Today, Australia is uninterested in the Middle
East. This isn’t new, but shifting priorities have worsened it. The Middle East
is not a core priority of Australian foreign policy, but it remains
counter-intuitively important.
Canberra has many interests in the region, from the
growing number of Australian citizens living there to the vital maritime trade
routes that supply Asia, and sustain the world economy.
If Canberra lets the skills and knowledge it has
acquired during a decade of military involvement evaporate just because combat
operations are over, it will lose the chance to best pursue its interests in a
region vital to Australia.
More than 65,000 Australian citizens live in the
Middle East, of which 38,000 live in the Gulf – that’s two thirds of the
average voting population of an electorate. Not only that, but these expats are
well educated, influential individuals. Australia has an interest in their
security, particularly because the region is rife with instability.
Contingency planning requires in-depth knowledge of a
region, something that Australia has invested a great deal in building up, but
will lose if it continues on the current trajectory.
But the significance of the region for Canberra goes
beyond Australian expats living there.
Australia’s economy depends on the Middle East.
That’s because, for Asia to grow it will need Middle Eastern energy. Although
dependence varies from country to country, today, the Middle East supplies
nearly 50 per cent of Asian oil consumption and Asia buys 75 per cent of Middle
East oil exports. More importantly, the vast proportion of Asia’s future energy
needs will come from the Middle East and the region’s ability to increase
domestic energy production to meet demand will be restricted.
Energy from the Middle East will ensure Asia
continues to grow. But what if this supply was disrupted? Oil stocks in most
Asian countries (except Korea and Japan) are low, meaning that shocks in oil
supply cannot be offset by national stocks. While the possibility of releasing
emergency European and US stocks exists, it will take longer to ship to Asia.
The region will see short phases of acute shortages before it can adjust to a
supply shock. The Middle East was the source of five major disruptions in the
past 40 years – Asia isn’t well equipped to deal with more.
Australia would not be immune to such shocks.
Canberra is dependent on imports of oil products from Asia, which in turn rely
heavily on Middle East crude oil imports. In the event of a shock, it is likely
that product-exporting countries will redirect some of their supplies to meet
national demand. Along with Thailand, Australia would face shortfalls of 5 to
10 per cent of consumption following an oil shock originating in the Middle
East.
Needless to say, such disruptions will have a
severe impact on economic stability and growth in the region. And Canberra
knows this.
In addition, nearly all of Australia’s sea lines of
communication that do not go through Asia go through the Middle East. Seventeen
per cent of Australia’s oil imports travel through the Strait of Hormuz.
That number jumps to 56 per cent when discussing the Asia-Pacific region as a
whole. The Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal are high-density shipping
routes. Today, the political situation in Egypt and Iran’s repeated (but
unlikely) threats to close the strait make both routes volatile. Australia must
be able to anticipate changes that would affect these routes.
Australia and the Gulf Co-operation Council share a
significant economic relationship. The value of trade between the six states of
the council and Australia was $10.165 billion in 2012. They are expanding
markets with significant buying power. The UAE grew 4 per cent last year, Saudi
Arabia 3.6 per cent and Qatar 5 per cent. Although today trade with Iran is
negligible, the possibility of a final nuclear deal that includes a lifting of
sanctions would potentially open a market of 76 million people up for business.
Asia is already present, Europe is weighing its options, so why not Australia?
The region is replete with security interests for
Australia, even after the end of Australian Defence Force operations in
Afghanistan. The three-year civil war in Syria has been a headache for
Canberra. According to the Attorney-General, George Brandis, “Australia is one
of the largest sources of foreign war fighters to the Syrian conflict from
countries outside the region.” He estimated that between 120 and 150
Australians were fighting in Syria, a conservative estimate compared with
numbers floated by others, which go up to 205. These fighters pose domestic
security risks when they return from battle, a concern that is furrowing brows
in Canberra’s national security community.
While Syria poses a more immediate risk, the
spillover of Middle Eastern Islamic terrorism into south-east Asia has been on
the agenda for a while. The Bali bombings of October 2002, which killed 88
Australians, made this threat all too real. Jemaah Islamiah, a south-east Asian
militant Islamist organisation with ties to al-Qaeda in the Middle East was
responsible for the attack. A week later, al-Qaeda said that the bombings were
in retaliation for Australia’s support of the US war on terror,
involvement in Afghanistan and the liberation of East Timor.
Of course Australia is focused on Asia. The growth of
China, disputes in the South China Sea and changes in Indonesia and Thailand
are much closer to home. But stability in the Middle East matters for Asia’s
security too, because the more the US devotes effort to pacifying and securing
the Middle East, the less it will be devoted to managing flashpoints in Asia. Australia
would much rather live in an Asia that has Washington’s undivided attention.
Australia can ignore the Middle East today, but that
won’t stop the region having an impact on Australian interests tomorrow. It’s
an unstable but valuable part of the world. If Canberra decides too late that
it needs to understand what’s going on, it will have to redevelop the capacity
and relearn the lessons learnt over a decade spent on the ground. It is natural
for strategic priorities to shift, but it’s a mistake to let skills dissolve.
It is in Canberra’s economic and strategic interest to understand the Middle
East, and where possible to promote stability. After all, there’s more to the
world than Asia.
Dina Esfandiary is a research associate,
Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Program with the International Institute for
Strategic Studies.
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