Of greater import, however, is that the Australian prime minister has still not matched the rhetoric of the White House’s National Security Strategy which labels China a “strategic competitor.” For good measure, Morrison has said on any number of occasions that he sees no value in the U.S.-China relationship being defined by “confrontation” or becoming solely interpreted through a “binary” or “zero-sum” prism. Thus, the Australian leader has not stated unequivocally that his government views China as an existential threat to Australian security and prosperity. Indeed, he clings to the existence of a “comprehensive strategic partnership” between the two countries, however hollow its very utterance now rings. It is telling that neither Morrison nor any senior ministers have publicly endorsed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent Nixon Library clarion call to the “Free World” to muscle up to China. He has eschewed talk of a new Cold War, and, on more than one occasion, even defined the United States and China as Australia’s new “great and powerful friends.” That statement has its own resonance in Australia’s Cold War history, and was coined by the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, to define what was virtually a canonical faith in Australia’s international outlook—that Britain and the United States formed a protective umbrella for the country in a threatening Asia. But even as that phrase reflected the dictates of national interest, it also carried enormous emotional and sentimental weight: anchoring Australia’s cultural moorings in an unfamiliar Asian setting. For Morrison to use it in relation to the United States and China was therefore nothing short of remarkable—an attempt, perhaps, to clothe in older rhetorical garb the imaginative leap he wants Australians to make. There was at the very least the suggestion in his use of the phrase that Australia’s relations with the United States and China might come to have a certain equivalence, that these dominant two sides of Australian foreign policy could exist in something of an equilibrium. Morrison is known to have been personally pleased by this very interpretation of his remarks, but his staff has since advised him to stop using the phrase. And, indeed, given the recent tone of the Australian debate over China it would be virtually unthinkable for the prime minister to now do so.

Morrison came to office not having given much thought to foreign affairs. It is true that as Treasurer in the Abbott and Turnbull governments he played a major role in some of the key decisions on China—most notably the blocking of a Chinese state-owned company’s bid to purchase the electricity grid in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, and on Huawei. But his approach to the world has been mostly ad hoc since coming to office. There is no Morrison doctrine. For all his studious passing over of old Cold War glossaries of containment, Morrison has been unable to arrest the slide in relations with Beijing, a slide brought on first and foremost by new Chinese assertiveness, but one that has been hardly helped by the growing tendency of the more hawkish in his own party—particularly those outside Cabinet—to freelance on China policy. A national foundation for Australia-China relations, established last year to nurture a new era of engagement between the two countries, is now adrift following the resignation of its chair, who claimed faltering government support for the initiative. There is clear unease from party elders on the escalating tension in ties. As Morrison launched the idea of an independent inquiry into coronavirus, former prime minister John Howard, widely respected for his adroit stewardship of both the China and U.S. relationships, warned that a “pragmatic approach” to China policy was still needed. This was not a time to “suddenly turn the relationship on its head.”

THERE WOULD be no shedding of tears in the State Department or the Pentagon that Australia-China relations have been in a state of permafrost—at least in terms of leaders’ exchanges—for the past three years, with no thaw in prospect. China’s ambassador in Canberra, Cheng Jingye, as if to emphasize the point made by Pompeo and Clinton on Australian economic “dependency,” held a press conference in October last year to remind Australians that China’s thirst for Australian natural resources constituted the source of Australia’s prosperity. Up until this year, the Australian economy had enjoyed twenty-eight years of consecutive economic growth, a record amongst developed economies. More recently, China’s Global Times has labelled Australia “chewing gum on the boot of China” and a “dog of the US,” adding that China’s decision to sign up to an independent WHO inquiry was a “slap in the face” for Australia’s original proposal. These slurs have met with appropriately vigorous responses from ministers and commentators, and have served only to inflame popular hostility towards China. Australian public opinion strongly supported the prime minister’s initiative on an independent inquiry.

The bellicose Chinese rhetoric has now been followed up by retaliatory action—in trade, tourism, and higher education, with authorities in China advising both university students and tourists to resist travelling to Australia. Ambassador Jingye has indicated that economic sticks would be used to punish Australia since the Chinese public was “frustrated, dismayed and disappointed” by Australia’s “politically driven” call for an inquiry. In May, China not only slapped an 80 percent tariff on Australian barley exports for a period of five years—affecting 50 percent of Australia’s overall barley trade—it blacklisted beef imports from four major Australian abattoirs, which on some estimates comprise approximately 35 percent of total Australian beef exports to mainland China. Australian ministers have been at pains to dismiss talk of a “trade war,” but parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Trade and Investment Growth has already commenced an inquiry into diversifying Australia’s trade and investment profile. Its chair, another of the hawks, released a scarifying video that drew on a slew of Cold War imagery to depict the nation as being under virtual attack from China. And yet, for all the breathless talk of “diversification”—the assumption being that new markets equivalent to China can be found overnight—the distinguished Australian National University economist Peter Drysdale points out that over the period of these tensions, Australia’s exports to China grew by 4.3 percent from 2019 figures, even as China’s GDP growth dropped 6.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020.

Herein lies Canberra’s dilemma. For nearly two decades now its mantra has been that Australia could manage both the U.S. alliance and its relationship with China, that it “didn’t have to choose between its history and geography,” in the words of former prime minister Howard, or that it could have “an ally in Washington and a friend in Beijing” as put by Julia Gillard. But President Xi’s aggressive brand of Chinese exceptionalism, and Trump’s increasing belligerence towards China, is bringing Australia’s delicate diplomatic waltz to an abrupt end. The situation for Canberra becomes more acute as the United States moves increasingly along the spectrum towards the virtual containment of China, at the same time as the Morrison government recognizes—even if it will rarely say so unequivocally—that trade with China remains essential to its economic recovery post the pandemic. Yet American hawks rarely if ever take into account Australia’s economic interests—they assume that Canberra can easily find similarly profitable destinations, other than China, for its two major exports, iron-ore and coal. But such thinking is delusional.

There has been no shortage of American visitors to Australia in reinforcing the message as to where Canberra should stand, and that the United States is in for a long twilight struggle with China. During a 2019 speaking tour, Chicago University’s John Mearsheimer told Australian audiences that since the United States last century had dispensed consecutively with German militarism, National Socialism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Communism, it would likely do the same to Xi’s China. Indeed, Mearsheimer had no doubt that political elites in Washington and New York would “go to enormous lengths to portray China as the greatest threat the world has ever seen” in order to galvanize the American public into action. It is likely that he reinforced this message in his private meetings with the Australian prime minister and other national security officials. This hardening of American attitudes towards Beijing was also stressed in a visit to Sydney earlier this year by a former senior official in George W. Bush’s national security council. According to this interlocutor, any moderate U.S. voices on China had been “stampeded” by those pushing a tougher line. Even the Chinese embassy in Washington now has little inclination to seek out the views of those articulating the need for ongoing U.S. engagement with China. Hawkish voices are not confined to the Pentagon, with a younger generation of State Department officials depicted as “particularly ideologically gung-ho on countering China.” An official at the Australian embassy in Washington put it in different terms, observing that the various flocks of hawkish views on China in Congress—on trade, human rights, and national security—far from taking different flight paths as they had in the past, now fly in unison.