Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2020

The coronavirus outbreak was a dramatic foreign policy game‐changer in the first half of 2020 While alarm bells started to ring in January, the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially declared COVID‐19 as a global pandemic on 11 March The animal pathogen introduced into the human world created an abrupt series of international security shockwaves that tested community resilience and compounded situations of uncertainty and division in a more multi‐polar world order Australia was not immune to this turbulence The Morrison government's first year since the election was dominated by this extraordinary high‐impact global event that placed great stress on political systems and fuelled worrying scenarios of military tension and geopolitical friction against the backdrop of declining US influence and intensified Chinese assertiveness It also threatened widespread social and economic dislocation while boosting nationalist, populist and extremist impulses, both at home and abroad Further, heightened disinformation and propaganda campaigns emerged as a profound national security threat As Thomas Rid cautioned, “it is impossible to excel at both misinformation and democracy at the same time” In the wake of a horror bushfire season that had caused colossal devastation across a number of affected regions (and calls for a major change in policy settings to address “the existential nature of the threat to people and ecosystems”), the attention‐span of the government found itself quickly consumed by a rapidly evolving public health emergency This emergency that swept across the globe had a decisive and immediate impact on vulnerable populations and global geo‐political and socio‐economic realities A June 2020 Lowy Institute poll also found that pressures to whole‐of‐government responses as well as the fragilities within international co‐operation networks had been heightened by the pandemic as many Australians were feeling unsafe, anxious and pessimistic about navigating a more uncertain future This included the status of the economy and the scope of ties with China During the period under review, this article will therefore predominantely focus on the impact and implications of the pandemic on the international system and Australia's response as a small but not insignificant actor in dealing with a knotty series of events The dramatic deterioration of Australia‐China relations will be a major theme in this analysis This phase of heightened strategic competition directly cuts into multiple questions and concerns about new types of interdependencies, hastened regional instability and a volatile recipe of overlapping security, economic, diplomatic and cyber concerns In short, Australia's relations with China worsened dramatically during this period But perhaps most strikingly, and what will also be underscored in more detail below, is that the pandemic did not create an entirely new set of foreign policy problems Rather, it acted to fast‐track and augment a number of pre‐existing dilemmas and fragmentary pressures that had been previously testing Australian interests and values Notably, “the coronavirus has only hastened what was already underway” This distillation of worrisome global trends and amplified problem spots included: the acceleration of great‐power competition and wider geo‐political instability;the increased complexity of cyber‐management;the extension of disinformation and “grey zone” campaigns; and an upswing in re‐empowered right‐wing extremism It is not surprising that interventionist measures and policy planning to deal with a “clear and present” crisis will always be broadly reactive in nature Ambitious calls to develop stronger strategic foresight and actively re‐shape the direction of Australia's foreign policy in a more future‐oriented way will tend to be overshadowed by immediate and urgent pressure and time constraints — in this case, namely actions to reduce the overall severity of the pandemic Unquestionably, a vari ty of circumstances did exert a strong gravitational push that disrupted the status quo in the Indo‐Pacific region and, as mentioned, acted to heighten and amplify a number of pre‐existing tensions and security dynamics Yet, as policy‐makers continued to grapple with uncertainty, predictions to understand the longer‐term consequences of the COVID‐19 epidemic, and associated second and third order effects, do remain highly speculative and range from a bleak and grim prognosis to a cautious optimism In this sense, the pandemic is characterised by a multiplicity of ambiguities The longer‐term impacts will be varied and nuanced: the realities of the twenty‐first century will continue to entail channels of contestation and opportunity;fragmentation and integration;conflict and co‐operation all operating along a slippery continuum At the very least, the pandemic underscored the significance of the political and intellectual struggle in which any reconstruction of foreign policy is involved As a starting point, the emerging challenges of COVID‐19 and its fallout did set in motion a series of urgent re‐evaluations on Australia's capacity to mitigate security escalation risks and related resilience perspectives as well as the counter‐productive undercurrents of self‐help instincts in international systems