22vPaX

oundtable • non-claimant perspectives on the south china sea
submarines during the Cold War. 2 Its decades of trading relations with
North Asia have involved heavy reliance on these sea lanes. As an early
contributor to regional security diplomacy, including the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum and other
ASEAN-centric institutions, Canberra has sustained serious efforts to
build the regimes of confidence building, transparency, and conflict
prevention that Asia has long needed to maintain stability and guard the
gains of prosperity.
Even so, until the upsurge of tensions and assertiveness over the past
five years, the South China Sea did not feature prominently in official
public documents about Australian foreign and defense policy. A brief
survey of the past two decades is illuminating. In the 1980s, despite
simmering territorial differences and occasional conflict between China
and Vietnam, Australia saw the South China Sea essentially in a Cold
War context: the 1987 defense white paper referred to it only as a zone
for Australian surveillance flights from a forward base in Butterworth,
Malaysia. 3 By the 1994 white paper, with the end of the Cold War,
Canberra began to acknowledge concern about “competing territorial
claims” among “well-armed nations.” 4 The situation was still seen as one
among many regional problems to be “handled carefully” rather than as a
major threat. This of course was still an era when China’s growing military
power and economic heft were of concern mainly because the country was
growing so rapidly, not because of demonstrations of coercive behavior or
a perceived ambition to seek to eclipse the U.S.-led alliance system.
Australia’s deepening security anxieties around China’s military power
and U.S.-China strategic competition were made plain in the 2009 defense
white paper. 5 Yet although worries about China’s maritime ambitions
clearly informed this blueprint for a strong Australian navy, the focus was
not specifically the South China Sea, which was left unmentioned. This was
in marked contrast with a series of policy statements in subsequent years.
As territorial tensions rose, and China’s stance from 2009 onward took
on characteristics of assertiveness, risk-taking, and sometimes coercion,
Australia’s policy position of general concern became sharper and more
explicit. In September 2011, Australia and the United States signed on to an
2 Department of Defence (Australia), The Defence of Australia (Canberra, 1987), 7, 15, 16.
3 Ibid.
4 Department of Defence (Australia), Defending Australia (Canberra, 1994), 10.
5 Department of Defence (Australia), Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030
(Canberra, 2009).
[ 7 ]