Chinese population”. As ambassador, he had no ready access to the Chinese foreign minister, no channel at all to the upper echelons of the Chinese leadership.
Australia’s first ambassador to China Stephen FitzGerald talks with foreign minister, Chiao Kuan-Hua, in 1975. But this is a strategic gamble, possibly the greatest in the history of Australia’s relations with the world. Its politicians bank on a hope that the internal strife in the United States is but a passing phase, that once more American democracy, as it has in the past, will recover its purpose following a period of drift and introspection.
Ultimately, Australia has responded to China’s rise by rebooting a policy approach it followed consistently from the late 19th century: it has continued to believe that solidarity with its great-power allies, old and new, is the best means by which to preserve its welfare and wellbeing. Australia has even enlarged the geographic definition of its primary strategic environment – the “Indo-Pacific″ – in its search for new friends, primarily India, that might help it balance China into the future.
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