Beazley pledged troops to help US in a war with China Philip Dorling and Richard Baker

December 8, 2010
Replay video AUSTRALIA's ambassador to the US and former opposition leader, Kim Beazley, assured American officials that Australia would always side with the US in the event of a war with China, a confidential diplomatic cable reveals.

Mr Beazley's remarks, made in a meeting in 2006 with the then US ambassador, Robert McCallum, just months before Kevin Rudd replaced him as Labor leader, are significant as no Australian federal political leader has ever disclosed what position they believed the nation should take if the US and China came to blows over Taiwan - an event that would present Australia's greatest foreign policy dilemma.

Advertisement: Story continues below The cable, classified as confidential and not to be disclosed outside the US government, gave the following summary of Mr Beazley's comments: ''In the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen.''

The cable is one of hundreds of US State Department documents relevant to Australia released by the WikiLeaks website to the Herald.

Two other cables reveal further insights into Australia's relations with China. They relate to a pledge in 2007 by Mr Rudd, as the newly elected prime minister, to US officials to ''get inside the heads'' of China's leaders, and the government's belief that China had tried to intimidate it through a series of actions last year, including the arrest of the former Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu.

Mr Beazley was commenting on remarks in 2004 by Alexander Downer, then the foreign affairs minister in the Howard government, that a conflict between the US and China over Taiwan would not necessarily trigger Aus- tralia's obligations under the ANZUS Treaty.

The treaty commits Australia and the US to respond if the armed forces of the other in the Pacific come under attack.

Mr Downer's comments, which he insisted were taken out of context, caused concern in Washington and prompted the then US ambassador, Tom Schieffer, to declare that America expected Australia's support in the event of conflict over Taiwan.

The then prime minister, John Howard, refused to comment publicly on what Australia would do if hostility broke out between the US and China, saying it was a hypothetical situation.

But Mr Beazley told Mr McCallum that Mr Downer should have ''known better than to have given Beijing any notion that Canberra would be able to sit out a conflict''.

The publication of Mr Beazley's remarks comes at a sensitive time in Australia's increasingly complex relationship with China.

Earlier this week, another cable released by WikiLeaks revealed that last year Mr Rudd, now the Foreign Affairs Minister, told the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to be prepared ''to deploy force'' if efforts to integrate China into the international community failed.

A fresh WikiLeaks cable released to the Herald discloses the Australian government's belief that China had tried last year to intimidate it through aggressive lobbying, increased public criticism, the arrest of Hu and the ''time-worn tactic'' of cancelling high-level visits.

The confidential cable from the US embassy in Beijing last December quotes Graham Fletcher, the first assistant secretary for north Asia in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as saying Australia had stood up to Chinese pressure and forced its leaders to soften their approach in the latter part of the year. ''We learnt we can make them blink,'' the cable quotes Mr Fletcher as saying, adding his view that it was ''only round one''.

Mr Fletcher is recorded describing how China had gone to great lengths last year to pressure Australia not to give the Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer a visa, including ''privately warning a major Australian bank that sponsors the National Press Club to use its influence to block a Kadeer speech there''.

He told the US officials of the federal government's concern that cracking down too hard on Chinese lobbying in Australia would ''simply drive it underground''.

Meanwhile, another cable in the latest releases, dated December 2007 and from the US embassy in Canberra following a meeting between Mr Rudd and Mr McCallum, records Mr Rudd stating his intention to engage China and ''get inside the heads of their senior leadership on their long-term plans''.

Mr Rudd told Mr McCallum he was ''not starry-eyed towards China'', despite his time as a diplomat in Beijing.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/beazley-pledged-troops-to-help-us-in-a-war-with-china-20101207-18obt.html