A Pragmatic Partner: Australia and the ADMM-Plus

Abstract

A Pragmatic Partner:Australia and the ADMM-Plus Brendan Taylor (bio) Right from the establishment of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus) in October 2010, Australia has been among its most enthusiastic supporters. In the lead-up to the grouping’s third ministerial gathering in November 2015, for instance, Australian defense minister Marise Payne characterized the ADMM-Plus as “Australia’s top priority for regional defence engagement.”1 In a similar vein, the Gillard government’s 2013 defense white paper projected that “Australia will continue to take a leading role in the [ADMM-Plus].”2 Consistent with this commitment, Australia has participated in all six ADMM-Plus experts’ working groups (EWG). It co-chaired EWGs on maritime security (with Malaysia in 2013) and counterterrorism (with Singapore in 2014) and also hosted the inaugural ADMM-Plus maritime security exercise in September–October 2013. Under Australia’s chairmanship of the counterterrorism EWG, an ADMM-Plus exercise focusing on maritime security and counterterrorism was held in Brunei and Singapore in May 2016. According to one account, this constituted “the largest cooperative military exercise ever seen in the region.”3 This essay argues that three factors explain Australia’s enthusiastic embrace of the ADMM-Plus and of Asian multilateralism more generally. First, Australia has long displayed an almost visceral fear of being excluded from these groupings and of its marginalization from Asia as a consequence. Second, Canberra is interested in such groupings when they deliver practical benefits—especially in the areas of conflict management and avoidance—reflecting Australia’s pragmatic political culture. Third, the ability of multilateral groupings to facilitate Australian engagement with this region’s major powers exhibits particular appeal. The essay goes on to highlight shortcomings of the ADMM-Plus from Canberra’s perspective, namely in terms of the grouping’s inability to meaningfully constrain [End Page 83] major-power dominance and maintain the international rules-based order. So long as the ADMM-Plus continues to deliver tangible benefits in the other three areas outlined above, however, these perceived shortcomings are unlikely to prove decisive. The Past as Prologue Australia’s enthusiastic engagement with the ADMM-Plus is by no means unprecedented. Ever since multilateral processes began to burgeon in Asia during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Australia has been actively involved. The government of Bob Hawke, for instance, is widely credited with formally proposing the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, while Hawke’s successor, Paul Keating, built on this legacy by initiating the APEC Leaders’ Meeting. The establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) has also been attributed, in part, to cooperative efforts between Canberra and Tokyo that highlighted the need for a multilateral institution focused on security matters. To be sure, Australian interventions have not always been entirely welcome. The proposal by Foreign Minister Gareth Evans in the early 1990s for a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Asia modeled on the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe immediately caused concern in Washington—largely due to the potential for such a grouping to undermine the United States’ network of Asian alliances—and was also rejected by ASEAN, China, Japan, and South Korea. Nearly two decades later, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s ill-fated “Asia-Pacific community” proposal received a similarly cool regional reception, this time on the grounds that it was seeking to eject ASEAN from its preferred position in the driver’s seat of Asia’s institutional architecture.4 Australia’s Embrace of Asian Multilateralism Given that Australia is a medium-sized country located on Asia’s periphery, what explains its interest in the ADMM-Plus and extraordinary level of engagement with Asian multilateralism more generally? First, the Australian approach to regional architecture is driven by fear of exclusion. The late Samuel Huntington famously described Australia as a “torn [End Page 84] country,” a people who in his words were “divided over whether their society belongs to one civilization or another.”5 For reasons of history and culture, Australia’s ties have traditionally been to Great Britain and the broader Western world. In geographic terms, however, Australia’s destiny is intimately tied to that of Asia. Yet precisely due to this...