China should play by the rules

The Australian

Paul Keating is right. 

It should be a politician at the helm, not an admiral, if Australia decides to send naval ships through the contested South China Sea. 

In these pages today, the former prime minister says a potentially momentous decision such as this ought to be made by a democratically elected government. (This would not restrict commanders responding to fast-changing events once an operation had specific government approval.) 

Here, Mr Keating parts ways with Labor’s defence spokesman, Richard Marles, who would give the navy a general authorisation and leave it up to commanders to launch freedom of navigation exercises as “operational decisions”. 

This point of principle aside, Mr Marles’s comments, reported in Inquirer last Saturday, capture what is at stake as China tries to trump international law with ill-founded territorial claims in the region.
“When most of our trade goes through the South China Sea, we’ve got an interest in a rules-based order applying in respect of the South China Sea, and the activities of China fly in the face of that,” Mr Marles said. 

As ever, there are uncertainties. US Pacific Command chief Harry B. Harris has been more hawkish on this issue than US Secretary of State John Kerry; and a Trump presidency would throw out the rule book.
Although the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague rejected China’s territorial claims in July, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been unable to parlay this into a united front, much to Beijing’s satisfaction. 

In these circumstances, Australia could find itself called on to support freedom of navigation exercises by the US. 

It would not be an easy decision but we have a strong interest in the settling of disputes by international norms. 

Neither this nor our alliance with the US would come as any surprise to China, which can respect a strong adversary.
In 2013, when the Chinese declared an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea, the US called their bluff by sending two B-52 bombers through the zone without identifying themselves. After The Hague ruling, China’s vice foreign minister Liu Zhenmin threatened to impose such a zone in the South China Sea. 

Better for China to accept the umpire’s decision.