Reporters don’t get to watch the tectonic plates of geopolitics shift in real time all that often. But we’ve been watching the plates shift over five hectic days trailing Anthony Albanese through our region.
But before we get to Albanese’s reset with the Chinese president on Tuesday night, it’s best we understand the high-powered preamble.
Joe Biden met Xi Jinping in Bali on Monday. Here’s some quick context for that meeting. The US and China – led by a couple of presidents who have just consolidated their domestic political power – are locked and loaded in their competition for regional supremacy. Biden was very clear about that after Monday’s meeting with Xi. Strategic competition is fierce, and it’s here to stay.
But Biden had a very clear objective when he met Xi at the G20. He was pursuing something close to reciprocal trust.
Biden said he wanted he and Xi to maintain open lines of communication as insurance against a cataclysm. If Biden’s meaning isn’t clear, let me help. The US president wanted to be able to pick up the phone to Xi to avert a world war that could start because of an accident, or a stupid miscalculation. And he wanted Xi to be able to reciprocate.
If that thought feels chilling, I’m sorry. But it’s the world as it is.
From our vantage point in Bali, it’s very clear the world wants an off-ramp from danger, from living in a constant state of fight or flight. World leaders are doing their red carpet struts, kings and queens of their dominions, but they are locked in an extraordinary, anxious huddle here in the luxury beach resorts of a tropical paradise in Indonesia.
This G20 meeting is orbiting around a terrible war in Europe, and China’s role as a facilitator of Russia. The northern hemisphere is preoccupied with that conflict. But Biden well understands the dangers bubbling in the Indo-Pacific. So does Indonesia, the summit hosts. So do Asean nations. So Biden is working the world as it is, at both ends.
The gavotte of the heavyweights in Bali on Monday night was Biden’s first face-to-face discussion with Xi since he took the White House, and the diplomatic reset was a bit of summit season pageantry staged for the world. While the media coverage ramped up the first contact angle, Biden and Xi actually know each other well. Their relationship goes back many years.
Australia’s prime minister is yet to build a relationship with his most powerful peer in the region, and that work began on Tuesday night, when Albanese had his first meeting with Xi. It’s a first step, but it’s an important one.
Albanese has cemented peer relationships quickly since winning the May election. He’s travelled extensively and won plaudits for being empathetic and sensible, and for not being Scott Morrison – the Australian prime minister much of the world seems to want to forget.
Albanese has built rapport with Australia’s key allies by seeking human connections. I don’t know whether transactional humanism cuts through with an implacable, dangerous, authoritarian Chinese president, but I suspect Albanese will start with that, because temperamentally, that’s his thing.
Biden, who has some of Albanese’s personality traits, signals differently on the world stage. Superpower diplomacy has to be aggressively simple, understood from the dress circle to the cheap seats.
Albanese’s objectives and the way he projects reflects our status as an energetic regional middle power squeezed between our most important security and our largest trading partner. Aspirational. Not uppity. Quieter.
Albanese was asked before Tuesday night’s meeting to articulate Australia’s objectives. They were modest. He was seeking “an improvement in the relationship”. Asked what success would look like, Albanese said: “Having the meeting is a successful outcome, because for six years, we have not had any dialogue”.
The modest-sounding dot points belie the extreme complexity of this exercise.
Once upon a time, Australian prime ministers used to pretend we wouldn’t “take sides” when it came to our relationships with the US and China. “Taking sides” was universally disdained as the unsophisticated, binary thinking of hacks and plodders.
We are a long way away from that time now, and the reality is Australia has always had a side, even when we claimed we wouldn’t take one. China’s sharp elbows has made our choice explicit.
As John Curtin said in 1941, Australia looks to America. As long as Biden and his rational presidential successors can hoist their democracy out of the post-truth bin fire, and keep it safe from the posturing proto-fascists who would destroy it, Australia will look to America.
But that doesn’t mean Australia’s objectives with the China relationship are a facsimile of US objectives. There are differences, mostly expressed in the abstruse nuances of diplomacy, but these differences are actually substantial.
Albanese lives in this region. Biden visits it. Australia seeks its security in this region, not from it, while Biden scans across the Pacific from afar.
While the US asserts itself as the pre-eminent regional power, with all the trappings and status of pater familias, Labor’s tone in the region reflects our status, and our values.
Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong is a child of the region, genetically and intellectually. A core doctrine in the new Labor government’s foreign policy has been to facilitate a sense of agency for our most important near neighbours.
As she’s lapped south-east Asia and Pacific nations over the past six months in one of the most consequential soft-power offensives Australia has mounted in recent times, Wong has posed the same rhetorical question over and over. What kind of region do we want to live in?
She tells our neighbours things are scary, but we get to determine what happens next. We can influence the flow of history through the sum of our actions. We don’t have to sit mute while China and the US dictate how security and prosperity looks in this region. We can decide. We should decide.
But the thing about decisions is everyone can make them. China will also make decisions based on its own interests.
Don’t get me wrong. Tuesday night is a good first start. Xi’s language suggests he wants a reset grounded in “mutual respect”. China’s signalling on this point has been obvious for several months, even when studded with flaring bellicosity from the foreign ministry. And Albanese will ride that tiger with eyes wide open.
But there are profound disagreements in this relationship. It’s hard to see how the differences of values and aspirations can be bridged.
It’s important to be clear at this juncture. From Australia’s perspective, the point of Tuesday night’s reset isn’t chasing perfect unanimity. Australia is actually seeking something else – the capacity to disagree well with China, with the least amount of collateral damage.
Tuesday night is certainly a diplomatic coup for Albanese, a coup for Wong. But when it comes to the crunch, hard power, and the capacity to wield it, determines outcomes.
China is the rising hegemon; the region’s long shadow.
This century is China’s. Australians know that because we are a neighbour of China’s. We live it. We breathe it. We don’t need to read about it in a G20 brief as we fly in for an international summit.
In the long run, China will decide how it wants to treat an Australia bolted into the military complex of the US; an Australia that is actively, openly, unapologetically, repelling Beijing’s influence campaigns both domestically and regionally.
It will be up to China to determine whether it can pursue a fruitful relationship with Australia when Australia has already picked the other side, and everyone knows that.
Talking is good. Talking is always better than not talking. Talking can change the world.
But durable detente, if it is to happen, is a reciprocity business. It always requires two.
