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Australia looks to raise its profile

P.S. Suryanarayana

Canberra's recent dealings with major powers show its preference for "reassurance rather than deterrence."

AUSTRALIA IS preparing for a leadership role in the Asia Pacific region. A policy of power projection in the South Pacific and an adjacent East Asian corridor would reinforce its identity as a military ally of the United States.

At the same time, Australia has signalled its strategic choices of astute political friendship with China and calibrated economic engagement with India. In April this year, Canberra and Beijing signed a peaceful nuclear pact. Australia's decision to raise its military profile was announced in late August. On September 1, Australian Prime Minister John Howard pledged his country's commitment to a long-term relationship with India on a wide range of issues.

Australia's leadership role formed the centrepiece of Mr. Howard's announcements about plans for an expansion of the Army and Federal Police. In Mr. Howard's new worldview, "Australia has, and is seen to have, a leadership role in contributing to security and stability in our region." Regional states, like East Timor and Solomon Islands, "will continue to look to Australia for help" for their security needs at home.

Australia's regional military focus, reflecting a largely autonomous role that might also benefit the U.S., is not the whole story though. The proposed Army expansion would bolster the "capacity to contribute to [U.S.-led] coalitions in areas further a-field [such as West Asia and Afghanistan, as of now]," Mr. Howard noted. He dropped a parallel hint that the ADF would be deployed under future U.S.-led coalitions as well in areas where Canberra's "interests might be at stake." In contrast, he did not, in mid-August, evince similar enthusiasm for a United Nations-proposed peace force in Lebanon. On balance, though, Mr. Howard, by pursuing a foreign policy of realism, has already guided Australia on to the centre-stage of East Asian diplomacy. China, Japan, India, and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) are Australia's key interlocutors in this arena.

The inevitable question, therefore, is whether Australia is now flexing its military muscle in a manner that could raise alarm across East Asia. An answer is that Mr. Howard has, on available evidence, packaged his proposals in a way that might not threaten the vital interests of China, Japan, India, and the ASEAN.

He has also gone the extra mile along the path of sophistication since 2000, when he ruffled the feathers of some ASEAN countries by suggesting, as interpreted by them, that Australia could play the U.S.-surrogate in East Asia. In March this year, Australia launched, in association with the U.S. and Japan, a new forum called the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue. This had led to speculation that the U.S. was seeking to isolate China. Smart politics is all about timing, and on April 3, Australia agreed to sell its uranium to China. The political message was that Canberra would not pursue a policy of containment towards China.

From a purely military standpoint, Australia has not so far considered the possibility of teaming up with the U.S., India, and Japan — of the tsunami-relief naval core group — for any kind of longer-term defence tie-up. Moreover, the idea of cooperative security, as enunciated by a former Australian leader Gareth Evans, is not resonant now, but Canberra's recent dealings with the major powers show its preference for "reassurance rather than deterrence."

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