Anglosphere redux must confront an infuriated China
Arms race or no, it will reconfigure international relations and at least end the notion that the global power of America and its allies is in terminal decline.
Sep 21, 2021
Asad Latif
The writer is a Singapore journalist
WRITING in these pages just three months ago, I argued that cultural, political, economic and strategic affinities among the English-speaking nations of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand created the basis for the robust public declaration of a global strategic identity today.
I had not imagined that that declaration would arrive so soon or take the radically transformative shape of Aukus, the historic security agreement reached by Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States on their common role in the Indo-Pacific.
Canada and New Zealand are not party to Aukus, which therefore is not a truly Anglospheric project, but its three founding partners nevertheless represent the bulk of the Anglosphere's economic and strategic heft. Its cutting edge will be apparent in Australia possessing the technology and capability necessary to deploy nuclear-powered submarines, among other areas of Anglospheric cooperation.
For the United States, Aukus reiterates its desire to remain the chief offshore balancer in the Indo-Pacific, particularly after its miserable withdrawal from Afghanistan last month that raised doubts about the remit of the hegemonic stability it could produce and sustain.
For the United Kingdom, the agreement marks the return of post-Brexit Britain to East of Suez. In 1968, Whitehall declared that it would withdraw troops permanently from east of the Suez Canal. The decision marked late-imperial Britain's military retrenchment from South-east Asia and affected its base in Singapore viscerally.
Although there is no indication of British military bases re-emerging in the Indo-Pacific, Aukus combines Britain's special relationship with America across the Atlantic and its special ties with Australia in the Pacific.
Britain is back in post-imperial action, having thrown in its lot decisively with America to shore up Australia as a member of a rejuvenated Anglosphere in all but name.
Contemporary Australia, which has been torn always between its Pacific geography and its European provenance, has moved now to reaffirm its global identity as an essential pillar of the Anglospheric effort to structure world affairs.
FRENCH FURY
So strong is this Anglospheric impulse that it risks undermining relations with the Eurosphere, that triumvirate of power whose political capital is Brussels, economic capital Berlin and military capital Paris.
Velina Tchakarova of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy fears a split between the Anglosphere and the European Union in dealing with the "Dragonbear" nations of China and Russia. If so, the Anglosphere has broken loose of its strategic ties with the Eurosphere in confronting the Sinosphere and the Slavosphere amid the "emerging bifurcation of the global system".
"The fact that the US is willing to spend more political capital and invest in security and defence ties with the UK and Australia before reaching out to EU powers is quite revealing," she writes.
"Reaching out" is an understatement given the extent of French fury at losing a lucrative conventional submarine-building contract with Australia as a result of Canberra's choice of nuclear-powered submarines promised by the Aukus deal. Clearly, once the Anglosphere comes into view, the Eurosphere begins to recede into the strategic distance.
Of course, to recede is not to disappear. The expansive energies of Russia and its Slavosphere will keep the United States and the United Kingdom engaged in Europe in foreseeable time.
The American diplomat George F Kennan argued that there are five centres of industrial and military power that are crucial to the national security of the United States: the US itself; the UK; Germany and Central Europe; the Soviet Union; and Japan. Asia is not everything: Asia's place in a shifting world order is. Europe, too, is a key player in that order.
For Britain, likewise, there is an abiding concern inherited from the geographer Halford Mackinder's warning of the formation of a hostile Eurasian heartland, the geographical pivot of world history which survives periodic readjustments in inter-state relations. Britain must remain a Eurasian player if it has to possess any credibility in the Indo-Pacific.
For Australia, which fears both strategic abandonment by the rest of the West (read America and Britain) and strategic entanglement with imperious Anglo-American adventurism (as in the illegal invasion of Iraq), the choice between the two evils has been resolved by Aukus. Geographically prodigal Australia has returned to its historical home in Anglo-American time.
Aukus - Anglosphere redux - now contends with China as the next global hegemon, beginning with Asia.
CHINESE IRE
The Anglosphere must confront an infuriated China. Some commentators have warned that Australia will become a target of Chinese nuclear retribution since its nuclear-powered submarines could serve to mount a second nuclear strike on China in the event of a Sino-American war over Taiwan.
Canberra's reaction appears to be: So be it. There was no guarantee in any case that China would not attack even non-Aukus Australia in such a war, given the presence of the Anzus treaty that ties together the strategic destinies of Australia, New Zealand and the United States. That treaty, like America's treaties with Japan and South Korea, is a source of perpetual ire to China.
What Aukus does is give Australia a greater stake in its Anglospheric identity than before by giving the Anglo-American axis a greater stake in Australian security. All in all, the Anglosphere has re-entered the Indo-Pacific theatre as a major actor. Whether or not Aukus sparks a major arms race in the region, it will reconfigure international relations at least to the point of destroying the narrative that the global power of America and its allies is in terminal decline.