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DARWIN, AUSTRALIA At first glance there was no connection between U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement in November the U.S. was establishing a permanent base for 2,500 Marines near Darwin and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s revelation late Wednesday U.S. combat forces expect to quit Afghanistan early.
But there is. The announcements underscore how quickly U.S. global military priorities are shifting to the Pacific, where Beijing’s ambitions have become a white-hot issue.
The U.S. military focus is now on Asia, where a new strategic order is being established with the U.S. and Australia working closely together. Canberra’s strategic concerns were highlighted in the 2009 White Paper on defence, which concluded China was a potential direct threat and the country must have “defence in depth.”
The Sydney-based Lowy Institute for International Policy said more or less the same thing last year. It said there was “a real possibility of diplomatic crisis and military confrontation” between China and other Pacific nations “because of overconfidence, national pride, resource pressures and sovereignty disputes.”
Although no official would say so for the record, the U.S. is developing a containment strategy for China similar to the one established with NATO more than half a century ago to hem in the Soviet Union, and Darwin is part of the solution.
Australia is walking a slippery diplomatic slope because its booming resource-based economy depends heavily on exports to China. Yet there is strong support here for the kind of collaboration that has been agreed to for Darwin, and the U.S. and Australia have long had at the top-secret Pine Gap intelligence-gathering complex deep in the Outback.
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