The Australia-U.S. Ministerial (AUSMIN) meeting of defense and foreign ministers ended yesterday with a lengthy statement which, as expected, focused heavily on China’s alleged bad behavior and U.S.-Australian joint efforts to contain China. While the Australian side agreed with most of the assertions about China’s supposed bad behavior made by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne nonetheless appeared to be less than enthusiastic about Australia joining with the “Alliance of Democracies” that Pompeo called for in his Nixon Library speech on July 23.
Payne said that while the U.S. and Australia have “shared values,” she stressed that Australia makes its own decisions and judgements about Australia’s own interests. “So we deal with China in [our own] way. We have a strong economic engagement, other engagements, and it works in the interests of both countries,” she said.
“That said, of course, we [that is, the U.S. and Australia] don’t agree on everything,” she continued. “We are very different countries. We are very different systems, and it’s the points on which we disagree that we should be able to articulate in a mature and sensible way and advance, as I said, our interests and our values. As my Prime Minister put it recently, the relationship that we have with China is important, and we have no intention of injuring it, but nor do we intend to do things that are contrary to our interests, and that is the premise from which we begin.”
Left unsettled, is the matter of Australian participation in U.S. freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea. Australian Defense Minister Linda Reynolds, when asked about this, would only say that it was a “subject of discussion,” and that Australian ships “will continue to transit through the region in accordance with international law.” The Australian Financial Review interpreted this to mean that the classified military cooperation agreement that the two sides signed will not involve Australian warships sailing within 12 nautical miles of disputed islands in the South China Sea to challenge China’s claims of sovereignty.
