Sweet Caroline: can American royalty stop fears of imperial decline in Asia?

If all goes according to plan, Australia is getting a Kennedy. Caroline, last surviving child of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Onassis, is odds-on to become Joe Biden’s ambassador to Australia. Sending bona fide American aristocracy over here is already being viewed as a sign America is sitting up and taking notice of little old Australia, and a sign of a Biden administration getting serious about the challenge of China and an unstable Asia-Pacific after the chaos and neglect of the Trump years.

Kennedy’s celebrity will excite us. Her close ties to Biden and diplomatic experience in the Asia-Pacific should reassure us. But in a corner of the world where US imperial decline is most closely felt, is that enough? 

American royalty

When Neil Diamond penned his 1969 hit “Sweet Caroline”, a song butchered in football stadiums around the world, he was inspired by a photograph of Kennedy riding her pony around the grounds of the White House.

The point is, Kennedy has been part of public life from the day she was born — just five years old on that dark day in Dallas, and a bit player in a great American tragedy ever since. When former president Donald Trump screeched (hypocritically) about draining the swamp, he was talking about people like Kennedy.

Born into the American version of royalty, with degrees from Harvard and Columbia, she’s spent most of her professional life deeply enmeshed in the Democratic machinery. In January 2008, she was an early-ish Obama backer, leading his search for a running mate (hence the Biden connection). She was also a co-chair for his reelection campaign in 2012.

Whispers of a Senate or even presidential run were never far away — as they are for literally anyone with her last name. Instead, Kennedy became the United States’ first female ambassador to Japan. After some early muttering about her lack of experience, Kennedy grew into the role, and won plaudits for her work on women’s empowerment. 

It’s this background that makes her seem like such a strong pick, according to Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings.

“Basically what Australia needs from any American ambassadorial appointment is a person capable of picking up a phone to the president,” he said. 

“Kennedy is senior in the Democratic Party, and experienced in the Asia-Pacific. She’s clearly able to do that.”

It’s this background that draws a sharp contrast with many past ambassadors. Ever since Marshall Green, an influential Asia specialist sent by Richard Nixon in 1973 to make sure the Whitlam government was playing ball with the alliance, we’ve tended to get the “runt of the ambassadorial litter”, says University of Sydney historian James Curran.

“Most of them we get are these presidential bagmen, campaign donors sent to Canberra as a thank you or a sunset posting,” he said.

That’s a pretty apt description of many of Washington DC’s men in Canberra (and they have all been men) — political appointees with close ties to the incumbent president. Tom Schieffer co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball franchise with buddy George W Bush, who gave him the posting. Jeff Bleich, domestically well-regarded, was a long-term friend of Barack Obama. The last ambassador, Arthur B Culvahouse Jr — White House counsel during the tail end of the Reagan administration — was appointed after Trump left the position vacant for nearly three years. It wasn’t so much a sign of disrespect as a reflection of the administration’s deep dysfunction. 

The volatile Trump years instilled a real fear of abandonment among some in Australia’s national security circles. Biden, meanwhile, has made early noises about the importance of the Asia-Pacific. Of all his potential ambassadorial nominees, Kennedy is the biggest name.

The celebrity factor

If and when Kennedy does reach Canberra, the column inches devoted to gushing tributes will be matched by the lines around the block to kiss the ring. Celebrity will make us feel important. But that feeling might be illusory, says Australian National University professor and veteran defence analyst Hugh White.

“We’ll be encouraged to read it as a compliment to Australia,” says White. “It’s really a compliment to Caroline Kennedy.”

Instead, Kennedy’s appointment is about managing expectations and currying favours in the Washington bubble. White warns the appointment could make us lose sight of what we’re living through: a time of terminal American decline in the region, matched by China’s unstoppable rise. He sees Canberra as far too starry-eyed about American power to seriously grapple with this existential challenge. In Kennedy’s appointment, policymakers here might continue to overlook the United States’ abandonment of any deep, clear-eyed vision for the region in favour of empty sloganeering.

“The tendency to romanticise the significance of a glamorous, high-profile celebrity ambassador is part and parcel of a tendency to romanticise and sentimentalise the alliance,” White says.

Curran and Jennings, who are both full of praise for Kennedy as a potential ambassador, both harbour similar fears about America’s future in the region.

“I worry because it means we think the Americans take us seriously, we don’t have to ask the hard questions about where America’s going,” Curran says.

Jennings fears there’s been a gap between Biden’s rhetoric on supporting allies, and what the administration has actually done. 

The past 12 months have only accelerated the narrative of American decline and Chinese ascendancy. The naive view of liberal ideologues, that the Chinese Communist Party would simply liberalise or collapse is not coming to pass. 

Instead Xi’s China crushed the pandemic with brutal, efficient force. America, in contrast, has never felt more like a broken empire, where illness, death and misinformation spread across the country and was met with a shrug of inevitability. Four years of unravelling under Trump culminated in an attempted coup that made the foundations of democracy shudder.

After all that, the Biden years were meant to feel like a soothing return to normal, both at home and abroad. Kennedy’s appointment is supposed to remind Australia’s foreign policy heads that the America we remember is back.

But that America might be gone for good.

“This could be a very short interregnum of normality before normal programming — Trumpian craziness — resumes in America,” Curran said.