Politics “down under” can be pretty upside-down.
Kevin Rudd led his Labor Party to victory in Australia’s 2007 election. Shortly after settling into the prime minister’s office, Rudd and his team did something rarely seen from the leadership of a left-leaning party: call for a big increase in defense spending.
Indeed, Rudd announced the biggest military buildup in Australia since World War II. The Australian Defense White Paper, released last May, offered a blueprint for a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in new hardware from ships and submarines to planes and cruise missiles.
Even more startling, Rudd vowed that government would find a way to pay for the more than $100 billion program regardless of other budgetary pressures and demands to fund social programs.
Perhaps the most startling revelation in the white paper: It’s a candid assessment that more military muscle was needed to counterbalance a rising China and declining U.S. presence in the region.
Australia has been a solid ally for the United States since World War I. The Aussies also have a well-earned reputation for hard thinking about long-term challenges. Today’s clear-eyed thinkers in Canberra see troubled times ahead for their neighborhood.
The White House should have taken notice when the Aussie “warning light” started blinking. It is not clear that it did.
Yes, President Obama swept through Asia in a series of meetings last week. Yes, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has racked up a good many frequent-flyer miles visiting the region. And, yes, the standard Asian “hot spots” — Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea — all get mentioned in White House news briefings.
But despite all the trips and talks, there are plenty of signs the administration doesn’t get it. In Asia, trade has long been a cornerstone of our security interests, but efforts to strengthen trade relations are conspicuously absent from in the administration’s Asia portfolio.
Trade with Asia is vital to America’s future. America is a trading nation–a third of our economy comes from trade. Asia accounts for more than a quarter of global trade — more than the U.S. and Europe combined. According to the Index of Economic Freedom, half of the world’s 10 most free economies are Asian nations.
Yet even leaders in the president’s own party concede that the White House is missing in action. Last week, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus declared “that absence is palpable. … We must trade or fade.”
The White House is fading. The South Korea Free Trade Agreement, hammered out and signed back on June 30, 2007, is gathering cobwebs as it awaits ratification. The administration refuses to push for it, even though recently 88 members of Congress (half from each party) recently wrote a letter pleading to dust off the proposal.
The administration has not even started to develop a free-trade agreement with India (one of the regions fastest-growing economies) even after New Delhi signed a trade pact with China and drafted one with the European Union.
Washington, however, has almost forgotten how to spell free trade. The White House is obsessed with global climate change regulations and treaties that are more likely to kill both jobs and trade than clean up the environment.
The president is also unwilling to take on labor unions and other entrenched interests that are more interested in having a controlling power in a dwindling America than in growing American prosperity and power.
When the U.S. is seen as a less reliable security and trading partner in Asia, trouble happens. This is not only a lesson of history; it could well be an iron rule that governs the course of the 21st century. It is time for the White House to wake up, reinvigorate our security alliances with Asia and declare America open for business.
Examiner Columnist James Jay Carafano is a senior research fellow for national security at The Heritage Foundation ( heritage.org)
