A modern addition to the pantheon is a university professor and writer who also worked in America’s National Intelligence Council, State Department and Defense Department.

Step forward Joseph Nye, the man who invented the concepts of “soft power” and “smart power” and set them beside “hard power.” Described by one of his Washington contemporaries as “the Grandmaster of the study of power,” Nye coined soft power to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce. The United States could use culture and communications to influence the decisions and behaviour of others in ways that military force could not reach. Nye stands with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Military power can bully, economic power can buy, but soft power is blarney magic.

Ideas set international standards in the same way that American software set the standards for the world’s computers. Thus, the lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty of American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, backed by the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. Mickey Mouse stood with the Marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or cash — “the ability to change what others do.” Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in his 1990 book on the changing nature of American power, is “the ability to shape what others want” through attraction.

Millions of Google citations show the reach of soft power, Nye writes, but “the most surprising was in 2007 when the president of China declared soft power to be their national objective.” For Nye, the result was “countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.”

Nye has seen his idea become an instrument with practical effects: soft power shifts the way leaders talk and generals act. Attending a state dinner at the White House in 2015 (“the hall was filled with cherry blossom and a Marine band in scarlet jackets was playing”), Nye shakes hands with president Barack Obama to be told “everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.”

Nye’s recently published memoir muses about his “life in the American century,” the title taken from a famous 1941 editorial by Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life magazines. Nye, born in 1937, dates the American century from the moment the United States entered the second world war: “Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.”

The United States could still be the strongest power in 2045, he thinks; in which case the American century would, indeed, mark a hundred years. The caveats on that prediction are that “we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarisation of our society and politics.”

This leading member of the American foreign policy establishment offers his biography as illumination for fellow foreign policy wonks and tragics. Most memoirs look inward; the chapter headings of Nye’s book are organised around the administrations of US presidents and America’s international role.

Nye and his friend Robert Keohane are identified as cofounders of the school of analysis of international affairs known as “neoliberalism.” While not disavowing that role, Nye writes that he and Keohane regard neoliberalism as an “over-simplified label.”

Whether in government or university, Nye’s life is one of constant travel, constant conferences and constant writing. In the Defense Department in 1995, “alliance maintenance” sent him to fifty-three countries. The military parades became a blur but the banquets were the real ordeal: sent abroad to eat for his country, Nye jested he would go out “in a blaze of calories.”

Emerging from an “unofficial meeting” with Taiwan’s defence minister, Nye is told that his father has died: “On Friday, November 4, 1994, I had the odd experience of picking up the New York Times and finding myself quoted in a front-page story on Saudi Arabia, while my father’s obituary appeared on page thirty-three. I wept.”

The motto of the public intellectual is “I think, ergo I write” (my words, not his). Nye exemplifies the dictum. He is the author of thirty books and contributor to or editor of another forty-five; his textbook ran to ten editions and sold 100,000 copes. (Here’s the Inside Story review of his book on the foreign policy morality of US presidents from FDR to Trump.) He writes a column for Project Syndicate; topics so far this year: “Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?,” “American Greatness and Decline” and “What Killed US-China Engagement?”

Graduating from Princeton at the end of the Eisenhower years, Nye planned to become a Marine officer. (“All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge.”) Instead, one of his professors pushed him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he won:

One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took me thirty-five years before I saw service in the Department of Defense, and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.

Nye worked for two Democrat presidents. For Jimmy Carter, he was in charge of policy designed to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and then went to Defense to run the “Pentagon’s little State Department” as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

Professors who go to work in Washington can offer an anthropologist’s view of the tribes that serve the president and congress. Kissinger is good on this, but the best rules for working the swamp were penned by John Kenneth Galbraith: have the president behind you (or give that impression); adopt a modest aspect of menace — arrogance backed by substance can work; never threaten to resign because that tells your allies you might leave; but be ready to lose and leave town. Nye gets much outsider understanding into a paragraph:

In Washington, there was no shortage of bureaucrats and rival political appointees eager to take my job — or leave me with the title but empty it of substance. I had been issued a hunting licence, but there was no guarantee I would bag my game. My first instinct as an academic was to try to do things myself, but that was impossible… I realised I was drowning. I discovered that unlike academia, politics and bureaucracy comprise a team sport. The secret to success was to attract others to want to do the work for me. In that sense, I learned soft power the hard way.

Nye records two of the “major regrets” Bill Clinton offered about his presidency: “having an inexperienced White House staff and underestimating the bitterness of Washington politics.”

Because of his diaries, Nye’s memoir offers tone and temperature on how different the world felt as the cold war ended. Washington was optimistic about Russia and fearful of Japan: “economic friction was high, and many in both Tokyo and Washington regarded the military alliance as a historical relic now that the cold war was over.”

Japan debated the idea of relying on the United Nations rather than the United States for security. Nye argued against both the economic hawks in Washington and the security doves in Tokyo, pointing to the rise of China and problem of North Korea. “The logic was simple,” he writes. “In a three-country balance of power, it is better to be part of the two than the isolated one.”

During defence negotiations in Tokyo, Japanese officials took him out for evening drinks and cut to the fundamentals: “How much could they trust us? As the Chinese market grew larger, wouldn’t we abandon Japan for China? I answered no, because Japan was a democracy and was not a threat. It seemed to work.”

In 1995, with “moderates still in control in Moscow, there was a sense of optimism about the future of US–Russia relations.” That mood helped drive the expansion of NATO. At talks in Geneva, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev discussed the idea of a “new NATO” with a “collective security pact” and “partial membership in NATO” for Russia. Nye wrote in his diary that Russia would accept a bigger NATO “if it is done right — and if Russia doesn’t change.”

By 1999, the optimism was gone. The US now believed that “Russia would not collapse but would develop a form of corrupt state capitalism.” Talking to former colleagues in Washington, Nye is “struck that nobody seemed to know much about Putin or to have realised how important he would become.”

As the US century enters this century, China takes centre stage as the peer competitor. Asked by Xinhua News Agency whether he’s a China hawk or dove, Nye replies that he is an owl. At a dinner in Beijing in 2012 a member of the Communist Party central committee tells Nye: “We are Confucians in Marxist clothing.”

The following year, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi invites Nye to a private meal “to quiz me about how China could increase its soft power.” Nye replies that raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and celebrating a gorgeous traditional culture are “important sources of attraction for China. At the same time, as long as it had territorial disputes with its neighbours, and as long as its insistence on tight party control over civil society and human rights continued, China would face serious limits on its soft power in Asia and in the West.”

The US power equation has shifted significantly in two decades. In the early years of this century, as the United States invaded Iraq, Nye’s concern was about “unipolar hubris.” Today, he frets about a polarized America turning inward. He thinks the greatest danger the United States faces “is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done.”

In the final pages of his memoir, Nye assesses the balance of power between China and the US, and says America has five long-term advantages:

• Geography: the United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbours, while China “shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several.”

• Energy: China depends on energy imports far more than the United States.

• Finance: the United States gets power from the international role of the dollar and its large financial institutions. “A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks.”

• Demography: the United States is the only major developed country projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. “The US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014.”

• Technology: America is “at the forefront in key technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the number of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind American ones.”

Nye’s fear is that domestic change within the United States could endanger the American century. Even if its external power remains dominant, he writes, a country can lose its internal virtue:

All told, the US holds a strong hand in the great power competition, but if we succumb to hysteria about China’s rise or complacency about its “peak,” we could play our cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards — including strong alliances and influence in international institutions — would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the US unless we make it one by blundering into a major war. This historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.

Nye ends his memoir with the humility that befits an old man: “I cannot be fully sure how much of my optimism rests on my analysis or my genes.” In his final paragraph, he ruefully notes that “the more I learn, the less I know… Though I have spent a lifetime following my curiosity and trying to understand us, I do not leave many answers for my grandchildren. The best I can do is leave them my love and a faint ray of guarded optimism.” •

A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye | Polity Press | 254 pages | $51.95

The post The father of “soft power” appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.

While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

The post Spiky questions remain for AUKUS proponents appeared first on Inside Story.

Crucially, these new approaches envisage Australia working with neighbouring governments on a range of challenges including climate change, global economic uncertainty, and the need to build “effective, accountable states that drive their own development.” These strategies aren’t straightforward: they will involve not only grappling with challenging political realities in Asia and the Pacific but also navigating the contending ideas and interests jostling to shape Australia’s foreign policy.

The late Alan Gyngell, one of Australia’s foremost foreign policy analysts, argued that Australia lacks the power or resources to shape politics in the region and must therefore focus on building partnerships with existing governments through statecraft and diplomacy.

Like the paper released last month, Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper argued that such partnerships can tackle a wide range of challenges, including the spread of “terrorism and extremist ideas” and “growing transnational challenges such as crime and people smuggling.” They can even enable “effective programmes to promote economic reform and inclusive growth, reduce poverty and address inequality.”

Partnerships with regional governments would focus on “shared values” and “enduring ties” — assumptions also found in the terms of reference for the current parliamentary inquiry. But it isn’t always easy to identify those common values. Experience in Southeast Asia shows how electoral democracy and pro-market governance can mask the reality of rule by highly illiberal and anti-democratic forces.

Does this matter? Not so much, it seems, when Australia’s foreign policy increasingly places a priority on security by supporting political leaders and governments seen to provide social order and political stability — governments that can act as a bulwark against China and contain insurgency and unrest within the region.

But can the two strategies — fostering security and fostering democracy — work together? Writing for the Lowy Institute, Kevin Casas-Zamora argues that democracy “is not separate from security — the first begets the second.” The United States Studies Centre’s Lavina Lee contends that policies promoting democracy, good governance and a more open Southeast Asia are important tools in protecting the region from the influence of autocratic regimes, notably China.

Australian foreign policy has taken a different route in recent years, drawing a sharp divide between its security goals and programs aimed at democratic and social reform. As former prime minister Tony Abbott famously declared in 2016, “moral posturing” was never allowed to threaten Australia’s security interests under his government. His comment reflects the cold war fear that democracy and social reform in developing societies open the door to social disorder and political instability.

Perhaps the central question, though, is whether strategies promoting democracy and civil society are possible while certain governments and allied elites remain entrenched? Governments themselves, and their apparatus of officials, politicians and security forces, are often the primary causes of repression and consequent unrest. Reformers can face pervasive systems of money politics and assaults on independent judiciaries and media or find their efforts blocked by purportedly democratic constitutions that use restrictive electoral laws to limit political competition. In some cases, they confront extra-legal and state-sponsored violence and, in the extreme, military coups.

Rather than being orthodox defence forces, these militaries were always vehicles for protecting powerful ruling interests against opponents and critics.

It should have come as no surprise when the militaries in Thailand and Myanmar overthrew democratically elected governments or when the military and security forces in Cambodia played the central role in consolidating a repressive one-party state in that country. Australian efforts to help bail out an inept Philippines military struggling to control a ragtag Islamist insurgency may also have simply helped prop up the creaking system of oligarchic politics that underlies a long history of exploitation and repression in that country.

Outside the mainstream, civil society organisations including farmers’ associations, workers’ unions and environmental movements face land grabbing by politically backed elites or illegal logging and deforestation by large mining and palm oil conglomerates. Like human rights groups, professional and business associations aligned with anti-corruption movements struggle to hold police or militaries to account for abuses of power.

Expectations that Australia can partner with countries to promote a “rules-based order” and good governance also collide with governments and elites in the region whose power and wealth is rooted in rent-seeking. This has been illustrated especially by sustained but often futile attempts to control endemic corruption. Indonesia’s anti-corruption commission, the KPK, is a striking example of how an effective and popular reformist institution can be undermined — in this case by vested interests in parliament and the police service.

Efforts to introduce reform through pro-market policies, including privatisation and deregulation, have similarly been co-opted by entrenched rent-seeking coalitions, turning public authority and resources into private monopolies and translating property rights into land grabbing. As in the dramatic case of Russia, market reform has enabled the rise of powerful political and business oligarchies in Southeast Asia.

Clearly, as Gyngell argued, there are limits to Australia’s capacity to reshape these factors within the region. Nevertheless, important opportunities exist to bolster reformist strategies by tackling deep problems of policymaking within Australia itself.

What would such a foreign policy entail?

To begin with, it would mean reinvesting in the authority and resources of a public sector overly reliant on consultants and outsourcing. This reliance has fatally compromised Australia’s understanding of how democracy or good governance are built, reducing officials to roles of accounting, processing and tendering work to private consultants and contractors.

It would mean replacing process-driven approaches that diminish the importance of analysing the environments in which development and other assistance programs operate. An important example is how “statecraft” — now conceived as a set of context-free tools — operates without recognition of the structures of power and wealth in the region.

It would also mean taking “soft power” seriously and harnessing it to support reformist forces in Southeast Asia. This involves leveraging the very liberal nature of what Australia can offer, including the appeal of our universities for regional students as distinctive sites of new ideas and ways of thinking about societies and their governance.

Identifying reforms is one thing, but implementing them is quite another, when foreign policy has become a proxy for deeper political and ideological conflicts in Australia. Rolling back the vast and pervasive influence of security-focused foreign policy–makers will be difficult given the breadth and power of their interests inside and outside the state, and their formidable lobbying networks.

With their emphasis on continuing threats and uncertainty, these policymakers and networks provide the basis for electoral appeals to nationalism and xenophobia by right-wing politicians and parties. This creates a powerful conservative political coalition. They also support a vast apparatus of defence and security institutions extending into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and universities. A large and well-funded think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, projects their ideological claims.

Above all, it is difficult to find any cohesive force or set of ideas driving Australia’s promotion of democracy. It may indeed be simply another case of Australia mimicking the United States by following the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy announced by US secretary of state Antony Blinken in late 2021.

A successful program for promoting democracy and good governance must provide a case for how this will be in Australia’s national interest. Will the Labor government provide this reformist agenda? Can it arrive at a coherent engagement strategy that transcends the rhetoric of AUKUS and the American alliance, or will it revert to the position taken in the 2017 defence white paper and confirm that the old cold war thinking is again ascendant? Sadly, Labor in government seems to be embedding itself in a deepening subordinate relationship with the United States focused firmly on issues of security. •

The post Is security trumping democracy? appeared first on Inside Story.

Ahead of an American presidential election that might return to power an isolationist and avowed admirer of dictators, Australian national security insiders have been assured during their regular “leadership dialogue” with their American counterparts that, yes, protection and patronage remain. But whether or not Donald Trump returns, says Lowy Institute analyst Sam Roggeveen, the Americans will inevitably pull back from trying to maintain strategic primacy in the Western Pacific.

Eventually, Roggeveen argues in his important new book The Echidna Strategy, the Americans will come to terms with a power balance involving its adversaries — China, North Korea and Russia — facing off against strong friends like Japan, South Korea and Australia, with independent emerging powers Indonesia and India in the middle.

Roggeveen doesn’t envisage a sudden US withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific. But Australia will gradually lose great-power protection, forcing it to take a more independent path. “There won’t be a principled declaration of independence, but a hesitant and gradual process of separation triggered by America’s declining interest and motivation to protect Australia.”

Since this shift could conceivably happen over the first half of this century — during the next twenty-five or so years, that is — he believes it should be influencing the defence investments and foreign policy decisions we are making right now. Instead of placing a “big bet” on the United States remaining dominant, and acquiring nuclear submarines to assist, Australia should adopt a version of the porcupine strategy — by promising to inflict too much pain on the aggressor to justify any gains they may anticipate — for its own defence and go all out to keep Indonesia on side and help build its strength.

In a little over 200 pages of elegant logic, Roggeveen, who has led the security team at Lowy for the last fifteen years and before that worked in the Office of National Assessments, delivers a broadside at Canberra’s bipartisan consensus on the AUKUS agreement. He adds to the case made by figures like James Curran, historian and Australian Financial Review international editor, that the agreement still hasn’t been explained — and probably can’t be, except as a political fix.

As former ONA head Peter Varghese says, Roggeveen’s book “defies the echo chamber of current strategic policy” — the chamber that takes in the two main parties, the defence and foreign affairs departments, ONA’s successor the Office of National Intelligence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the ANU National Security College, and a federal press gallery captivated by gee-whiz weaponry and China panics.

Roggeveen builds on the thinking of strategic analysts Hugh White and the late Allan Gyngell, who could see an era of power contestation developing in Asia. Far from “appeasement” — the cheap slur thrown by junior minister Pat Conroy at Labor’s national conference last week — they urge a bristly defence of Australia and its approaches combined with efforts to avoid being roadkill if the big vehicles start moving.

Roggeveen looks first at America’s national will. So far, the cost of its post-1945 security presence in Asia has been manageable and the risks low. But China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weaponry are changing the calculus. “When it comes to taking on China, the costs are too high and the stakes too low,” Roggeveen says.

The United States is uniquely secure, he points out, buffered by wide oceans east and west, and by benign neighbours north and south. It has the world’s largest military, its largest nuclear arsenal, and a young and growing population. With foreign trade only 23 per cent of its GDP, it can be economically self-sufficient.

“When Donald Trump said what was previously unsayable for a US president — that America’s allies are free-riders, that NATO had passed its use-by date, and that America gains nothing from its forward military presence in East Asia — the response from the US security establishment was swift and predictable,” Roggeveen writes. “America’s alliances, they said, are the backbone of global security.”

But Trump had grasped an important point. “America’s alliances are not a service the US offers to its allies and the world. Ultimately, they need to make the United States safer. If America’s alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia cease to have any benefit for the US, then it will stop making sacrifices for them.”

Cold war justifications for alliances are crumbling. East Asian allies are starting to question the “extended deterrence” of US nuclear forces and thinking about acquiring their own. “The US has learned to live with French, British and Israeli nuclear weapons. It can do the same for South Korea and Japan,” Roggeveen says.

And unlike Washington’s old enemy, the Soviet Union, China lacks an exportable ideology. “Communism in China is little more than a series of slogans (such as the ‘China dream’ and a ‘community of common destiny’). To be a communist in China today is to be committed not to the global spread of Marxist-Leninist ideology but simply to the preservation of Communist Party rule at home.”

Realistically, no nation of China’s economic weight would ever be content for its rival to be the leading strategic power in its own region, “any more than the US would tolerate China being the leading strategic power in North and Latin America. Imagine tens of thousands of Chinese troops based in Canada, an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in Cuba, and Chinese spy planes routinely patrolling just off the US east coast, and you get the idea.”

Should Trump be re-elected, or a “Trump-like figure” take the Republican Party back into the White House, his agenda would return, and probably with less institutional resistance. Trump might have been unexpected but he isn’t anomalous, says Roggeveen. His rise injected a new uncertainty into Australia’s strategic future.

The result will be “a long sunset of American power in Asia, in which China emerges as the leading nation but not the dominant one.” Australia’s alliance with the United States won’t be formally abrogated or repealed: too many people in both countries have a stake in its preservation.

“The treaty will remain,” says Roggeveen. “So will the troops, and the joint exercises, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements, and the arms sales. What will erode is the credibility of the alliance. Australia and the region in general will simply stop believing that the alliance represents an implicit promise that the two countries will fight on each other’s behalf.”

Yet Australia is doubling its bet on the United States staying on top. The planned eight nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs, more than the British or French navies possess, will operate as a one-eighth addition to the US navy’s SSN force. Aside from being able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with a 1500 to 2000 kilometre range, their role will be to find and chase China’s ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs.

For nuclear powers, such SSBNs are the guaranteed “second strike” capability against a successful “first strike.” Roggeveen could have said more about the fact that China has only six SSBNs, five operating from a base in Hainan island facing the South China Sea and one near Qingdao in the Yellow Sea. Maintenance and training mean that only one or two are likely to be on patrol at any time. The relentless “freedom of navigation” patrols in these waters by US and allied forces seem designed to stop those SSBNs slipping out into the open ocean, from where more of the continental United States would be in missile range. Or perhaps they are poised to destroy the subs before they can launch. Either way, are we out to remove this stabilising element of mutual assured destruction?

This is a case of capability determining defence policy rather than the other way round, Roggeveen says: “Once we have the capability to send a fleet of boats thousands of kilometres to our north around China’s coast, and the capability to fire missiles at the Chinese mainland, we are going to have to come up with reasons why we are choosing to withhold that capability in the event of war.” Equally worryingly, “by the time this question arises Australia will have been enculturated and integrated with the US Navy over decades. It is too much to expect that our leaders would turn their backs on all that in the decisive moment.”

Any sense that the United States might have to compel Australia into helping in a future conflict is contradicted by the continuing willingness of both major political parties to lock military planning into US thinking. As Roggeveen puts it, the AUKUS agreement shows that “Australia didn’t need to be talked into anything.” And from an American perspective, what’s not to like when Australia comes offering to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for US weapons?

All the costs of AUKUS weaponry will be carried by Australia, with no hard promises in return. “It is a project of vaulting ambition that is out of step with Australian tradition as a military middle power, wildly at odds with our international status and, most importantly, a wasteful expenditure of public money that will make Australia less safe,” Roggeveen says. “But having cancelled the French project and inaugurated AUKUS, Australia is now proposing to manage not two but three submarine designs. The Collins upgrade is still going ahead, and we are adding two nuclear-powered designs as well, a technology with which Australia has no experience. It will surely shock no one if this initiative fails entirely, or is severely cut back over time.”

Meanwhile, Canberra’s advocates of more defence spending are vague about what exactly Australia needs to defend itself against. At the same time, they assume that China is or will be so powerful that resisting it without US help is pointless.

Waging war on Australia wouldn’t be easy, says Roggeveen, and Australia can relatively cheaply raise the stakes even further. “Australia’s security commentators project their anxieties about Australia, their lack of confidence in it, onto China. They think we can’t manage the challenge of China alone because we’re not strong or mature enough. I say we are, and I say we can.”

The invasion scenario put up by defence hawks like late army general and Liberal senator Jim Molan are laughably implausible. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to defend ourselves against invasion,” says Roggeveen. “[T]his will remain beyond the capabilities of any rival military force for the indefinite future, and even if it becomes achievable, it will remain unnecessary and even counterproductive for the aggressor.” The only plausible reason to attack Australia would be to strike facilities being used to attack China — the US strategic bombers at the Katherine air base, for instance, and the SSNs at the Fremantle naval base.

Instead, Australia should rely on distance to put huge restraints on any Chinese military action. “Put simply, distance is Australia’s single biggest defence asset,” Roggeveen says, reminding his readers that Beijing is closer to London than to Sydney. That distance is invariably played down in the Australian defence debate in favour of a view that Australia is on the front line of military competition with China, or on China’s doorstep.

Australia should invest in forces that can punish and repel any antagonist who comes close — an antagonist gaining a military base in the Pacific islands, for example — but not attempt to project power any further. In other words, no capabilities aimed explicitly at hitting Chinese territory. Submarines, yes, long-range air power, yes, some missiles, yes, a lot of troops for restoring peace or providing disaster relief in the region, yes — but no heavily armoured army. Backing these capabilities would be hardened military bases, stockpiles of fuel and strategic materials, and deeper protection against cyberattack and other “grey” threats.

This is the “echidna strategy” of the book’s title — a version of which Roggeveen suggests for the defence of Taiwan. (He doesn’t favour a simple surrender of this democracy, and perhaps could have made this clearer.) It is essentially a strategy of denial.

“[This means] we are essentially planning to inflict the bare minimum damage on China so that we can persuade Beijing to stop but not give it a reason to hit us even harder,” Roggeveen says. It may not be heroic, “but such is the lot of a middle power when facing a great power. The alternative, which we are now pursuing, is a defence strategy which incentivises China to pay more military attention to us.”

Roggeveen does explore the ultimate defensive spike — nuclear weapons for Australia — but concludes that as nuclear weapons haven’t been used against non-nuclear adversaries since 1945, the chances of China raising the stakes that far against a much smaller, distant power are slim enough to discount.

But this doesn’t mean Australia should withdraw into a ball like a threatened echidna. It should be ambitious, but by using diplomacy and defence support. The focus should be Indonesia, the only emerging big power in the most contestable region around China capable of pushing back against the Chinese. “All the threat inflation, all the fever dreams conjured by our security pundits about China’s military threat to Australia — we are at risk of being surrounded; there is danger on our doorstep — would suddenly become real if Indonesia was ever hostile towards Australia.”

Then there is preserving Australia’s sphere of influence in the Pacific by doing more: more aid, more infrastructure, more investment, more labour mobility, more diplomacy and more defence cooperation. Though the smaller nations might be reluctant to surrender their China leverage, a European Union–style economic and political pact could cement island relations with Australia and New Zealand, with free trade, open borders, shared services, a regional airline and perhaps even a regional bank with a single currency.

This initiative could build on Roggeveen’s argument for a doubling of the Australian population to create a bigger economic base. With Papua New Guinea’s population now put tentatively at 11.8 million, and another three million or so in the other Pacific island nations, the region is there for us all to bulk up.

Roggeveen also puts the case for strong regional organisations. Not the Quad so much — its members are too dispersed, too divergent and too invested in China to agree to a NATO-style common defence, or even to explicitly mention China — but the much-derided Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its appendages. Instead of being disappointed about what ASEAN fails to do, we should look at what it’s been able to prevent — namely, wars between its members.

The Albanese government might sincerely believe in AUKUS, or it might be using it to help gain time in office in the expectation it will collapse on someone else’s watch. Either way, this book from such a seasoned and centrally placed figure in the defence and foreign policy sphere shows that our national future is being decided in panic and haste. •

The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace
By Sam Roggeveen | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $32.99 | 232 pages

The post Spiky questions about the US alliance appeared first on Inside Story.

US president Joe Biden had rushed back to Washington from the G7 summit in Hiroshima to negotiate a debt-ceiling deal with Congress. Otherwise he would have joined Modi, Albanese and Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida in Sydney for a meeting of the Quad, that relatively new grouping seen in American and Australian circles as a way of countering the two Asian countries’ diffidence about lining up against China. (Japan’s diffidence reflects its post-1945 constitution’s bar on non-defensive use of force, India’s its longstanding non-alignment doctrine.)

But what if the Quad instead became a forum for Japan and India to enlist Australia’s help in persuading Washington to give China some space? Just such a proposal is put forward in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads: A Japanese Strategy for Peace and Sustainable Prosperity,” a paper published in Tokyo at the end of July.

The paper comes not from familiar members of Japan’s left but from Japanese scholars and a South Korean co-author who mostly gained their doctorates in the United States. The two lead authors, Mike Mochizuki and Kuniko Ashizawa, are professors at George Washington University in the American capital.

In essence, the paper argues that Japan should lead a “middle power” effort to lower tensions in Asia. “As part of its middle power diplomacy,” the scholars write, “Japan could also build on the Quad… and take the lead in promoting a ‘middle power coalition’ among Japan, Australia, and India, and thus lead the agenda-setting of the Quad.”

The coalition could then be extended to include other middle powers in the region, including South Korea and the ASEAN countries: “In this process, it would be effective to envision a ‘middle power quad’ by inviting South Korea to join the Japan–Australia–India coalition. By building on its partnerships with middle powers in Asia and in Europe, Japan should vigorously engage China to stabilise bilateral relations as well as to cooperate on pressing transnational challenges.”

The paper’s critique and proposals may upset comfortable assumptions in Washington and Canberra. “Rather [than] being solely dependent on the United States,” it says, “Japan needs a more autonomous foreign policy — what might be called a ‘pro-American, autonomous diplomacy.’” Instead of being “self-righteous” about values-oriented foreign policy, Japan should respect political diversity and promote peaceful coexistence, resisting efforts to divide Asia into a struggle between democracies and autocracies.

This vision is offered as a counterpoint to the concept of the “Indo-Pacific” — a formulation developed by Canberra pundits and adopted by the United States — which “diminishes the importance of continental Asia and suggests a regional orientation designed to counter and even contain China.”

The authors see the National Security Strategy announced by Prime Minister Kishida in December as a “180-degree turnaround” from longstanding Japanese defence policy. It included a doubling of defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP and an arsenal of new Tomahawk cruise missiles designed to strike back at China and North Korea. Commenting on the counterstrike capabilities of the missiles, they argue that “what would only be of tactical use during a military conflict is recklessly justified from the logic of strategic deterrence.”

Rather than treating Australia as Japan’s most important partner in middle-power diplomacy, the authors turn to South Korea: an established democracy and developed economy (one of the world’s ten largest) with per capita income equal to or exceeding Japan’s.

“Both countries [Japan and South Korea] are close allies of the United States; and they both see North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as acute threats and are concerned about China’s military build-up and coercive behaviour,” says the paper. “But at the same time, they share a deep interest in preventing a military conflict in East Asia that would have devastating consequences for both countries; and they want to maintain close and stable economic relations with China, which is their largest trading partner. In short, both Japan and South Korea desire an Asia that is not divided into two conflicting camps and would prefer a region that is open and inclusive.”

The scholars believe the new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the trade, investment and data pact Australia and Japan pressed ahead with after Donald Trump withdrew the United States — should be opened to simultaneous admission to both China, once it meets its qualifications, and Taiwan.

The paper’s authors aren’t arguing for an unarmed Japan. But they fear that conflict over Taiwan would have a devastating impact on Japan, probably as a result of Chinese attacks on US bases there. They agree that the United States must show it could beat off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Japan can best contribute to this deterrence by denial by improving the resilience and survivability of US and Japanese defence assets in Japan and by strengthening Japan’s own capabilities to defend its own territory, especially its southwest island chain that is close to Taiwan.”

The key point is that the capacity to strike Chinese military targets on the mainland with missiles would not add greatly to deterrence, since China has too many targets and could rain fire back on a more compact Japan.

While the Biden administration has recently emphasised that America’s “One China” policy hasn’t changed, calls by Congress members and former officials to drop the policy, extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan and defend Taiwan unconditionally are “especially provocative” and have raised the danger of conflict over Taiwan.

Japan’s aim “should be to maintain the conditions for preserving the status quo until the day comes when China and Taiwan can find a peaceful solution to the issue of unification,” the scholars urge, adding: “Moreover, Japan should not base its policies on forecasts of imminent military conflict or Chinese purported deadlines on unification and should not support the drawing of various ‘redlines.’”

The proposals in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” are likely to be welcomed by those senior figures in Australia’s foreign affairs and strategic circles — mostly out of government positions now — who criticise an increasingly security-oriented approach to Asia, along with our tightening “interoperability” with US forces and an apparent concurrence in US primacy.

They also chime with the kind of ideas the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was putting forward in opposition, which have been submerged by the unequivocal embrace of the AUKUS agreement on nuclear-powered submarines and advanced technologies.

Some of Kishida’s December proposals are similar to contentious Australian moves by Scott Morrison and now Anthony Albanese. Notable among these are a closer commitment to the defence of Taiwan and general alliance war-fighting capability, and the acquisition of 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawks and other missiles to strike back at China. The difference here is that Australia’s missiles would have to be fired from submarines, ships or aircraft some thousands of kilometres away from Australia.

The key question is: how much influence will “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” have in Japan? The answer is not much, at least immediately. The paper was published two days before Japan’s defence ministry, the Self-Defence Agency, came out with a new white paper that, as defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said, “explains how we will drastically reinforce our defence capabilities.”

On Taiwan, the white paper doesn’t go as far as Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party predecessors — Shinzo Abe said a Taiwan conflict would be an “emergency” for Japan and Taro Aso suggested Japan could join Taiwan’s defence — but it strongly supports the “counterstrike” capability in case Japan comes under fire.

Still, the yearning for peace in Japan, ingrained since the wartime US firebombing and atomic attacks on its cities, will act as a political brake on rearmament and assertive power play. Despite the belligerent drift in Chinese security policy since 2012 under Xi Jinping, the notion of an underlying Asian affinity also remains.

That notion last surfaced in 2009 when a splinter of the Liberal Democratic Party called the Democratic Party of Japan, led by former LDP politician Yukio Hatoyama, swept into power, interrupting near-unbroken LDP rule since the end of the Allied occupation in 1952. The foreign policies of the incoming government so concerned Washington that US secretary of state Hillary Clinton handed Japan policy to the Pentagon. (One of the authors of “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads,” Kiyoshi Sugawa, was an adviser in the Democratic Party government.)

Three years later, with the Democratic Party in disarray, the LDP was back under Shinzo Abe, who set about turning Japan into a militarily “normal” state.

Yet the LDP’s Kishida has gone part of the way in the direction proposed in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” by rescuing Japan’s relations with Seoul from the plunge under Shinzo Abe over South Korean grievances dating from Japan’s 1910–45 annexation of that country. Helped by South Korea’s election last year of a more conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and stepped-up missile testing and nuclear threats by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Kishida has developed a warmer partnership on several fronts, including defence.

In June, he also announced plans to expand staff in Japan’s foreign ministry to 8000 by 2030, a 20 per cent increase on current levels, in order to step up Japan’s engagement with the world, especially Asia, and counter China’s influence. While most reporting focused on China’s 7 per cent increase in defence spending this year, Beijing also said it was spending 12.2 per cent more on its diplomacy.

In Australia, meanwhile, the military brass section still dominates the foreign policy orchestra. The latest formal talks between Australian and US foreign and defence ministers, in Brisbane on 28–29 July, will have pleased China hawks and made critics of the alliance drift grind their teeth. In the background, some 30,000 American, Australian and allied defence personnel were engaged in the biannual Talisman Sabre war games.

Australia will be hosting more US forces, manufacturing missiles for both countries in two years, somehow getting hold of its US nuclear submarines despite problems in the US Congress, and — mentioned only vaguely — becoming more deeply involved in US space warfare capability. Albanese is out to pre-empt any criticism at the upcoming Australian Labor Party national conference in Brisbane.

The growing closeness to Washington has so far earned Labor no evident traction in getting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange free of US efforts to extradite and charge him under its espionage law.

Some sign of a resurgence in the influence of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came in April, when the government’s Defence Strategic Review recommended that it “be appropriately resourced to lead a nationally determined and strategically directed whole-of-government statecraft effort in the Indo-Pacific.” And glimmers of Foreign Affairs influence were evident when Albanese stressed the importance of diplomacy as well as deterrence and the need for “guardrails” to avoid conflict, and praised Biden for talking to China, at the annual Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore in early June.

But Foreign Affairs still seems undernourished for a more central role. A departmental spokesperson tells me that “work is under way across agencies to implement the government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review,” but evidence Foreign Affairs is still a supporting act to Defence can be seen in one of its latest budget allocations: $52.7 million over two years from 2023–24 “to provide international policy advice and diplomatic support for the nuclear-powered submarine program.”

The sophisticated debate in Japan and India’s ambivalence about deeper military ties under the Quad (including its late withdrawal from the Talisman Sabre exercise) indicates the department has much work to do in guiding its political masters around this complicated region. And if Donald Trump does return to the White House, the idea of Japan, India and Australia using the Quad to handle America might not be so far-fetched. •

The post Quad erat demonstrandum? appeared first on Inside Story.

Security and defence agencies in both countries seem determined to drain any warmth from a relationship founded on a high degree of economic complementarity. In the Pacific, China’s attempts to become the security partner of small island nations have set off alarm bells; on the mainland, a vague new anti-espionage law has rattled foreign businesses. In Australia, shrill warnings continue about China’s influence-building, spying and emerging military threat, and the federal police have charged an Australian IT specialist in Shanghai under the Turnbull government’s foreign interference law.

The international setting isn’t helping. The United States and China, the two contestants for hegemony in the Western Pacific, are in the midst of a profound re-evaluation of the economic paradigms of the past forty years and how their two economies should connect.

China’s longstanding economic model, which fuelled rapid growth out of Maoist poverty, has come to the end of its road. After a decade’s reliance on construction, its domestic economy is burdened by large-scale debt and enormous numbers of empty apartments. Hopes of graduating from simple manufactures into high-tech products are threatened by American, European, Japanese and South Korean moves to retain control of the advanced semiconductors that run them.

America is abandoning the neoliberal doctrines it has followed since the Reagan era, adopting industrial policies aimed at bringing key industries back to home territory or friendly allies, chiefly through the trillions of dollars of subsidies and spending in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Transfers of American intellectual property and advanced equipment to China and other adversaries are under greater scrutiny.

In Australia’s case, an announcement of a Beijing visit by prime minister Anthony Albanese sometime later this year will signal that the thaw is still on. In contrast to his willingness to visit countries aligned in suspicion of China, though, Albanese is not looking at all eager.

“He doesn’t seem to have a lot of enthusiasm for this trip,” says Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador to China who is now a trade and business consultant in Beijing. “I’m really not sure what’s going on.”

From late last year, all the signs were that China’s leadership wanted to back away from the trade sanctions and freeze on political contacts imposed in 2020 in response to the Morrison government’s claim that Beijing was hiding the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s sharp tariff increases and other restrictions on a swathe of Australian exports — coal, barley, lobsters, copper, wine and timber — added up to about $20 billion in lost sales. Though small compared with our major exports to China (especially iron ore, which actually grew in value) the sanctions hit particular industries and regions hard.

At around the same time, a domestic national security case in China saw Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei suddenly disappear from her job with Chinese state television in Beijing. She later underwent a closed-court trial for allegedly passing state secrets abroad, though no verdict or sentence has been announced. All China-based correspondents for Australian media were withdrawn by their employers for fear of arrest.

The defeat of Morrison’s government in May 2022 changed the atmosphere. Informal talks on the fringe of multilateral meetings — notably Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s encounter with Albanese at the G20 summit in Bali last November — led to foreign minister Penny Wong’s meeting with China’s senior foreign affairs minister, Wang Yi, in Beijing on 21 December. It was the first Australian ministerial visit to China in more than three years.

Steps to ease the trade sanctions soon followed. The ban on Australian coal lifted in January, with exports jumping to the point that Queensland’s budget had an unexpected surplus for the year just ending. China’s consul-general in Perth visited a major lobster fishing cooperative, suggesting that the ban would soon end. In Canberra, Chinese ambassador Xiao Qian expressed a hope that the two countries would come back to “a normal kind of relationship” and praised Albanese’s “pragmatic approach.”

Talks ensued between senior officials at Davos and elsewhere. Australia agreed to suspend its action at the World Trade Organization over the barley ban. Then, in early May, trade minister Don Farrell went to Beijing to meet his counterpart, commerce minister Wang Wentao.

A few days later, Beijing announced it would resume timber imports from Australia, with no mention of the pest infestations cited as the reason for the ban. The trade had previously been earning Australian exporters about $700 million a year.

Xiao, the ambassador, also expressed concern for the imprisoned Cheng Lei, who has not seen her children in “such a long time.” “Personally, as a Chinese ambassador to this country, I can share with you: I have my personal sympathy to her and to her family,” he said. “So based on humanitarian grounds, I have been trying, I will continue to try to do my utmost to facilitate more access, that she could have some kind of access granted to her partner and friends and families to let them know that she’s OK.”

Further steps are awaited. Australia’s ambassador in Beijing, Graham Fletcher, who was barred from attending Cheng Lei’s trial in early 2022, was able to visit her in prison recently, but detected no change in her situation. Punitive tariffs on Australian wine and the halt in the lobster trade remain. No date has been set for a visit to Australia, mooted for July, by China’s new foreign minister, Qin Gang. (Qin replaced the long-serving Wang Yi, who remains in a supervisory role as head of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign affairs department.)

“They’ve achieved stabilisation — that’s good. Cabinet ministers are all disciplined in what they say about China — all that’s good, but I think the whole thing’s stalled in the last couple of months,” says Raby. “There’s not a lot of activity at the moment. The foreign minister’s dates haven’t been announced and July’s on us now. And they’re dicking around over the prime minister’s visit.”

But James Laurenceson, head of the Australia–China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, sees improvement, with China’s share of Australia’s trade starting to rise again after a sharp dip in the last two years and new items — electric vehicles from China and lithium ore going the other way for their batteries — gaining importance.

A new Lowy Institute poll, meanwhile, shows the Australian public’s concern about a threat from China easing, though still high and (short of sending troops) in favour of helping Taiwan defend itself. As a major threat, China has been overtaken by worries about cyber attacks from various sources.

Even if there has been a pause in the thaw, Australia’s experience still makes for quite a contrast to the state of relations between the United States and China, which US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Beijing to talk with Qin have barely warmed. Blinken pushed the line that Washington sought a “de-risking” of economic ties with China rather than “decoupling” and assured Qin that Washington doesn’t support Taiwan’s independence from China.

China seems not to have been mollified — and president Joe Biden’s subsequent reference to Xi Jinping as a “dictator” hasn’t helped. Chinese warships and aircraft continue to cut across US patrols through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. In Washington, Congress members and senators on both sides of the aisle compete in tough talk about China. The Chinese defence minister is still refusing to talk to his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, or re-open a military-to-military hotline.

While not directly accusing China, Albanese has aligned his government with America’s assertive defence manoeuvres in the Western Pacific and its cultivation of closer strategic ties with Japan and India. But for Biden’s debt-ceiling negotiations with the Republicans, Australia would have hosted all four leaders of this Quad in Sydney immediately after the recent summit of the Group of Seven advanced economies in Hiroshima.

And, of course, Albanese has fervently adopted the AUKUS agreement forged by Morrison to equip the navy, one day, with nuclear-powered submarines capable of projecting power far from Australian shores. The agreement has drawn predictable condemnation from Beijing, though it hasn’t been an economic deal-breaker.

Perhaps China’s leaders anticipate the AUKUS deal eventually collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, as a Marxist would say. Its embassy will be keenly watching the groundswell against AUKUS in Labor branches ahead of the party’s national conference in August. More broadly, the Lowy Poll found the Australian public “somewhat” supportive of AUKUS but unsure about its rationale or benefits.

China’s willingness to overlook far-off defence postures by minor powers is evident in this week’s visit to Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin by NZ prime minister Chris Hipkins and a large business delegation. It’s only a few months since Qin, the Chinese foreign minister, blasted his NZ counterpart Nanaia Mahuta over former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s strong warning about China’s attempts to form security partnerships in the South Pacific.

More recently, a New Zealand frigate sailed through Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea and was challenged by Chinese warships. But Wellington’s diplomatic deftness in recent years — not thrusting itself forward on things like the Covid investigation or security risks in Chinese telecom systems — has enabled it to keep channels open.

Australia’s hesitancy may come from the American mood playing into Canberra, Raby believes. “I think the pressure comes from the security and intelligence area in the US, through Shearer [Andrew Shearer, head of the Office of National Intelligence] and the security and defence people in Australia,” he says. “We are hobbled by these people. They don’t care if the New Zealand prime minister goes and takes a trade delegation and gets some deals. That’s not their agenda at all. Their agenda is to stay as close to the US as possible.”

Meanwhile, outside the defence–intelligence camp, other departments are working to keep up the economic momentum. Raby says talks are going on privately to extract the best advantage from a prime ministerial visit. “There is a negotiation about a package of outcomes,” he said. “And while everyone probably knows where you land, for some reason it seems to be difficult — I think on our side — to get there.”

Albanese has indicated that a complete lifting of the 2020 trade restrictions is required. He would also be hoping for resolution of Cheng Lei’s case, and preferably her release. “It would be very hard for Albanese to go without getting some concession on Cheng Lei,” says one of Canberra’s leading China specialists, who asked not to be named.

Beijing would want assurances that discrimination against Chinese foreign investment on national security grounds would be eased back from the absurd paranoia that ruled under Morrison’s government, when treasurer Josh Frydenberg blocked a Chinese company from taking over a Japanese-owned milk depot in Victoria.

In return for a resolution of Cheng Lei’s case, China would also want a promise that Australia won’t oppose its bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement covering e-commerce and intellectual property as well as conventional goods. Taiwan’s parallel application to join the CPTPP complicates this issue.

Given the barely concealed message of much mainstream media commentary in recent years — that seeking business deals with China amounts almost to treason — Albanese won’t want to look too enthused. Despite the easing of public concern about China, the Lowy Institute poll also found that 70 per cent of respondents want Australia’s supply chains to run through friendly countries.

For economist John Edwards, this is at odds with how Australians actually behave. “Australian homes are chock-a-block with Chinese-made kitchen equipment, refrigerators and washing machines, their garden sheds with Chinese-made tools, their desks cluttered with Chinese-made phones, computers, printers and peripherals,” Edward wrote last week in the Australian Financial Review.

“We wear clothes made in China and are now beginning to buy cars made in China,” Edwards went on. “In a roundabout way, these imports are paid for with exports of iron ore, coal, lithium, and other metals and minerals, often to China. They are also paid for by revenue from Chinese students in Australia, and Chinese tourists in Australia, with China the predominant source of both.”

A vast number of imports also come from third countries like South Korea and Japan that use Chinese components for their products. Allies like Britain and the United States meanwhile account for a very small proportion of Australia’s trade. For all its talk of “friend-shoring,” the Biden administration’s main focus, subsidising semiconductor manufacture in the United States, will be at the expense of two friends, Taiwan and South Korea.

And it’s not just Australian households that are chock-a-block with Chinese goods. The difficulty of disconnecting from China was shown in an interview this month by the chief executive of the huge US defence and aerospace group Raytheon. “We can de-risk but not decouple,” Greg Hayes told the Financial Times. “Think about the US$500 billion of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative.”

If Raytheon were to withdraw from China it would spend many years rebuilding its supply chains either in the United States or friendly countries, Hayes said. “We are looking at de-risking, to take some of the most critical components and have second sources but we are not in a position to pull out of China the way we did out of Russia.”

Raytheon is deeply involved in Australia’s defence. It provides the combat system for the Collins-class submarines, air defence for the army and missiles for the air force, and it helps run the space warfare ground station at Exmouth, Western Australia. All, it seems, reliant on Chinese-made components — and paid for, in large part, by our exports to China. Trading with “frenemies” is the international norm. •

The post A pause in the thaw? appeared first on Inside Story.

How much dangerous truth could be told in Born of Fire and Ash: Australian Operations in Response to the East Timor Crisis 1999–2000? The line-by-line redaction attempts added up to a three-year battle about how the record of the past might influence the future.

The wrangle echoed previous interdepartmental contests, including Australia’s choices in the lead-up to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion and its role in bringing about East Timor’s independence vote in 1999. In each case, a strong Australian prime minister shifted Jakarta’s thinking in not quite the intended way. The element linking the two vastly different leaders, Gough Whitlam and John Howard, was Australia’s desire that East Timor should be Indonesian.

What Australia achieved in East Timor in 1999 was a triumph for the Timorese, but triumphing on the basis of serendipity is a nerve-jangling way to do strategy. Howard’s diplomatic initiative in support of Australia’s core policy — that East Timor should remain in Indonesia — suffered a spectacular crash. As Stockings observes in the line that gives his book its title, happenchance delivered a victory Canberra never wanted: “Within the tragic storm of devastation and destruction wrought upon them, the Indonesian province of East Timor was set on the path towards the independent nation of Timor-Leste — born of fire and ash.”

Stockings’s history opens with the “strategic and policy context” of the 1975 invasion. Using a cold war frame, Australia gave scant regard to East Timorese aspirations: “In Canberra’s view, East Timor was small and inconsequential. Indonesia was large and influential.” With Indonesian stability and prosperity seen as essential for Australian wellbeing, “the imperative of good relations with Jakarta grew into an article of faith.”

After Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in April 1974, Lisbon offered its colonies self-determination and independence. When Whitlam met Indonesia’s President Suharto in September 1974, he expressed his personal view that Portuguese Timor should become part of Indonesia because it was too small to be viable.

Suharto’s ominous response was that an independent East Timor would be “a thorn in the eye of Australia and a thorn in Indonesia’s back.” Whitlam later told Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, “I am in favour of incorporation, but obeisance has to be made to self-determination.”

The two elements of Whitlam’s Timor policy — incorporation and self-determination — were in conflict. Indonesia “consulted” with and briefed Australia as it prepared to invade in 1975. Canberra’s detailed foreknowledge was read as acquiescence. Whitlam’s “obeisance” fig leaf was swept aside.

Australia hadn’t given a green light for Indonesia’s annexation, but Stockings judges that

Australian policy-makers not only regarded the Indonesian incorporation of Portuguese Timor favourably from the very beginning, but played an active role in encouraging — or at least not discouraging — actions and activities in this direction. An Australian desire for self-determination in East Timor was real and Whitlam’s commitment in this regard was genuine, yet such competing considerations were not in balance. The desire for incorporation was considered more important in 1974–75 than the aspirations of the local population.

Suharto — whose long-serving foreign minister, Ali Alatas, eventually wrote a book about Timor called The Pebble in the Shoe — was right about the place becoming a thorn. By the time he fell from power in May 1998, the pebble was a rock weighing down Indonesia’s reputation.

The new president, B.J. Habibie, was “bombarded with questions from international visitors and journalists asking what he was going to do about East Timor,” Stockings writes. “Everywhere he went, especially in the US and Europe, no matter what he talked about, questions turned towards the province.”

Such was the atmosphere that prompted John Howard to write to Habibie in December 1998 “to make some suggestions about the East Timor situation.” His letter became one of the most consequential in the annals of Australian foreign and defence policy.

Australia’s support for Indonesian sovereignty was unchanged, Howard emphasised, but Habibie’s “offer of autonomy for East Timor [within Indonesia] was a bold and clear-sighted step that has opened a window of opportunity to achieve a peaceful settlement.” A settlement would “put the issue behind you,” Howard said, and “make a substantial difference to Indonesia’s standing.” He cautioned against “an early and final decision” on the province’s future, advocating a deal to defer any referendum on final status “for many years.”

Howard’s “open window” let in what Stockings calls “a perfect storm.” Seeking to defuse the problem, Australia had instead detonated it.

The mercurial Habibie scribbled across Howard’s letter, “Why not independence?” If East Timor “becomes a burden” to Indonesia, he wrote, then it could be “honourably separated.” On 27 January 1999, Jakarta announced that East Timorese would get an immediate vote on their political future. It was, as Stockings notes, “the exact opposite of Howard’s suggestion.”

Many in Indonesia’s military were shocked by Habibie’s announcement. So was Australia’s defence department. Howard’s letter had emerged from the prime minister’s department and the department of foreign affairs and trade, or DFAT: “Defence was not consulted over its potential ramifications; and indeed, it did not even know of the letter’s existence.” No one thought to inform Defence, explained the head of the PM’s department, “because no one anticipated a need for military force.”

When defence leaders in Canberra did eventually learn of the initiative, they were variously “gobsmacked,” “aghast,” “stunned” and “blindsided.”

The Indonesian military mobilised militia groups in an effort to win the 30 August vote in favour of special autonomy within Indonesia. If the vote went the other way, the United Nations would oversee a transition to independence.

“An extraordinary 98.6 per cent of those registered cast their votes” on that day in August 1999, writes Stockings. When the result was announced on 4 September, 21.5 per cent (93,388 voters) had cast their ballots for autonomy within Indonesia and 78.5 per cent (344,580) had chosen independence. “It was a staggering and unequivocal expression of popular will, and one whose strength in the face of pre-ballot intimidation surprised policymakers in Canberra as it most assuredly did Jakarta.”

The extraordinary vote launched an extraordinary September. Indonesia’s astonishment turned to fury, and its military launched what the UN called an “eruption of violence” — a systematic, comprehensive and coordinated operation to loot and destroy public and private buildings. The aim of this “scorched earth” policy, said the UN, was “to empty East Timor of much of its population, killing those who were identified as pro-independence.”

Once martial law was declared, on 7 September, the Indonesian military “could no longer hide behind the facade of police control,” writes Stockings. “The tragic truth of hundreds of deaths, thousands missing, and huge swathes of Dili in ashes was impossible to hide.” Australia’s consul in Dili, James Batley, told Canberra the operation was akin to what had happened in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge took power.

Stockings points to Australia’s detailed understanding of how Indonesia’s military had armed and directed the campaign. The chief of the Australian Defence Force, admiral Chris Barrie, dismissed the idea of “rogue elements” in the military, saying the hard evidence revealed “a campaign of terror.”

Stockings notes multiple studies concluding that the Indonesian military sponsored the militias and “provided training, arms, money, safety and in some cases drugs; they also encouraged the campaign of violence, and organised the wave of destruction and deportation which occurred between 5 September and 20 September.”

The horror of the rampage played out on TV screens around the world:

Aside from the killings and deportations, the rape and sexual assault of hundreds of women was also an abhorrent method of control, punishment and intimidation; so too the assault and beating of thousands of civilians; the forced recruitment of thousands of East Timorese into militia groups; the burning of over 60,000 homes; the looting of vast amounts of civilian property (including almost all motor vehicles and valuable manufactured goods); the theft or killing of large numbers of livestock; and the wanton destruction of the majority of public infrastructure, including hospitals, most schools, water installations, electric generators and other equipment necessary for supporting the well-being of the civilian population, for no military purpose.

As the violence continued, the Howard government laid down four conditions to be met before Australia would send in the ADF at the head of a peacekeeping coalition: “Indonesian consent; UN authorisation; a clear endorsement by a significant proportion of ASEAN members; and active US support.” It was a checklist of the bilateral, the regional, the multilateral and the alliance.

Senior ADF planners settled on what they wanted from the United States: some small key capabilities but not combat ground troops, “for these might dilute the appearance of Australian leadership and undermine efforts to flesh out the force with ASEAN contributions. US force protection doctrine was also seen as overly restrictive, and infantry could be found from other troop-contributing nations.”

The prime minister’s office and his department pushed back at “Defence arguments for as little US presence as possible on the ground,” fearing Defence did not fully appreciate the politics of a large US presence — not least, the implied threat that the US involvement would present to the Indonesian military and its militias.

But Howard’s push for “a firm US commitment” had a shaky start:

Howard rang [US president] Clinton on 6 September to specifically discuss what assistance the US might provide for any Australian-led intervention and to emphasise his personal preference for US boots on the ground. The prime minister was surprised by Clinton’s reply, which emphasised the overstretched nature of the US military and the hostility within Congress to further interventions. “I was very taken aback,” recalled Howard.

Foreign minister Alexander Downer, “stunned” by Clinton’s response, went hard in an interview with CNN, “emphasising his disappointment at the negative sounds emanating from Washington.” Policymakers at the Pentagon got the point: “Australia had been there for the US in the past and was expected to be there in the future,” writes Stockings. “It was now time for some quid pro quo.”

The international centre of gravity for any action then moved to the APEC summit in Auckland, happily being held from 9 to 13 September. Foreign ministers put “the screws” on Indonesia during a meeting chaired by New Zealand’s foreign minister, involving Indonesia, Australia, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and ASEAN. The foreign ministers urged international action if Indonesia could not restore order.

That coincidence of summit timing galvanised action, not least by extracting a firmer nod from Bill Clinton after he arrived in Auckland. The meeting became the message, and for Indonesia it was a powerful one. “From this point it was clear to both Canberra and Jakarta that there was a critical mass of international ‘in-principle’ agreement as to the need to act decisively in the troubled province.”

Downer’s view was that APEC had concluded there would be an international force — the only question was when.

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan called on Indonesia to seek help to restore peace. Otherwise, he said, it “could not escape responsibility for what could amount to crimes against humanity.” After a lengthy telephone conversation with Annan, Habibie announced on 12 September that Indonesia would accept peacekeeping forces. He told Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, John McCarthy, that he had battled “enormous resistance” from Indonesia’s military, “to the degree that he feared a military coup.”

Australia scrambled to assemble a peacekeeping force that it feared might have to fight Indonesian troops and militias — the “doomsday” scenario for Australian planners. Jakarta’s anger at Canberra was underlined by the announcement on 16 September that Indonesia had torn up the bilateral security treaty signed in December 1995. The ambitious Australian–Indonesian “Agreement to Maintain Security” was another item reduced to ash.

Australia’s plan for what became known as the International Force East Timor, or Interfet, was quickly born in the period from 5 to 14 September. As with much else that happened at the time, it had “a difficult gestation,” says Stockings, indicating “haste and rusty planning processes.”

The army was so busy thinking about its needs that it didn’t consult the other two armed services until a meeting on 14 September. Its “plan” was a wish list of what it wanted done by the navy and the air force rather than a consultation on what they could do with available ships and planes. The meeting between those wearing blue, white and khaki uniforms is described variously as “a hiccup” and “a disaster,” resulting in a direction that the plan be reworked within forty-eight hours.

The hiccup/disaster descriptors set the scene for much else. The ADF was woefully unprepared. Yet what could have been disasters were repeatedly dealt with, on the fly, in ways that turned them into mere hiccups.

The plan that emerged by 19 September was the product of adhockery and muddled process, “confused command chains” and the differing cultures of the three services. Old assumptions were challenged as “an essentially peacetime or peace-oriented ADF was shaken suddenly from its stupor.” Canberra had taken a peace dividend out of the ADF — “a decade’s worth of diminishment” — and Timor revealed how much that had hollowed out supplies, logistics and Australia’s ability to project and sustain its forces.

As the unfolding crisis began imposing pressures of a “size and scale” not experienced for decades, the relationship between defence minister John Moore and his departmental secretary, Paul Barratt, had already exploded. Moore dismissed Barratt in August, saying he no longer had trust and confidence in him. Timor was not the main cause of the schism, yet the Timor history points to the “impact” and the “turmoil” the sacking caused in the department. A deputy secretary of defence, Hugh White, stepped up to take over as acting secretary. Amid crisis, the department had to improvise at all levels.

Stockings records the ADF’s “sprint to Dili” following a UN Security Council resolution on 15 September establishing the multinational force: “This force was to be under a ‘unified’ command structure, which essentially translated to Australian control, even if Australia was not explicitly confirmed as a ‘lead’ nation.” Interfet would grow to be a coalition of twenty-three nations.

The Interfet commander, major general Peter Cosgrove, flew into Dili on 19 September. Reflecting his “robust” orders, he set the tone at a press conference in Darwin: he was going to get peace, not to seek a fight; but force could and would be used if needed.

Stockings judges that Cosgrove’s leadership was “fundamentally important.” With a mixture of “intelligence and occasional ruthlessness,” he was a commander who “had to straddle the operational/strategic divide and sell the operation to domestic and international audiences.” While meeting the UN mandate, Cosgrove had explicit orders from Canberra that he must also protect Australia’s future relationship with Indonesia. This was the most challenging of straddles.

By 20 September, the first Australian troops were in Dili. In those tense early days, the fear was that promises of cooperation from Jakarta would be undone by violence on the ground: “One or two gunfights in Dili might have turned the tables and changed the strategic scene dramatically. Thankfully, this did not happen. The doomsday scenario had, for the moment, been avoided.”

The chapter headings in the history’s section on “The Planning Cauldron” include “A Bit of Doing It on the Run” and “By the Skin of Our Teeth.” The section on the arrival and consolidation in Dili has chapters headed “Lucky to Get Away with It” and “The Psychological Ascendency.”

By the end of September, militia activity in Dili had ceased. Australia had 3300 personnel on the ground in an international force of 4300. Night-fighting equipment gave Interfet the hours of darkness, helicopters gave vital mobility and “armoured vehicles provided a powerful sense of resolve and technological dominance.”

Dili was “largely ceded to Interfet, not taken,” Stockings notes, as Indonesia’s military stuck to the agreement and ordered its battalions and militias to disperse towards the West Timor border.

Australia’s work in Timor-Leste in 1999–2000 was its largest mission under the UN. The ADF provided more than 9300 personnel to the coalition, with as many as 5500 in Timor at any given moment. “It was the single largest deployment of ADF personnel since the Second World War,” Stockings writes, “larger than the commitment to the Vietnam War at its peak in 1967”:

Crucially, it was also one not nestled within a larger or lead nation’s logistics and administrative support. It was also the first time Australia had led such a large multinational force; and all from a standing start. In short, Interfet was the most complex strategic challenge Australia had faced, at least since the 1940s.

Interfet was the first time Australian women “were operationally deployed in large numbers on active service. At its height this figure approached around 420 of 5500, a high percentage, although one still lower than the overall proportion of women in the ADF in 1999.”

The 157-day mission was “a type of maturing” for Australia in Southeast Asia, says Stockings — and, for that moment, at least, “a step out from under the strategic wing of the United States.” Defence and the ADF, however, were “rocked” by Timor reality checks. The ADF might not have stumbled in East Timor “because it was never seriously pushed,” but the mission exposed “how much it had atrophied since the 1970s” — “how hollow the organisation had become, how unsuited to a large-scale overseas operation.”

Some gaps in training — including the accidental firing of live rounds from weapons — were potentially deadly. Australian personnel were formally disciplined for fifty-eight of these “unauthorised discharges,” though the actual total was higher because other cases were dealt with informally. The general standard of weapons handling within the army was poor, “possibly below the level of recruit qualifying standard.” Asked about the dangers he faced in Timor, one corporal remarked that militia activity “rated a distant second to the danger of unauthorised discharges.”

When Peter Leahy was promoted to chief of army in mid 2002 he acted to “repair” the army. The problems and weaknesses exposed by Timor were, he remarked, “such a big lesson, such a wakeup call.”

“Yet,” Stockings reflects at the end of his history, “East Timor felt like victory — from initial deployment to welcome home parade.” The 1999 crisis gave the Howard government “greater knowledge of and perhaps confidence in the application of military force than had previously been the case.” Had operations in East Timor not gone so well, Stockings speculates, later Australian commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq might have been different.

The ADF had been fortunate:

Everything that could have gone right just about did go right, while serious problems that might have emerged stayed hidden. The enemy in East Timor was never as it seemed, nor did militia groups alone possess the innate will to exploit Interfet’s weaknesses, seriously challenge its monopoly on the use of force, or place stress on the coalition.

Good fortune helps, but people make success. For that, the historian points to the “stamina, initiative, discipline and commitment of soldiers, sailors and air personnel,” good and flexible middle management, and the professional competence of senior ranks:

[T]he memories of East Timor for the vast majority of Australians deployed in 1999 and 2000 were not of strategic and political calculations, policy enigmas, operational missteps, logistical problems, or even the horrific results of the militia strategy. Rather, it was the faces of the locals — smiling children, families rebuilding their lives amid the rubble that had been bequeathed to them — that were the enduring images of Interfet. The feeling of helping a desperate and grateful people was what Interfet veterans carried home with them.

In that penultimate paragraph of the history you might glimpse a younger Craig Stockings, who served in Interfet as a captain and second in command of Bravo Company of 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, in Dili, then the border, and the Oecussi enclave.

Professor Stockings is the official historian of Australian operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor, and Fire and Ash is the first in a series of volumes. This is the sixth such official multi-volume history produced by Australia, and Stockings is the sixth official historian. A deep and valuable tradition has been built on the great foundations laid by Charles Bean with the fifteen-volume official history of Australia in the first world war.

Research on the Timor history began in 2016 and the result was scheduled to be published in 2019. But the timetable was stymied by what some called “unprecedented resistance” by government departments. Stockings had to wage a long and unusual struggle to protect this “official history” from the knives of official Canberra.

Unlike the earlier historians, Stockings faced “sensitivities and security considerations associated with the unprecedented impact of intelligence and intelligence agencies on tactical military operations.” The authors of the works on the Vietnam and Korea wars emphasised the lack of any censorship and the full cooperation of officialdom. Stockings, by contrast, details how Canberra stakeholders created “a difficult journey towards publication.” The history was well funded and resourced, but “I am perhaps not as ‘free’ in terms of externally imposed governance as some of my predecessors.”

The philosophy of the series, though, followed tradition:

Official histories are, in many ways, a record of government actions and decisions based on government sources. They are not government stories, however… They are the product of historical investigations by independent researchers. The government pays the bill — it does not decide what is written.

He didn’t self-censor, he says, and included the good with the bad in an effort to be “truthful, not necessarily triumphal.”

In the process of reviewing and “clearing” the official history for publication, government departments could seek amendments on national security and national interest grounds. “Some stakeholders have proved more invested than others in this regard, and the process has sometimes been difficult. Nonetheless, no changes have been wrought that threaten the overall truthfulness, credibility, legitimacy or integrity of the volumes.”

One document suffices to show how Canberra officialdom fights the battle of review and redaction. Released by the National Archives of Australia in 2021, it is a submission titled “East Timor: Post-Independence Scenarios” that went to the Howard cabinet in August 2000. More than twenty phrases and paragraphs were blacked out twenty-one years later because they would “cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth.” Even with those black bars, though, the paper is a fascinating discussion of the enduring responsibility Australia would carry for Timor-Leste because of the intervention.

I’ve reported for decades on the annual release of cabinet documents by the National Archives, and a recurring feature is that papers dealing with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are more than likely to have bits blacked out or be withheld completely. Indonesia frames Australia’s view of Southeast Asia; PNG does the same for the South Pacific. Twenty-year-old cabinet papers dealing with these vital neighbours touch the present and the future as well as the past. DFAT is vigilant in using its review veto.

My interpretation of the redaction fight over the Timor history is that official Canberra’s resistance had four strands: fear of offending Indonesia; a wish to defend the department’s reputation and the Timor “triumph” legend; a desire to protect intelligence capabilities; and official Canberra’s deeply embedded culture of secrecy.

On the culture of secrecy, the New York Times has plenty of evidence to back its headline “Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy.” Australia may have a freedom of information law, but Canberra bureaucratic practice turns this into freedom from information.

The culture of secrecy obviously suffered culture shock when confronted by an official history more interested in the history than the secrecy. And Stockings wasn’t just writing history. He was up against diplomatic imperatives that will forever place Indonesia at the heart of Australia’s strategic calculations. Add in the secrecy culture and a measure of bureaucratic arse-covering, and you get a volume — both important and sensitive — that took twice as long as scheduled to produce.

In one footnote fusillade, Stockings fires off at DFAT’s own history of the challenge of East Timor, published in July 2001. He calls the book

an interesting case-study of the shaping of public discourse. The department seemed keen to ensure its own view of the events in 1999, based on a selective reading of its own documents, be released soon after the event. The book was not authored by DFAT’s historical section but rather by those who had worked on the East Timor crisis as it unfolded. When considering the launch of this book the department reached out to academics it believed would be “supportive in their views” and sought to avoid the standard practice at commercial publishing houses of referring draft manuscripts to external assessors. Such a practice was thought might “detract from Department’s control.”

The lack of much documentation, up till now, has conspired to leave Interfet and the 1999 crisis with “only a limited historiography in English,” Stockings writes. What has been written divides into two camps. The dominant view presents Interfet “as a triumph of Australian military, strategic and diplomatic action.” The other side “with far less mainstream traction and influence,” interprets Interfet as “a cynical end of twenty-five years of disgraceful acquiescence to the Indonesian occupation.”

In his magisterial work, Stockings encompasses both camps, showing how the vital and vexed dimensions of Australia’s approach to Indonesia and East Timor collided in 1999. He follows the tradition established by Bean in offering history as seen by the soldiers on the ground as well as the officers and officials. The story of the tactical engagements is the sinew of the strategy and international policy. The mishaps and stuff-ups are recorded as the counterpoint for all that was achieved.

The crisis wind in 1999 kept blowing the Howard cabinet into new territory. Rather than cement East Timor as it planned, Australia helped deliver an independent Timor-Leste. By its actions, Australia gave the new nation a de facto security guarantee, a point quietly understood by the Howard government. The terms of that guarantee endure.

Turning potential disasters into hiccups, the ADF achieved one of the most successful of all UN missions. Many things that could have been disastrous turned out right. An institution usually defined by the different cultures of its three military arms and a complex civilian bureaucracy, the defence department delivered for Timor and for Australia — and ultimately, for Indonesia. •

Born of Fire and Ash: Australian Operations in Response to the East Timor Crisis 1999–2000
By Craig Stockings | Australian War Memorial & NewSouth | $99 | 976 pages

The post Fire, ash and official secrecy appeared first on Inside Story.

Along with Honolulu, those were the only places the two visited outside Australia to seek views on the strategic picture. Not Tokyo, nor New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta or Port Moresby.

In their wake, many observers are mystified by the relationship between the Defence Strategic Review and Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, a decision sprung on voters in September 2021 by Scott Morrison and endorsed with less than a day’s study by then opposition leader Anthony Albanese.

The parts of the Smith–Houston review curated and released by defence minister Richard Marles confirm that it didn’t question the Australia–United Kingdom–United States agreement, known as AUKUS. If Smith and Houston discussed what role the extraordinarily expensive submarines will actually perform, they did so in the still-classified parts of their review.

Press gallery defence reporters have already started the game of trying to winkle out of anonymous sources the scenarios that might have been canvassed by the review, including the defence of Taiwan and the lodging of Chinese forces in the Solomon Islands. Presumably Smith and Houston looked at the possibility that China would strike at Australia in the event of a Taiwan conflict in order to disable Pine Gap, North West Cape and other US war-fighting installations.

Sydney University historian James Curran, newly appointed international editor of the Australian Financial Review, raises a scenario that probably wasn’t mooted: the cutting of Australian shipments of iron ore and other commodities to China. “Such a devastating blow to Australia’s economy is never mentioned in these strategic reviews — economics and national security remain in uncooperating silos,” Curran writes.

As for the text that was released, many commentators have detected unsupported assertions and logical leaps. Most glaring perhaps was the reference to an “AUKUS Treaty” when the tripartite agreement was simply a joint statement by the three leaders at the US navy’s San Diego base in March.

Neither Morrison nor Albanese has presented the agreement to parliament for explanation and debate, let alone set in motion the ratification required of a treaty. Nor have the other two governments to their legislatures. Both Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak face elections next year and could be gone — in America’s case, possibly replaced by Donald Trump.

Those elections aren’t the only stumbling blocks. Washington’s agreement to sell between three and five Virginia-class submarines to the Australian navy from the early 2030s could be contingent on its own navy managing to step up production of these hunter-killer vessels, known as SSNs.

The Americans currently have about fifty SSNs, well below their force level goal of sixty-six. They hope to increase production of new Virginia-class boats to two a year, but the current rate works out at about 1.3 boats per year. At the AUKUS ceremony, it was disclosed that Australia would be investing perhaps $3 billion in helping the two US submarine yards speed up work, but the impact is likely to be quite marginal.

As it is, the US navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan shows the SSN force reaching the sixty-six-boat target in 2049 at the earliest. So the sale to the RAN will subtract from the American fleet — unless, of course, the vessels effectively operate as part of the US navy’s Indo-Pacific fleet. Marles has denied any such agreement or condition; veteran defence-intelligence analyst Brian Toohey scoffs at such assurances.

The three to five Virginia-class subs provided to Australia will already be about halfway through their thirty-year reactor life, and are seen as a holding capability until a jointly designed successor to Britain’s current Astute-class SSNs can be built. The first of those future submarines will be laid down in the early 2030s and delivered — from Barrow-in-Furness in England for the British navy, and from Adelaide for the Australian navy — in the 2040s.

But not from the American yards, despite the promised US contribution to the design. The US navy doesn’t want them, and is instead persisting in developing its own successor to the Virginia-class, known as the SSN(X). This raises an obvious question: having inducted an American boat into its fleet, why wouldn’t the Australian navy stick with the Americans for its successor?

It also brings us to perhaps the most perplexing thing about AUKUS: the involvement of the United Kingdom. Why did Morrison need to get his British counterpart Boris Johnson involved in approaching the Americans? Even if the Australian navy was inclined to Britain’s Astute-class, an American sign-off was required for the transfer of its reactor technology, a closely held US secret.

The proposed joint AUKUS submarine thus hangs on Britain, a declining power in great economic disarray. The Tories must be quietly chortling at having roped in the Australians to subsidise their naval plans. Adding to the puzzle is the post-politics job Morrison is said to be negotiating with a British defence group.

Australia’s close strategic alliance with the United States is generally accepted in our region. Japan and South Korea have similar alliances, Singapore and Thailand more tacit ones, and India and Vietnam a growing closeness. To revive close strategic ties with Britain undercuts decades of diplomacy designed to project Australia as an authentic regional partner. Surely the Australian navy has moved on from pink gins?

Meanwhile, the Smith–Houston review has rearranged our defence capacity around the nuclear submarines and their projected $368 billion cost. From a “balanced” force with a bit of everything, it is to become “focused” on projecting power further from Australia.

Ships and aircraft are to be equipped with longer-range missiles, their stockpiles built up by local production rather than imports. The army will also be more of a missile force, with the US artillery–missile hybrid known as the HIMARS extending its strike range to 500 kilometres and a greater amphibious capacity to move forward against threats.

To pay for this, the army loses a second battery of heavy guns, and its planned new fleet of South Korean– or German- designed, locally built armoured personnel carriers will be cut from 450 to 139, enough for a single brigade. At a mooted cost of $27 billion — averaging $60 million per vehicle — the project did seem absurdly inflated, but Smith and Houston mentioned no other means for protecting soldiers.

Nor do they discuss the fate of the army’s heavy tanks — its fifty-nine M1 Abrams and the updated replacements ordered by Morrison’s government. Perhaps a contribution to Ukraine, to be announced by Albanese when he is a guest at the NATO summit in July?

Accompanying the partial publication of the defence review has been some spin-doctoring designed to create the impression that the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, which has prevailed since senior defence official Paul Dibb’s 1987 white paper, was designed to deal only with low-level threats and is consequently obsolete. Actually, under the earlier doctrine Australia possessed quite an extended punch using air-refuelled F-18 strike aircraft and the six Collins-class conventional submarines.

Former army chief Peter Leahy is one who believes that Smith and Houston’s “all new” doctrine is really Defence of Australia Extended. “Its authors boldly state that it is not ‘just another defence review,’ but that is exactly what it is,” writes former defence official Hugh White, who wrote a defence white paper in the Dibb tradition in 2000.

Members of the hawkish commentariat, meanwhile, are apoplectic at the government’s failure to back with big money the review’s dire warnings of rising threats and a defence force “not fit for purpose.” They point out that many of the proposed new capabilities had been announced over the past three years. Some of them point to the government’s post-review backpedalling on capabilities already in the works. A committee headed by a retired US admiral will see whether the navy’s surface fleet needs all of the nine Hunter-class large frigates to be built in Adelaide, or a larger number of smaller corvettes.

“The Defence Strategic Review is worthless unless Defence stops deliberately dragging the chain,” declared the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan. “Strategy without dollars is just noise.” For Peter Jennings, former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the review was “a collection of unfunded compromises and shocking policy gaps.”

The funding gaps are not just directly in the military domain of the “national defence” strategy propounded in the review. Referring to increasing calls on the defence forces to help out in natural disasters caused by climate change, Smith and Houston suggest a separate emergency agency. They point to Australia’s small reserves of fuel and dwindling refining capacity, declaring that the energy industry should be directed to come up with remedies.

A different criticism of the review comes from White. “The choice we face today is whether to build armed forces designed to help the US defend its strategic position in Asia against China’s challenge and preserve the old US-led order,” he writes, “or build forces that can keep us secure as American power in Asia fades and a new order dominated by China and India takes its place.”

We can’t do both, White adds, “because that pulls our force priorities in very different directions.” On the one hand, AUKUS was all about supporting the United States against China in Northeast Asia. On the other hand, the defence review — despite its emphasis on the US alliance — focuses on the defence of the Australian continent and its approaches.

At points, the review doesn’t seem sure which way to jump. As White observes, it argues that Australia’s forces must be able to deter “unilaterally” but then, in the same paragraph, it says this can only be achieved by working with the United States. “Australia’s nonchalance about this,” says White, “is typified by the reckless gamble of entrusting our future submarine capability to the impossibly protracted, complex and risky AUKUS nuclear program, when much faster and more cost-effective conventional options are available.”

The Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen sees “tension and ambiguity” between the review and the AUKUS plans. “If the navy should be ‘optimised for operating in our immediate region,’ why do we need submarines optimised for operating thousands of kilometres north of it?” he writes. “Why is the RAAF Tindal air base being modernised so the United States can operate long-range bombers from there?”

A deeper contradiction looms for Peter Varghese, the former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and director of ONA, Australia’s top intelligence assessment agency. Talking to James Curran for the AFR, Varghese agreed that Australia should stick with the United States as the most important player crafting a new balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Whether we can sustain this position without handcuffing ourselves to the maintenance of US strategic primacy is the big challenge for our strategic policy,” Varghese said. “A balance of power which favours our interests and adopting US strategic primacy as a vital Australian interest are not the same thing, and it would be a mistake to conflate them.” •

The post Pink gin diplomacy appeared first on Inside Story.

The deal developed by the RAN’s vice-admiral Jonathan Mead and his project team, and accepted by the Albanese cabinet, is like a boy given carte blanche in a toy shop: we’ll have three to five of the US-model Virginia-class subs; then eight or more of the British follow-on to the existing Astute-class, to be built in Adelaide.

Albanese insists that Australian “sovereignty” will be paramount. But until 2033 or so, Australia will be protected in large part by US Navy and Royal Navy nuclear submarines patrolling out of the RAN’s Cockburn Sound base near Perth. The base will be expanded at a cost of $1 billion to accommodate them.

Only in 2033 will the RAN get its first nuclear-powered submarine, a Virginia-class boat transferred from the United States. It is unclear whether this — or the next two, three or four subs — will be new or second-hand. That will depend on how quickly the two US shipyards building the Virginia-class can ramp up production beyond the two per year demanded by the US Navy and concerned members of the US Congress.

To this end, Biden is asking Congress for US$4.6 billion. Canberra will be putting in A$3 billion, with a bit of that going to the British submarine yard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Rather than building new slipways, the extra capacity will be created by introducing a nightshift at the American yards. With US unemployment at a record low and the yards paying somewhat miserly wages to new staff, that might be hard to achieve. Australia is also hoping to rotate workers from Adelaide into the US and British yards to gain experience.

American experts think the transferred submarines will be second-hand, probably from the third and fourth production “blocks” commissioned since 2014. This means some will have as few as fourteen years remaining of their thirty-three-year reactor life when they are transferred in 2033 and beyond.

The price tag is put at somewhere between A$268 billion and A$368 billion over thirty years. The government insists that the initial $9 billion, over the next four years, won’t be felt at all: it will be met by $6 billion that would otherwise have gone to the cancelled French conventional submarines and $3 billion carved out of other defence programs. Expect protests over the latter, especially from the army, which is likely to see its heavy armour cut back.

The San Diego announcement by the three leaders has been greeted by a display of bipartisanship. The Coalition claims AUKUS as its own initiative, under the helmsmanship of Scott Morrison. But once it comes to finding the money — likely to be equivalent to 0.15 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product each year — the bipartisanship will start to fray.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has already nobly offered to support cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care to fit the bill. Expect some in Labor and the crossbenches to suggest the stage-three tax cuts and the capital gains tax discount are fairer sacrifices. What better excuse than national security and the Chinese peril for breaking election promises?

The biggest loser in the short term is South Australia. It is left with only the two-year-long refurbishments of the RAN’s Collins-class conventional submarines, one by one from 2026, when the first boat, the HMAS Collins, reaches thirty years in service.

Further work depends on progress in the joint British, US and Australian design work on the Astute-class follow-on submarine, known as the SSN-AUKUS. If it is ready to build, the first steel will be cut and laid down in the early 2030s and the first submarine commissioned in the early 2040s, with the rest to follow into the late 2050s. It is unclear whether the US will build some of these AUKUS submarines for itself, or continue developing the Virginia-class successor, known as the SSN (X).

BAE Systems has taken nine to eleven years to complete each of the seven Astutes for the Royal Navy, as against just under seven years for the American yards to turn out a Virginia-class boat. That relative slowness has already given rise to doubts about the promised schedule and cost of what is an entirely new design.

“Defence does not have a strong record in this area and the navy in particular has struggled to maintain design discipline,” Peter Dean, a professor and defence expert at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, wrote in the Nine papers. “Constant design changes have slowed projects, frustrated industry and blown out budgets,” Dean went on.

BAE Systems is also running the $45 billion program for nine Hunter-class frigates. They were originally priced at $30 billion, and the first was supposed to be laid down in Adelaide last year but work has not yet commenced. The frigate “was supposed to bring synergies by sharing the design between the UK, Canada and Australia,” wrote Dean. “But this project has blown out the budget, hit delays and fractured its initial approach as the design has constantly been modified, raising concerns about its viability.”

Former Coalition foreign minister Alexander Downer, for one, thinks the 40 per cent cost savings of building the SSN-AUKUS submarines overseas rather than in Adelaide will be tempting for a future government. “Assuming South Australia’s relative decline in its share of the national population will continue,” Downer wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week, “federal governments will become less concerned about holding a diminishing number of seats in South Australia and more concerned about how they’re going to pay for their other expensive and right-on plans.”

It’s tough, but Adelaide has declined the chance of sending a fourth generation of the Downer dynasty to Canberra.

Cameron Stewart, a former defence signals analyst who is now one of the Australian’s best strategic commentators, thinks it could go further than this, and Rishi Sunak or his successor could be in for the kind of treatment Morrison meted out to France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The decision to go for the British design is “madness,” he wrote. “After Australia has done all of the very hard work — overcoming the regulations, the red tape, the export control, the politics — in securing a system whereby we can acquire three to five Virginia-class submarines from Washington, it gives it all up. For what? To help build from scratch in Adelaide a completely separate next-generation British designed nuclear-powered submarine.”

“This all but guarantees a future nightmare of massive delays, development risk, price blow-outs and schedule nightmares — everything that we see on every first-of-type submarine project around the world,” Stewart went on. It would be better just to keep on acquiring Virginia-class submarines rather than making a “needless U-turn” to keep Adelaide and the British happy.

The long schedule at least means that if the balloon goes up over Taiwan — as feared within the next three years by the hawkish thinkers recently assembled by the Nine papers in their “Red Alert” series — conflict between the United States and China will happen without us being able to do much about it, nor China paying us much attention.

We still await a formal statement to parliament and the Australian people outlining why we need these very large submarines with the capability to cruise to China’s nearby waters and bombard it with cruise missiles. Defence of the archipelagic approaches to Australia will be left to smaller, silent conventional submarines: our own Collins-class for a while and then perhaps with some help from the Indonesian, Singaporean and Vietnamese navies. •

The post Torpedoes ahead! appeared first on Inside Story.

The tripartite pact known as AUKUS grew out of a Morrison brainwave some six months after he won what seemed an unwinnable election virtually single-handedly. Under the agreement, Australia is to acquire — and even build — eight US- or British-designed nuclear-powered submarines, known as SSNs.

According to senior political correspondents Peter Hartcher and Paul Kelly, Morrison started asking his officials about possible alternatives to the contentious contract with France’s Naval Group to build twelve Shortfin Barracuda-class conventional submarines in Adelaide. Not long after, in March 2020, he asked defence secretary Greg Moriarty to prepare an options paper, which was delivered two weeks later. Then, in May of that year, he asked Moriarty and defence force chief Angus Campbell to form a group to weigh up the nuclear-power option. Headed by then navy chief Michael Noonan, the group worked in a tight security bubble.

Efforts continued to try to resolve differences with Naval Group over the cost and local content of the French submarines. No one seems to have considered asking the French about the nuclear option, yet the Shortfin Barracuda was a special conventionally powered version of the Barracuda nuclear-powered attack submarine and the Americans had agreed to fit it with their most advanced war-fighting electronics.

One problem was the fact that the reactors in the French submarines use low-enriched (around 5 per cent) uranium in their fuel rods, which require replacing every ten years. This means fewer problems with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but would have meant relying on a foreign power. Without a domestic nuclear industry capable of enriching uranium and fabricating rods, any Barracuda submarine bought by Australia would have to sail to France every decade or else somehow arrange transfer of fuel rods from France.

The Australian team and its political masters were seized by the revelation that current American and British nuclear submarines are fuelled by highly enriched (92 per cent) uranium rods that work for the entire life of the submarine, thirty years. Once built, it was claimed, they could be operated by the Australian navy without recourse to American support. Despite the US and British submarines having operated for many years, that news somehow came as a surprise in Canberra.

So, in February 2021, a visiting Australian naval delegation broached the idea of a British or US purchase with the sea lords of the Royal Navy, who gave it a cautious nod as long as the Americans could be brought on board. Britain’s US-derived reactor technology is the product of a unique transfer of know-how by the United States in 1958.

Next, the Americans were sounded out. The first approach was made by Morrison’s handpicked director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer, and Australian ambassador Arthur Sinodinos at the end of April 2021, in a meeting with the Biden administration’s senior adviser on Indo-Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell. Then, the following month, Morrison’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, met with Biden’s secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Another few weeks later, Morrison was a guest at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, where he felt able to broach the plan with Biden himself. Strangely, British prime minister Boris Johnson was also at the meeting with Biden. The American president clearly detests Johnson for his role in Brexit and potential reopening of conflict in Northern Ireland, but his presence didn’t queer Morrison’s pitch.

Although Biden stipulated that the nuclear transfer must be a bipartisan exercise on the Australian side, Morrison gave opposition leader Anthony Albanese and his deputy just twelve hours’ notice of the announcement of the tripartite agreement to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and collaborate on futuristic technology. The announcement came in September last year in a video hook-up with Biden and Johnson.

Labor endorsed what became known as the AUKUS pact, no doubt seeing it as an attempted political wedge on Morrison’s part but presumably also trusting it to be a well-thought-out response to China’s increasingly confrontational approach and an equally considered lift in Australia’s defence capabilities. After securing government in May last year, though, the Albanese government might have been expected to take a harder look at the AUKUS deal and the SSN component.

There were early signs of such scrutiny. In August, the government appointed former Labor defence and foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence forces chief Angus Houston to advise on what defence capability Australia needs to meet “the increasingly challenging geostrategic environment.” They were given until March this year to submit their findings (though speculation suggests they’ll report next month) and handed a secret preliminary report to Marles in November.

From hints thrown out by Albanese and Marles, the Smith–Houston review was encouraged to be iconoclastic. In particular, the army’s projected force of 127 heavy Abrams tanks for $2.5 billion and 450 new armoured fighting vehicles at a mooted $27 billion cost — or an average of around $60 million each — seems likely to come into question.

“Our defence assets need to not be about fighting a land war defending western Queensland because that is highly unlikely,” Albanese said in an end-of-year interview with the Nine newspapers, “but a lot of our assets are not really the ones that we necessarily need for this century and for the times — and also their location as well.”

Yet the SSN project seems off-limits. The review’s terms of reference don’t say that explicitly, but Smith and Houston are asked to recommend the “defence posture” needed in 2032–33 and beyond “in light of recently announced large-scale projects.”

This suggests that a parallel defence taskforce, given eighteen months in September 2021 by Morrison to find a pathway to acquiring the SSNs, has proceeded without any fear of being called off.

A defence briefing note describing how the Smith–Houston review relates to the AUKUS submarine project states that it “will help ensure we maximise the potential of this and other AUKUS partnership initiatives in Australia’s best strategic interests.” In other words, defence spending will be trimmed elsewhere if necessary to finance the SSNs, estimated to cost us $200 billion.

Meanwhile, Morrison’s submarine taskforce, with its staff of 360 defence and industry personnel, says it’s on schedule to report to the government in March. (Both it and the final Smith–Houston report are likely to be kept secret.) The SSN taskforce chief, Jonathan Mead, was giving little away in an interview with the Australian’s Cameron Stewart in December. The SSN, he said, would “deliver for Australia a potent war-fighting capability [and help] to deter anyone who may seek to do harm to Australia.”

Mead left a riddle about how the navy can avoid a “capability gap” between likely delivery of the SSNs in the 2040s and 2050s and the retirement of the existing six conventional Collins-class submarines between 2038 and 2046 — assuming that major refits can safely extend the operating life of the Collins boats. Mead said he is focusing only on nuclear submarines, not on stopgap acquisitions of conventional subs.

The capability gap could be even wider if, as British defence minister Ben Wallace and others have suggested, the three AUKUS partners work on a common design for a new generation SSN to replace both the current US Virginia-class and the British Astute-class, each designed in the 1990s and coming towards the end of their production runs.

Mead will also wrestle with the question of local production, which Marles still insists will happen. Ideas floated include building the submarine hulls in Adelaide and then barging them to the United States or Britain for the nuclear reactor to be inserted, or barging the nuclear reactor module with its bomb-grade uranium core to Adelaide. The latter prospect might unsettle some in the City of Churches: when the Astute submarines are fuelled up in Barrow-in-Furness on the west English coast, the local council hands out iodine tablets to residents.

Awaiting the two reports, a clamour of urgency has built up within Canberra’s defence commentariat. Even before last year’s election, Peter Dutton was expressing the hope that the Australian navy could lease one or two Virginia-class SSNs from the US navy to bridge the gap. Having ditched the French, and before them the Japanese, the then defence minister was ready to dump the British.

In November, shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie said Canberra should stop insisting the submarines be built here. Authoritarian powers are “on the move” and it would take too long to start with Australian domestic production, he said. We should try to order two submarines from US yards for delivery by the end of this decade.

But the two US naval yards that build submarines are flat out with orders from the US navy for more Virginia-class SSNs. A letter to Joe Biden in December from two senior US senators argued that adding orders from the Australian navy would stretch American industrial capacity to “breaking point.”

Purchased or leased, the Australian navy won’t have the engineering and command expertise to operate nuclear submarines for many years without importing talent from the US or British navies and arranging maintenance at American or British bases. The submarines will be Australian assets in name only. They will also spend a lot of time undergoing maintenance, and are likely to be available for six-month cruises only fifteen times in their thirty-three-year operational life.

Mixed in with this clamour has been the extension of another Morrison initiative, the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, with its goal of acquiring “more potent capabilities to hold adversary forces and infrastructure at risk further from Australia, including longer-range strike weapons, cyber capabilities and area denial systems.”

Compounding a sense of alarm during Morrison’s prime ministership was the abrupt deterioration in relations with China caused by his call in April 2020 for outside health inspectors to storm into China, invited or not, to find the origins of Covid-19, and the federal police raid on the homes of four journalists with Chinese official media two months later. China responded with trade sanctions to the tune of $20 billion a year and the arrest of Australian journalist Cheng Lei.

With Chinese leader Xi Jinping choosing to wear a military uniform to review huge parades of his armed forces, and Chinese ships and aircraft jostling US forces in nearby seas, it was not hard for defence hawks in Canberra to connect the military build-up and the relationship chill to produce the conclusion: China is a military threat to Australia.

Consequently, Morrison announced a $1 billion scheme to create a domestic missile manufacturing industry to build up ammunition stocks. This quest for greater lethality at longer range has continued under Labor with the planned acquisition of 800-kilometre-range US anti-ship missiles for the air force, 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and Norwegian anti-ship missiles for major navy surface ships and, just recently, twenty US 100- to 300-kilometre-range precision rocket artillery units for the army. The latter, known as HIMARS, have proved a devastatingly effective weapon for Ukraine.

It is unclear whether Canberra intends to acquire its own satellite reconnaissance and targeting systems to direct these missiles, or whether it will rely on American systems.

With multibillion-dollar arms purchases coming thick and fast, defence analysts have thrown off all restraint. A paper last month from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggested the air force acquire a squadron of the newly unveiled US air force B-21 bombers. This bat-winged stealth bomber, with its unrefuelled combat radius of 4000 kilometres, could plug the long-range strike capability gap until the SSNs arrive, according to the institute. Still a prototype and yet to be tested in the air, B-21s are likely to cost more than $2 billion each.

Though this thinking was initially presented as a means of hitting any enemy planning to hit Australian assets between 2000 and 3000 kilometres away, and could thus be seen as an extension of the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, it has morphed in some quarters into a strategy of deterrence: that is, if any enemy thinks it can land blows against Australia it must expect blows in return.

Hence the preference for the larger of the two contending SSNs, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest version is 10,200 tonnes and can carry up to sixty-five torpedoes, Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles or other long weapons. Britain’s smaller Astute-class (about 7500 tonnes) carries thirty-six long weapons.

This extra capacity shifts the submarine’s role from denying access to Australian waters to retaliating or attacking. It should be an unsettling thought. Until now, deterrence against a rival superpower was left to the Americans. Are we having doubts about that, just as the South Koreans and perhaps some Japanese are?

And, for China, what kind of deterrence would be offered by the prospect of a couple of submarines coming close to its coast and firing off conventional-explosive-tipped missiles at a score of land targets?

This line of thinking also betrays unease in Canberra about the American nuclear umbrella. In countries anxious about nuclear-armed strategic rivals but without a reliable superpower protector, deterrence thinking goes in one direction, towards an independent nuclear capability: ask India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel.

But the nuclear submarine push is unlikely to be thrown off course by questions about its feasibility — and certainly not by suggestions from defence analysts like Hugh White, Brian Toohey and Clinton Fernandes that smaller and less noisy conventional submarines are a greater threat to enemy navies than nuclear subs, are better suited to operations in the archipelagic waters of Australia’s approaches, and are better matched with our budgetary and industrial capacities.

Nor will the hawks be thrown off course by the equally forlorn thoughts of some in the international relations community, along with figures like Paul Keating, that getting closer to the anglophone powers is a retrograde step. Australian proponents of the American alliance have long claimed that Southeast Asians are secretly pleased by our closeness with the United States and are not fussed about our tightening “interoperability” and now “interchangeability” with US forces. There is not a lot of evidence for this.

Hawkish commentators are thrilled that the stepped-up “rotation” of American forces through northern Australia will make us somehow pivotal to the US posture against China in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea, instead of a rear base to disperse forces away from Chinese attack. Their worry is that things will blow up before we have the SSNs to join in.

Unless Admiral Mead produces a technological surprise out of his braided hat, though, the sheer impracticality of Morrison’s grand scheme may soon become apparent. This may give more scope for foreign minister Penny Wong to work on giving AUKUS a less dominant place in Australia’s strategic position.

Morrison’s AUKUS plan raised “valid questions about Australia’s sovereign capability,” Wong said in a speech to Sydney University’s US Studies Centre a week after the September 2021 announcement. But, she added, “with the prospect of a higher level of technological dependence on the US, how does the Morrison–Joyce government assure Australians that we can act alone when need be; that we have the autonomy to defend ourselves, however and whenever we need to.”

The new pact had to be “additional to” and not “instead of” Australia’s contribution to existing regional architecture, Wong said. “It doesn’t replace the ANZUS alliance, the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, APEC or the Quad.”

For Wong, Southeast Asia remains a prime focus of Australian national interest. “Our strategic ambitions must be matched by equally ambitious efforts to respond to the region’s needs. This of course requires a bigger investment in our diplomacy, including in our economic engagement and development program. Submarines might help protect the region, but on their own they won’t build the region we want — a region that is stable, prosperous, as well as respectful of sovereignty. And submarines can help our national defence, but won’t of themselves prevent efforts at economic coercion.”

Judging by her round of regional visits and the more low-key tone of dialogue with China, these are surely the kind of thoughts she is expressing within the government. But having so warmly embraced what Paul Kelly has tentatively called the “Morrison doctrine” it may take a while for Albanese and Marles to loosen their attachment to the Anglosphere, return strategic policy to the mainstream represented by the Defence of Australia doctrine, and extricate themselves from what is turning into another Morrison fiasco. •

The post Time to rethink the Morrison doctrine appeared first on Inside Story.

Commentators generally agree a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would involve the following elements, alone or in combination:

• a decapitation strike, using special forces to kill or capture the Taiwanese leadership and install a Beijing-aligned government

• a seaborne invasion, with a large force crossing the Taiwan Strait

• an extensive bombing campaign using aircraft and missiles

• a blockade of the Strait to cut off Taiwan’s imports and exports.

All of these approaches have been tried by Russia, under highly favourable conditions, since it attacked Ukraine. All have failed.

In the lead-up to the 24 February invasion, the Russians were able to assemble large forces on Ukraine’s borders while maintaining ambiguity about their intentions. For fear of inflaming the situation, Ukraine could do little to prepare, and its allies provided little or nothing in the way of lethal military aid.

These conditions were ideal for Russia’s opening move. A rapid assault on Kyiv was planned to begin with the takeover of Hostomel Airport by elite airborne troops, who would be followed in by a much larger airborne force. Things didn’t go to plan: the assault force was driven off with heavy casualties and the main force turned back. By the time Russian land forces reached Hostomel, the chance of a surprise attack was lost.

Even if the strike had not been a military failure, the political calculation on which it was based turned out to be absolutely wrong. Far from welcoming Russian invaders as liberators, Ukrainians fought back furiously. Even in Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv, Putin found little or no support.

A decapitation strike against Taiwan would face immensely greater difficulties. There would be no possibility of surprise. Taiwan’s air defences have been built up over decades. Reunification has essentially zero support among Taiwanese. And even if the current leadership could somehow be eliminated, local replacements would be equally or more hostile.

The most commonly discussed scenario for forcible reunification is a seaborne invasion. Even before the Ukraine war this idea seemed far-fetched, as a comparison with the Normandy landings in 1944 shows. The Allies had complete air superiority, the narrow English Channel to cross, a wide choice of poorly defended landing sites and a numerical superiority of five to one. The Germans didn’t detect the attack until landing craft were within reach of shore. Even so, the Allies fell far short of their Day 1 objectives.

A Chinese invasion fleet, by contrast, would have to cross the 170 kilometre Taiwan Strait with no chance of avoiding detection, then land on one of a handful of well-protected beaches and face numerically superior defenders.

The Ukraine war drives the lesson home. Before the invasion, Russia’s Black Sea fleet was widely seen as a major strategic asset. When the initial attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, a seaborne attack on Odessa was generally anticipated. Ukraine had only a handful of domestically produced anti-ship missiles, and its own navy had been wiped out on the first day of the war. Russia was in complete command of the sea.

Yet the attack never took place. The sinking of the Moskva in April by a Ukrainian Neptune missile proved that the Russians had been right to hold back. Russian naval forces were inadequate even to defend the famous Snake Island, kilometres from Ukrainian mainland. With Ukraine’s acquisition of increasing numbers of modern missiles, most of the fleet has been withdrawn entirely to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Ukraine repelled the Black Sea fleet with a handful of missiles. Taiwan has hundreds, including American-made Harpoons and domestically produced missiles easily capable of hitting Chinese ships before they leave port. Many are truck-mounted and effectively impossible to destroy even with an intensive air campaign.

All the evidence suggests that China understands this. While it is politically necessary for the government in Beijing to maintain that it has the capacity to reunify China by force, the announced plan for doing so is outlandish. It involves securing landing sites with a handful of craft then sending in the main force on lightly modified civilian ferries. No sensible person could take such a plan seriously.

Much the same points can be made about the idea of an extended bombing campaign. Bombing an enemy into submission has been tried many times since its initial success at Guernica in 1937 and has almost invariably failed.

Moreover, Russia’s massive air force has proved incapable of overcoming Ukrainian air defences, or even driving the much smaller Ukraine air force from the skies. With the exception of the mythical “ghost of Kyiv,” air-to-air combat has been almost non-existent, and crewed aircraft have played at most a marginal role. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese air force, operating under far less favourable conditions, could do any better against Taiwan.

Finally, there is the possibility of a blockade. Like the other options for an assault on Taiwan, this idea has always been problematic. It would be easy enough to close the South China Sea to shipping, but that would be more damaging to China than Taiwan, which could use air transport or develop ports on its eastern coast.

By contrast, Russia’s strategy of blocking Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea looked relatively easy, and for a while it seemed to work. But a combination of military failures (notably the loss of Snake Island) and global condemnation forced it to abandon the idea. The resumption of Ukrainian grain exports (billed as a “goodwill gesture”) has reversed one of the few successes of Russia’s war.

Taiwan is clearly aware of this, and has shifted its focus  from traditional air and naval warfare to a defensive “hedgehog” strategy based primarily on anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile warfare. (Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute has suggested a similar “echidna” strategy for Australia.)

If an invasion of Taiwan is militarily impossible, why is it continually discussed? The answer is that it is in the interests of all the major parties to pretend that an invasion is a real possibility. The Chinese government can’t concede that it lacks the capacity to unify the country by force. The Taiwanese government has every reason to present itself as being threatened by China. And the US military, particularly the navy, has no incentive to downplay threats that demand high levels of defence expenditure.

This continued focus on conflict over Taiwan, and more generally in the South China Sea, increases the risk of accidental escalation, possibly even involving nuclear weapons. Moreover, it distracts attention from arguably more serious threats, most notably the rise of North Korea as a rogue nuclear power under effective Chinese protection. It also undermines possibilities for cooperation, particularly in relation to climate change.

A realistic Western approach to China would accept that it is a powerful adversary in a number of strategic dimensions but a necessary partner in others. The same realism is needed on the Chinese side. Focusing on the chimerical idea of an invasion of Taiwan is counterproductive on both sides.

The post Why an invasion of Taiwan would fail appeared first on Inside Story.

It was late 2002 or early 2003, not long before Howard publicly committed to joining George W. Bush and Tony Blair in waging war on Iraq. Papers by ASPI analysts, including inaugural director Hugh White, had disputed the case for war and opposed Australian involvement.

In a gathering that included government figures, White, a former deputy secretary for strategy in the defence department, found himself under attack for breaking ranks at a time of crisis. Howard, who was present, intervened. “No, no,” he said. “Hugh’s doing exactly his job.”

Two decades later, the notion of an ASPI head taking an adversarial stand against the government of the day and its defence–security establishment — or even allowing alternative voices in its analytical ranks — seems unthinkable.

The Australia Institute’s Allan Behm, another former senior defence official, is among those who think ASPI has strayed far from its original mandate. Howard’s aim, he says, was to create “a freestanding and independent commentator on mainstream national defence issues” that would hold defence officials like him accountable. It would make sure their advice “was subject to appropriate scrutiny by other people who knew as much as we did or indeed knew better than we did.”

White, who is now emeritus professor of strategic studies at ANU, believes a founding principle of the institute — that there should be no “ASPI view” — has also been eroded. Over time, the institute developed a single, hardline view on how Australia should respond to the biggest foreign policy and strategic challenge for a long time, the rise of China.

“Very little of what ASPI has published, except some material on its blog, has seriously contested what you might call the Canberra orthodoxy on those big questions,” White tells me. “And that’s a failure of ASPI to fulfil its true function.”

“Maybe that’s unfair,” he adds after a pause. “Where ASPI has criticised the prevailing orthodoxy and government policy it has criticised it solely on the grounds it hasn’t gone far enough.”

Talk to many of Australia’s most senior figures from the worlds of defence, intelligence and foreign relations, and similar criticism of ASPI comes thick and fast. Even among the toughest, though, the criticism is tempered with praise for Marcus Hellyer and other ASPI analysts who are still doing what used to be the institute’s core business — pulling apart the defence budget, scrutinising the uniformed and civilian defence machine, and assessing the costs and benefits of weapons systems.

Critics chiefly argue that ASPI has talked up the China panic and then proposed only one way to deal with it: more powerful weapons in larger quantities, closer military ties to the United States and an adversarial posture.

“ASPI started doing too many things, then it took on the ‘wolverine’ tendency” — a hawkish attitude to China — “to such a degree that I always knew what it would say about China so it wasn’t worth reading,” says one retired but still influential security figure. (Like some other critics keen to keep communications open, he asked not to be named.) “There was some genuine research which was valuable, but all of it was directed to proving a point. And once a think tank goes down that road and it’s a case for the prosecution, which it was, then it is no longer as influential as it might have been.”

With ASPI seen as echoing rather than questioning the Canberra orthodoxy, outsiders could assume it to be the voice of Australia, and a rather strident one. Those who actually set policy — the diplomats, defence personnel and intelligence analysts with perhaps more nuanced views — are muzzled by official secrecy requirements.

“ASPI has gone into a rather dark direction, where what it is really doing is amplifying a kind of new security ideology, a rather old-fashioned one,” Behm says. “Where it has ended up is in the creation of a network of reinforcing binaries, which in fact distort reality and are built around a premise that China is embarked upon world domination.”

That premise leads logically to very substantial build-ups in military capabilities, says Behm. “The consequence is to marginalise diplomacy and put the big emphasis on the ability to deliver kinetic force.” Worryingly, “it has been, and is being, successful,” he adds.

The former security figure echoes this concern. “There’s a really big story to be written about the military–industrial complex in Australia,” he says. “There are a lot of very powerful companies which have a vested interest in the defence area, and are therefore willing to put money into supporting the sorts of things that ASPI has done. Therefore ASPI has a vested interest in making its stakeholders and donors happy. There’s no equivalent in the foreign policy area.”

According to ASPI, nearly 40 per cent of its $11 million annual budget comes from the Department of Defence and another 25 per cent from various federal departments and agencies. Foreign government agencies in the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Japan chipped in nearly $2 million, or 18 per cent, in 2020–21.

Defence contractors like BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rafael and Thales contributed just $316,000, or 3 per cent of the ASPI budget — small change for them, and a bargain if ASPI does in fact influence spending on weapons deals such as the F-35s, submarines, frigates and armoured vehicles each worth tens of billions of dollars.

John Blaxland, professor of international security and intelligence studies at ANU, is one who disagrees that the sources of funding have called ASPI’s tune. At times, he says, its analysts have directly criticised what donors have been doing.

For an outfit of some thirty analysts and twenty support staff working mostly from open-source material, ASPI has an outsize voice. That’s largely the legacy of its longest-serving executive director, Peter Jennings, another former defence deputy secretary, who ended his ten years leading ASPI earlier this year. That decade roughly matched Xi Jinping’s first two terms as China’s supreme leader.

As Xi moved from the sweet-sounding goal of realising the “China Dream” through his Belt and Road Initiative to displays of military power, Jennings’s warnings became louder. ASPI and Jennings were quick to point to danger from China and ready to provide a quick quote to this effect for press gallery defence and foreign affairs correspondents. As one China specialist puts it, “He was kind of like driving around Canberra with a police siren on every day, yelling, ‘China! China!’”

Sometimes Jennings jumped the gun or ignored contrary evidence. He quickly blamed the crash of the Australian census computer system in 2016 on a Chinese cyberattack, but post-mortems found it was just an overload. When a proposed Chinese-built wharf in Luganville, Vanuatu, was played up as a base for the Chinese navy, the Vanuatu government’s insistence that its non-alignment forbade any foreign military bases was disregarded.

It was almost as if Jennings was leading a sort of backlash against the whole idea of diplomacy. The field of international relations has traditionally been a conservative one, respectful of government and diplomacy, as Rodney Tiffen, emeritus professor of government at the University of Sydney, points out. “Now there is a sort of counter-establishment, or new establishment, against the old Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade approach.”

Jennings declined to be interviewed for this article, saying any comments should be left to his successor. And, to be fair, he wasn’t the only contributor to rising public and government concern about Chinese power and influence. In 2016–17, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and his own national security officials look for evidence of Chinese subversion and influence buying. Tighter laws on foreign lobbying and political funding resulted.

In an interview in 2019 after five years as ASIO director-general, Duncan Lewis warned about the risk of “insidious” espionage and interference. “You wake up one day and find decisions made in our country that are not in the interests of our country,” he said.

The academic Clive Hamilton also added to the fevered atmosphere in two books that painted Australia as already deeply penetrated by Chinese spies and political manipulators. News Corp newspapers provided an eager forum for this kind of “disclosure,” and some Fairfax and ABC investigative journalists named prominent business figures as instruments of the Chinese Communist Party, in one case resulting in a large defamation payout.

As well as deriding DFAT and specialist academics for clinging to hopes that Beijing would converge politically with the West, the hardline China critics attacked business leaders. Their sin was to try to stop trade being further damaged after the $20 billion worth of retaliation for Scott Morrison’s switch to “calling out” and “pushing back” against China in 2020.

That year the business-supported Sydney think tank China Matters lost funding from several federal departments and had its tax-deductible status removed. News Corp tabloids obliged by accusing it of lobbying against Australia’s interests. “Advocacy of ongoing engagement with the PRC does not make one a stooge of the Communist Party of China or an agent of influence,” protested its chair, former Macquarie Bank chief Kevin McCann. But the punishment remains, crippling this alternative voice.

While saying he sometimes disagrees strongly with what comes out of ASPI, the ANU’s Blaxland says its stance on China was probably consistent with a consensus among “insiders” briefed on the “aggressive and industrial scale of Chinese attempts at foreign interference.”

“Successive prime ministers, once they’ve been briefed on it, change their tune,” Blaxland says. “Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, who was the most dovish, and not just Scott Morrison but now Anthony Albanese.”

The big question, says Blaxland, is how you respond to the challenge. “Do you beat the drumbeats of war or do you speak more softly and try and carry a bigger stick, which is what I would recommend. Let’s be careful about what we say.” The answer should not involve muffling or defunding ASPI, “which has done a public service by provoking a necessary and vigorous national debate. Let’s fund more bodies: AsiaLink, the Australia Institute, China Matters.”

Ahead of the recent federal election, Morrison’s defence minister, Peter Dutton, took steps to keep ASPI on the path set by Jennings. New appointments to the ASPI council included former Coalition ministers John Anderson and Michael Keenan, cybersecurity business figure Rachael Falk, and former army officer Catherine McGregor. Then, in this year’s budget, the Coalition granted ASPI $5 million in extra funding over two years to open a branch in Washington, a move that has baffled or infuriated many informed observers.

ASPI is about contributing to the Australian defence debate, not the American one, says Hugh White. “To the extent that ASPI’s role in Washington is simply to convince Americans that everyone on this side of the Pacific agrees with them, which they don’t, then they’re doing both us and the Americans a disservice.”

Adding to the puzzle is the fact that Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies had just set up its own Australia chair, under Charles Edel, a Yale-educated long-time think-tanker who has written extensively on foreign policy and security and has been a guest scholar at Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre. And that’s not to mention that Australia has one of its biggest embassies in Washington. Could not the $5 million have gone to research in places like Tokyo, Singapore, Jakarta and New Delhi?

Dutton also vetoed the new executive director proposed by a search panel of ASPI council members, former defence minister Brendan Nelson and former federal Labor MP Gai Brodtmann. Its preferred candidate was Michael Shoebridge, a former defence official who had long directed ASPI’s research covering defence, strategy and national security — its traditional focus.

Instead Dutton appointed Justin Bassi, chief of staff in the office of Marise Payne, Morrison’s foreign minister. Bassi had earlier been a national security adviser to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and, further back, to attorney-general George Brandis. His career in the public service started in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Office of National Assessments, or ONA (now the larger Office of National Intelligence).

Some think Bassi’s experience rather narrow for the role he has taken on. He has mainly focused on cybersecurity and domestic threats, hasn’t run any organisation larger than a ministerial office or a small ONA section, and hasn’t done anything much in the public domain.

His credentials as a security and China hawk are impeccable, however. On Turnbull’s staff he would have been deeply involved in the investigation of influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. And his job on Payne’s staff, one China-watcher says, was to “ride shotgun,” but until his or Payne’s memoirs are published we may not know for sure.

Payne did take on China during the Covid-19 outbreak with her call for an outside inquiry in April 2020. But three months later, during what is usually an annual bilateral ministerial love-in, she explicitly distanced Australia from harsh attacks on China by her US counterpart, Mike Pompeo.

Justin Bassi declined to speak to me about his plans for ASPI, and didn’t respond to emailed questions. “ASPI doesn’t tend to do interviews on itself, but rather interviews relating to its research on strategic and security issues,” its head of communications, Olivia Nelson, told me.

It is too early to judge how ASPI will fare under Labor, which is yet to reveal whether its bipartisan concurrence with nearly every defence and foreign policy step of the previous government was tactical — in an effort to avoid being wedged — or reflected genuine accord.

If there is pushback against the defence–security mindset, it will come from foreign minister Penny Wong, who has been active on the ground in the near regions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. Signs of a reorientation of China policy include the appointment of former Beijing and Tokyo ambassador Jan Adams as secretary of DFAT, replacing the non-diplomat and part-time army general Kathryn Campbell, who was installed by Scott Morrison in August 2021. Joining Wong’s staff are DFAT officers with intelligence assessment experience, along with Natasha Kassam, a Mandarin speaker who has served in Australia’s Beijing embassy and was until recently a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute.

Wong’s office will have a receptive ear in the prime minister’s office. The new national security adviser, Philippa Brant, is a Mandarin speaker with a China-related doctorate who has worked with Wong; and Anthony Albanese’s new foreign policy adviser, Kathy Klugman, comes from DFAT.

Publicly, Wong is taking a quiet approach. But according to the Australian’s Ben Packham, she told DFAT staff a month ago, “I am asking you to help me bring DFAT back to the centre of the Australian government.” Later, in an interview with former ONA chief Allan Gyngell, national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, she indicated ambitions for a stronger DFAT voice in government. “The levers of state power have not been accorded equal value,” she said.

For the moment, many China hawks remain in place in Canberra. Andrew Shearer is still director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, and accompanied Albanese on his first foreign foray, a meeting of Quad leaders in Tokyo.

And so far, according to Packham, ASPI’s main paymaster is happy with it, and with Bassi. The first foreign trip by the new defence minister, Richard Marles, was to Washington, where he opened the new ASPI office, spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and attended the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a closed-door gathering of official and private-sector ANZUS alliance worshippers. Marles astonished many defence analysts by going beyond the doctrine of “interoperability” to declare Australia’s forces should be “interchangeable” with those of the United States.

Back in Canberra, the new defence minister held a teleconference with twenty-five selected experts in defence and security fields, each given a few minutes to talk about what they saw as the most pressing issue. “No one who spoke at that meeting seriously contested the principles upon which the present government and their predecessors are approaching Australia’s strategic circumstances,” says Hugh White, who was one of the invited, though didn’t himself speak. Another participant said the general theme was the “urgency” of building up the defence forces, and improving equipment and munition procurement.

Nor has the appointment of two notably cautious figures — former Labor foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence force and air force chief Angus Houston — to conduct a review of defence policy inspired hopes of a contest of ideas. From hints given at a recent defence conference in Perth, the pair will recommend more of the same, including more F-35 fighters.

Bassi, meanwhile, has many things to master in his new job. His installation has been deeply unsettling at the institute. Despite being elevated to deputy director, Shoebridge has resigned and circulated a barbed email to his colleagues.

Some see a bifurcation under way at the institute, with its International Cyber Policy Centre, directed by Fergus Hanson, employing more analysts than the traditional defence and national security wing, and eclipsing it somewhat in research output.

Overall, though, Bassi seems happy with the trend in Canberra. In one of his earliest writings as ASPI head, for the Australian Financial Review, he praised the new government for maintaining Coalition policy on Huawei and the 5G network, AUKUS and the Quad, for standing with other small and medium countries against Chinese “coercion,” and for not having “compromised” any foreign policy, national security or defence settings for the sake of dialogue with China. Nor, he wrote, should the bar be lowered for China to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade and investment pact. For ASPI’s new head, the Albanese government has got off to a splendid start. •

The post Diplomacy on the defensive appeared first on Inside Story.

So what went so terribly wrong? What could possibly explain last week’s sudden and abrupt decision to throw the project overboard and substitute a vague promise of embarking on a new build in two year’s time? Defence analysts increasingly believe the only way to make sense of the move is to see it as the first step in the creation of an independent nuclear deterrent.

The key is in the vessels themselves.

It’s evident the new submarine must offer something pretty special, although there’s been no indication, so far, of exactly what this might be. The public statements have been anodyne, simply emphasising the advantages of nuclear propulsion and building on an existing design. Both points are accurate. Conventional submarines regularly have to “snort,” rising to the surface to take in oxygen and expel contaminants, increasing the risk they’ll be located. Nuclear vessels don’t. They can remain on station for months and possess far greater range than normal subs. There’s much more to it, though, than just this.

These new submarines will be nuclear-powered general-purpose attack submarines, or SSNs. The critical issue is capability. The design that’s been abandoned, the so-called “Attack class,” would have delivered (roughly) 5300 tonne vessels with six torpedo tubes capable of firing Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which have a thirty-four-centimetre diameter and range of about 300 kilometres. At 7400 tonnes, however, the Astute class (on which the new design will be based) is much larger and with size comes huge potential. They carry larger, fifty-two-centimetre diameter silos capable of holding Tomahawk Block IV cruise missiles. As well as accurately hitting a small target (something the size of a house) from more than 1600 kilometres away, the route of these weapons can be changed in flight.

Perhaps most crucially, they can also be fitted with nuclear warheads.

The massive range of the weapon dramatically changes the nature of the boat’s capabilities. Instead of being forced to sail close in, where it becomes vulnerable, the vessel stands off, lurking deep in the ocean well away from land. This submarine represents a sudden escalation in Australia’s strategic capability, which perhaps explains why concern has come not only from China but more particularly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They understand how this decision could change the world.

There are, of course, no current plans to acquire nuclear missiles. Indeed, such a capability hasn’t been mentioned in all the speeches and interviews. But that’s not the point.

What’s relevant is that owning this sort of submarine is a game changer. It opens up options Scott Morrison (and, perhaps more particularly, defence minister Peter Dutton) are well aware of, and are probably seeking.

Perhaps this is the vital background to why the French project was abandoned.

Both weapons systems are potent. But the shift can’t be explained away as simply an acknowledgement that Australia’s submarines need to be nuclear-powered. If this was the only requirement, talks would have already begun with the French, who produce highly sophisticated nuclear vessels. Indeed, we’ve been working hard to convert one of their nuclear subs to a conventionally powered boat, so swapping in a new engine block would have been simple.

The only way to make any sense of the move is to understand it as, quite possibly, the most significant strategic decision Canberra has made since the second world war, wedding the country decisively to a US/UK alliance and catapulting Australia into the ranks of potentially nuclear-armed states.

This also explains the initial silence from navy officers who were surprised — or perhaps stunned is a better word — by Morrison’s out-of-the-blue announcement.

At press conferences like last week’s, viewers would normally expect politicians to be surrounded by a phalanx of uniformed commanders, bedecked with medals. But the military was conspicuous by its absence, underlining the implicit change in the strategic role such vessels might have and lending weight to the thesis that the change originated with the politicians rather than the strategists. Similarly, the lack of a plan to immediately commence work doesn’t sound like the way the navy would initiate work on the submarines. In fact, absolutely nothing other than “scoping” — perhaps another submarine analogy — will be done for at least eighteen months.

The other possibility — one that’s almost too depressing to contemplate — is that Morrison was persuaded to overturn decades of careful defence planning by a couple of determined advocates in his own inner circle of advisers. The remarkable secrecy surrounding this announcement suggests the PM’s office was well aware it faced the danger of significant pushback. Perhaps that’s why the deal was presented as very much a fait accompli. The possibility remains that Morrison has just tossed away billions of dollars and years of research, in return for vague promises of future cooperation on subs that will, inevitably, be built overseas.

The best way to understand what’s happened is to go back to the very beginnings of the fraught program that Defence once labelled SEA 1000: the project to build twelve “regionally superior” conventional submarines in Adelaide. Back in 2009 Kevin Rudd promised (with trademark aplomb, if slightly less engagement with possible realities) to build a fleet that would not merely defend the sea lanes but also provide a foundation for industry and kick-start a vibrant technological and scientific future. What was not to like?

It offered a single, neat solution to a multiplicity of different issues — defence, industrial and intellectual. It was about using knowledge to do things better.

But then, just two years later (and before any work on fleshing out ideas had begun) Rudd was gone, replaced by Julia Gillard. She didn’t hesitate to shelve the project and concentrating instead on budget repair. Then it was Tony Abbott’s turn to move the project forward. He chose to adopt a Japanese design only to have his plan aborted when a Liberal senator from South Australia threatened to vote against the government if the build didn’t remain in Adelaide.

Having caved in, Abbott bequeathed the problem to yet another PM, Malcolm Turnbull. By 2016 the prospect of building a dozen world-leading conventional submarines as a cornerstone of the country’s defence had become deeply problematic but the big difference was Turnbull had an energetic “can do” defence minister in Christopher Pyne.

Pyne engaged again with the original problem, never for a moment doubting that he could pull a solution out of the hat and, if it was one nobody else had thought of, well, so much the better. He looked around again, noticed the French, and liked what he saw. Voilà!

Naval Group — once known as Direction des Constructions Navales — had been around, in one form or another, since Cardinal Richelieu had taken command of France’s shipbuilding policy back in 1624. It had produced France’s ultimate deterrent, when Le Redoutable entered service as a ballistic missile submarine in 1971. It made everything from aircraft carriers to drones and, to Pyne, appeared as reliable as a good glass of fine Bordeaux.

Australia had already dated, and discarded, Japanese, German, and Swedish partners. A second-rate French conventional design — not the one that would be perused by Pyne — had already been ruled out as inadequate. Canberra’s traditional allies, London and Washington, only made nuclear submarines and, as these were out of contention, a flirtation with the French began. Perhaps they would be prepared to convert their nuclear boat to a conventional one?

Of course there would be problems because that’s what relationships are like. But “how hard,” Christopher asked, “how hard could it really be to pull out the nuclear power-plant and slip in a conventional engine?” Naval Group was willing.

There was enthusiasm, excitement, on both sides: a preparedness to experiment and, who knows, even the prospect of a massive breakthrough in submarine technology.

But the detail of the abandoned project reveals much more about Canberra’s incapacity to focus on the future than it does about the failure of a huge company to listen, or the simple preference of the French for a long lunch and fine wine. If this breakdown is the result of a culture clash, well, there were certainly two parties at fault.

It’s difficult to determine the exact moment disillusion entered the union.

Perhaps it was because this was never, really, a partnership of equals. Although both sides — the French builders and the Royal Australian Navy — wanted to end up in what was the same place, there were still fundamental theoretical disagreements about exactly where this might be. The rapid speed of technical progress further complicated issues. A pre-2020s design was attempting to anticipate an operating environment some twenty or thirty years into the future, but the constricting envelope of the submarine meant that difficult decisions needed to be made early in the process.

One simple example was propulsion. Obviously the system would involve some form of battery — but which type? The tested and reliable solution was lead-acid, but new advances in lithium–ion technology looked as if they’d soon offer significant advantages. It wouldn’t be simply possible to rip one type out and replace it with the other, though. The boats’ weight, trim and basic stability would be dramatically altered.

Technical arguments raged over this and other issues, including what used to be called torpedo tubes, or the way missiles would be launched from the vessel. Should these be located forward, in the bow, or would upward, as in the original design, and appropriate for firing a ballistic missile? How many and what size of missile would be stowed?

With limited space available choices like these inevitably affected not merely the capacity of magazines but also the number and type of weapons that could be carried. These questions are critical because they went to the task and possible missions the boats could be sent on. It was a given that there would never be enough space, so what should the room that was available be allocated to? Spare missiles, or room for commando teams and food? Extra diesel, or more batteries?

The real problem was there were no “right” answers, simply choices that would result in different outcomes. Fundamental disagreements were inevitable, and festered until minor cultural difficulties had grown to become seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The French team felt the Australians were making impossible demands, but they adopted the new requirements and the cost kept growing. The navy felt Naval Group wasn’t listening or working with them to achieve a positive result. Feelers were put out to SAAB Australia, the company that had built the earlier (and initially trouble-plagued) Collins class submarines and was now working on an interim refit of these vessels.

Details of what was happening were scarce — submariners aren’t called the “silent service” for nothing — but it was obvious big issues were in play. The original contract with the French had been broken into different parts precisely so that either side could opt out at fixed points. The conclusion of the design phase appeared to be the obvious point to make the breach final. As that came and went, however, it appeared as if both sides had reconciled their differences and would move forward together.

That was not to be.

On 13 June this year Morrison was in Cornwall, where he’d been invited as a guest to attend a scheduled meeting of G7 leaders. There, beside the sands, Morrison quietly sealed a deal with British PM Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden to scrap the French team’s efforts. Macron was also in town but had no idea a plot was being hatched behind his back to dump Naval.

Exactly what had happened is still obscure. Naval Group makes the damaging charge that it was string along while secret negotiations began with the British, first, and the United States second. They believe Morrison, prodded by new defence minister Peter Dutton, had already made a firm decision to switch builder long before he finally met French president Emmanuel Macron for private talks in Paris on his way home from Britain.

It was all smiles and warmth as the two leaders reviewed ranks of be-plumed soldiers from the steps of the Elysée Palace. Macron even dispensed with the cold elbow-bump and instead pulled the Australian PM into a traditional Gallic embrace. Incredibly, Morrison seems to have said nothing of his plans to his host. If he’d intended to give any hint to Macron that an irreparable breach was imminent, he failed badly. It’s the secrecy accompanying the Australian manoeuvre — together with the way the sudden switch to build a nuclear submarine was announced without any consultation or pre-warning — that’s more than partly responsible for the almost universal negative worldwide reaction.

What changed in Canberra was the political leadership. Morrison didn’t share Turnbull’s appreciation of the French or nuanced understanding of international issues. He and Dutton brought a new determination to make things happen and to do so in their own way. They looked for allies where they were comfortable; they found them in the Anglo-sphere.

The only other alternative is to assume the government really is completely incompetent and has been sold a pup.

This story really ends where it began — in politics, driven by personality.

Sometimes, huge defence industrial projects — like Australia’s attempt to build the best conventional submarine in the world — simply fail. And sometimes there’s more to the story than first appears. Nobody will, or is even likely to provide the full facts in the middle of all the acrimony. All one is left with are questions — but one, in particular, stands out.

After spending massive sums of money attempting to convert a nuclear submarine into a conventional one, if all that was required was a nuclear powered boat, then why not just revert to the original successful French design? What extra oomph did the British vessel (widely believed to be the frontrunner as replacement) offer to make it worth the angst and furore that’s accompanied the decision to scrap the project? Is it really worth a close to $3 billion write-off, simply so we can pay more to get an Anglo design that will probably be built overseas anyway?

This is especially the case when the British boats have been plagued for years with their own technical problems and also suffered (in the case of their first submarine) similarly huge cost blowouts.

Apportioning blame for what’s happened is as pointless as pontificating on the breakdown of a bad marriage. Perhaps, in the end, each partner just wanted something different and it simply took a while to work it out. Maybe in the end there were so many reasons cascading together, large and small, that dissolution became inevitable.

If so, the problem appears to spring from an attitude that seems to encapsulate Scott Morrison’s entire approach to politics. Change partners swiftly, strike and never look back; whether your aim is to become PM or buy a new submarine. By partnering in AUKUS, Australia’s back in an older, much more familiar relationship — and, what’s more, a threesome! What’s not to like about that? It comes with all the excitement and hope that springs from the sudden blooming of a whirlwind romance.

What could possibly go wrong? •

The post Going nuclear appeared first on Inside Story.

No such meltdown is known to have occurred among the navies that have operated nuclear-powered submarines over the past sixty-five years, not even aboard the USS Thresher, which was lost with all hands during deep-diving tests in 1963. Even so, a lot of public reassurance will be needed following Scott Morrison’s joint announcement with US president Joe Biden and British PM Boris Johnson that nuclear-powered submarines will be built and maintained by the Australian Submarine Corporation, or ASC, at Osborne, just outside Adelaide.

As independent senator Rex Patrick, a former submariner himself, points out, this means “nuclear reactors sitting on hard-stands at Osborne and moored in the Port River.”

American and British nuclear submarines are understood to use highly enriched uranium fuel that is close to bomb grade. With only one small nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights near Sydney, used for making medical and industrial isotopes, Australia will need to have made a big investment in nuclear expertise by the time these submarines arrive.

Morrison’s surprise decision to dump Australia’s commitment to twelve diesel-electric submarines designed by France’s Naval Group in favour of eight US or British nuclear-powered vessels is still being analysed and debated. But one thing is clear. “This is a strategic decision, not a commercial one,” says Steve Ludlam, a former managing director of ASC and, before that, head of Rolls-Royce’s program of modernising Britain’s submarines.

No one is hiding the fact that the new Australian–UK–US technology agreement, AUKUS — which also includes cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other frontier science — is about facing up to China, although none of the three leaders mentioned the fact at this week’s announcement.

“If there was any doubt about what Australia would do in an armed conflict between the US and China over Taiwan or the South China Sea, that’s now gone,” Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on Friday. “The US doesn’t provide you with the crown jewels of its military technology if you are not going to use them when it calls for help.”

But we would have been expected to sign up anyway. It is a popular misconception that the navy needs these nuclear submarines to help out in Northeast Asia. Its existing Collins-class boats, and the Oberon-class before them, have operated in that region. Silent conventional submarines like the Collins-class and India’s and Vietnam’s Russian Kilo-class are said to have successfully stalked and “sunk” US nuclear submarines and major surface ships in exercises.

As Canberra strategist Hugh White points out, for the money likely to be spent on the nuclear submarines — exceeding the $90 billion price tag on the twelve French vessels — the navy could have got twenty-four smaller conventional submarines suited to defence of Australia. The twenty-four ultra-quiet subs could also be deployed further afield with replenishment from bases like Singapore, Guam or Japan’s Sasebo.

The latest British and US nuclear submarines benefit from pump-jet propulsion rather than propellers, quieter engines and battery power for lurking, though, and are big enough and powerful enough to carry autonomous underwater vehicles and other new weapons.

Regardless of the technical issues, Thursday’s announcement leaves Scott Morrison with several fires to put out.

China’s reaction to the agreement so far uses routine language to accuse the AUKUS allies of a “cold war mentality.” As the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor has observed, Beijing must be aware its own defence build-up has helped create this level of alarm.

Trade issues might anyway be more pressing for the Chinese. The night before the AUKUS announcement, the Chinese commerce ministry fired another salvo in the US–China strategic contest by lodging a formal application to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a free-trade deal that links eleven countries including Australia. Although the timing appears entirely coincidental, the request painted the United States and its allies as preoccupied with military matters.

Pushed by George W. Bush’s administration, the original TPP was pursued by Barack Obama and negotiated to signature in 2016 by the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam. Then, after the Republicans stalled ratification in the US Senate, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2017. Malcolm Turnbull and Japan’s Shinzo Abe got the remaining parties to hang in, hoping for a change of mind in Washington. Biden says the agreement will need to be modified for this to happen.

The Chinese application sits oddly with Xi Jinping’s move back to promoting state-owned enterprises, subsidising selected industries, and separating off China’s internet and cloud storage — each of which would breach the terms of the TPP. But it will throw attention back on Washington’s position when Morrison and Japan’s Yoshihide Suga meet Biden on 24 September.

A more immediate challenge is the rift with France. Morrison has said he started thinking about the switch to nuclear submarines eighteen months ago. It wasn’t until June this year that he broached the idea with Biden — who has final say over transfers of the US nuclear-propulsion technology previously shared only with Britain — at his meeting with the US president and Johnson on the fringes of the G7 meeting. Morrison went on to Paris for an effusive meeting with Emmanuel Macron at which he made no mention of the impending decision. Eventually — about ten hours before the announcement, and after the first leaks by Morrison’s office started appearing in the media — defence minister Peter Dutton notified his French counterpart.

The rift throws into doubt the strategic spin-off from the cancelled submarine contract. France controls vast swathes of the Pacific through its territories’ economic exclusion zones, and French forces add to the West’s array of power in the Indo-Pacific. The political future of New Caledonia and French Polynesia are consequently being closely watched.

The French ambassador to Canberra, Jean-Pierre Thebault — recalled to Paris this week, along with his counterpart in Washington, over what the French foreign minister called “a stab in the back” — has revealed that France had offered Australia the nuclear version of its submarine. The agreed Shortfin Barracuda was actually a diesel-electric version of the Barracuda nuclear attack submarine, the first of which is now operating.

Thebault told the Sydney Morning Herald that his government had asked “at the very high level” whether Australia would be interested in nuclear-powered submarines and had “received no answer.” France had “a high level of expertise in nuclear reactors,” he pointed out. Seventy per cent of the country’s electricity is generated by nuclear plants.

Though closer, at 5000 tonnes, to the size originally sought by the Australian navy, the nuclear Barracuda had three disadvantages. It would not directly contribute to closer strategic engagement with the United States, symbolised by being entrusted with America’s nuclear-propulsion knowledge, nor would it help Boris Johnson’s vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain” beloved of Anglophiles in Coalition circles like Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer. And, unlike the American and British submarines, whose highly enriched fuel is believed to last the lifetime of the submarines, the French systems are believed to use less-enriched fuel that needs to be replaced every ten years. And the French submarines would not be attached to a nuclear umbrella.

That brings us to the domestic promises Scott Morrison has made about the new submarines: that they will be built in Adelaide, that no civil nuclear power industry needs to be developed to support them, and that the submarines don’t breach the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed by Australia, which bars the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Already the first promise is being watered down. The local content requirement for the submarines now seems to be 40 per cent — no doubt to the fury of Naval Group, which was being held to 60 per cent for the Shortfin Barracuda. Canberra briefings are also testing the idea of building the first one or two lead submarines in the United States or Britain to speed up the program. Meanwhile, about one hundred Australian workers who moved their families to France, and numerous Naval Group staff and contractors living in Adelaide, face a long gap before a new submarine program starts.

Steve Ludlam, the former ASC chief, has no doubt the Osborne yard could handle construction of either of the two most likely models of the Shortfin Barracuda, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest “Block V” version is 10,200 tonnes and 140 metres long, or Britain’s Astute-class, which is about 7000 tonnes and ninety-seven metres long.

An American naval expert told me that the hull section, which contains the highly secret reactor plant, could be shipped to Adelaide for assembly with the other hull sections. This is already done between the two shipyards building the Virginia-class for the US navy. “Every Virginia-class boat has been built this way, so this approach is well established,” the expert said.

Most Canberra reports suggest the Virginia-class will be the choice of the panel Morrison has set up to advise within eighteen months. But the American naval expert thinks the Astute-class will be favoured. The British boat is about the same length as the Barracuda and, importantly for the Australian navy, has fewer crew requirements — ninety-eight officers and sailors against 135 — than the Virginia-class.

Those who know about these things are cagey about the fuel endurance of the two submarines. Choosing the Barracuda would have required Australia either to build its own uranium enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication plants or to rely on French sources. But the expert said that a US or British design wouldn’t necessarily have fuel rods installed for the submarine’s lifetime.

Ludlam says the naval nuclear capability could be developed without a civilian industry, but that Australia already had expertise in the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which runs Lucas Heights and manages nuclear waste. “We are capable of doing it,” he says. “We haven’t got the same experience as the UK or US, but that’s the value of the partnership.”

The American expert agrees, while observing that it might make the naval program more expensive and pointing out that the US navy’s nuclear-propulsion program is run separately from the nuclear power industry.

But there are those who think a civil nuclear industry will follow, despite Morrison’s promise. “On the issue of nuclear power plants, don’t believe him,” Giles Parkinson, editor of Renew Economy, wrote on Friday. He points out that a poll by the Australian found that forty-eight of the Coalition’s 112 federal MPs and senators support nuclear energy.

“The nuclear lobby will say it is bizarre that Australia could be the only country in the world planning to sustain a nuclear-powered submarine fleet without a civil nuclear industry,” says Parkinson, noting that the Minerals Council of Australia has declared this to be “an incredible opportunity for Australia’s economy — not only will we develop the skills and infrastructure to support this naval technology, but it connects us to the growing global nuclear power industry and its supply chains.”

All these messy details can be pushed into the eighteen-month study behind closed doors, however, along with the costing. Construction in the United States or Britain would probably get eight boats for about US$40 billion (A$55 billion unless China undermines the Australian dollar by buying iron ore elsewhere), though the figure will be much higher if they’re built here.

And on Morrison’s third promise, Washington officials are saying the nuclear-propulsion transfer comes with an insistence the submarines will never carry nuclear weapons. Putting nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard a submarine, even a conventional one as Israel does, would be the most attainable delivery system for Australia. That now seems ruled out.

The doubts among Australia’s hard realists will no doubt remain: would the Americans really risk a Chinese nuclear strike for us?

Morrison, meanwhile, will be counting on his political fortunes being boosted by what his officials are describing in journalists’ briefings as a pivotal strategic decision to protect Australia. He might be hoping to get the same electoral bounce that some believe Robert Menzies received in 1963, recovering from his near defeat in 1961, after he announced the acquisition of the F-111 bomber. By the time the F-111s went into service in 1973 the threat from Indonesian president Sukarno’s fevered anti-Western posture had disappeared, and the aircraft never saw action.

The new submarines won’t start operating until about 2040 — well after the 2035 date Xi Jinping seems to have set for his own retirement, aged eighty-two, after he has settled the status of Taiwan and other outstanding issues. •

The post Signing up appeared first on Inside Story.

The 5 August ruling by Federal Court judge Richard White, sitting as a presidential member of the AAT, stripped away the prime minister’s veil of secrecy around proceedings of the national cabinet, in which Morrison meets state and territory leaders to discuss pandemic strategy.

The judge upheld Patrick’s appeal against the refusal of the prime minister’s department to disclose the national cabinet’s minutes, and tore into its argument that the group met as a subcommittee of federal cabinet and was therefore subject to the twenty-year secrecy rule.

The government was given twenty-eight days to appeal before the judge’s decision takes effect. But any appeal must be based on points of law, and the options seem narrow. Patrick says he is ready to fight for the documents in the Federal Court and the High Court if necessary. “If they want to push on with it, there’s no harm from my side,” he tells me.

In fact, the crossbench senator is basking in the attention his secrecy-busting has attracted, and that’s invaluable for a first-term independent facing election within ten months. “People who are really engaged in politics and perhaps law and transparency issues are very interested in the fact of the judgement, the nature of the decision,” says Patrick. “Everyone else just says good on Rex for beating up Scott.”

The appeal is the latest in a dozen wins on freedom of information cases Patrick has taken to the AAT, the federal information commissioner and appeals bodies back in his home state of South Australia.

Transparency has been his campaign theme since taking his old boss Nick Xenophon’s place in the Senate in November 2017, following Xenophon’s resignation to contest the South Australian election, unsuccessfully as it turned out. On his first day as senator, Patrick sought details of water buy-backs in the Murray–Darling basin, eliciting the independent valuations that eventually showed that the federal government had paid vastly excessive prices to private interests for the water.

Some 200 FOI requests and pointed questioning of public servants in Senate estimates have made Patrick something of a terror for the government and bureaucracy. Xenophon dubbed him “Inspector Rex,” after the tenacious German shepherd in the beloved Austrian and Italian police series.

On one occasion, Patrick was in the AAT arguing against seven lawyers for the Commonwealth and a company. He has spent approaching $15,000 of his own funds in pursuing FOI applications, and in many cases he has also been able to make gratis public interest claims as a senator. He gets good advice: in the national cabinet case, the Canberra historian and journalist Philip Dorling found a 1940s precedent that undercut the argument of Morrison’s department head, Phil Gaetjens.

A particular focus has been the huge investment in naval shipbuilding in his home state, which started under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Patrick has exposed the escalating prices, technical risks and slipping delivery times of the now $90 billion future submarine and $45 billion future frigate builds. Coming from a background in the navy and the defence industry, he carries authority. “When I read him, I think: this bloke does know what he’s talking about,” says Haydon Manning, an adjunct professor of politics at Adelaide’s Flinders University.

Patrick’s new target is the Howard government’s policymaking on the Timor Sea maritime boundary with Timor-Leste, just as the new nation was emerging from a United Nations interregnum following the end of Indonesia’s occupation in 1999.

Those maritime discussions were a prelude to the bugging of Timor-Leste government offices in Dili by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 2004 during fraught boundary negotiations. Distinguished Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery and a former ASIS officer named only as Witness K are on trial over alleged disclosure of the operation.

Patrick told the Senate last week that the operation was probably illegal and therefore improperly authorised by then foreign minister Alexander Downer for the benefit of Australia’s Woodside Petroleum, which led a consortium with rights to the big Greater Sunrise natural gas deposit straddling the contested sea border. Noting that former attorney-general George Brandis stalled the prosecutions of Collaery and Witness K for three years, Patrick questions his successor Christian Porter’s judgement in letting them proceed.

Again, the fact that he speaks as someone who was once immersed in the armed forces, and almost certainly in intelligence-gathering, strengthens his point that this was an egregious misuse of ASIS.

Having migrated with his parents from New Zealand, Rex Patrick grew up in the coastal South Australian town of Whyalla, where he joined the navy aged sixteen. Once his talents were spotted, he was trained as an electronics engineer, running radar, sonar and communications systems. His sea service during the 1980s was mostly on the Oberon-class submarines, legendary for snooping on naval bases in places like Vladivostok and Shanghai. Patrick is guarded about the details. “Everyone in submarines is cleared to top secret, and will find themselves at some stage conducting highly classified surveillance and intelligence operations,” he says.

After eleven years he left for a specialist sonar company, working with navies around the world, and then set up his own sonar advisory company. A decade ago, his writings for defence industry journals about the looming replacement of the Australian navy’s present Collins-class submarines led to him advising former Coalition defence spokesperson David Johnston.

But he declined an offer to join Johnston’s staff when the Liberal MP became defence minister in 2013. Unhappy that the major parties approached all issues from a partisan viewpoint, he was attracted by Xenophon’s different “algorithm” when someone asked him to take up an issue: “If it was right and he could do something about it, he would take it on.”

Patrick shut down his company and started working in Xenophon’s Senate office. But he didn’t anticipate filling Xenophon’s seat. “I’m an accidental senator — I never ever sought a pathway to entering politics,” he says. “I got here by seeing the government embarking on the very costly, very risky future submarine project.”

He clearly thinks Canberra would have been better sticking to an existing submarine like the German Type 214. “They are superb submarines, and they will do 90 per cent of what the Australian navy requires,” he said. “Unfortunately, when you try for the other 10 per cent, that’s when you triple the price and quadruple the risk.”

Now the navy waits on innovative French-designed vessels, adapted from a nuclear-powered model, that will arrive ten years later than originally envisaged. In the meantime, the lives of the Collins-class submarines will be extended at a cost of $10 billion.

Patrick’s career also informs his approach to issues like the ASIS operation in Dili. “I came from a submarine background, where submarines conduct intelligence operations, and that happens all the time between countries,” he says. “Nations keep an eye on their neighbours and their capabilities and I have no objection to that. I also have no objection to intelligence services looking out for us.”

But this was different, he says. “This was a negotiation that in law was supposed to be in good faith. That’s what we signed up to, with one of the poorest nations on earth. Ultimately that operation harmed our relationship with East Timor. I’ve been up there. I’ve seen the Chinese building freeways on the southern plateau, power lines, ports. I can’t help but think that the Chinese have gained a strategic foothold based on Australia treating them in an awful way.”

From his maiden speech onwards, Patrick has pressed for parliament’s intelligence and security committee to have the same powers of investigation over intelligence services as the equivalent committees in the United States Congress. Australia’s Intelligence Services Act of 2001 created the committee but barred it from looking into any past, present or proposed operations.

Following up on Patrick’s statement last week on the Collaery–Witness K prosecutions, Labor senator Katy Gallagher says a Labor government would authorise an inquiry into the Dili operation, first amending the Intelligence Services Act to allow it. Patrick will believe it when he sees it, as Labor has voted against his similar amendments on six occasions.

Clinton Fernandes, a UNSW professor of international relations who has also battled intelligence secrecy with FOI appeals, gives Patrick full marks for persistence. “There are others like [MP] Andrew Wilkie and [senator] Nick McKim and so on, but in terms of consistency and banging the drum as often as he can, it’s Rex Patrick,” Fernandes says, adding that “his opposition is not to the intelligence system as a whole, or even part, but that specific problem that’s not able to be examined.”

Patrick says the amendment would be a crucial safeguard. “The intelligence services have greatly increased powers since the establishment of that committee, powers exercised in secret, and generally involving impositions on people’s liberties and rights to privacy. And my view is you have to have the correct checks and balances in place.”

His attitude brought him into public dispute with a key figure behind those greater security powers. After the Australian Federal Police raids on the ABC’s Sydney headquarters and the Canberra journalist Annika Smethurst in 2019, Patrick said then home affairs minister Peter Dutton and department secretary Mike Pezzullo “clearly hate media scrutiny” and had a double standard about leaks. Pezzullo rang Patrick and asked him to “reconsider” his remarks. Patrick took this as threatening and pushed back. Pezzullo was given a pro forma rebuke by Dutton.

Federal governments have had Senate majorities for only thirty months over the past forty years, and Australia probably accepts the virtues of the upper house’s plural voices, especially as that last spell of government control, in 2005–07, led to John Howard’s overreaching with his WorkChoices legislation.

As well as scrutinising and proposing amendments to legislation, the Senate and its committees have an important oversight role, says Patrick. “The most important thing about Senate estimates is not what gets revealed there, but that the people who are working in government buildings who are making decisions and spending taxpayers’ money must always be thinking: what or how will I answer questions about what I’m doing at the next estimates?”

For the crossbenchers who put the swing factor into this oversight, a Senate career is often just six years or less. The Greens have their niche vote, and some earlier splinters from the main parties, like the Democratic Labor Party and the Australian Democrats, had a longer span. For others, like Jacqui Lambie and Pauline Hanson, longevity can depend on personal projection. That’s why Patrick cut himself loose from the Centre Alliance with the aim of boosting his own name recognition.

South Australian voters tend to kindness towards politicians in the middle. Flinders University’s Manning says they liked the late Janine Haines’s “plague on both your houses” approach when she led the Australian Democrats. They backed Steele Hall when he split from the old Liberal Country League to form his Liberal Movement, and later returned to the Liberal Party. Local Labor leaders like Don Dunstan and John Bannon were hardly blue-collar. So Xenophon’s group fitted well into that moderate, centrist tendency.

Even so, Manning thinks Patrick may struggle for re-election. To win a slot, he will need 14 per cent or slightly more of the vote. “He might get 5 per cent but where’s he going to get the preference help?” says Manning.

“The sad reality is you can be as smart as anything as a senator, you can be really good on policy, but in the end do most voters get what you’re going on about?” says Manning. “I’m not so sure.” Xenophon carefully based his media “stunts” on policy issues he knew would resonate broadly, like poker machines, he says. “Do most voters really ponder about the national cabinet and its machinations? Though it’s really important and interesting, I did wonder about Rex on that one.”

Patrick says he is getting a steady flow of small campaign donations. He has also been careful, he says, to balance his efforts with bread-and-butter issues like JobKeeper and tax compliance. His strong stand against China’s treatment of its Uighur minority has attracted support, even though the state’s wine industry has suffered for Canberra’s frosty relations with Beijing.

“I would like to be re-elected,” says Patrick. “I like what I do, and I think I do reasonably well as a single person, with a very good team working behind me. But if I got to the election and was unsuccessful, I would just move on to the next stage of my life without batting an eyelid.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The accidental senator appeared first on Inside Story.

The odds of defence being a stepping stone to greater things are not high. “For the overwhelming majority of defence ministers over the last fifty years, it’s been a graveyard of political ambitions,” says ANU’s Hugh White, the gadfly of Australian strategists. “We’ve had a very long tradition of defence ministers being ineffective, and looking ineffective. Most defence ministers find it very hard to give the impression, to the public, to their colleagues, that they’re actually in charge of their portfolio. It’s rather that their portfolio is running them.”

On the other hand, Dutton is the most politically powerful figure to take on the portfolio since Labor’s Kim Beazley. “People speak of Dutton as a future prime minister,” acknowledges White, “and certainly he’s the first defence minister since Beazley that people speak of in those terms.”

Dutton’s most visible moves in the portfolio have been culture-war dog whistles. He reprimanded the navy for allowing a female twerking troupe to do a sort of “hello sailor” routine at the commissioning of its new supply ship. He banned anti-homophobia morning teas and rainbow-coloured clothing, saying, “We are not pursuing a woke agenda.” It’s par for the course from the man who voted against marriage equality and boycotted parliament during Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations.

But the new minister has also sent signals to two defence communities. Against the background of army inspector-general justice Paul Brereton’s report on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, he assured serving soldiers that the government “has got your backs” and pledged to prevent the sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, who helped uncover the alleged crimes, from getting further defence contracts. Ignoring Brereton’s advice and countermanding general Angus Campbell, the defence force chief, he allowed some 3000 present and former special forces personnel not accused of war crimes to retain their Meritorious Unit Citations.

Then he let it be known he was keeping to a minimum any secondments from the Department of Defence to his ministerial staff, instead bringing over trusted aides from Home Affairs. He wanted to keep out “skewed” advice from the department, Dutton told his and Morrison’s favourite interlocutor, 2GB radio host Ray Hadley. “I want to make sure that we’re looking at it objectively, in particular around some of the projects where there is a lot of money involved,” he said. “Decisions have been made in some cases I don’t think should’ve been made, or the contracting is inadequate.”

Thus, from the start, Dutton put himself at war, or at least in heightened hostilities, with both his department and his service chiefs.

White, who served on Kim Beazley’s ministerial staff before moving to a senior role in Defence, says it isn’t unusual for defence ministers to bring in outsiders for advice and employ just one or two departmental staff to navigate the huge defence bureaucracy. But it’s another indicator, he adds, that Dutton is “potentially the most demanding and potentially the most reform-oriented minister they’ve had in a very long time.”

John Blaxland, a former army intelligence officer and now ANU war historian, thinks Dutton’s early statements were carefully thought out. “He has been thinking about national security issues for quite some time, and he is iconoclastic. He’s not accepting the accepted wisdom as being good enough for the future. He’s challenging everything. He’s making a lot of people squirm. He’s making life quite difficult for people inside. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s causing considerable discomfort.”

So what is he challenging? “Querying the basis of decisions, from what I understand are first principles, challenging why we’ve done things the way we have,” says Blaxland. “And the thing is he doesn’t have any skin in the game. They’re not his decisions. And if anything, he’s quite happy to find things that might be a little untidy for some of his potential political competitors.”

Dutton has come to the job “with pretty good preparation,” agrees White, noting that Home Affairs has grown second only to Defence among federal departments in size and complexity. In fact, the two departments have come to overlap, with shared concerns about cyber and military technology security.

“The other thing is that Dutton comes to the job at an interesting time,” says White, “when people are talking up Australia’s strategic challenges in a way they haven’t done in your and my professional lifetimes. There was all the stuff about 9/11 and the war on terror, but nobody ever envisaged that was going to impose really high-order demands on the ADF. Now we’ve had Morrison, announcing the defence strategic update this time last year, saying the situation today resembles the late 1930s.”

This means the job of defence minister feels more serious at the moment, White adds. “I think that’s the way he wants it. He obviously wanted the job. And it is interesting to ask why he wanted it, what he thinks he can do with it. I believe he thinks Defence is in very bad shape, and not just bad shape administratively but bad shape strategically. That is, they don’t really know what they’re on about. They don’t just not know how to get things done, they don’t know what they’re trying to do.”

To a large extent, though, Dutton must work with major decisions already made: the $90 billion construction of French-designed Shortfin Barracuda submarines, the $35 billion build of nine frigates the size of second world war cruisers, the final delivery of the $17 billion worth of F-35 strike fighters.

Still to come is a decision on armoured fighting vehicles for the army, an order valued at up to $29 billion. As part of that, the government has just ordered a replacement of the army’s current force of seventy-five Abrams tanks with a new model, at a cost of some $1 billion. This suggests Dutton has gone with proponents of a “balanced” force structure, ready to cope with all kinds of conflict — not on its own, it’s hoped — rather than those favouring more “asymmetrical” forces to counter foreseeable threats. Assets like tanks would be kept for the Army Reserve, if at all.

With the first of the new submarines at least twelve years away, Dutton tackled the emerging capability gap with a $10 billion program to refit the navy’s six existing Collins-class submarines. A small Defence team has been assigned to look at “plan B” alternatives from Germany or Sweden in case the French design proves impossible, but so far this seems a bargaining tactic. “He’s holding the French feet to the fire,” says Blaxland. “They’re not at all comfortable with what he’s doing to them. He’s talking up alternative options to apply pressure on the French to deliver, on time and as close to the budget as possible.”

In terms of beefing up military capability in the shorter term, though, the two notable measures were announced by Morrison before Dutton moved into Defence: the plan to equip the navy and air force with longer-range missiles and establish a “sovereign” missile factory, and the expansion of the Northern Territory facilities to host the annual US Marine Corps training contingents.

If he wants to pursue more radical reform, both in force structure and force expansion, Dutton is seen as having the edge on Morrison, who has few developed views on strategic affairs and is wary about taking Dutton on.

But is Dutton up to the intellectual task? Hugh White says the “good news” is Dutton’s inclination to think outside the box. “The bad news is that I think his judgement looks likely to be extremely bad on the really key strategic questions about what exactly Australia should be doing to address the rise of China. He does seem to be beholden to the idea surprisingly common around Canberra that it’s worth going to war with China to prevent China becoming the dominant power in East Asia.”

Blaxland says much “skulduggery” is going on behind the scenes, and the two-week delay in announcing a Foreign Affairs replacement suggests that’s the case. This week we learned that Kathryn Campbell, secretary of Social Services and a major-general in the Army Reserve, will be the new head. The appointment ended one line of speculation: that Defence’s current secretary, Greg Moriarty, could be moved to Foreign Affairs, opening up that position for Dutton’s secretary at Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo. A former Defence employee with a dark view of world affairs, Pezzullo wrote the 2009 defence white paper that urged the doubling of the navy’s submarine force, which has since been adopted.

But Pezzullo might still have an avenue if and when the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, retires. Moriarty might be persuaded to move into that job, or Pezzullo could take it — “In which case he will be a good ally for Dutton,” says Blaxland.

Campbell’s appointment meanwhile extends a security-minded view across Canberra, and might worry those calling for more investment in diplomacy and aid. She has a technical background, and her Army Reserve specialisation was in signals. Apart from a short assignment in the Middle East as deputy commander of Australia’s task force in 2016, her career seems to have included no foreign postings.

If he does eventually get Pezzullo, Dutton will have a departmental head likely to encourage his questioning of the status quo. “He may well feel he’d really prefer to have his trusted old hand Mike Pezzullo by his side,” says Blaxland.

But Moriarty is said to be keen to stay in the job, and Blaxland sees advantages for Dutton in that. “In Greg Moriarty he’s got an extremely capable manager of the defence business,” Blaxland says, noting Moriarty’s experience as ambassador to Iran and Indonesia and as peacemaking envoy in Bougainville and the Solomons. “He has a pretty sophisticated understanding of where Australia fits in the great power equation.”

Moriarty is also “adept at playing the bureaucratic game,” says Blaxland. “My sense is that Greg Moriarty will capitalise on Dutton’s dynamism and drive, and also moderate possible excesses, if Dutton allows him to moderate them. It depends on whether Dutton trusts him enough.”

Hugh White also returns to the question of judgement and balance. “It’s easy to see that Dutton is in some ways a more powerful figure, a more formidable figure than almost any other of his cabinet colleagues,” he says, “but we don’t really have any idea of how bright he is, how effective he is.”

Although Home Affairs is an “administrative behemoth,” White goes on, “it’s hard to point out an actual policy question on which Dutton has done anything other than hang tough. And hanging tough has its place but it’s not the whole of good policy. Dutton has set himself up for a test, and I think it’s perfectly likely — notwithstanding he’s more formidable than any of his predecessors for a very long time — he will stick in the portfolio for a while, and in the end he will leave with the place still in a shambles.”

But perhaps Dutton will be hoping to move onwards and upwards before that becomes a possibility.

“Once upon a time Defence used to be a bit of a political backwater, but it’s becoming more and more a pivotal agency on the national stage,” says Blaxland. “We’ve seen that not just with the Covid vaccine rollout and taskforce, but with the prospects of great power conflict looming, increased investment in the defence industry, additional expansion and muscling up of the defence force. Dutton is seeing this as a strong base for potential future ambitions.” •

The post The best form of defence? appeared first on Inside Story.

The story begins with the Rizhao-based Landbridge Group’s successful bid for a ninety-nine-year lease of the Port of Darwin in 2015, which prompted soul-searching in Canberra about how best to protect strategic assets from the large sums of Chinese cash sloshing around international markets. The result was a set of new laws and procedures to regulate investments by companies owned or controlled by foreign governments (China is never mentioned by name). And those laws came with what seemed like a minor footnote — an enforceable public register for lobbyists — that began throwing fresh light on Australia’s underregulated lobbying industry.

Since 10 December 2018, anyone lobbying Australian officials on behalf of a foreign government or a company controlled by a foreign government — and almost all Chinese companies are likely to fall into that second category — must sign up to the Transparency Register. Failure to fill out the form comes at a significant price: violations of the 2018 Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act can lead to prison terms of up to five years, depending on the seriousness of the omission. Landbridge’s high-profile Australian consultant, former trade minister Andrew Robb, reportedly ended his association with the Chinese company during the new legislation’s grace period.

Because the legislation applies only to what it calls “foreign principals,” the Transparency Register illuminates a very narrow subsection of the lobbying industry. Lobbyists representing Australian businesses or foreign companies that aren’t government owned or controlled are still free to ply their trade without having to worry too much about the separate but much weaker Australian Government Lobbyist Register, which was established under the 2008 Lobbying Code of Conduct.

Even so, the Transparency Register represents progress for a country that has a comparatively weak record of transparency — a record compounded by the inadequacies of Australia’s freedom of information laws and the absence of rules to prevent officials from moving freely between government and private enterprise. By contrast, the US Lobbying Disclosure Act forces all lobbyists to sign up to a public register or face a fine or a jail sentence of up to five years.

But for those with the time and inclination, a delve into the Transparency Register does offer real insights into how “foreign principals” target government ministers and MPs. It tells us, for example, that former foreign minister Alexander Downer is registered as a lobbyist on behalf of the British overseas territory of Gibraltar now that Britain has taken back control of trade negotiations from Brussels. It also tells us that Sanlaan, the firm of Howard government minister Santo Santoro, has engaged in “general political lobbying” and “parliamentary lobbying” for the Port of Brisbane, partly owned by a Canadian superannuation fund backed by the provincial government of Québec, and has also worked for Beijing Jingneng Clean Energy (Australia) and other Chinese renewable energy companies.

Other celebrity lobbying figures on the Transparency Register include one Anthony John Abbott, who declares that he is an “unpaid adviser to the UK Board of Trade” with the role of “advocat[ing] for free and fair trade, especially trade with the UK and its allies.” In other words, the former PM will be lobbying his former colleagues in Australia to help bring about a trade deal that British prime minister Boris Johnson desperately needs as part of his post-Brexit narrative.

Abbott’s decision to register is controversial because he once described calls for him to sign up as a result of a gig speaking to foreign conservative leaders as “absurd.” He also warned journalists “to rethink the making of such misplaced and impertinent requests in the future.”

Kevin Rudd, another former prime minister, has made his dissatisfaction with the law’s lack of clarity publicly known via an essay in his Transparency Register entry describing the uncertainty about whether he needed to register. Rudd lists all the government-owned foreign media outlets he has appeared on — from the BBC to the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation and Radio New Zealand — because they are state-owned and, he argues mischievously, may fall within the law’s current wording. He says that requiring a former prime minister to list his media appearances, as well as unpaid speeches to the European Parliament and the National University of Singapore, amounts to an absurd interpretation of the law, albeit one that he has been forced to accept.

More importantly, though, while the Transparency Register may reveal that Kevin Rudd isn’t above appearing on Canada’s TVOntario, the information he provided is still insufficient to allow the public to join the dots. We may know that Alexander Downer is lobbying for the Gibraltarians, but we don’t know whom he has spoken to and the matters being discussed. That information is key for anyone trying to establish a connection between lobbying efforts and government decisions. What’s more, the Transparency Register offers no insight into the activities of companies that aren’t owned or controlled by foreign states.

What these cases highlight is that Australia’s transparency system doesn’t stand up well internationally. If you type the name of Chinese technology giant Huawei into the search engine of Ireland’s lobbying register, for example, you will find a list of meetings held by the company and an explanation of the matters discussed. On 17 January, Huawei disclosed that it had met Heather Humphreys, an Irish minister, to discuss “the investment of €70 million in Irish R&D and the creation of 100 new jobs.” That’s marketing spin, to be sure, but when added to previous entries it’s clear Huawei was lobbying to play a part in the country’s rollout of new 5G technology. We also know that the company was in touch with the government via PR and lobbying firms, whose telephone numbers and email addresses the Irish register helpfully includes.

That’s not to say that Ireland’s transparency regime has all been smooth sailing. I was working in Europe when the register took effect, and an Irish lobbyist told me that when he saw a local politician at the supermarket at the weekend he would turn the other way to avoid having to spend his Monday morning filling out disclosure forms. What’s more, the administrative burden of such transparency requirements tends to fall more heavily on small community groups. Extensive and probably time-consuming entries in the register tell us, for instance, that the charitable Irish Guard Dogs for the Blind organisation has been in regular contact with the Irish government.

Australia’s Transparency Register tells us, for example, that between March and December 2019 former defence minister Brendan Nelson took on a role with the Thales Group, the publicly listed, Paris-based company that provides technology for military, aerospace and transport projects. But whom did Nelson speak to on behalf of Thales? And what did they discuss? The register doesn’t offer any answers and the arrangement was only picked up because of the French state’s 25 per cent ownership of Thales.

The parallel Lobbyist Register, which lists third parties but not direct contact from company managers, doesn’t mention either Thales or Brendan Nelson. As for the network of state-based transparency registers, Thales only appears in New South Wales, where it’s represented by a firm listed as Lyndon George, co-owned by a former senior adviser to John Howard, Hellen Georgopoulos. None of this information sheds light on what Thales got out of its relationship with Nelson and how his work may have affected government.

This leaves freedom of information requests as the only fallback, and here the frustrations multiply. Several years ago, I heard that US software company Oracle had met with officials at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to brief them on privacy concerns surrounding Google. We know that Oracle had been fighting the search giant in a US court for over a decade, but what was said in those meetings? Neither the ACCC nor the OAIC revealed whom they spoke to as part of their investigations, and Oracle wasn’t talking either.

Even if the foreign-lobbying laws had applied back in 2017, they wouldn’t have picked up these meetings because Oracle isn’t owned or controlled by a foreign government. The more general Lobbying Register would not have been much use either, because it only includes “third party” lobbying firms rather than direct contact between the company and state officials. And unlike, say, the European Union’s competition commissioner, the ACCC doesn’t publish daily lists of meetings attended by its top officials, making cross-referencing impossible.

I made a freedom of information request to both the ACCC and the OAIC that yielded correspondence confirming the meetings had taken place but little about what had been discussed. The central slideshow presentation made by the visiting Americans couldn’t be released, I was told, because the company had objected. Almost two years after I had filed my FOI request, an Administrative Appeals decision produced the full slide show, which laid out what became the ACCC’s consumer-law court action against Google over the data collected by its Android devices.

That’s not to say there was a causal link between the two — the ACCC may well have been planning the enforcement action anyway. Transparency is simply designed to let the public know who is being lobbied by whom, and about what. A two-year wait for documents frustrates and ultimately derails any attempt to understand how lobbying unfolds.

The Transparency Register came into being as part of Australia’s revamp of foreign investment and security policies after the Port of Darwin controversy. The sweeping changes included tougher rules for foreign investment, a new agricultural land register, and the creation of the Critical Infrastructure Centre, which would draw a line in the sand for foreign government–backed companies looking to invest in Australia. New laws also awarded the government the power to veto significant investment plans signed by Australian states and territories involving foreign companies owned or controlled by foreign governments — the same laws that last week dismantled Victoria’s Belt and Road deal with China and may now be used to unwind Landbridge’s control of Darwin’s port.

These rule changes also revealed fissures between Treasury, traditionally supportive of foreign investment, and a home affairs department preoccupied with espionage and the security implications of Chinese control of key infrastructure. Until now, the Foreign Investment Review Board has assessed foreign takeover bids and the treasurer has had the final say. But the new Critical Infrastructure Centre is part of home affairs and its focus is rooted in security concerns rather than economic considerations.

Chinese control of Darwin’s port may indeed raise espionage concerns — this is the criticism that was levelled in 2015 by former US secretary of state Richard Armitage, who was concerned about the movements of US navy ships being monitored by the Chinese-run operation. And Canberra’s August 2018 decision to exclude Huawei and fellow Chinese telecommunications company ZTE from the 5G rollout could also be justified on those grounds.

But stopping Chinese companies from owning gas pipelines or agricultural land remains highly controversial. Some observers question the fear that China could turn the tap on a domestic Australian pipeline during a conflict or export food from Australian farms without Canberra’s consent. Yet the Critical Infrastructure Centre’s job description is indeed to list “those physical facilities, supply chains, information technologies and communication networks which, if destroyed, degraded or rendered unavailable for an extended period, would significantly impact the social or economic wellbeing of the nation” — a definition that shoehorns the home affairs minister into a Treasury-based decision-making process.

But perhaps the Treasury and home affairs perspectives were already converging. In November 2018 treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced he would block the $13 billion acquisition of APA Group, Australia’s largest natural-gas infrastructure business, by a consortium led by Hong Kong’s CK Infrastructure. Treasury already appeared to be falling into line with home affairs — a shift that had arguably been on the cards since former ASIO head David Irvine was appointed to run the Foreign Investment Review Board.

Of course, the push for greater transparency in foreign lobbying doesn’t appear to have been motivated by a broader interest in aligning Australia’s lobbying rules with the United States or some European countries. In fact, you could argue that the erosion of funding for the OAIC, which attempts to oversee freedom of information, and the government’s unwillingness to release unredacted documents continue to tarnish Australia’s international reputation.

Nonetheless, as a map of foreign political lobbying in Australia by foreign companies, the Transparency Register is an important tool. It also provides a blueprint for an expanded and legally enforceable lobbying register that could shed important light on what takes place behind Australia’s closed doors. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post China’s gift to transparency campaigners appeared first on Inside Story.

Four days earlier, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited a naval base on Hainan island for the commissioning of three new warships, including a giant amphibious landing vessel capable of putting hundreds of marines ashore by helicopter and hovercraft. Two more are under construction, and Chinese media listed Taiwan among their potential targets.

Here in Australia, Michael Pezzullo, the powerful secretary of the home affairs department — a man given to dark warnings — spoke on Anzac Day about the “drums of war” beating louder, declaring the need to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s by arming to deter aggressors.

In Canberra’s political, official and media circles, Taiwan is suddenly a big strategic question. Will China use force to gain control of the island of twenty-four million people it claims as ancestral territory? If so, when? How far will the United States go to defend it? And if Joe Biden is drawn into a war over Taiwan, will Australia be fighting alongside him?

Answering the last question is possibly the easiest for many of our most seasoned officials. “There’s absolutely no doubt that if the Americans were to go to war over Taiwan we would be in it,” says John McCarthy, a former Australian envoy to the United States, Japan, Indonesia and India.

“Australia is not a major player,” Cavan Hogue, a former ambassador to Russia, South Korea and the Philippines, tells me. “But if the Americans decided to defend Taiwan they would expect us to join in — or at least offer our flag even if the military contribution were minimal.”

The Americans would be hoping for a fair bit more than that, says Scott Harold, a senior China analyst with the RAND Corporation think tank in Washington. “US policymakers would be expecting, at a minimum, intelligence support, political-diplomatic support, probably facilities access of some sort,” he tells me, adding it would not be surprising if Washington also expected some “niche” capabilities, such as special forces, anti-submarine operations and air and surface ship deployments.

The Australian Defence Force has spent decades working up the capability to join in such an operation. The navy operates three Aegis destroyers that can be networked into a theatre air-and-missile defence system. Its submarines have American combat systems and weapons. Its two landing ships can each carry a battalion of troops to take back islands. The air force flies American F-35, P-8 and Wedgetail aircraft. All three services have senior officers rotating through US command positions. Seamless “interoperability” with US forces is the doctrine.

It would be hard for Canberra to decline. “If we lost a war against China over Taiwan and Taiwan was forcibly absorbed, and our allies stood on the sidelines,” says RAND Corp’s Harold, “then it’s quite clear that would be the end of the liberal international order in the Indo-Pacific, and quite possibly worldwide.”

Even if the United States did fight off a Chinese assault on Taiwan without visible help from Australia, it would mean the effective end of the ANZUS alliance, according to Australian strategic thinker Paul Dibb.

Only in recent years has a war of this kind become a contingency that the United States and its allies needed to worry much about. In the early decades after nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his Kuomintang forces in 1949, it became something of a pariah state. Washington transferred its recognition to Beijing in 1979, leaving the Chinese nationalist regime in Taiwan in a kind of diplomatic limbo. American defence assistance was promised only so long as the Taiwanese didn’t start a fight with China or provoke one by declaring independence.

But circumstances began changing after Chiang’s son ended martial law and his successor, a native of Taiwan, opened up contested elections. Since then, government has alternated between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party, which promotes a Taiwanese identity and has veered close to outright separatism.

Under president Tsai Ing-wen, the DPP has held power since 2016. Elections, a female leader, and liberal social policies have made it a successful testbed for Chinese democracy. Its handling of Covid-19, a danger it recognised before Beijing sounded the alarm, has added to its kudos. The transformation has weakened the argument, still held in some quarters, that Western powers and Japan, with their records of meddling and exploitation, should stand back and let two not-entirely-admirable Chinese regimes settle their differences.

Rather than the convergence many expected in the 1970s, the democratic transition set Taiwan on a path of political divergence from the communist mainland. The gap has widened, especially since Xi became China’s leader, tightening internal political and ideological control, promoting an expansion of China’s global influence, and crushing hopes of autonomy in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. He has raised the recovery of Taiwan to a sacred goal and has devoted huge budgets to converting the People’s Liberation Army into a high-tech force that can contest American control of nearby seas.

Xi’s deadline for taking back Taiwan is unknown. It is unlikely to be the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China in June this year — the preparations would have been apparent to US satellites. Xi himself has set 2035 as a target for some of his other plans.

In recent weeks, US Pacific fleet commanders have signalled to Washington their concern about a window of vulnerability within the next five or six years, before their own modernisation programs take effect. Scott Harold points out that America is responding to China’s growing power by dispersing its forces from bases vulnerable to Chinese strikes. It could be seen as a window of opportunity closing for PLA commanders.

Would Xi risk an all-out attack on Taiwan? It would almost certainly involve missile strikes on US bases in Japan, drawing Japan into the conflict by triggering the carefully drawn provisions about self-defence in its constitution. PLA generals talk about using nuclear weapons, which would invite retaliation in kind, shattering the carefully built-up economy and perhaps the party’s domestic grip.

“Would a communist regime really put those equities at risk when Xi Jinping knows that as long as I don’t do something incredibly stupid, I’ll still be the effective emperor of China tomorrow?” asks Harold. But hidden power plays within the Chinese Communist Party could work a different logic: “Xi could be pushed to be more hawkish than anyone else.”

Mark Harrison, a China specialist at the University of Tasmania with a deep knowledge of Taiwan, thinks all-out invasion is highly unlikely. China’s leaders know that seizing the island would be just the start, involving an occupation force of hundreds of thousands of troops who would be vulnerable to blockade. “It’s a crisis that would go on forever, and be incredibly testing of the PLA and China’s military infrastructure,” he says.

“Australia would be involved” in such a large-scale scenario, says Harrison. “But China is more likely to act in a way that makes it much more equivocal for the US and its allies, including the Taiwanese, about their best response. What we’re much more likely to face is a smaller event where you don’t have a clear choice. And Beijing will seek to use that to its tactical advantage.”

Smaller operations could include grabs for the Taiwan-held islands on the Fujian coast — islands like Kinmen, which the nationalists held against attack in the 1950s, or the remote Pratas islands in the South China Sea.

“It’s almost a version of grey-zone coercion,” says Harold, referring to China’s use of swarms of fishing boats and coastguard vessels to push its maritime claims. “A little bit beyond that because it’s actually occupying territory and kills a limited number of Taiwanese people. That’s a pretty serious threat, and to not respond to it would feel a bit like the militarisation of the Sudetenland” — Hitler’s occupation of German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

“There would be some people saying it’s either this or we fight the big war, and are we going to fight the big war over this small thing?” Harold adds. “The reality is that’s how status quo powers get manipulated by aggressive, risk-accepting, risk-manipulative rising powers.”

Since taking office, US president Joe Biden drawn Washington back behind the Chinese “red lines” that Donald Trump trampled all over when he sent high-ranking officials to Taiwan. But his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has declared “rock-solid” support for Taiwan, and supplies of missiles, extra F-16 fighters and other advanced munitions continue. When Biden met with Japan’s Yoshihide Suga the two leaders reiterated their support for “peace and security” in the Taiwan Strait — a coded signal that alarmed Beijing.

“In a sense,” says Harold, “this is in some ways more threatening because it suggests the US is returning to a recognition that it needs to be an active leader, not necessarily the only one but certainly the most capable one among others. If you look at the calculations of Tokyo and Canberra, clearly those are much more closely aligned with trying to respond to and support Taipei’s continued de facto independence from Beijing.”

Taiwan itself has been angling for more explicit support from Canberra, notably during a long interview with foreign minister Joseph Wu on the ABC last year. Some analysts see a division between Australia’s defence and foreign affairs departments. But foreign affairs secretary Frances Adamson, who has served in Beijing and Taipei, told a Senate estimates inquiry that Canberra had made several representations to China about Taiwan recently. Nor are defence secretary Greg Moriarty or his deputy secretary for strategy Peter Tesch — both former ambassadors — noticeably pushing for change. ADF chief General Angus Campbell says a conflict over Taiwan would be “disastrous.”

Australia’s official position is still strictly “one China” — that Taiwan is part of China — while urging that reunification happens by consent, which is now a forlorn prospect. Yet reports do suggest that the defence department is updating its scenarios for Taiwan to include some major military assets. ANU strategic expert Brendan Taylor sees this move as a response to pressure from Washington for Canberra and Tokyo to add their weight to American deterrence.

“Because of the capabilities that the Chinese have been developing it’s going to become more and more difficult for the Americans to come to Taiwan’s defence in the way they were able to, not without cost but relatively easily in the past,” says Taylor.

Harrison, at the University of Tasmania, sees no likelihood of an upgrade in relations with Taiwan. “There is a view in certain quarters that Australia is particularly belligerent towards China, but that really isn’t the case,” he says. “In really significant areas — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang — Australia’s actually been very reticent.”

Canberra’s loudest drumbeat of war comes from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose dire scenarios are lapped up by the media and some politicians. “The place is getting a lot hotter under the collar than it should,” complains former ambassador McCarthy. “Everybody is whipping everybody else up.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Is China’s claim to Taiwan approaching its end game? appeared first on Inside Story.

The problem was still unresolved when Scott Morrison flew into Tokyo on Tuesday, on his first foreign prime ministerial excursion since the coronavirus lockdown, to meet his Japanese counterpart, Yoshihide Suga. Nonetheless, the two went on to declare their commitment, “in principle,” to a “reciprocal access agreement” governing their armed forces training in or operating from each other’s territory.

The banal title belies the significance, highly symbolic at least, of Japan’s entering the first such agreement to allow foreign troops to operate on its soil in sixty years. That 1960 treaty with the United States allowed American forces to hold on to the scores of military bases they had occupied since Japan’s defeat in 1945.

With this “landmark” defence treaty, said Morrison, “our special strategic partnership became even stronger.” And, indeed, it represents a historic shift from the future presaged in the early postwar era, when Australia helped disarm Japan and then, in 1951, gained its own US protection — partly against a resurgent post-occupation Japan — through the ANZUS treaty.

After the culture shock when Japan replaced Western countries as Australia’s leading trade partner, a significant investor and a major source of tourists, the relationship settled into a cosy familiarity, with thousands of young people using the working holiday visa scheme started by the two countries in 1980, a first for Japan.

But the strategic setting is far from cosy now. China eclipsed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy some years back, and by some estimates has already taken the top position from the United States. It is contesting US hegemony in the Western Pacific, and has a particular historical bone to pick with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.

Canberra is also alarmed, and wants to join with Japan and other regional powers to push back against Beijing — though not to the extent of severing economic ties, since China is the top trading partner for Australia and most of these other countries. Starting with an agreement signed by John Howard’s government in 2007, Australia has moved steadily towards this week’s deal.

Alongside that push, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service has been helping Japan set up its own MI6-style external espionage service, and the then Japanese defence minister recently floated the idea of Tokyo’s being admitted to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between anglophone powers.

The basis of the new cooperation is “shared values,” and this week Suga repeated the mantra that Australia and Japan were mutually committed to democracy and the rule of law, and would “cooperate to realise a free and open Indo-Pacific.” It wasn’t necessary to state that both countries were backed by the power and values of the United States.

But something has changed to bring these members of separate US alliances together in an alliance of their own. “Historically Australian diplomacy has attached primacy to exchanging views with the United States on Asia,” John McCarthy, a former ambassador to Washington and Tokyo, wrote this week. “Since the lack of follow-through on President Obama’s pivot to Asia, and latterly the quixotic behaviour of the Trump regime, it has made equal — and arguably more — sense to talk to the Asians about the United States. Our most important interlocutor is Japan.”

Morrison and Suga would have spent much of their time swapping notes on what incoming US president Joe Biden might do in the region, and what damage Donald Trump might do on his way out. While signals from Biden’s camp showed determination to keep standing up for US interests, they also indicated a “much more structured” policy approach than Trump’s, and readiness to cooperate with China in areas like health, nuclear nonproliferation and climate.

“If this sort of thinking develops into policy, it makes sense to encourage Biden towards receptivity to indications, should they come, of a Chinese desire to wind back tensions,” McCarthy wrote. “Here, Japanese thinking is almost certainly more nuanced than our own. While rigorous on adherence to the security relationship with the United States, there is more two-way flexibility in Japan’s dealings with China.”

Instead of Canberra concentrating on naval power by promoting tighter integration among the “quadrilateral” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, McCarthy suggested that a deeper and broader engagement by America and Japan in Southeast Asia would be more effective. Getting the Americans to focus on that region might require patience, though, given that the pandemic, economic recovery and restoring North Atlantic alliances will be immediate priorities for Biden.

As well as the China relationship, Biden’s administration will have to formulate a new approach to Korea, following Trump’s theatrics with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Under current president Moon Jae-in, South Korea has declared itself uninterested in joining the Quad, especially as a junior to Japan.

The capital punishment question, meanwhile, was left hanging, as it were. Reporters were briefed that it will be tackled on a “case by case” basis — a reminder that not all values are shared in the Quad. Australia is the only member to ban capital punishment, and the other three have, if anything, stepped up their execution rates.

As the Australian National University’s eminent Northeast Asia historian Gavan McCormack points out, Suga has been at the forefront of efforts by Japan’s “Shintoists” to return their country to something like the state the United States, Australia and British India opposed before 1945 by restoring the emperor as the source of sovereignty and centre of a cult of cultural uniqueness.

“What committed Shintoists such as Abe and Suga seemed to find most offensive about the postwar Japanese state was its democratic, citizen-based, anti-militarist qualities and its admission of responsibility for war and crimes of war by the pre-war and wartime state,” writes McCormack. Referring to this week’s agreement, he adds that Suga proceeded under laws that the government’s own constitutional experts unanimously declared to be in violation of the postwar Japanese constitution’s famous Article 9, which restricts military action to self-defence. “The new ‘quasi alliance’ Tokyo–Canberra link seems to commit Australia to a view in support of Japan’s government and in opposition to its civil society on this most sensitive of issues,” says McCormack.

A similarly retrograde trend is seen in India too, where Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party is trying to impose majoritarian religious supremacism, often with sanctioned mob violence. And the last four years has even shaken the trust of many Australians in their country’s “shared values” with America.

If inclined, Morrison would have had much to reflect on during his nine-hour flight back to quarantine at the Lodge, unbroken by an abandoned stop-off in Port Moresby to meet Papua New Guinea’s James Marape, who is defending his leadership against a sudden defection of his ministers and MPs to the opposition — a reminder that domestic politics can trump diplomacy anytime. •

The post Winging it to Japan appeared first on Inside Story.

The Brereton inquiry was conducted in such secrecy that even its terms of reference aren’t public. But a recent Parliamentary Research Service report spells out how events unfolded after media outlets began publishing allegations of serious misconduct in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. The key date is 2015, when special operations commander Jeff Sengelman responded to rumours and internal accounts of misconduct by commissioning Canberra-based sociologist Samantha Crompvoets to examine “special operations command culture interactions.” It became clear that “a culture of impunity… may have normalised allegedly disturbing behaviour” (in the words of the Sydney Morning Herald) and that serious governance and behavioural lapses had occurred.

Sengelman forwarded those findings to the chief of army, Angus Campbell, in early 2016, and Campbell asked the inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force to ascertain whether the allegations had any substance. Sometime after that, the inspector-general appointed Brereton, a justice of the NSW Court of Appeal, to inquire into the matter.

Given that this all looks somewhat like the ADF investigating itself — and doing it in great (if understandable) secrecy — it is reasonable to ask how independent this inquiry really is. The answer: very independent. The inspector-general is a statutory position established outside the chain of command to monitor the health of the military justice system and, where necessary, conduct inquiries into matters concerning the defence force. The inspector-general may in turn appoint an assistant inspector-general, who is a judicial officer. Such appointees (of whom Justice Brereton is one) are not bound by the rules that apply to other inquiries by the inspector-general; they are required to conduct their inquiry in a manner they consider appropriate “having regard to the subject matter of the inquiry.”

In plain English, Justice Brereton, operating as part of a system that sits outside the normal chain of command, is not only free to investigate as he thinks fit but also required to do so. No one may give him directions.

Justice Brereton’s findings are disturbing, to say the least. Earlier this year, the inspector-general revealed that fifty-five separate potential breaches of the laws of armed conflict had been identified as having been committed by Australia’s Special Operations Task Group in the period 2005–16. The inspector-general noted that the inquiry had focused not on decisions made during the “heat of battle” but on the treatment of individuals who were clearly non-combatants or were no longer combatants.

We can take some comfort from the fact that this appalling behaviour came to light as a result of appropriate action both at the front line and at the highest level of command. Fellow members of the Special Operations Task Group brought the incidents to light, the commander of special operations commissioned the Crompvoets report and handed it to the chief of army, and the chief of army referred it to the inspector-general, who appointed Justice Brereton to investigate.

It is important to note that the Brereton inquiry is an administrative process rather than a criminal investigation. It is intended not only to ascertain whether misconduct has occurred but also to exonerate those who may be affected by unsubstantiated rumours and allegations. It will be for the newly created Office of the Special Investigator, operating within the home affairs department and leveraging the powers of the Australian Federal Police, to decide how and when to deal with the recommended criminal prosecutions, and perhaps the military justice system will play a role in considering military sanctions.

No doubt the defence department and the military hierarchy will also need to determine why the issue came to Sengelman’s notice only via rumours and media reports rather than up the chain of command. Who, between the frontline soldier and Sengelman, knew what about this behaviour, when did they know it, and what did they do about it? What leadership failures occurred at those intermediate levels?

There are suggestions that some frontline soldiers became almost untouchable because of the “old hand” status they had acquired from repeated deployments — and perhaps too many deployments is itself part of the problem. Perhaps, also, decades of concealing special operations members from public view may have been misconstrued by some insiders as an indication that they were immune to scrutiny. We know that Justice Brereton’s inquiry examined the organisational, operational and cultural environment that may have enabled the alleged breaches, and it will be surprising if he does not have a lot to say about them.

What will probably get less attention, because it will be beyond the scope of the inquiry, is the light that these dreadful incidents, and others revealed in the ABC’s 2017 series The Afghan Files, sheds on the nightmare that military conflict of this kind visits on the civilian population we are supposedly trying to help. Innocent people in the contested zones come under threat both from the indigenous insurgents — the Taliban — and heavily armed special forces able to descend on them from the sky at any moment. No matter how diligently the invading forces concentrate on individuals assessed as high-value targets, innocent civilians will be killed, either because they are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or because a highly trained soldier had to make a split-second decision in the heat of battle — a decision on which his own life may depend — about whether a person in his field of fire represented a risk. We now know that some who are killed are either non-combatants or are no longer combatants.

According to the ABC report on next week’s release, senior army figures estimate that Australian personnel killed more than 5000 individuals during the Afghanistan deployment. Most were suspected Taliban fighters, but numerous of them were innocent civilians. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reports that 1282 civilians, including 340 children, were killed during the fighting in Afghanistan in the first half of 2020. While anti-government elements were responsible for more than half of those deaths, pro-government forces killed more children, mainly with airstrikes and indirect fire during ground engagements. Children and women continue to be disproportionately affected by the violence.

The humanitarian cost of these military engagements is one factor that should be explicitly weighed up when we contemplate participating in foreign military conflicts. So too is the damage to our own military personnel. It is not good enough to go along with US-initiated military action simply to show that we are “a good ally,” and nor should we hang around year after year, long after the endeavour has become a lost cause, simply because our ally would prefer to sustain operations at some level rather than admit defeat. Apart from the continuing impact on the civilian population, how can morale and a sense of purpose hold up in the absence of a plausible strategy for winning? Does killing supposed adversaries become an end in itself?

The place to consider and debate these costs before committing to military action, and to take account of the financial and opportunity costs of tying up defence forces far from our shores, is our national parliament. It is to be hoped that we will make no future commitments to military action — apart from emergency decisions for the direct defence of Australia — without a parliamentary resolution emerging from a fully informed debate.

Finally, knowing what we know now, it would be a good time for the government to consider dropping the charges against David McBride, the man at the heart of the leak that prompted the ABC’s The Afghan Files and led to the AFP raids on the ABC offices. McBride faces charges of theft of Commonwealth property, breaching the Defence Act and unauthorised disclosure of information. He says he tried to push the story internally before going to the federal police and the media; surely it is time to lay off the messenger and concentrate on the message. •

The post Weighing the costs of war appeared first on Inside Story.

Pulled out of line, I was made to wait, then instructed by a guard using a clipped imperial accent to open my suitcases and each of the smaller bags within. I care as much as anyone about security, but I was also nearly eighty years old, blessed with a benign, albeit wrinkled countenance, and late for a meeting. Under my breath, I muttered, “Why me?” More minutes elapsed with the guards just standing around and onlookers whispering among themselves, pointing, and imagining what I must have done to deserve such treatment. Made shameless by frustration, I finally confronted my officious tormenters by pulling rank: “Do you know who I am?” There, I thought, that should do it. “No,” came the sympathetic reply, “but we have doctors here who can help you to figure that out.”

Albright offers a wryly sharp account of how an ex–power player stays in the game, seeking to beat the affliction former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans dubbed “relevance deprivation syndrome.” Her first chapter on being a “former somebody” is titled “Afterlife.”

Another version of the afterlife effect comes when she is rushed to a Washington hospital after falling over and gashing her head. With no identification documents, the emergency room paperwork stalls:

To get things moving again, I said to the woman who had stopped filling out forms, “Perhaps you recognise me. I’m Madeleine Albright, and I used to be secretary of state.” The woman gazed at me with a blank expression, taking in my ragged, bloodstained blouse with leaves sticking to it, ripped stockings, and mud-spattered shoes. “No,” she announced. “Colin Powell is secretary of state.”

I replied, “Yes, you’re right, Colin Powell. But I had the job before him.” A spark of comprehension flickered in the woman’s eyes, “So,” she said, “that means you’re unemployed.”

Not so much unemployed as no longer holding power, the foreign affairs wonk must find other ways to prod at policy — to pronounce, protest and preach. In office, she writes, the player can make waves and create headlines with a few words that merely recycle an old idea. Out of the office, the same player can perform cartwheels in the Champs-Élysées without causing a stir.

Albright brings an outsider’s sensibility to the inner workings of the power game. The child of refugees from Czechoslovakia who fled war and then communism, she arrived in the United States when she was eleven. America’s first female secretary of state writes from her lived experience of how a woman pushes her way to the top table in Washington.

The coffee chain, Starbucks, put one of her declarations on its cups: “There’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women.” That motto, and her afterlife decision to say “Hell, yes” to everything, deliver the title of her twenty-first-century memoir.

Because this is America, the former secretary of state gets to play herself on television. Appearing on the drama Madam Secretary, she is allowed to add a line of her own to the script: “There is plenty of room in the world for mediocre men, but there is no room for mediocre women.” This is a woman superbly qualified to pronounce that the administration of George W. Bush was a “bonfire of male vanities.”

As America’s top diplomat (“my job is to go everywhere and eat for my country”) and as a professor, Albright has honed her message to women: argue and interrupt:

I would spend many hours urging the women in my classes to unlearn everything they had been taught about the virtues of humility and waiting one’s turn. “Silence may be golden,” I said, “but it won’t win many arguments. If you have something to say, don’t keep your ideas locked up; unclench your jaws and set those thoughts free. And don’t be afraid to interrupt, because that may be the only way you are going to be heard.”

Having attended a girls high school and a women’s college, Albright has often made the point that a world run by women would be very different. But anyone who thinks it’d be better, she says, has forgotten high school.

Making lots of money on the afterlife speaking circuit, she has honed her lines. “Barely five feet” tall, she carries around a wooden block to get her head above the lectern and reach the microphone. The movie characters she identifies with, she jests, are the seven dwarfs.

The laugh lines serve a serious purpose in her discussion of how policy and politics get done in this roiling century. But they also deserve savouring because they’re good. Here’s Albright describing the fun of her favourite think tank: “Only at Aspen could a former secretary of state be observed singing ‘Hello Dalai!’ to commemorate a visit by the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.”

The sharp eye keeps circling back to Washington, quoting a favourite saying from a friend, the Republican senator John McCain, on the difference between a caucus and a cactus: “With the cactus, the pricks are on the outside.” The kinder version from Albright is that most elected politicians are “earnest, hardworking, well-intentioned and exhausted.”

Surveying the wonk milieu, she describes how professional subspecies approach the same subject. Lawyers start with a thesis and then list the main points for and against a proposition. Professors emphasise history and culture, and “want to put as much data as possible into the pot.” The military seek what’s practical: “for them, doable is an adjective of merit and ‘if only’ a phrase that wastes time.” Media specialists focus on how to present ideas: choose a catchy name and pick the right moment to announce the initiative. Experts on Congress know “how politics influences everything.”

On how politics is operating these days, Albright laments what she calls an undeniable crisis of confidence in democracy as “a way of life that both trusts human nature and makes demands on it.” Most people haven’t given up on democracy, she concludes, they just want better results.

Finding connections across differences is how democracies must work, but “the talking points developed during almost any political campaign can sully one’s soul.” And too often in the United States, she thinks, noise is defeating reason: “There used to be boundaries beyond which partisanship was inherently self-defeating. A politician who was overly strident would be shunned. That is no longer the case, and the blame falls on both parties.”

Albright confronts the crisis of confidence from a player’s perspective: “Ancient Greek dramatists employed a chorus to comment on folly. In our age, we have social media.” The player facing a tough interview must be able “to dodge the question and tell jokes.” Debating foreign policy on a weekly TV show from 1989 to 1991, she quickly grasped the basic rules:

Speak crisply, stick to the point, eschew hand or arm gestures, strive to have the last word, and be sure of your makeup. When someone else is talking, don’t react, just sit like a mannequin and listen. Though the television lights may be hot, you should not be: harsh words are magnified by the medium, and in that era, civility was still deemed a virtue.

It’s still good advice; even Donald Trump stopped shouting by the time of the final debate with Joe Biden.

Trump arrives at the end of Albright’s memoir, because she’s already delivered a comprehensive denunciation in her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning (“I dipped my pen in sulphur and began to write.”) On the tour to promote that book, Albright found Americans bewildered and cranky. The major political parties are at war and Republicans, under Trump, had “undergone a metamorphosis worthy of Kafka.” In this memoir, Albright sums it up:

Is Donald Trump a fascist? During my book tour, this was the question I was asked most often. To me it was a trap. I could not in good conscience defend the president, but it would have been ridiculous to put him in the same category as such mass murderers as Hitler or Stalin. I replied, “I do not call him a fascist. I do say that he has the most antidemocratic instincts of any president in modern American history.” Why? Not merely because Trump berates the media, is often at loggerheads with Congress, complains about court decisions, and fired the director of the FBI. Other presidents have done all of those things. Some, too, have been excessively self-absorbed and throwers of ear-splitting tantrums. What separates this president from his predecessors is a matter of degree. No other president has so thoroughly combined a boorish personality with an incapacity to accept criticism, an utter disregard for the responsibilities of his office, and a tendency to make stuff up worthy of both Guinness’s book and Ripley’s. There are those who point to Trump’s atrocious spelling and reliance on short words as evidence that he lacks brainpower. I am not so sure. The man has a multitude of blind spots, but he also has an instinct that he has relied on throughout his career: to go on the offensive and claim at the same time to be under attack. Politically, this approach energises supporters and channels their outrage in whatever direction Trump is pointing his finger. The tactic is deliberate, reflects cunning, and often leaves opponents floundering about in the mud that seems to be the president’s favoured terrain. The effect on society is correspondingly bog-like.

Albright dismisses Trump by quoting the observation that “rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.” She can’t decide whether the harm Trump has caused America’s international reputation and interests will be temporary or lasting.

The harm that is clear is the polarisation of US politics, which is “causing grave damage to the foundations of our democracy.” When she was ambassador to the United Nations, Albright declared that the United States was “the indispensable nation.” Now she worries that a society that still claims to lead the free world is prey to a torrent of angry passions that could “carry us towards fascism.”

As an “optimist who worries a lot,” this spirited eighty-three-year-old agrees on the need to “stop and smell the roses — before stooping to pull weeds.” Grab time, she advises, and shake it hard:

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that. Sadly, I see no evidence that enlightenment comes with age. A four-year-old slurping ice cream knows as much about contentment as any elder.

Madeleine Albright’s memoir isn’t a summation or conclusion. It’s a stimulating situation report. “I am greedy for more,” she writes. “Sum up my life? Not yet: I am still counting. Until I am carried out, I will carry on.” •

The post Carrying on till she’s carried out appeared first on Inside Story.

Just two weeks earlier, though, a proposal by Japan to take the strategic partnership to even greater heights, ranking that country with Australia’s longstanding anglophone allies, had met with a resounding silence in Canberra.

In an interview with Nihon Keizai Shimbun on 14 August, defence minister Taro Kono said that Japan was keen to expand its cooperation with the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact that links the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “These countries share the same values,” he told the newspaper. “Japan can get closer [to the alliance], even to the extent of it being called the ‘Six Eyes.’”

Japan has been approached about sharing its information “on various occasions,” said Kono. “If approaches are made on a constant basis, then it may be called the ‘Six Eyes.’” The country need not go through formal procedures to join officially, he added. “We will just bring our chair to their table and tell them to count us in.”

The Five Eyes pact, created in 1946 with just two full members, Britain and the United States, grew out of collaborative efforts to collect and break the coded signals of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Australia had been involved in code-breaking against Japan since the 1930s, first with the British in Hong Kong and then with the Americans and other allies in Melbourne and Brisbane. Along with Canada and New Zealand, it was elevated from associated status around 1955 after upgrading domestic security.

The achievement of the wartime Allies in breaking enemy codes was kept secret for nearly three decades after the war, partly because the same capabilities were being deployed against the Soviet Union and other powers. It was blown open by the publication in 1974 of a book called The Ultra Secret by a former staffer at Britain’s now-famous Bletchley Park. Thanks to their “Cambridge” spy ring, though, the Soviets had long known about the code-breaking.

Japan has a highly developed signals intelligence capability and for decades has been a valued contributor in exchanges with the Five Eyes group. It listened to Chinese tank commanders preparing to enter Vietnam in 1979 during Deng Xiaoping’s “punishment” for its invasion of Cambodia. It heard the chatter of Soviet fighter pilots in the shooting down of the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 in 1983. In 2018, its agencies joined those from the Five Eyes in a US war game simulating a hostile attack on the allies’ satellite systems. It closely tracks Chinese and North Korean manoeuvres.

But Kono has not so far been rushed with invitations to the alliance top table. Although Japan clearly wants to move ahead of other powers sharing information with the Five Eyes — including France, Germany, South Korea, Norway and Denmark — even the most fervid Western supporters of bringing Japan out of its post-1945 diffidence about defence and security concede it will be some time before that particular set of eyes is a regular at the table.

No one is blackballing Japan’s membership of the club, it seems, but as yet no proposer or seconder has emerged.

Asked to comment on Taro Kono’s remarks, Australia’s defence department says that Australia values its “close and enduring partnership with Japan, including our strong defence cooperation” and points to the joint statement of a Five Eyes defence ministers’ meeting on 23 June, which “recognised the role of regional partners and institutions in shaping globally and across the Indo-Pacific a stable and secure, economically resilient community, where the sovereign rights of all states are respected.” Apart from that, “consistent with longstanding practice, government does not comment on intelligence matters.”

The chair of the Australian parliament’s joint committee on intelligence and security, Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie, did not respond to a request for comment.

The warmest endorsement for closer Japanese involvement has come from the Conservative chairman of the British parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, Tom Tugendhat, after a visit from Kono in July. “We should look at partners we can trust to deepen our alliances,” he said. “Japan is an important strategic partner for many reasons and we should be looking at every opportunity to cooperate more closely.”

Washington is not pushing the pace. “The Japanese are definitely keen,” acknowledges Michael Green, a senior Asian affairs specialist in the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council who is now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. “Full ‘Five Eyes’ is not on the cards,” he adds, “but there is support for an à la carte role for Japan.”

The most obvious inhibition is cited by another US specialist on Northeast Asian strategic affairs, Brad Glosserman, now at Tama University in Tokyo and previously at the CSIS offshoot in Hawaii, Pacific Forum. Japan’s partners recognised the value of its intelligence product, he writes, but worried about the security of information they gave Tokyo. Laws to protect official secrets passed by Abe’s government in 2013 have not completely allayed those concerns.

“The Japanese leak like a sieve and the idea of the secrecy laws is all about trying to plug those leaks or make it more difficult to leak,” adds a former senior Australian official closely involved with Japan. “If they were ever going to have access to high-level information they needed to assure the US and other Five Eyes partners they weren’t going to read it on the front page of the Nikkei the next day.”

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, agrees that more work is needed. “It is widely believed that Japan does not yet have the system of security clearances and standards of information protection that would be required,” he says. “Having said that, there is much that the Five Eyes could do to collaborate with Japan — and with France, the logical seventh eye and the way in to Europe.”

In seeking deeper protection for secrets, not only in military and intelligence affairs but also now in technology, Glosserman says the Five Eyes were up against “cultural obstacles” in the form of the Japanese public’s resistance to government secrecy and “thought control.”

This is certainly true, but it might be added that Abe only added to the fears with his push for great patriotism in school education, his erosion of the independence of the national broadcaster NHK, his attacks on the Asahi Shimbun and other liberal media, and his nostalgic nationalism, all of which stirred collective memories of pre-1945 conditions.

Then there’s the view from inside the clubhouse. “The second obstacle to Japan’s membership is also cultural — but this one exists among the Five Eyes members,” says Glosserman. “The group shares deep historical and cultural ties that stem from a common Anglo-Saxon heritage; they’re all native English speaking too. Seventy years of cooperation has given them a fluency, comfort and confidence that compounds their sense of identity and separation from non-members. All this is subtle and immeasurable, but it is palpable and it matters.”

Not that the Five Eyes partners share everything. During Sukarno’s Konfrontasi of Malaysia in the early 1960s, the late Hunter Wade’s position as New Zealand’s envoy in Singapore gave him a seat in its joint intelligence committee. At a certain point, Wade once told me, the British chairman would cough, and the American representative would leave. At a second cough, the Australian and New Zealand officials would exit.

During the 1999 crisis in East Timor, Canberra’s efforts to keep certain “Australian Eyes Only,” or “Austeo,” material from Washington led to the suicide of defence intelligence liaison officer Mervyn Jenkins, who had been blamed for passing it to the Americans.

But in its original core business of signals intelligence, Five Eyes has the firm rule that each partner must share, without being asked, its entire stream of “raw” material and “end product,” or the assessments made from it. The partners are not to spy on each other’s communications (unless asked), and their human intelligence agencies — the CIA, MI6, ASIS and so on — are not to recruit each other’s nationals without permission. Those are the rules, anyway.

Australia’s intelligence and military links with Japan have tightened greatly over the past two decades. After the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, the then secretary of Australia’s foreign affairs department, Ashton Calvert, and the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, started a regular trilateral security dialogue with Japan’s foreign ministry at vice-minister level.

Then, in 2006–07, the Australian army provided protection for Japanese military engineers in Southern Iraq. Prime minister John Howard signed a joint declaration on security cooperation with Abe during the latter’s first short spell as prime minister. As well as increasing intelligence exchange and joint operations to enforce North Korea embargoes, ASIS is reported to have joined MI6 in helping Tokyo set up its own external spy agency on the British model.

“There’s hardly anything we hold back, and they deeply appreciate that,” says Warren Reed, a self-disclosed former ASIS officer and Japanese-speaker once posted in Tokyo, whose latest spy novel, An Elephant on Your Nose, has Japanese and British agents working together against a terrorist plot. “I don’t know whether it is necessary to actually put the cherry on the cake.”

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party is still deciding on a successor to Abe, but it seems unlikely Taro Kono will get the job and be in a position to push his Five Eyes membership application at a higher level. As a Georgetown University graduate fluent in English, though, the relatively liberal defence minister is well placed to allay cultural reservations on both sides. And, at fifty-seven, he has more years on his side than the two front-runners for PM, Yoshihide Suga and Shigeru Ishiba, both members of the hawkish and retro-nationalist group Nippon Kaigi. His turn may yet come.

Still, if Canberra really wants to show its faith in Japan, it could openly agree to the cherry being put on the cake. •

The post No cherry on Japan’s cake appeared first on Inside Story.

The same is true in foreign policy. The probability of war has increased significantly in recent years. China, Russia, North Korea and the Middle East are all mired in geopolitical tensions. Australia has responded by announcing what’s been billed as a dramatic increase in military spending — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade. Whether this is new spending or not, the announcement suggests that conventional defence measures are the government’s primary response to these challenging times.

But is this dealing with the symptom, or the cause? A key reason the threat of war has increased is that war has become cheaper. By cutting trade, investment and people-to-people links — and the mutual economic benefits that come with them — the West’s decoupling from China, Russia and others makes the cost of going to war lower and the probability of war higher. Australia’s security will be diminished for as long as this process of “decoupling” continues. Increased defence spending ignores the root cause of the problem.

The front line of this global decoupling is the toxic relationship between the United States and China. What started as a trade war over tariffs and subsidies quickly became a technology war over 5G mobile technology and cross-border data flows. It has spread further since then, moving from an investment war to a financial war and a currency war. Businesspeople are being arrested, immigrants restricted, and tourists and international students threatened with boycotts and bans.

Multilateral cooperation is just as bleak. The United States has withdrawn from or weakened institutions that it claims are too close to China or too willing to accommodate its demands. The World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and the Paris Climate Accord top the list. President Donald Trump refused to sign off on the latest G7 communiqué because the rest of the G7 rebuffed his push to call Covid-19 the “Chinese virus.”

The benefit of trade, foreign investment and immigration isn’t just that it makes us richer (although that’s nice, too). They also provide a “peace dividend” by making war and conflict significantly more expensive. The reason the United States and China haven’t already gone to war with each other has more to do with incentives than their peace-loving leaders. War would be extremely costly for both. This is partly about defence — both are nuclear-armed countries with huge militaries — but much of it is about economics.

If war were to break out, the United States and China would both instantly lose their biggest customer, along with three-quarters of a trillion dollars in two-way trade. Countless US and Chinese businesses would collapse. People would lose their livelihoods. Consumers would see their cost of living skyrocket, to say nothing of the human costs of war and the direct financial costs to government budgets. War is never good for the economy. It represents a huge increase in government spending whether the economy needs it or not, and it is spending on something that does nothing to improve living standards.

It gets worse. Both countries would lose trillions of dollars in cross-border investments. China alone has about US$3 trillion in financial assets abroad, mostly in the United States. For the American government, businesses and consumers, the cost of borrowing and consumption would rise sharply. If China were carved out of the US-led global financial system, the consequences for both countries would be enormous.

Enter Australia. Some have suggested we should do some decoupling of our own. Those making such calls are being dishonest by neglecting to mention the lost trade, investment and skills that would result from decoupling. They also forget that Australia is not the United States. Even with increased spending, our military capabilities pale in comparison with those of the United States. This means that our economic ties, our ability to build regional alliances and our ability to promote a global system based on rules, not power, are the most vital pillars of our security. As Australia’s former top spy, Allan Gygnell, put it, “Even when the Australian Defence Force is involved, persuasion is always going to be the most effective tool available to Australia.”

Australia’s openness underpins our prosperity. But it also underpins our security. Our openness boosts our economy, which funds our military. Our openness also makes Australia an expensive adversary. With $900 billion of two-way trade, $4 trillion of foreign investment and 7.5 million people living here who were born overseas, conflict with Australia would be expensive. But the more we chip away at these trade, investment and people-to-people links — as some are proposing — the cheaper war becomes, and the less secure Australia becomes.

Increased defence spending might tackle the symptom of these trends, but until countries like Australia work together to strengthen global economic integration and the rules-based order, our security will remain diminished. •

The post Raising the price of war appeared first on Inside Story.

In a nutshell, the documents see a region rendered more turbulent and uncertain not only by strategic competition between China and the United States but also by Covid-19 and its consequences, and rendered more threatening by increases in advanced military capability across the region. They propose a tighter focus on defending Australia by dominating our immediate surrounds, recovering our technological edge, and being able to project serious force at greater range. And there are nods in the direction of strengthening our independent war-fighting capability. So far, so good.

While experts will debate whether the documents are an adequate response to these challenging circumstances, any attempt to judge the totality of the government’s response must also look at the context in which they are written. The department’s civilian and military experts are constrained by the government’s worldview and can only devise those parts of the solution that involve the use of military force.

An important problem with the government’s worldview — admittedly shared widely in the defence community — is that the solution to every military problem is to strengthen what prime minister Scott Morrison referred to yesterday as “our ever-closer alliance with the United States.” There are several problems with being, as Malcolm Turnbull put it, “joined at the hip” with the United States.

The first of these is that the formal obligations created by the ANZUS treaty are quite weak, reflecting the lack of enthusiasm with which the United States came to the party in 1951. The treaty partners — Australia, New Zealand and the United States — have no more than an obligation to “consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific,” and then, having done so, to “act to meet the common danger in accordance with [their] constitutional processes.”

And while we in Australia tend to regard ANZUS as extending a “nuclear umbrella,” one would have to wonder why any nuclear power, confronting a nuclear adversary, would use or threaten to use nuclear weapons in circumstances other than countering a direct threat to its own homeland.

Nevertheless, our political leaders have elevated the treaty to such a point that, rather than serving the national interests of Australia, it is used to determine where Australia’s national interests lie. And that means we must participate in all American-initiated conflicts to show we are a good ally.

This attachment to ANZUS as the linchpin of our defence collides with the government’s direction to focus our defence preparedness on our own region. Old habits die hard. While the prospect of operations further afield will not be permitted to shape the ADF’s force structure (something Kevin Rudd said in his 2009 white paper), the prime minister couldn’t refrain from affirming the old thinking: “We remain prepared to make military contributions outside of our immediate region where it is in our national interest to do so, including in support of US-led coalitions.”

Given the regional uncertainties described by the government, why on earth would we commit forces to military conflict outside our immediate area of interest? Dominating the approaches to Australia will be challenging enough without getting military assets stuck on the very sticky flypaper of avoidable military conflict. We committed troops to Afghanistan in 2001 and we are still there. The navy started conducting “maritime security” operations in the Middle East in 1990, and we’re still there too, and we also have aircraft and hundreds of support personnel engaged in operations in that region.

A deeper problem with the alliance relationship is a technological dependence on the United States that can leave us subject to American coercion when we choose new technology. We are not only dependent on the United States for maintenance and resupply of sensitive components of our advanced hardware, we also need access to US systems for the very operation of aircraft like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control Aircraft. As a parliamentary research paper observed as long ago as 2001, “it is almost literally true that Australia cannot go to war without the consent and support of the United States. This represents a substantial sacrifice of national freedom of action, and must be counted as a significant cost.”

Consistent with the close relationship, Australia long ago agreed to host American or joint facilities on our soil, including at Pine Gap and Nurrungar. These facilities might have contributed to the strategic balance during the cold war, but in his significantly named book, Dangerous Allies (2014), former prime minister Malcolm Fraser expressed concern that new technologies now permitted Pine Gap’s capabilities “to be used in new and aggressive ways” — namely, to facilitate drone assassinations and targeted killings by pinpointing targets in real time.

As Fraser stressed, Australia’s longstanding insistence that everything Pine Gap does happens with our “full knowledge and concurrence” means we can be taken to approve of America’s use of drones to kill the citizens of friendly countries with which we are not at war. Pakistan — a fellow member of the Commonwealth and a country for which we budgeted $32.2 million in development assistance in 2019–20 — is a case in point. So are Yemen and Somalia.

Implicitly supporting Fraser’s critique were papers published in 2015 by strategic analyst Desmond Ball and his colleagues, which recounted in detail the militarisation of the personnel and administration at Pine Gap, and changes to its higher management structure. After more than two decades in which there were no serving US military personnel at Pine Gap, their numbers steadily increased after 1990 to the point where, by 2015, serving military personnel constituted two-thirds of US government employees, excluding contractors. In parallel with and reflecting this militarisation, the higher management of Pine Gap, always an American affair, passed in the early 1990s from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology to the National Reconnaissance Office, and Pine Gap became more oriented to direct support of combat operations.

These changes, along with the evolution of technology and the changing geopolitical situation, suggest that Pine Gap has changed Australia’s political and military stance. We have gone from supporting the strategic balance during the cold war to collaborating, virtually automatically, in US wars of choice anywhere in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

Malcolm Fraser was a staunch cold warrior in his day, and no bleeding heart leftie. When a former prime minister of his stamp (and with his insider knowledge) says that Pine Gap has been transformed into “a critical part of an offensive weapons system” and that “Australia should not be a part of it,” any Australian government should take heed. The prudent course would be to undertake a fundamental review of whether, to what extent and under what circumstances the facility continues to serve Australia’s national security interests. But this question is never asked.

Beyond the defence domain, government policy is at odds with an appropriately wide concept of how to manage national security in a threatening and rapidly changing world. Diplomacy is our frontline means of influencing world events, and hence means of defence: much better to manage our relationships so that we don’t come under threat than to park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to pick up the pieces when things don’t go as we hope.

For as long as I can remember, though, governments have seen the Australian diplomatic service and the department that supports it as a suitable targets for savings, to the point where a parliamentary subcommittee, citing a 2011 Lowy Institute report, could note in a 2012 report:

Australia has the smallest diplomatic network of all G20 nations, and only nine of the thirty-four OECD countries (all far smaller than Australia) have fewer diplomatic missions… The average number of posts for an OECD nation is 133. Australia has only ninety-five, and sits at twenty-fifth of thirty-four nations in the OECD league table of diplomatic representation — numbers which are wholly incompatible with Australia’s standing in the world.

The subcommittee’s report cited evidence that countries with much smaller economies but larger overseas networks had gained significant traction in the principal organs of the global governance framework: the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Court of Justice, the UN Development Programme, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Economic and Social Council.

We need to recognise that soft power — the ability to persuade rather than coerce — is an important part of our armoury. Accordingly, we need to strike a better balance between it and our hard (military) power by dramatically strengthening our diplomatic capabilities, including our representation in foreign capitals.

Other policies are at odds with the strategic picture painted by the government. The prime minister spoke of “Defence forming even deeper links and trust with regional armed forces and a further expansion in our defence, diplomacy, cooperation, and capability and capacity building.” Yet the government’s war on the universities, and on the humanities in particular, seems at odds with this approach. Where are we going to find the personnel with the deep linguistic capability and cultural understanding needed to engage with our complex region?

Similarly, the government’s war on science — exemplified again by its attacks on the universities, and by its savage cuts to research funding — is at odds with its high-tech goals for the ADF. This tendency plumbed the depths of absurdity when, in 2014, prime minister Tony Abbott both promised Defence increased funding and directed it to spend less on science.

I have long believed that the way we go to war — with the government alone making the decision, as the inheritor of the traditional powers of the monarch — is both an anachronism and an anomaly. In a modern state, with power supposedly flowing from the people to the government rather than the other way around, the decision to commit the ADF to armed international conflict should be made by our elected representatives in parliament. The uncertainties that lie ahead only serve to strengthen the case.

“We’re all in this together,” said Scott Morrison in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis. We are certainly all in it together when we go to war, and accordingly we, or at least our elected representatives on our behalf, should all have a say in when we go to war, alongside whom, and for what reason. •

The post Australia’s soft-power gap appeared first on Inside Story.

Having looked pessimistically at the extent of Chinese influence operations in Australia, Charles Sturt University academic and Australia Institute founder Clive Hamilton has turned his sights on the rest of the Western world, and finds another bleak scene of venality and often wilful ignorance.

His new book, Hidden Hand, shows greater familiarity with the networks of the Chinese Communist Party and its coded stock phrases than did his 2018 book on Australia, Silent Invasion, thanks to his partnering with a German researcher with a doctorate in Chinese studies.

It cautions several times against conflating the party with the Chinese people or assuming that the ethnic Chinese diaspora is an agency of Beijing — lapses of which Hamilton was accused by reviewers of the earlier book, notably when he expressed alarm that the cleaning contractor at the Australian Defence Force Academy, an open campus, employed ethnic Chinese.

Hidden Hand focuses chiefly on influence-building by Beijing’s United Front Work Department, a huge, lavishly funded outfit that has been cultivating potential allies among non-communist groups since revolutionary days. With China itself under the tightening control of president Xi Jinping, the department has taken its tried and trusted methods to the wider world. “Its implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China’s dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile,” write Hamilton and Ohlberg.

The department, as powerful as any ministry in Beijing, sits behind the Chinese organisations that partner foreigners in sister cities, parliamentary friendship groups, business and trade cooperation associations, and the like. “Western leaders can believe they are dealing with leaders of genuine Chinese civic organisations,” write the authors, “whereas in fact they are dealing with party operatives or people guided by agencies in Beijing.”

The perks of dealing with these bodies — including expenses-paid trips to China and meetings with senior leaders — draw in many retired politicians, military chiefs, ambassadors and others who miss the limelight and enjoy the sense they are listened to. Journalists and other opinion makers are given their first introduction to China and come away dazzled by its advances without realising that Japan and other countries made similar, earlier strides.

Hidden Hand gives many examples of Western figures persuaded to publicly endorse Chinese policies using terms like “friendship” and “win-win,” and willing to remain silent about human rights abuses because they accept the United Front line that “quiet diplomacy behind the scenes is more effective than vocal diplomacy.” Certain figures in parliamentary China friendship groups have been prepared to downplay the contemporary relevance of the Dalai Lama or make sneering remarks about Rubiya Kadeer, the exiled spokeswoman for the Uighurs.

In fact, cringe-making examples can be found right down the political chain across the West. Hamilton throws in some from Australia, including the decision of city officials in Rockhampton to paint over the tiny Taiwanese flags put on a multicultural festival float by local children, and then to lamely defend their action as being in line with Canberra’s “one China” policy.

One prime example of United Front penetration, say Hamilton and Ohlberg, is Britain’s 48 Group Club, derived from a body of businesspeople and sympathisers who pioneered trade with China after the Korean war embargoes ended in 1954. Its current members include Tony Blair and other senior political figures, former Bank of England officials, the chairman of British Airways and five former ambassadors to Beijing.

The club’s chairman, Stephen Perry, is quoted by China’s Xinhua news service as saying Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative is all about “sharing” prosperity, which is the “essence of Socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Beijing’s current definition of its ideology). “In our judgement,” write Hamilton and Ohlberg, “so entrenched are the CCP’s influence networks among British elites that Britain has passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Beijing’s orbit would probably fail.”

The French and German pillars of continental Europe are also being eroded by leaders, former chancellor Gerhard Schröder among them, who are on the Beijing gravy train. And the embrace of the Belt and Road Initiative by Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and Malta resembles Mao Zedong’s old strategy of “using the countryside to surround the city.”

With many seeing the Belt and Road Initiative as a Trojan horse, the authors take another trip Down Under, where “wilful ignorance, and the influence of United Front agents at top levels of state governments, help explain why the state of Victoria in Australia signed on to the BRI, despite the federal government having expressly declined to do so, and the fact that the issue had been widely discussed in the media.”

In the United States, Donald Trump has filled his cabinet with bankers from Goldman Sachs and other outfits deeply compromised by investments in China, while Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is married to the daughter of a rich Chinese American who was a classmate of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. The authors suggest that Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact aimed at greater protection of intellectual property, was a result of their pro-China influence.

In Canada, they claim, Justin Trudeau has been weak in defence of the two Canadians who were arrested for “spying” in retaliation for the extradition case against Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou. Why? Because he is beholden to political donations from Chinese-Canadian businesspeople linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

By the end of this analysis, the authors come close — strangely, for the progressive Hamilton — to endorsing Trump for re-election as the only Western leader strong and confident enough to call out China. Joe Biden and John Kerry sat on their hands while Xi reinforced his islands in the South China Sea, Jeb Bush took Chinese money, and Michael Bloomberg is the most China-friendly of all recent presidential aspirants.

Like Hamilton’s previous book, Hidden Hand concedes no creditable motives to those who pursue engagement with China. They are either in it for the money or — especially in the case of the political left — inclined to “whataboutism,” pointing to instances of Western countries behaving as badly as China.

Hamilton and Ohlberg dismiss the argument that economic engagement will eventually bring political liberalisation to the Chinese system. Xi, they say, has shown the reverse to be true.

They do cut a little slack to those who have let themselves be duped by the United Front Work Department out of ignorance. They claim the West has not had to contend with such an adversary before, given its very slender economic ties to the Soviet Union. They don’t seem to recall the Beatrice and Sidney Webbs of the 1930s, the numerous peace fronts and Soviet friendship groups, the powerful pro-Soviet communist parties, the touring Red Army choirs, the ballet, the communist plants in other parties and organisations.

They think a West that stood up to the Soviet challenge has turned out to be weak before the cash-wielding cadres from Beijing. “Democratic institutions and the global order built after the Second World War have proven to be more fragile than imagined, and are vulnerable to the new weapons of political warfare now deployed against them,” they say.

They seem to accept that United Front work really is what Xi Jinping calls it: “a magic weapon.” They say that “Beijing has become the world’s master practitioner of the dark arts of economic statecraft,” with the Belt and Road Initiative “the ultimate instrument of economic statecraft or, more accurately, economic blackmail.”

Yet, with China’s economy halted and many loan recipients already seeking debt forgiveness, the Belt and Road moment may have passed. And how big is resistance inside China itself to Xi’s grandiosity? We don’t know, and may not for some years.

Hidden Hand does include examples of Western institutions resisting China’s reach. The University of Maryland supported a Chinese student who was pilloried from home for mentioning “the fresh air of free speech” in the United States during her commencement address, and accepted the loss of enrolments from China that followed. The Prague city council terminated its sister city relationship with Beijing over the inclusion of “One China” in the agreement, and switched to Taipei instead. Although Xi and the Dutch king attended the launch of the University of Groningen’s campus in Yantai, China, the university walked away from the partly completed project after Beijing announced a party official had to sit on the boards of all foreign-funded universities.

Indeed, the book’s concluding sentence concedes that “the pushback is growing by the day and the party bosses in Beijing are worried.”

If the objective of United Front work is to create a more favourable view of China around the world, it has demonstrably failed. Hamilton and Ohlberg have produced a useful compendium of what Beijing gets up to. But like the “grains of sand” theory that underlies China’s alleged mass espionage, what Hidden Hand produces is a pile of sand. And what is hidden about that? •

The post In plain sight appeared first on Inside Story.

Partly it’s the secrecy that surrounds cyber operations, which is where Ben Buchanan, a researcher with Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, comes in. In The Hacker and the State, he charts the rise of cyber operations as a tool of state, using clear and vivid examples from the main players in the cyber contest — the United States, Russia, Iran, China and North Korea — to show us how this armoury is used by governments to advance their goals, and how cyber operations have evolved over time.

In a nutshell, Buchanan’s argument is that cyber operations are good for shaping but not for signalling. In high-stakes international statecraft, cyber capabilities are a versatile way of changing the facts on the ground, altering the balance of power, and seizing the advantage. Like all covert operations, though, they aren’t good for signalling intentions. Even when the effects of a cyber operation are visible, victims are often reluctant to reveal details publicly, and the expertise and time needed to determine who did what makes it difficult to quickly and reliably judge what has happened, who was to blame, and why they did it.

Buchanan shows that cyber operations can be used for different purposes: for espionage, which it has helped vastly expand in scale and scope; for attack, putting at risk critical infrastructure worldwide; and for disruption, making it possible to interfere with elections via keyboard. Cyber operations are not only being used as an everyday tool of statecraft, they are perhaps the most significant of those tools.

In a very real sense, though, the countries in the cyber game don’t just have different playing styles, they are playing different games. Western nations play cricket while our opponents play rugby — different games, with different goals on a different playing field — with the latter a far more robust, physical contest than we’ve been willing to engage in.

In the field of espionage, one example of this mismatch is China’s theft of intellectual property. Western intelligence agencies focus narrowly on military and government intelligence, but Chinese hackers have also sought intellectual property on a scale that has been described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” Chinese military hackers have stolen intellectual property, trade secrets and negotiating positions from Western companies across finance, telecommunications, electronics, medical equipment, resources and more in over a dozen countries. Although this flow of secrets and technology dates back to at least the early 2000s, Western countries have failed to staunch the bleeding.

After covering a series of significant cyber espionage cases, Buchanan describes cyber-attacks on targets including nuclear fuel enrichment facilities, petrochemical plants, casinos and electricity networks. One such incident that shocked the US national security community was the targeting of Sony Pictures Entertainment by North Korean state hackers. To the displeasure of the North Korean regime, Sony was making a satirical movie about the assassination of supreme leader Kim Jung-un. In retaliation, North Korean government hackers breached the company, destroyed computers, leaked several unreleased movies onto the internet and stole emails that they released to damage the studio in a stream of embarrassing media stories.

The US government was stunned by the attack. After all, what are the possible diplomatic or military responses when a movie studio and film release are at stake? But despite the apparent inadequacy of its response — naming and shaming North Korea — the operation turned out to be a failure for the North. After threats of a terrorist attack, The Interview didn’t play in major theatre chains, but in a kind of cyber-Streisand effect it owes most of its fame to the state-sponsored theatrics that accompanied its launch.

Finally, there’s the capacity of cyber operations to destabilise and interfere. Buchanan comprehensively describes how Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections using social media, by hacking Democratic Party institutions and by releasing stolen documents to sway public opinion. The media has often focused on how Russia manipulated social media to stoke division and outrage, but Buchanan looks in detail at not one but two Russian-backed operations working to compromise the Democratic National Convention, and shows how these “traditional” cyber-espionage operations were used to gather material that was leaked to and subsequently amplified by the mainstream media.

Another case with immediate policy relevance is the long saga of what is known as Dual_EC, an encryption standard whose adoption was driven by the National Security Agency, the American intelligence organisation responsible for both signals intelligence and information security (or hacking to gather intelligence and defending against hackers). Buchanan surveys the intriguing — albeit circumstantial — evidence that the NSA deliberately weakened the Dual_EC standard and encouraged its adoption so that it could eavesdrop on communications that relied on the standard. At the very least, a series of curiously poor design choices resulted in commercial products that were — for those who knew how to exploit them — totally insecure.

Whether they were deliberate or accidental, these weaknesses in the implementation of Dual_EC were, in a very subtle way, exploited by hackers in China, according to Buchanan’s sources. Either the NSA, one of the most technically sophisticated intelligence agencies on the planet, was unable to make a backdoor that couldn’t be exploited by its adversaries, or it was unable to produce an encryption algorithm that couldn’t be secretly hijacked by an adversary. Both possibilities highlight the difficulty of designing secure encrypted communications systems: introducing a “secure weakness” — one that can only be used by those with the right legal authorities — is not simple, and may not be possible without opening up poorly recognised vulnerabilities.

Without resorting to sensationalism, and in a measured, clear-eyed way, Ben Buchanan wonderfully describes how states employ cyber operations to advance their goals. But the logical next question is “what is the best way to deal with our adversaries’ cyber operations?”

For the players described in The Hacker and the State the immediate future is clear — they will continue to use cyber operations to advance their interests. China will continue to steal intellectual property. Iran and Russia will continue making occasionally destructive attacks, and Russia will continue to use cyber operations to bolster its global ambitions. North Korea will continue to steal money. The United States will continue to follow International Humanitarian Law and engage in narrowly scoped operations.

Cyber capabilities are relatively cheap and are proliferating as other countries see their value and effectiveness. The risks of malicious behaviour increase as we place ever more of our lives online.

Continuing with the status quo is not an option. Now that we’ve seen how they are used, we need to turn our minds to how they will be deterred. There is another book’s worth of material in that subject. •

The post War by other means appeared first on Inside Story.

In those ten years or so, “Indo-Pacific” shifted from a way of looking at the map to an arena for a mounting contest — and a label for a US strategy (the “free and open Indo-Pacific”). From mental map to military map, the journey has been short and sharp.

“Asia-Pacific” had dominated for thirty years, from 1980 to 2010. In a swift remaking, Indo-Pacific became its replacement for the United States, Japan, India, Australia, the ten ASEAN states of Southeast Asia, and Europe.

The crucial absence from the convert list is China. Beijing charges that the Indo-Pacific is a device to contain and constrain its ambitions. That’s true. An equal truth, though, is that China reaps what it sows; its behaviour made pushback inevitable.

The Indo-Pacific is pushback aimed at achieving balance. Uniting the two oceans is ambitious and driven by power. Much meaning crowds onto the new map:

• the rise of China and its ambition to dominate Asia

• India’s arrival as a major player

• the relative decline of US power

• the need to achieve balance in a multipolar system (or avoid war)

• the geoeconomics and geostrategy of the two joined oceans, webbed by the shipping lanes that are the Indo-Pacific’s arteries

Rory Medcalf, an Australian apostle of the Indo-Pacific, says that the idea’s rise has heralded a new era of power rivalry, a world away from the optimism of globalisation. The Indo-Pacific became the “global centre of gravity, in wealth and population, but also the heartland of military might and latent conflict,” he writes. “Confrontation was trumping cooperation. From the Gulf of Aden to Papua New Guinea, the board was uncomfortably set for a great game with many layers and many players.”

Medcalf’s book expresses his hope that the Indo-Pacific will become a metaphor for collective action. If diplomacy fails, he fears, it will be the theatre of the first general war since 1945.

One of Medcalf’s many strengths is that he’s an intellectual who writes like a journalist; he started in hackdom, getting a Walkley commendation in 1991 for his reporting for the Northern Star newspaper in Lismore. From journalism, he became an Australian intelligence analyst and diplomat (postings to New Delhi, Tokyo and, as a truce monitor, Bougainville), then took think-tank duty at the Lowy Institute. Now he’s the professor heading the National Security College at the Australian National University.

Many moons ago, introducing him as a speaker, I listed his CV and asked if he’d ever had a real job. It’s the jibe of one journalist to another, because all hacks are plagued by the question of what they’ll do when they grow up (happily, after forty-nine years of hackdom, I’m still to decide). In Rory’s case, the jest is a tribute to someone from that nebulous place where strategists and analysts try to pin down what’s happening and imagine what’ll happen next. It’s a job you hold in your head, not your hands.

Medcalf has helped redefine the way Australia thinks of its region, bringing into being the geographic realm in which the hard-edged realists will do duty seeking balance or fighting the battle. “Words shape the world,” he writes. “An imagined space on a map both reflects and influences real and palpable things like military deployments, patterns of prosperity, and calculations of risk among the world’s most powerful leaders.”

His book offers an origin story for today’s Indo-Pacific, and some fine thinkers step forward. The first modern academic article to mention the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical term, by the Canadian naval scholar James Boutilier (a bon vivant who savours all the joys of strategy jousts), appeared in 2004.

The following year, the term was used by the New Zealand strategist Peter Cozens (who also champions Kiwi wine as “liquid sunshine”). Catching an idea arriving with the times, a great Australian journalist in Asia, Michael Richardson (late of the Age and the International Herald Tribune), wrote in the Australian Journal of International Affairs in 2005 about what Australia should aim for as a founding member of the East Asia Summit:

The economic and geopolitical landscape of Asia has changed dramatically in recent years, providing Australia with an unprecedented opportunity to become an integral and significant player in a wider Indo-Pacific region as it charts its future and seeks to manage tensions while shaping a new architecture of cooperation.

By then, having served as an Australian diplomat in New Delhi from 2000 to 2003, Medcalf was back in Canberra as an intelligence analyst, and he was an early adopter:

The logic that Australia’s region was changing to a two-ocean system, with China turning south and west and India turning east, accorded both with the evidence and the need to define Australia’s place in the world.

That word “logic” is at the heart of Medcalf’s Indo-Pacific explanation. The logic is driven by those key factors — China up, America down, India in — and by the geostrategic and geoeconomic drives of a multipolar system.

In the Medcalf telling, this logic sweeps aside other important constructs, such as the Asia-Pacific and the “Asian century.” The logic case he builds is strong, but logic doesn’t explain everything. It’s not to deny Medcalf’s argument to note that other factors were in play. As a former secretary of Australia’s defence department, Tony Ayers, used to chide his minions: “You’re being logical again, stupid, I’ve warned you about that!” Ayers was a supremely logical operator, but his jest was tough and true.

Logic can crash against personality and power and history and happenstance and pride and… (please add your pick). As Medcalf says, “Mistakes happen and accidents matter.”

Beyond logic, why were Japan and Australia among the first countries to place the Indo-Pacific atop their foreign policy? The question has weight because Japan and Australia were crucial players in the creation and embrace of the Asia-Pacific, especially in forming the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, or APEC, back in 1989.

Medcalf argues that the Asia-Pacific was overthrown by history and geography and the shifting balance of power, whereas an integrated two-ocean perspective has an ancient pedigree:

It is a more enduring way of understanding Asia than twentieth-century notions like the Asia-Pacific… [T]he precursors of the Indo-Pacific in this geopolitical sense also go back thousands of years, to a proto-economy of regional maritime trade and migration beyond recorded history.

The two-ocean view is a frame, rather than explanation, for the surprisingly rapid shift by Japan, a conservative, bureaucratic state that mirrors the consensus culture of its society. The change agent wasn’t just logic, but the character and drive of a single leader, Abe Shinzo. (One Abe-era change: Japan drops Western name order and turns back to Asian tradition, putting the surname first.)

In fact, Medcalf begins his book with a meeting between Abe and India’s Narendra Modi on a Japanese bullet train in 2016. He gives much credit to Abe for the creation of what he calls the Indo-Pacific “fever” that has since swept governments.

Adopting the new geographic vision feeds into the effort by Abe to remake how his nation acts in the world. A more conventional Japanese leader (or leaders) wouldn’t have overturned the Asia-Pacific consensus. Japan still puzzles about whether Abe, its longest-serving prime minister, is a one-off outlier or the model for future leaders.

Australia’s abandonment of the Asia-Pacific identity it had done so much to create wasn’t achieved by the push of a strong leader. The shift emerged from strong cross-currents within a Canberra wavering between the sunny optimism of the Asian century and the darker forebodings of the “Indo-Pacific.” The two terms describe the same set of players and forces, but arrange them in different orders with different weightings.

Asian-century usage blends liberal internationalism with an optimistic view of Asia entering a new phase of deeper and broader engagement, privileging geoeconomics over geopolitics. The Indo-Pacific gives more weight to geopolitics, shifting the focus from economic bonanza to surging strategic rivalry. Little wonder ASEAN’s new Indo-Pacific Outlook seeks “dialogue and cooperation instead of rivalry.” Cooperation is what we desire, rivalry is what we’ve got.

“Asian century” versus “Indo-Pacific” is also a way to describe a Canberra debate among diplomats, econocrats and defenceniks. The econocrats bleat that the security agencies are today running the show. Or as the ever-vivid former prime minister Paul Keating puts it, “the nutters are in charge.”

The econocrats describe Medcalf’s book as “the American alliance framework resuscitated and reimagined with Indian heft.” The Indo-Pacific is seen as a maritime security construct trying to tie together the four democracies, Australia, Japan, India and the United States, in the Quad security dialogue: “It’s sure in its distrust of China but unsure of whether and how to build a coalition to counter it.”

The Asian century hit its Canberra high point in 2012 with the Gillard government’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper, which opened this way:

Asia’s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the 21st century — the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia’s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment… The Asian century is an Australian opportunity. As the global centre of gravity shifts to our region, the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity. Australia is located in the right place at the right time — in the Asian region in the Asian century.

Whatever truths the white paper delivered, Gillard also served political and personal interests — she had to create foreign policy not owned by the man she’d toppled, Kevin Rudd. The Asian century was Gillard making her own big-P policy.

The Asian-century language came from Treasury, and the quintessential Treasury man of his generation, Ken Henry, got to write the policy (although as Henry’s draft blew out towards 500 pages, the head of the Office of National Assessments, Allan Gyngell, was drafted to slash it to 300 pages and add a pinch of foreign policy coherence).

While Gillard had most of Canberra doing Asian-century duty, the defence department defected to the Indo-Pacific. Although it takes only a few minutes’ drive from the Russell Hill defence complex to the other side of the lake where parliament, the PM’s department and Foreign Affairs reside, sometimes the Kings Avenue bridge marks a major conceptual chasm.

Defence hated the Asian century tag because the headline dropped the United States from the equation. That’s conceptual poison for a department that sees anchoring America in Asia as a fundamental interest.

The 2013 defence white paper gave minimal linguistic obeisance rather than conceptual obedience to Gillard’s vision, citing the Indo-Pacific fifty-eight times and the Asian century white paper just ten times.

When the Liberal–National coalition won the 2013 election, the Asian-century usage became Canberra cactus — too prickly to touch and quickly discarded. Change the government, change the language. As Ken Henry laments, his paper has had “no impact on policy, not even on the tenor of public policy debate in Australia.”

Political cleansing was delivered as policy vandalism when the prime minister’s department deleted the Asian century white paper from its digital record (the polite term is archived). Savour the irony that the Asian century paper is still available on the defence web site. Defence understands the need to record the history of your victories; and it’s a major win when your department hands Canberra the new construct for the region.

Indo-Pacific has become Canberra’s uniform usage. The 2013 defence white paper marked the jump-off point, with further restatements in the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

Medcalf reports that when the Indo-Pacific map was promoted by the official in charge of writing the 2013 defence white paper, Brendan Sargeant, “it was initially controversial within parts of the Australian defence establishment and reportedly met bewilderment among American officials still focused on the Middle East.”

Medcalf dismisses as “rather conspiratorial” the view that “Australian defence officials promoted the Indo-Pacific to gain ascendancy over economic agencies that had pushed the Asian Century idea — but this overlooks that the Indo-Pacific had already been aired in the Asian Century white paper and was being taken seriously in foreign policy circles too.”

Australia doesn’t get too many masterworks on foreign policy, but we are in a fertile period, as tough times summon books to define the era. Three important books in three years — each distinctly different — have responded to an age that ponders US resolve, China’s purpose and possible paths for Australia.

Medcalf sits beside Allan Gyngell’s Fear of Abandonment on the fearfully pragmatic heart of Oz diplomacy, both offering magisterial views that highlight and explain.

With them on this literary peak is Hugh White’s How to Defend Australia, calling for a massive remaking of Australia’s defence force and an equally dramatic rethink of strategy. White presents Australia with a binary choice, while Medcalf sees a multipolar solution (“a many-sided world with no nation especially in charge”). White thinks that without the United States we’re on our own. Medcalf says many partners are available.

White says Medcalf portrays a vast region stretching from Hollywood to Bollywood that “will stand united and work together to contain China.” White’s riposte is that India is more likely to cut a deal with China to divide the region between them. India, White writes, won’t save Australia:

The Indo-Pacific concept is so popular in Canberra and elsewhere precisely because it is so reassuring. It is an invitation and an excuse to assume that Australia’s worries about its future in Asia will be solved by other countries, especially India, without much effort of its own. It is the old, familiar story of Australians expecting a “great and powerful friend” to look after it. Australia should be so lucky.

Medcalf argues that New Delhi won’t accept a deal on Beijing’s terms, relegating India to the role of a permanent second-tier power, restricted to South Asia. “Ultimately, India fears China’s superior economic and strategic weight,” Medcalf writes, and will resist by tilting away from its habit of strategic autonomy. “India is getting serious about cooperating with Indo-Pacific democracies to slow and moderate China’s expansion in the Indian Ocean.” He sets out what the newly imagined region must achieve by describing the dangers it faces.

China is joining a race to establish military bases to do dual-use duty with the networks of trade, investment and infrastructure. The bases are “less mighty bastions of territorial dominance and more lightly fortified lily pads” yet the race feeds the fears of a region “under the nuclear shadow of mutually assured destruction, and the cyber cloud of mutually assured disruption.”

This is not yet a region gripped by the prospect of total war, says Medcalf, but neither is it business as usual in the military balance. The Indo-Pacific has become “the vast ground zero for nuclear deterrence and risk: it is the epicentre of a ‘second nuclear age.’”

A plausible security future for the region is “a state of permanent coercion,” where the shadow of nuclear war doesn’t discourage conflict but exacerbates it at a lower but still dangerous level: “If nuclear weapons become the lone pillar for deterring China in the ocean of ambiguity between peace and Armageddon, then the contest is lost.” Nukes won’t deliver peace in a shifting system, “especially when the new geopolitical motorway is being built faster than drivers can learn the rules of the road.”

The potential crash points proliferate. What’s crucial, and far more contestable, is Medcalf’s contention that time isn’t automatically on Beijing’s side.

Widen the equation beyond the relative decline of the United States and China’s rise. Judged against the dynamic Indo-Pacific, Medcalf says, there’s good reason to think Chinese power “has already peaked.” He offers four factors limiting China’s ability to dominate or map the future:

• China’s Indo-Pacific and Eurasian ambitions along the Belt and Road have a perilous momentum: “pushback is happening and more is inevitable.”

• The rest of the Indo-Pacific is becoming wealthier and stronger too: “China’s power relative to its region may never be so great again.”

• America may be down but it’s far from out. Rather than having to dominate, the United States can work with others to balance China’s power.

• China’s internal problems — debt, demographics, environmental stress, discontent and now the Covid-19 crisis — could compound the external challenges to China’s “imperial over-stretch.”

If fully fledged cooperation with China is unrealistic for the foreseeable future, Medcalf writes, try to discourage confrontation and move the dial towards “competitive coexistence.”

Medcalf’s instruments to construct an Indo-Pacific to “absorb or deflect” China will be development, deterrence and diplomacy. The qualities underpinning the instruments will be solidarity and resilience.

The United States is vital — for investment, trade, alliances, technology and security — even if it can’t or won’t lead. Just as important will be the ambition and action of “the middle”: Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea and Australia. By the 2040s, he writes, “the combination of Japan, India and Indonesia is projected to outweigh China in GDP, military spending and population. Add just one or two more nations and this would be a hefty coalition, especially given the natural advantages of geography, namely its combined oversight of much of the strategic waterways of the Indo-Pacific.”

Dealing with China will require a fresh, if fraught, regional order. The task will be to stop China ruling or writing all the rules. Medcalf ends with an upbeat flourish, rendered in dark colours:

A path can be charted between conflict and capitulation. The future is not solely in the hands of an authoritarian China or an unpredictable, self-centred America. In the end, the Indo-Pacific is both a region and an idea: a metaphor for collective action, self-help combined with mutual help. If things go badly awry, it could be the place of the first general and catastrophic war since 1945. But if its future can be secured, it can flourish as a shared space at the heart of a reconnected world, in ways its early voyagers could have scarcely imagined.

The new Indo-Pacific will be built by pushback against China, the rise and strength of the rest, and American endurance.

The recipe is for what Medcalf calls “a kind of full-spectrum staring contest.” The vision is of a multipolar Indo-Pacific where lots of the poles line up together. The great staring contest will have myriad players. Protect the wealth, avoid the war. Lots of staring mediated by lots of sharing.

Hang together or hang separately. Hang tough or go hang. •

The post The heart of a reconnected world appeared first on Inside Story.

To understand what went wrong, it’s important to remember that the NPT was a compromise. It balanced idealist aspirations for disarmament against the conservative interests of powerful nations. This balance, always contentious, was achieved by dividing the world into two groups. The first of these — made up of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China — had acquired nuclear weapons by the time the treaty was opened for signature. They were allowed to keep the bomb for the time being on the condition that they agreed to work towards full nuclear disarmament. The second group — most of the rest of the world — promised never to acquire the bomb.

Six problems became evident over time.

First, the treaty never attained universal membership. South Africa, for example, resisted joining for many years; North Korea joined then withdrew; Israel, India and Pakistan have never signed up.

Second, the double standard built into the NPT undermined perceptions of its legitimacy. There’s an inevitable smell of hypocrisy when the nuclear bomb “haves” preach the virtues of abstinence to the “have nots.” This was compounded by bad faith on the part of the nuclear club. Washington, Moscow, London, Paris and Beijing treated their commitment to nuclear disarmament as a polite fiction, even a joke, rather than a program of action. Indeed, the cold war arms race actually accelerated after the NPT came into effect. Warhead numbers have since declined, but this had little to do with the NPT and much to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Washington’s subsequent trimming of its bloated arsenal. Even so, more than 10,000 warheads, mostly Russian and American, are still in existence.

Third, the treaty was marked by inadequate verification. It was naively assumed that if a state wanted to proliferate, it would simply refuse to join the treaty. Instead, membership has occasionally been used as cover for egregious cheating of the kind that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq tried to get away with in the 1980s.

Fourth, the treaty inadvertently permitted creeping “virtual” proliferation. It failed to draw a sharp enough line between allowable civilian nuclear technology and illegal weapons development, allowing a state like Iran to inch towards a weapons capability while staying within the letter of the law.

Fifth, enforcement was neglected in the treaty text. In practice, the policing of the treaty has been ad hoc.

And sixth, a sorry state of drift and a lamentable lack of leadership have set in. Although there’s a lot of blame to go around, the special case of the United States deserves mention. It’s true that Washington has arguably done more than most to reinforce non-proliferation by helping to underwrite the rules-based international system of which the NPT is a component. And in places like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Germany, the role of the United States as a force for stability has minimised incentives for proliferation.

But Washington’s record has been patchy. After president Bill Clinton signed the 1996 comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, for example, the Senate failed to make it law. Because ratification requires two-thirds approval, sceptical Republicans had a stranglehold. The United States tried to rationalise the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a case of robust arms control, despite Baghdad’s having by then abandoned its chemical and biological weapons and scrapped its nuclear program under UN supervision. That murderously destabilising misadventure damaged the rules-based global order.

Later, in a shift of philosophical gears, Barack Obama entered office promising to put the United States on a path towards nuclear disarmament, only to be buffeted by hostile political forces. Ultimately the country’s nuclear arsenal was put on a path to expensive modernisation during his presidency. Washington has also been in the minority in NPT review conferences by repeatedly refusing to rule out nuclear first use.

Then came the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, painstakingly constructed by international partners to plug holes in the NPT. Although most experts considered it a solid achievement, Republicans worked tirelessly to tear it down, primarily driven by visceral anti-Tehran sentiment and ideological hostility towards multilateralism. “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” said candidate Trump in 2016. “It is catastrophic for America… I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else.” Only the strategically illiterate would swallow that.

Before writing off the NPT, though, we should consider the positive side of the ledger. The treaty is the keystone of a broader non-proliferation regime helping to prevent a slide into “hyper-proliferation” and nuclear anarchy. This regime includes the International Atomic Energy Agency’s effort to learn from the experience with Iraq in the 1980s by improving verification protocols. The treaty also provided a framework for the denuclearisation of South Africa in the 1990s and is a reference point for nuclear-weapons-free zones in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

This broader non-proliferation regime is also a reason why most countries that could build nuclear weapons (Australia and perhaps thirty or so others) have decided not to do so.

In short, problems with the NPT need to be put into perspective. It’s very doubtful the world would be better off without it.

But what about that Doomsday Clock, now ticking closer than ever to the end of the world? Well, the clock is more a gimmick and call to arms than a serious measure of relative nuclear danger. It has been wheeled out every few years since 1947, and the suggestion that we are today closer to nuclear annihilation than, say, during the Berlin crisis of 1961, or the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, is questionable.

The clock’s minders have been led to move the minute hand closer to midnight by adding to the mix, first, climate change and then, more recently, information warfare and fake news. But these well-intentioned additions probably muddy the water. They also point to another issue eroding support for the NPT: today’s public seems relatively indifferent to potentially catastrophic nuclear danger and, depending on political orientation, more concerned with environmental challenges, say, or immigration. It’s true that activist concern has driven interest in a new treaty that would go beyond the NPT in prohibiting nuclear weapons, but the proposal so far has limited political bite.

The NPT is an ageing, leaky vessel alternately battered by the winds of nationalism and becalmed by indifference. Yet it remains afloat, offering some hope of avoiding the horrific deaths of several hundred million and the destruction of civilisation. It also helps buy us time to find a better solution. Whether the time available (another fifty years?) is well used remains to be seen. •

The post Doomsday postponed appeared first on Inside Story.

Mao’s successors appear to have taken his injunction very seriously. Watching closely when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, they were appalled to see the Red Army playing an independent, politically destabilising role, and they have since taken great care to ensure that the PLA can never operate as a kind of fifth column backing reformers against the government.

Those fears lay behind the party’s decision to abolish the PLA’s commercial operations, which had given it a measure of financial autonomy, in 1998. PLA leaders also ceased serving on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the supreme power body in the country.

The tightening of political control continued under Xi Jinping. His high-profile anti-corruption campaign — a key element of a general move to centralise power and instil discipline — has been deployed partly to control the military more firmly. Two members of the PLA’s main directing body, the Central Military Commission, were removed after claims of corrupt behaviour in 2014–15, and the general office of the PLA, its chief strategic nerve centre, was purged around the same period.

These restraints on the PLA sit oddly with the outsized role it plays in the way the world sees China. China’s large-scale spending on military equipment, for instance, sits within a defence budget second only to the United States. The double-digit growth in military outlays every year since the late 1990s meant that by 2015, when a national parade in Beijing marked the seventieth anniversary of the end of the second world war in Asia, it was estimated that over two-thirds of the matériel on display was new.

A good example of this equipment is the DF-41, a new-generation land-based intercontinental ballistic missile that is capable of reaching America. Another is the world’s first unmanned combat aerial stealth vehicle, the Sharp Sword. The navy has acquired long-range offshore combat capabilities, and the country now possesses a strategic air–ground integrated air force, drastically strengthened strategic penetration capabilities, and an upgraded information and intelligence system.

For purveyors of the China Threat theory, this is all grist to the mill. On paper at least, China looks like a first-class fighting machine. Before getting too excited, however, we need to remember that not a single Chinese soldier has seen combat internationally (except in UN-led peacekeeping missions) since 1979, when China clashed briefly and largely unsuccessfully with Vietnam. For all-out war, the last major fight was another quarter of a century back, on the Korean Peninsula.

China’s military might have plenty of symbolic meaning, but its real capabilities in the field are unknown because they are largely untested. Even European powers like France and Italy have more modern-day fighting experience than the world’s most populous country.

This leaves the PLA with a challenge. How best, despite this lack of experience, can it be involved in the legitimate protection of China’s security interests, not just domestically but also abroad?

It is abroad, where China is now a significant investor, that the issues are most complex. In many of the areas covered by the Belt and Road initiative — Central Asia and the Middle East, for instance — local conditions are chronically unstable. At the moment, China is overly reliant on private security firms to protect its projects. The PLA does have a military installation in Djibouti, East Africa, and its navy has become much more active in the world’s seaways. But the fact remains that being the armed wing of the Communist Party means the PLA’s deployment abroad is extremely sensitive. Even when Chinese nationals were repatriated from Libya during the fighting in 2010, it was the Chinese foreign ministry that took the lead, not the PLA.

How long this degree of political control can continue is a moot point. The PLA’s domestic strength — so closely linked to the ruling party that the two sink or swim together — is also its greatest weakness abroad. Party rule seems strong within China’s borders, which is good for the PLA, but abroad there is suspicion and unease at the rise of a country with a political system like China’s, and a military so closely linked to it.

The day when the PLA is forced to intervene to protect China’s interests beyond its borders may well be growing closer. It will be hard for much of the world to witness without at least some trepidation. Yet, for all the fanfare within the country about the renewed, powerful PLA, the puzzle for foreign observers is not that it has such a high profile but that its influence within China is so slight. •

The post The paradox of the People’s Liberation Army appeared first on Inside Story.

But it might be too early to declare an end to the northern hemisphere’s silly season. The Americans and Chinese may have agreed to resume trade talks this month, but the latest round of tit-for-tat tariff hikes remains in place, and plaintive calls for a wind-back from Scott Morrison and others at the G7 summit won’t have weighed heavily on Donald Trump, who sees trade machismo as a way to re-election in 2020.

In the meantime, American farmers have seen their exports of soybeans and pork to China plummet, an inversion of bond yield curve has revealed that US investors see a recession on the horizon, and Trump looks ever more detached from rational advice, either on trade or Iran.

By contrast, Xi Jinping looks like the calm adult. But beneath Beijing’s monolithic front are problems, notably the need for an already debt-laden financial system to do more to stimulate growth, the political challenge from Hong Kong’s savvy bourgeoisie, and increased US military support for Taiwan.

In this atmosphere of impending meltdown, talk in Australia about whether we must choose between the United States and China is beside the immediate point.

It’s true that Beijing has been playing the international order in a cynical way, stealing commercial secrets or forcing their transfer as the price of market entry, and trawling the West’s universities and research institutes for information it can use, all to seize control of the commanding heights of the future economy in areas like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

At home, Xi has punctured any notion that China is converging politically with the Western world, or that his show of Red orthodoxy was a “turning left so that he could turn right.” He has junked the distinction between the Communist Party and the state, replaced law with doctrine, and inserted party controllers into major private-sector corporations.

“Today’s China is not just a geopolitical challenge to the West,” says the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor in his new book, Xi Jinping: The Backlash. “It is a real-time empirical experiment challenging the West’s post–cold war ascendancy. Far from being a premodern throwback to discredited authoritarian ways, Xi’s project is taking shape as a postmodern phenomenon, a surveillance state with a fighting chance of success at home and the potential to replicate its core elements abroad.”

This is no cause, though, for the kind of defence–security panic that has swept Canberra. As signalled by the title of McGregor’s book, the outside world has woken up to Xi’s game and many of its biggest players — not just the United States — are pushing back. Xi’s foreign supporters, meanwhile, are mostly mendicant states.

McGregor reports seething resentment within elite Chinese circles over Xi’s clampdown, and some cheering that Trump’s bull-in-a-China-shop tactics might force a return to the path of opening up society and the economy. Among the party nomenklatura, Xi has made millions of enemies through his selective anti-corruption campaign.

The threshold for any attempt to depose Xi or clip his wings is very high, McGregor notes, but Xi has given himself little scope for retreat. And his timelines are shortening. Throwing money at every problem, including bailing out cash-strapped local government, “will only get harder,” writes McGregor. “By the time of the next party congress, due in late 2022, the issue of succession should return with a vengeance.”

All this is an argument for strategic patience. McGregor takes aim at Hugh White’s thesis that the era of American primacy in Asia is ending, and that China will soon be the dominant power. “This worst-case scenario makes sense for a defence planner, once White’s profession,” he says. “Diplomatically, however, the opposite is true. If Australia concedes, in effect, that it is game over and China will win, then policy-making becomes no more than a series of cascading concessions to the new hegemon.”

Complicating the picture are the current US administration’s self-inflicted wounds. Trump has driven a truck through the free-trade architecture. His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership weakened efforts to instil respect for intellectual property and online transparency — attributes he is now trying to extract from China using the tariff bludgeon. By vetoing appointments of new judges to the World Trade Organization’s dispute panels, he is crippling a trade system the United States itself sponsored, under which it regarded China’s accession in 2001 as a great advance. Since long before Trump, the US Senate has refused to ratify the same UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that Washington routinely urges China to observe.

According to Brad Glosserman, an Asia strategic specialist at Japan’s Tama University, calling this a “Thucydides Trap” — an inevitable conflict between a status quo power and a rising power — falsely treats these tensions as a binary dispute. “It is ironic that this reductionism is occurring as the US is being eclipsed as the most stalwart defender of the existing international order,” he writes. Historically, the United States has been the most prominent voice in defence of the status quo, but other governments, notably Japan, Australia and the European Union, have also assumed leading roles.

McGregor doesn’t believe we should prioritise preparations for an all-out war with China or create our own deterrence to avoid one, as White advocates in his recent book How to Defend Australia. Instead, Australia and other middle powers, as well as bigger players like Japan, Germany and South Korea, should push back together when China overreaches, well before the possibility of armed conflict arises.

“That does not mean replacing cooperation with confrontation at every turn,” McGregor writes. “It simply means competing with China, speaking openly about its actions and standing up to it when necessary.” He acknowledges that these policies might come at a cost. “But to do otherwise will allow Beijing to pick off smaller nations such as Australia one by one. That would leave not just regional nations isolated. Eventually the United States would be on its own as well.” •

The post China’s postmodern experiment appeared first on Inside Story.

In a nutshell, our dilemma arises from the fact that we have relied on the United States for our security since the fall of Singapore in 1942, but in recent decades China has become by far our largest trading partner. China represents a quarter of our two-way trade, taking about a third of our exports and providing about a fifth of our imports.

John Howard was able to assert with some plausibility that we didn’t have to choose between our ally and our major trading partner, but in the age of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump that assuredly doesn’t apply. Beijing and Washington are becoming increasingly assertive and increasingly strategically competitive. Plausible scenarios in both the military/strategic and trade domains will force us to make choices, and we need to think carefully, ahead of time, about how we would handle as wide a variety of scenarios as we can imagine. This level of forethought will enable us to respond in a timely and appropriate way to such exigencies as do arise and, just as importantly, to signal to each of these great powers both what we expect of them and what they can expect of us.

Our allies and those with whom we have more difficult relations can cope with our taking different positions from them, as long as we are up-front and consistent. The United States coped with Britain’s decision not to go into Vietnam and Canada’s decision not to participate in the invasion of Iraq. What friends and antagonists most dislike are surprises.

Navigating this tricky environment is going to require careful thought and full national debate about where Australia’s interests lie. These are matters on which reasonable people can differ, but the debate must be held in good faith and without political point-scoring. Only if we have a clear and widely agreed picture of our national interest can we decide and communicate what we will and won’t do.

A good place to start is the trade war being waged by the United States, both because we have a history of active multilateral trade diplomacy going back to the signature of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, in 1947, and because it is an opportunity to demonstrate to China that we are not an automatic and uncritical supporter of the United States. While China’s trade policies are not beyond reproach, if our decades of trade diplomacy mean anything, they mean that we stand for the maximum liberalisation of international trade and investment, and we should be saying loudly and clearly that we do not support the US policy of unilaterally imposing or raising tariffs.

It is also a good place to start because it is in a non-military realm and therefore less bound up in the emerging power play between the dominant United States and the emergent China. Relatively speaking, it is an everyday item of business.

Next, on the boundary between economic and military action, we have a right — indeed a duty — to object to Donald Trump’s proclivity to impose unilateral sanctions and then demand that allies follow. Sanctions are a hostile act, tantamount to an act of war. In medieval times they were called sieges, and no one was in any doubt that they were an instrument of war.

In the military realm, we desperately need to abandon decades of lazy thought and undertake a realistic analysis of our obligations and expectations under the ANZUS treaty, which has been invoked by politicians of both parties as the foundation of our security since its inception in 1951. ANZUS is not, in fact, a strong treaty. The obligations it contains are limited and weak because an unenthusiastic United States wanted it that way. All it requires of the parties is that, in the event of a threat in the Pacific to the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties, those parties will consult, and in the event of an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the parties, they will act to meet the common danger in accordance with their own constitutional processes.

So let’s be clear about ANZUS: the United States is only obliged to do anything for Australia in response to an armed attack on us or one of our island territories, and all it is required to do is act to meet the common danger through its own constitutional processes — which locate the war-making power in the Congress, not the president. Hardly a bankable guarantee of our security.

In practice, any US interest in Australia’s security stems more from the close relationship between our respective armed forces, the very close intelligence and technical relationships, the joint facilities in Australia, and the very high levels of US investment here. Those clear US interests, as distinct from the words written on a piece of paper in 1951, will ensure a certain level of US tolerance for Australia taking different positions on issues where we perceive our interests to differ.

As part of any consideration of the security relationship with the United States we need to undertake an audit of all joint facilities in Australia, and the US use of them and of Australian facilities, and consider whether they make us safer or simply turn us into a target.

In relation to China, we need to decide exactly where our interests lie in the South China Sea. Clearly they lie in the direction of freedom of navigation and a rules-based order derived strictly from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS. On this basis, we can decline US invitations to participate in joint freedom-of-navigation operations, but argue strictly from UNCLOS principles that, as a party to the convention, China must abandon historical claims based on the “nine-dash line.” Legally, any historical rights China may have had to the resources of the South China Sea were extinguished to the extent that they were incompatible with the exclusive economic zones established by the convention. These principles gives us a basis to argue for better Chinese behaviour in the South China Sea without getting involved in the Washington–Beijing power struggle.

Of one thing we may be sure: after its “century of humiliation” China is in no mood to be pushed around by anyone. Quiet, independent diplomacy behind closed doors will stand us in far better stead than the muscle-flexing and megaphone diplomacy currently favoured by the United States and a gaggle of the usual suspects.

The elephant in the room is, of course, Taiwan. Defence writers of the eminence of Paul Dibb and Hugh White have argued that Australia’s alliance with America would be fatally undermined if we did not join the United States in the defence of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, and over the years various Republican figures have been gung-ho about what would be expected of Australia in this eventuality. Dibb argues that an attack on Taiwan “certainly comes within the ANZUS Treaty’s definition of an armed attack in ‘the Pacific Area.’” I disagree with that view of what ANZUS requires, if not about the politics: the complete phrase is “an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties,” and Taiwan is not a party to ANZUS.

Like me, Hugh White argues that the requirement to defend Taiwan is not evident in the text of the treaty itself. White cites the foremost legal authority on the matter, J.G. Starke, who writes that the context of Article 4 makes clear that the “Pacific Area” doesn’t include Taiwan, because Australia didn’t want it to.

I think our best approach is to cut the defence of Taiwan unambiguously out of the picture, arguing that we expect the grown-ups in Beijing, Taipei and Washington to maintain the peace, and not to assume that Australian forces would be made available in the event of their failure to do so. Having acknowledged Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is a province of China, and having recognised that Taipei, like Beijing, regards itself as the legitimate government of an undivided China, why would we allow ourselves to become involved militarily in a confrontation to which we cannot make a meaningful difference?

All of these issues will require careful thought and diligent and skilful diplomacy. The point is that Australia, with its long history of effective diplomacy, is up to the task of navigating our way through the challenges of the US–China confrontations provided we pay careful regard to our national interests, and act as an independent state on the basis of the applicable rules.

And just to make sure we do not let our proclivity towards military action get the better of us, we should follow the US lead and locate the power to decide whether we go to war in parliament and not executive government. •

The post Australia’s US–China dilemma appeared first on Inside Story.

How to Defend Australia is an attempt to explode the fragile bipartisan consensus that has removed defence from the political debate. By launching a direct assault not just on the three services but also on the defence industry and enormous vested interests, White is challenging the fundamentals of our defence and foreign policy settings. That’s why his book is important.

This doesn’t mean, however, that people who share his disillusionment with the current situation will embrace his proposed solution.

To understand exactly what the controversy is all about you need to realise that the person who has written this radical jeremiad is not merely the ANU’s professor of strategic studies but also a former deputy secretary (strategy) of defence and the person who established the (now) conservative Australian Strategic Policy Institute. This isn’t some kind of left-wing critique urging us to warm to China’s embrace. It’s by an insider, familiar with both the office layout at Russell Hill and the long, empty corridors of Parliament House, urging that the whole system be completely reworked.

The book itself is an elegantly written, straightforward recipe designed to answer the question posed in the title. Its meat comes from a detailed analysis of Australia’s strategic geography; a dash of spice is added with a review of how the changing world scene has transformed our geopolitics. But what really counts is the heat — a thorough and relentless analysis of the consequences of our current strategic settings. White has cooked up a witches’ brew that will upset (almost) everyone involved in the defence debate in Australia.

To understand why, we need to start at the beginning. Less than a month after a surprise Japanese air assault on Pearl Harbor destroyed the US Pacific Fleet in late 1941, readers of the Melbourne Herald opened their newspapers to find Labor prime minister John Curtin prophesying “immense change.” Then he added a crucial sentence: “Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” These words set the new parameters of the defence arrangements that White has set out to change.

Most of those who circle around the strategic debate come to it with personal military experience. White, however, spent his youth at Oxford (winning the enormously challenging John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy, awarded for an essay tackling questions like “why?” or “why not?”). Later he worked as a journalist and as an adviser to defence minister Kim Beazley and prime minister Bob Hawke, before becoming the principal author of the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper, which set in place the force structure and strategy that still prevails.

It’s this background that allows White to make his controversial case so persuasively. He doesn’t come to the issue having handed hostages to any of the usual participants in the debate: the military, politicians or other interest groups. Instead, he uses that single philosophical tool, logic, to shear through the conventional shibboleths and attempt to understand both what we are trying to achieve (security) and how this can best be accomplished (through self-reliance and abandoning the US alliance).

This isn’t a book that’s been quickly dashed off. More than a decade ago, I sat in on White’s compressed course on Australian defence policy at ANU. He began speaking, lucidly and smoothly, at 9am on Monday, finishing a fortnight later. As he spoke, words coalesced into sentences, which then formed themselves into carefully structured paragraphs in the air around him. Even at the time a book seemed an obvious next step, although not to White. “I’m still not quite finished yet,” he said. “It’s not quite ready.”

Since that time White has become identified as part of the “China lobby,” having published a number of essays on the need for Washington to offer Beijing strategic space and the potential for a collision between the two superpowers. In this book, however, he focuses his attention on Australia, mounting a strong and persuasive case that our current policy settings (and the alliance more generally) are no longer protecting the country.

How to Defend Australia is the product of a keen mind frustrated at our refusal to recognise (or rather our wanton disregard of) the consequences of our actions. White is not challenging the myriad benefits that have resulted from the US alliance: “Sustaining the status quo would be the best outcome for us,” he has written elsewhere. “But how far should we be prepared to go, and at what cost? These are awkward questions that we’ve avoided for too long.”

White poses a real challenge to the enormous mass of woolly, circular reasoning that surrounds the debate about how we would defend Australia. He simply, and explicitly, forges a link between policy and force structure; between illusory security rhetoric and the reality of boots on the ground.

In doing so, he performs the huge service of opening up a subject that has effectively been closed and placed off limits for debate since the late 1980s, when the Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities, written by another ANU professor, Paul Dibb, first traversed the idea of independently defending our continent.

There’s already been serious pushback from those immersed in defence’s culture, and even fans of White may question some of his prescriptions. Take one example, his proposal for a deterrence posture relying on a fleet of twenty-four submarines. Such a strategy makes a great deal of sense today, when these vessels can remain undetected running silent and deep. But that could change dramatically if technological breakthroughs expose them to tracking by enemy forces, outflanking the book’s strategy. Alternatives could easily be constructed, but the questions linger.

More critically, it’s a policy premised on almost doubling defence spending to nearly 4 per cent of GDP. Reaching that figure would require steely determination — not something currently apparent on either side of politics. As for the big splash, the ambit claim that’s grabbed media attention — an indigenous Australian nuclear capability — well, that will alienate many of those on the left who might, perhaps, be attracted to other elements of White’s argument. By placing these questions at the forefront of debate, White draws attention to fundamental issues the country urgently needs to address.

For decades the strategic situation has been changing around us. Over the past few years this picture has shifted dramatically, and that’s why How to Defend Australia is much more than just a book about defence. It represents a fundamental attempt to rewire the strategic debate in this country, and it will reach out well beyond the usual suspects in the field. •

The post A strategist turns his guns on defence appeared first on Inside Story.

Around six months earlier, Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Joe Hockey, had initiated a cultural diplomacy campaign in Washington under the title “Celebrating a Centenary of Mateship.” The embassy launched a dedicated website and announced a calendar of events, including a military tattoo, a religious service in Washington National Cathedral, and centenary commemorations involving prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and president Donald Trump.

The occasion being marked was certainly deserving of commemoration. One hundred years earlier, on 4 July 1918, Australian and American troops under the command of General Sir John Monash conducted a successful offensive against German forces in the French town of Hamel, helping to turn the tide against German forces on the Western Front. This was the first time American and Australian troops had fought side by side, and the first occasion on which American troops fought offensively under a non-American commander. General Monash had chosen 4 July as the date of the battle.

And so, the embassy website continues, “Since that day, Australian and American soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and women have served alongside one another in every major conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our military alliance endures today, as our armed forces work together in Iraq and Syria to combat the threat of terrorism.”

No sooner was the schedule of centenary events under way than an Australian journalist, Meggie Palmer, detonated a digital depth charge, pointing out in her online newsletter that all fifteen Centenary of Mateship ambassadors were male and white. That may not have concerned Ambassador Hockey, who had long been engaged, alongside former prime minister Tony Abbott, in a domestic culture war celebrating national values such as mateship and treating concerns about gender equity and cultural diversity as self-indulgent identity politics. But the Australians had misread their mates, even in Donald Trump’s America-first America. An apology was issued — Hockey accepted the blame — and nothing more was heard of the Centenary of Mateship.

To be fair, men on both sides of Australian politics are prone to nostalgia about old-fashioned Australian values and tempted to translate their homespun folklore into diplomacy. Labor may be less inclined than the Coalition parties to trumpet “national values” in its foreign policy statements, or enact them in bilateral relations in office, but it has a similar weakness for working men’s values.

In July 2012, for example, speaking in Beijing on the fortieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China, deputy Labor prime minister Wayne Swan evoked a powerful image of mateship among working men to stamp Labor’s brand on the Australia–China relationship. He drew a graphic mental picture of his mentor, Mick Young, accompanying then opposition leader Gough Whitlam on his breakthrough visit to China in 1971. A lot happened on that visit but Swan chose to recall one episode in particular involving Mick Young:

Mick was a sheep shearer — a good one, too — before he become a union official and then a political leader. He had the big hands of a professional shearer. It would have given him great pleasure to firmly shake the hand of Zhou Enlai when the premier greeted the Australian delegation.

There is no doubting that it was a privilege to shake the hand of Premier Zhou Enlai (Chinese premier 1949–76). And yet this nostalgic evocation of mateship among the workers of the world — an Australian shearer shaking hands with a leader of proletarian China — was not reciprocated on the Chinese side. Premier Zhou hailed from one of the elite imperial families that successfully migrated, after the fall of the empire, to the peak of the Communist Party hierarchy. He could trace a pedigree of successful imperial examination candidates and imperial magistrates through both his maternal and paternal lines.

Nor is the Communist Party a working men’s party. It was and remains a closed and self-appointed post-imperial elite, whose historical mission is to keep common people out of public life and politics in China. It’s a privilege to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai because Zhou’s is the hand of privilege.

Enough of stories. My point in resorting to metaphors of scuttled fleets and shorn fleeces is to highlight a shift in the place of values in Australian public diplomacy today. Even before mateship went down in DC, a new suite of values had been commissioned by the Turnbull government. They appeared in its 2017 foreign policy white paper, which repositioned Australian values diplomacy from the old and familiar territory of white Australian male folklore to the global commons of liberal values. Mateship and the fair go made way for freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

How did it come to this? And where do we go from here?

The place of values in foreign and defence policy has been thrown into sharp relief by the disruptive times in which we live. Shifting power relations in the region, challenges to the postwar international order, and the rise of populist nationalism around the globe all present ethical challenges as well as policy ones.

At the popular level, movements targeting religious and ethnic difference test the commitment of all immigrant countries to inclusion, equality and diversity. Among state actors, a dynamic and increasingly powerful China is driving structural and strategic changes in the region while showing little sympathy for the values underpinning democracy, the rule of law, or the liberal rules-based order on which regional stability and prosperity have been based since the second world war. The Trump administration’s response to the China challenge brings the long-term viability of that order into question.

For Australia, the question arises of whether the values by which Australians live their lives can help governments to negotiate safe passage through these complex ethical and policy issues.

Recent Australian governments appear to think so. Comparing the place of values across foreign policy white papers published in 1997, 2003 and 2017 is a reasonably reliable measure of continuity and change: each was produced by a Coalition government and through a single department, Foreign Affairs and Trade. Given these shared sources, the difference between the earliest and latest white papers is revealing.

The first two white papers, issued under John Howard (prime minister 1996–2007) made a number of unequivocal statements about values but also reflected that government’s preference for describing values in colloquial folkloric terms, such as mateship and the fair go. Values so described were subordinated to the pursuit of jobs and security as the 1997 white paper’s “basic test” of the national interest. In practice, the effect was often to exclude values diplomacy altogether from the Australian foreign policy toolbox — as was reflected in the convention governing bilateral relations with China, under which the two sides agreed to leave their values at the door in meetings and negotiations.

This subordination of values to interests (and specifically to prosperity and security) was facilitated by the Howard government’s ethnocultural approach to national identity and values. The first of the white papers projected a national identity rooted in a distinctively European, if not British, social and cultural heritage. “The values which Australia brings to its foreign policy,” the paper stated, “… reflect a predominantly European intellectual and cultural heritage.” The second identified Australia as a cultural outlier, again with a “predominantly European heritage,” in an otherwise alien region. Translated into diplomacy, this approach implied that Australia had one set of values, Asians another, and all parties should respect the values associated with the others’ ethnocultural traditions by remaining silent on values altogether

China was quite comfortable with this arrangement. It confirmed the view in Beijing that Australia was still at heart White Australia, which isolated it from other major countries in the region. Australia’s stance precluded values advocacy (Australia was certainly not proposing to insert mateship into a UN convention) and, by implying that all values were based on national cultures and traditions rather than universal principles, effectively endorsed the authoritarian values of the communist government as authentic expressions of China’s national culture. For Beijing, what was not to like about that?

In Australia, however, these foreign policy statements reflected highly partisan political positions on identity and values, and were consequently unsustainable. National values, as they were known at the time, featured in a wide-ranging public debate in the 1990s on the “Asianisation” of Australia associated with Paul Keating’s term as prime minister — a debate that merged into a wider series of discursive battles that came to be known as the culture wars and the history wars. Conservatives who favoured the idea that values were rooted in cultural traditions — whether defined as anglophone, Western civilisation or Judaeo-Christian — swore they would never surrender Australia’s identity or values to the imperatives of Asian engagement. Progressives, including Keating and the Labor side of politics, who favoured a culturally agnostic mix of identity and values saw little risk to Australian identity or values in closer engagement with Asia.

These domestic tensions played out in the two strategic foreign policy statements produced under the direction of Howard’s government in the wake of Keating’s electoral defeat in 1996. In particular, the second white paper’s choice of “tolerance, perseverance and mateship” as distinctively Australian values can be traced to divisive domestic policy debates taking place around education, culture and immigration. In an Australia Day address in 1998, almost two years into his first term, Howard made a pointed reference to the “values that are particularly important to all of us as Australians,” listing tolerance, perseverance and mateship among them. Later, marking the centenary of Federation, he identified “four distinct and enduring Australian values,” which he termed “self-reliance, a fair go, pulling together, and having a go.”

The Howard government consistently framed values in foreign policy documents in a language that precluded international values advocacy and alienated the Labor side of politics, which perhaps explains why so very little attention was paid to values in the Labor government’s major policy statement of the period, Australia in the Asian Century (2012). There, the reason for Labor’s silence on values can be found in a revealing reference to the “values” of an earlier generation of Australians who were “oriented mainly towards the British Empire and Europe” and whose conduct and beliefs reflected “the values and attitudes of a time when many Australians defined themselves as distant and separate from Asia.” But the paper’s authors opted not to update the values of an earlier time, instead treading lightly around the issue. Better, in their judgement, to ignore values altogether than risk stirring the old beast in the basement.

In time, the lack of bipartisan support for the values statements in the first two white papers presented problems for managing Australia’s most important relationship in the region — with China — which called for a new commitment to values diplomacy on both sides of the house.

The 2017 white paper issued under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull sidestepped the ethnocultural approach by describing values in terms of universal liberal principles. “Australia does not define its national identity by race or religion,” it asserted, elevating values in foreign policy by shifting the locus of national identity from one based on ethnocultural heritage to one grounded in values themselves.

The folksy colloquialism of earlier statements gave way to the universal language of democratic liberalism in describing such values as “political, economic and religious freedom, liberal democracy, the rule of law, racial and gender equality and mutual respect.” Values were elevated in Australian foreign policy thinking from secondary attributes of a particular ethnic heritage to primary markers of national identity expressed in universal terms.

But what of Labor? In government it has never produced a foreign policy white paper, although it has published two defence white papers, one in 2009 and the other in 2013. Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 2009 defence white paper was the first formal statement by an Australian government to take account of the impact of China’s growing wealth and power on Australia’s shifting strategic environment (for which it earned a stern rebuke from Beijing). Australia in the Asian Century, Labor’s all-encompassing statement on Australia’s place in the region, largely ignored the changing strategic environment attendant on the rise of China, which had informed the same government’s defence white paper. Little effort was made to reconcile security concerns on the one side with diplomatic and trade issues on the other within the framework of a single strategy document.

And yet, consistent with the tone of the Turnbull government’s white paper, Labor’s foreign affairs spokesperson senator Penny Wong gave a hard-hitting talk on the place of values in Labor foreign policy at the Griffith Asia Institute in August 2017 that was no less important for the progressive side of politics than the 2017 white paper was for the conservatives. Senator Wong shunted aside earlier Labor concerns about values in foreign policy: “There are, of course, those who dismiss values as a ‘trap’ that only encourages contention and conflict.” She was presumably addressing those on her own side of politics who felt intimidated by the terms of a debate designed to ensnare unwary critics of homegrown values, such as “mateship” and the “fair go,” in a series of traps laid out by their conservative opponents.

Senator Wong was emboldened to break the Labor mould for reasons similar to those that compelled Turnbull’s government to break with conservative tradition on national values. Those reasons include growing threats to the “rules-based order,” signs of growing racial and national intolerance, and evidence that countries such as China were acting to undermine the postwar security regime.

Senator Wong began with a personal anecdote and ended with a clear affirmation of the place of values in Australian foreign policy, dismissing both the “Asian values” and “Western values” schools of thought along the way, and positing in their place an international order founded on the principle of equal human dignity and secured by the rule of law. “One can be born lucky,” she said:

It was my good fortune to have been born into a family having two “values” traditions — those of China and what we loosely term “the West.” So it will not surprise you that I do not accept the view that some former Asian leaders have propounded that “values” are an artefact of Western imperialism. Values are not some kind of stalking horse behind which “the West” — and many people see that as code for the US — seeks to assert and defend a form of political dominance. Nor are they simply the legacy of what some describe as the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Senator Wong highlighted the rule of law as a foundation both for democratic societies and for an international rules-based order, and she concluded her discussion of the rule of law with the observation that “values, as a core element in the construction of a foreign policy, are not just desirable but necessary.”

Whether the recent affirmation of liberal universal values on both sides of politics will translate into effective foreign policy practice is a question on which foreign policy experts are divided. Some see the shift, from particular national values to common or universal ones, as signalling closer alignment with the United States and greater distancing from China. Writing in this vein, Deakin University’s Pan Chengxin argues that the emphasis on universal values in the 2017 white paper was a misguided attempt to differentiate Australia from China and align it more closely with the US-led “rules-based order.”

Other analysts see very different risks in values diplomacy, including possible challenges to the US alliance, which is based on realpolitik no less than values. Former diplomat Alan Dupont of the Cognoscenti Group argues that a values-based foreign policy could “see the end of bipartisanship on the [US] alliance” and, on the Labor side, put an end to what Keating has called a “tag-along foreign policy” that allegedly subordinates Australian national interests to policies laid down in Washington. To be sure, Senator Wong did initially respond to Donald Trump’s election in November 2016 with a statement about values that suggested Trump’s victory placed the American alliance on Labor’s watchlist. Dupont described her comments at that time as “virtue signalling disguised as foreign policy.” And yet, speaking of the United States in her later Griffith Asia Institute address, Senator Wong referred not to the present incumbent in the White House but to “that extraordinary enterprise which is the USA,” which “has, as its wellspring, a sense of human value… that underpins what we term ‘the rule of law.’”

In my judgement, to suggest that the 2017 white paper’s assertion of universal values and a values-based identity inevitably pits values against realpolitik is misleading. Together, the 2017 white paper and Labor’s support for its basic principles mark a shift, not from a realist to a values-based diplomacy, but from one set of values to another in Australia’s generally pragmatic foreign policy culture — a shift from a partisan, folkloric suite of values, unique to Australia, to a code of universal values that enjoys bipartisan support and is universally understood beyond Australia. That this shift was long overdue was indicated by the fate of mateship in Washington a year ago; and it is especially timely in a period of heightened uncertainty and risk in relation to China.

Further, the earlier approach to national values left Australia disarmed in dealing with foreign interference on Australian soil — primarily interference by China in our mainstream media, in community media and community organisations, in Australian higher education, and in relation to our parliamentary sovereignty. Well might we say to Beijing, “Fair go, mate!” But mateship does not translate readily across cultures — and it was not intended to. As a national value, mateship offers little guidance for dealing with foreign interference from any country, which involves matters of high principle that underpin the integrity of our institutions and the sovereignty of our parliaments.

Finally, we misled our friends in China by signalling in earlier foreign policy statements that Australians care less for human dignity, freedom and the rule of law than we do for jobs and growth. Leaving values at the door was always a values statement in itself — it falsely signalled that Australians don’t value values. This is how it was read by China’s leading Australia-watchers, one of whom told me during John Howard’s term in office that he was reporting to authorities in Beijing that Australia, unlike the United States, was highly pragmatic and placed little store in principles or values.

Historically, Australian foreign policy does tend towards the pragmatic, but this does not imply that Australians are willing to sacrifice core values and principles. A useful historical example of Australian principled pragmatism is former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans’s take on liberal internationalism — in his case termed “constructive internationalism” — which was motivated by high principle and yet was applied to specific cases, such as Cambodia, where it could make a real difference.

For Australia–China relations we have comparable models of principled and pragmatic foreign policy already under development. Macquarie University professor Bates Gill offers one model, which he terms bounded engagement, that affirms liberal humanist values while preserving much that is mutually beneficial in the relationship. Australia has every reason to continue engaging closely with China across as many fronts as possible, partly to sustain trade, investment and people-to-people ties but also to keep lines of communication open so as to signal positive engagement and to facilitate pushback when China’s actions impinge on Australian values and interests.

Many areas of Australia–China interaction could become more constrained, but not all need be constrained to the same degree. Some areas of cooperation, like philanthropy and law-enforcement cooperation, could well expand. While pushing forward in new areas of cooperation, Australian relations with China would nevertheless be attuned to deflecting the challenges that China may present to Australian security, prosperity and social cohesion.

For all that, the question “where to form here?” remains an open one. Whatever the answers may be, placing the fundamental principles that Australians value and share onto the national foreign policy agenda, in a language that all sides can embrace and other countries can understand, brings greater clarity to differences between Australia and China that are patently in need of protection in President Xi Jinping’s new era. If values matter, then getting them right is a sound foundation for a pragmatic and principled foreign policy. •

This is an edited version of a lecture given by John Fitzgerald at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art last night. He wishes to thank Caitlin Byrne of the Griffith Asia Institute and Gilbert Rozman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies for their comments and assistance, and the Griffith Asia Institute and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art for hosting the presentation.

The post How mateship made way for freedom, democracy and rule of law appeared first on Inside Story.

Little more than two weeks after an election result that News Corp had devoted so much reportage and comment to achieving, the media group found one of its star Canberra journalists subject to an Australian Federal Police raid on her home in search of leaked intelligence material and clues to its source.

“Outrageous,” said a headline in the Australian, above a story citing support from the kind of people the newspaper usually sneers at. That was just hours before a second raid that saw three AFP officers trawling through the emails and files on newsroom computers at the ABC’s headquarters in Sydney.

You don’t have to agree with former prime minister Paul Keating that the security and intelligence community has gone “berko” to have profound misgivings about where this is taking Australia. Suddenly, all the media are in the same boat — threatened with a drastic curtailment of freedom of inquiry and expression.

Home affairs minister Peter Dutton professed to have no prior knowledge of the raids by an agency under his recently created super-ministry. Prime minister Scott Morrison says everyone is subject to the law, so there’s nothing to worry about. The AFP insists the two raids were merely coincidental.

Yet the AFP is normally acutely sensitive to which cases its political masters want pursued vigorously and which they would prefer to be treated as too hard (wheat sales to Iraq, say, or Indonesian army culpability in the Balibo killings). It’s hard to believe it hasn’t been given a signal to go in hard.

The raids are aimed at finding and penalising those who leaked two matters of undoubted public interest and concern.

The first raid, on Annika Smethurst, the national political editor of News Corp’s Sunday tabloids, concerned a story based on leaked correspondence between Michael Pezzullo, secretary of the home affairs department, and Greg Moriarty, secretary of the defence department, about a proposal to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to collect domestic intelligence for the first time since it was created soon after the second world war.

The second, on the ABC, concerned 2017 news reports citing highly secret “Australian eyes only” intelligence that Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan may have deliberately or carelessly killed civilians. A week before the raid, former Australian military lawyer David William McBride was committed to stand trial in the ACT Supreme Court after being charged with leaking documents to the ABC.

It can be surmised that the source of the first leaks was deeply concerned about a fundamental shift in the power to invade the privacy of Australian citizens and enterprises in the name of national security. The leak headed this off, at least for the time being. In the second, the source was worried by a cover-up of possible war crimes that sully the reputation of Australia’s defence forces. A judicial inquiry is partly a result.

Defence and security agencies are right, of course, to try to protect sensitive information and investigate cases of disclosure. But their political masters need to balance those concerns with judgements about when to heed the message and not shoot the messenger. Unfortunately, balance isn’t in the nature of hardline former police officer Peter Dutton, the home affairs minister, or former state prosecutor Christian Porter, the attorney-general.

Evidence of Porter’s views came in June last year with his decision to pursue lawyer Bernard Collaery and former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer “Witness K” over the disclosure that ASIS had bugged the Timor-Leste cabinet room during negotiations in 2004 about Timor Sea petroleum. The only possible reason for the attorney-general to risk more disclosures about this embarrassing episode is that he wants to crack the whip over Canberra’s bureaucracy to head off public revelations on the scale of Edward Snowden’s or Chelsea Manning’s intelligence dumps.

The raids come amid widening unease about other trends in the intelligence community. One is the expanding public profile of intelligence agency chiefs. ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis appears frequently in parliamentary committee hearings. In a departure from longstanding practice, the heads of ASIS and the Australian Signals Directorate have given speeches, and the latter even tweets.

Under Lewis, ASIO seems to be cooperating with a number of journalists and academics in pushing the notion of a great and imminent danger of subversion by China, requiring more powers and resources for security agencies. There is a high risk of jumping at shadows, or at the very least pre-empting cool analysis of how to mitigate dangers of using Huawei and other Chinese-made technology without derailing a crucial economic relationship.

As Richard McGregor, the Lowy Institute’s China specialist, has observed, ministers now casually claim to have seen intelligence material that backs their assertions. “Their offices are awash in it,” McGregor wrote earlier this year. “They are not shy in demanding the material, by all accounts. The green-marked briefs, indicating the material comes from ASIS, Australia’s mini-CIA, have apparently gained particular popularity.” Raw intelligence has never previously been allowed anywhere near political offices.

Tensions have also been created by the massive integration of the intelligence community carried out under Malcolm Turnbull, which centralised authority in the offices of Dutton and his ambitious department head, Pezzullo.

The exchange between Pezzullo and Moriarty reported by News Corp’s Smethurst reflects a battle for control of the ASD. The intelligence reorganisation saw the ASD made a statutory agency. Though it is still under the defence portfolio, home affairs has eyes on its intelligence-collection capabilities for domestic security. In addition, it has been given cybersecurity and cyberwarfare responsibilities. In January 2018, the Defence Force established a new signals intelligence and cyber command aimed at ensuring that “support to military operations remains the agency’s highest priority.”

Another side of the intelligence shake-up was the upgrading of the small Office of National Assessments, created in the 1980s on the recommendations of the Hope royal commissions, into the Office of National Intelligence. Under a new director-general of national intelligence, the ONI is supposed to coordinate the operations of all intelligence-collection agencies and give a daily intelligence brief to the prime minister. The new director-general is Nick Warner, who came straight from eight years heading ASIS.

Some senior former ONA officials see the new coordination function as simply mimicking Washington’s approach to “connecting the dots” after the 11 September 2001 failures, and as unnecessary in Canberra’s already close intelligence community. They worry this effort will divert attention and resources from the respected analysis function of ONA and erode the independence of reporting that successive directors have strongly defended.

While those in charge of these agencies are not “nutters,” as Keating also put it, there is a genuine cause for concern that security officials have too much policy influence in Canberra, that there is too much reliance on clandestine intelligence material instead of obvious open-source information, and that liberties are being too easily sacrificed.

It may take another Hope-style royal commission to address the first two concerns, and much stronger independent safeguards to address the third. •

The post Shooting the messengers appeared first on Inside Story.

The INF treaty’s symbolic importance dates back to the cold war manoeuvring of the postwar period. NATO had been established in 1949, tying together the United States and Western Europe to deter a Soviet invasion, and American troops had been based on the West German front line. They were followed by thousands of short-range “battlefield” nuclear weapons, designed to reassure Europeans that Washington could counter Moscow’s advantage in conventional forces. Not surprisingly, the weapons were controversial: they seemed likely to be used almost automatically against any fast-approaching Russian tank armies, and would devastate precisely the countries (like West Germany) they were supposed to protect.

The dilemma became stark in the late 1970s. NATO’s short-range nuclear forces were to be modernised with the “enhanced radiation warhead” — in other words, the neutron bomb. Outrage followed the media’s reporting of the plan. Moscow amped up its anti-NATO propaganda campaign, and in the West the peace movement mushroomed. “The shorter the range, the deader the Germans,” became a rallying cry. The Western alliance buckled under political pressure and abandoned the new warhead. NATO had shot itself in the foot; the Russians were delighted.

NATO revisited the issue in the early 1980s, aiming to repair the damage done to its credibility. This time the new weapons would be longer-range, capable of hitting Russia. They would provide a more powerful deterrent and be seen, it was hoped, as less dangerous to allied populations. NATO also fine-tuned the rationale, saying it needed to counter a new generation of Soviet weapons, especially the SS-20, a nuclear ballistic missile capable of reaching any location in Europe. More than 400 SS-20s were built, each carrying three warheads with the explosive equivalent of ten Hiroshima bombs. They seemed designed to intimidate Europe. The counter was the US nuclear-armed, Ground-Launched Cruise Missile, or GLCM, and the Pershing II missile, which were both deployed to Europe.

Again, there was an uproar, and a good deal of anxiety. This was an arms race many feared would end in a third world war. While the new missiles were packaged as symbols of NATO solidarity, they were formidable weapons integrated into serious plans for operations. Combined with their Soviet equivalents, they could easily kill a hundred million Europeans and lay waste to the continent from Portugal to the Ural Mountains.

Then, quite quickly, everything changed.

President Ronald Reagan proposed a “zero option”: why couldn’t NATO and Moscow simply agree to get rid of this class of weapon? Deterrence would remain in place, but the dangerous momentum would be reversed.

Reagan was widely ridiculed. The peace movement was convinced he was a warmonger and refused to take his idea at face value. Some conservatives believed he was strategically illiterate. The Soviet old guard refused to budge; the idea of giving up their newest and best weapons struck them as ludicrous.

The circuit-breaker was a new Soviet leader. Mikhail Gorbachev viewed the cold war as ruinously expensive, politically silly and reckless. He accepted Reagan’s offer, giving us the INF treaty. All the SS-20s, GLCMs and Pershing IIs were scrapped. It was a big step towards ending the cold war.

So why is the treaty being torn up? First and foremost, Vladimir Putin is no Gorbachev. He is resentful of NATO expansion, is prone to playing the nationalist card, and pushes his luck. He allowed (perhaps encouraged) the Russian military–industrial complex to proceed with a new missile that violates the treaty. Add to that a lack of transparency in Russia’s large arsenal of shorter-range nuclear weapons, and Putin’s provocations in Ukraine, and it’s hard to take him at his word.

In addition, Donald Trump seems uninterested in the implications of either abandoning the treaty or working to repair it. Playing tough, sidelining the concerns of allies and liberals, keeping issues simple and regurgitating slogans have become a program. He apparently views politics as a game of poker: convince the other side you can push harder, for longer, and can keep raising the stakes, and all will be well. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether his blustering is a considered strategy or simply a character fault.

Another factor is the passage of time. The treaty reflected a moment in history. It was bilateral — restricted to Washington and Moscow — with each side showing good faith. Today’s world isn’t so simple. Compared with 1987, trust is in short supply. And China is now more significant in Russian and American strategic thinking.

Lastly, there’s John Bolton. Trump’s national security advisor is considered smart but dogmatic. He’s been a pugnacious objector to arms control for decades. Many global security experts view him as the Prince of Darkness and suggest his opposition is almost pathological. He probably sees himself more like Dirty Harry: clear-eyed, making the tough but necessary calls that spineless, naive idealists run away from. For Bolton, there’s no merit in negotiation with dubious governments.

To a degree, he has a point. Bad arms control that discredits the brand and favours cheaters is worse than no arms control. But he takes the point to extremes. Bolton seems to relish ripping up diplomatic deals rather than fixing them.

The implications of the treaty’s end look grim. Three suggest themselves.

First, the scene has been set to abandon the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, for intercontinental-range missiles. Unlike the INF deal, this doesn’t have to be melodramatically ditched; it can simply be allowed to lapse in 2021.

Second, the door has been opened to a new round of proliferation. Russia has reportedly said it will respond to US withdrawal with new missiles. Trump’s stance means the Russians have been given a legal way to build new intermediate-range missiles while blaming Washington for the treaty failure. The United States had already begun a nuclear modernisation program costed at US$490 billion over ten years; scrapping the INF treaty could see this ramped up. But there’s also the awkward fact that few, if any, countries will want to host the American missiles. (Imagine the reaction to a request to base such weaponry in Australia, targeting China.)

This overlaps with the third point. NATO might be put under more strain. If the United States leans on its European allies to support a new generation of intermediate-range missiles, there will likely be political pandemonium. On the other hand, the Europeans won’t want to face an unconstrained Russia without American backing. Being caught between Trump’s trash-talking of the Western alliance and Putin’s imperious tendencies would be very unpleasant.

Now that notice has been given, the treaty is due to terminate in six months. Perhaps Trump and Putin will be persuaded to see reason and change their minds, but don’t hold your breath. •

The post Missile envy appeared first on Inside Story.

The descriptor of the moment is “new cold war” (or cold war 2.0). As a label, it’s sharp and vivid. As analysis, it’s wrong. The “new” bit is right, but it’s the newness of much of the contest that should caution against the old label.

Today’s struggle is as significant as the cold war. And it’ll run for decades. Badly bungled and dumbly driven, it could create two opposed blocs that would resemble a cold war line-up. But it’s going to need a lot more bad policy and economic stupidity to reach cold war 2.0.

What China and the United States are fighting about today is a system they share and each wants to dominate. The competition will be defined by connections and closeness. Both countries want to sit atop the system, not overthrow it.

Washington’s new fear of China was announced in US vice-president Mike Pence’s 4 October speech, which — as seen from Canberra — “sets out the most dramatic shift in relations with Beijing since Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘opening’ of relations in the early 1970s.”

Pence rails against China for its interference in everything from media to movies to markets. His description of the struggle offers an implicit rebuttal of the cold war 2.0 idea. In version 1.0, America never accused the Soviet Union of causing the US trade deficit by gaming the World Trade Organization.

Consider some other then-and-now differences.

Ideology: The cold war was a contest of ideas and values: communism fighting capitalism, Marxism versus democracy.

Today, the ideological content is almost non-existent. China isn’t offering any big new idea: it wants to expand its international power, not export its political system. The United States has a binary president, visceral in rejecting the friends, values and international institutions central to US conduct during the cold war.

The America First leader confronts the China Dream leader. The images play to the domestic audience. Neither side has much in its ideological armoury to enlist others and create a new, frigid division.

Economics and trade: The Soviet Union wanted to overthrow the economic system championed by the United States. It was Comecon versus capitalism. Bloc against bloc. Economic sphere facing economic sphere.

China merely wants to beat America at its own game. China loves what America has created; now Beijing wants to own it. From the WTO to the World Bank, China embraces the system.

Savour the irony that China, the new superpower, is following the same protectionist/mercantilist policies the United States used in the nineteenth century to match Europe. (The US civil war between the industrial north and slave-owning south was a fight between protectionists and free-traders, and the protectionists won.)

Today’s struggle between the United States and China has free-traders and protectionists on both sides. Many other nations are conflicted by this choice; Australia, more than most, wants the free-traders to win.

So, another irony: China’s leader chants the free-trade-globalisation mantra in confronting a protectionist US president.

Alliances and proxy wars: Militarily, the cold war was waged by opposed alliance systems, a hair-trigger nuclear stand-off and proxy wars.

The nukes remain, but the rest of the equation is gone. The proxy wars — Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and more — were disastrous conflicts, wounds bleeding across the second half of the twentieth century. We’re still dealing with what that did to Korea and Afghanistan. A pox on proxy wars.

The United States has allies. China doesn’t. Another irony: China understands the value of the US alliance system better than Donald Trump does.

The United States is clearly the world’s greatest military power, and US alliance dominance is a formidable bulwark against a new cold war. Yet China is coming and the equation is shifting. Robert Kaplan ponders what this means for America and its Asian allies:

The United States must face up to an important fact: the western Pacific is no longer a unipolar American naval lake, as it was for decades after World War II. The return of China to the status of great power ensures a more complicated multipolar situation. The United States must make at least some room for Chinese air and naval power in the Indo-Pacific region. How much room is the key question.

Australia and Asia need the United States as a balancer, not a new cold war belligerent.

As both the French and Chinese say in different ways, the naming of things is vital. It determines where you start and has much to do with where you go.

The trouble with the new cold war is that it’s a binary label for a networked world. The binary question last time was simple: which side of the Berlin Wall are you on? The network question is about the functions and connections of the nodes, and the protocols in use. Myriad networks, many uses. Analogue wall then; digital web now.

How will nations, acting as nodes, view the competition and the connections as well as the confrontation? No single, simple choice is possible because so many different choices crowd and call.

Strategically, the United States has enjoyed unipolar privileges since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, apparently, we’re to revert to bipolar business as usual, with China as the new foe. But the settings are all wrong for such a simple move. The ground today looks so different, ideologically, economically and in alliance structures.

Along with all the other disparities, today’s America is not the America of the cold war. Today’s occupant of the White House doesn’t have the intellect or worldview of an FDR or Truman or… just name your president, really. Donald Trump doesn’t do systems and structure; he does disruption and deals.

If we’re picking history analogies, look more at the long nineteenth century — from the French revolution to the first world war — than at the frigid stand-off that followed the second world war. Great power competition is back. The questions and partial answers are those of a series of contests with many different powers competing:

Q: Who you gonna trust?
A: It depends on the issue and the interests.

Q: Who you gonna line up with?
A: It depends. Everybody, or nobody, or a shifting mix.

Q: Who you gonna compete with?
A: Everybody!

Ngaire Woods gives a European-flavoured view of how this strategic free-for-all might go:

Rather than a cold war, the world may be heading toward an international system led by four powers, with the US, China, Russia, and Germany dominating their respective regions and seeking the upper hand in international negotiations. Such a scenario is reminiscent of the World War II vision of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proposed that the four victorious allies — the US, the UK, China, and the Soviet Union — act as “Four Policemen,” each patrolling its own sphere of influence and negotiating with the others on world peace.

Today, approximations of the same four powers are once again in the lead, only now we have stronger international institutions to help keep the peace. Whether that peace lasts will depend on the willingness of the four powers to use and adapt those institutions to the emerging international system.

The formula looks broadly right, but too simple. And in its Asia dimension, it too easily grants China dominance.

From where Australia sits, a couple of other players must be added: India and Japan. And then there’s ASEAN, with Indonesia foremost in our calculations. As a “system,” this is more a cacophony than a concert of powers. And that brings us back to the label issue. Names matter, so let’s offer a name.

If this is not a cold war, what’s it to be called? One flippant suggestion from inside the Canberra system is “big cat spat.” It’s certainly an update of the proverb that one mountain can’t contain two tigers. The need, though, is to broaden this to suggest many mountains and many tigers.

My answer, in a phrase, is “hot peace.” In a paragraph, it’s this: Rather than a new cold war, we’re entering a hot peace of simultaneous cooperation and competition among many states. Think the heat and sweat of a great power decathlon rather than the frozen blocs and rigidly opposed ideologies of the postwar world.

“Hot peace” is a better label for what the world faces than “new cold war,” not least because we’re well short of an icy, bipolar face-off between China and the United States. Beyond the current superpower and the coming superpower, a lot of other big powers are going to matter in this new era. All those powers are going to be running in many different races. See the G20 as competitors, with lots of other nations also contending in the foreign policy version of track and field.

In the hot peace, the United States and China will be central but not always decisive. That’s because the main job of the G2 will be managing differences and divisions, not agreeing on decisions. If and when they can agree, Beijing and Washington will have the capacity to direct and dominate specific issues. Big deals, even good deals, are still possible in a hot peace.

But this era is going to make deals difficult, because competition and confrontation build as the elements of engagement fade. It will be a hotly contested peace. The argument is that we have arrived at a troubled form of peace, not a muted form of indirect war. The strategic contest will have many peaceful dimensions. Hot peace rebuts the cold war claim by saying, “We’re not there yet!”

Without getting too metaphysical, the hot idea works better in describing close partners who are simultaneously opponents. Lots of friction from all those close contacts and contests.

Rather than frigid nuclear and ideological stand-off, China and the United States are locked together, interdependent even if intemperate. Joe Nye gets it right in describing the relationship of the two giants as “cooperative rivalry.”

A former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, calls his new book From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. What McFaul sees with Russia has arrived with China. During the Soviet–US cold war, hot peace was the improved state many yearned to reach. Back in 1973, Pierre Hassner mused about that shift in the New York Times:

A new stage of “hot peace” has indeed replaced the cold war, but it would be wrong to assume that the farther one gets from war and propaganda the closer one is to peace and reconciliation. In this new state of ambiguity, situations may thaw without being solved, isolation may be broken but in favor of asymmetrical penetration or imbalance rather than of reconciliation.

One of the great American historians of the cold war, John Lewis Gaddis, notes that the cold war was fought at different levels in dissimilar ways in multiple places over a very long time. Any attempt to reduce its history exclusively to the role of great forces, great powers or great leaders would fail to do it justice. Yet for Gaddis, the first step to understanding is clear: “It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.”

If the many competitors stuff up this new era, they could freeze the hot peace and drive history to deliver us all to a cold war. •

The post Not the new cold war appeared first on Inside Story.

During a visit to their base in 1999, the chief of the defence force at the time, Chris Barrie, and I chatted to a corporal whose daily routine was to run the ten kilometres from his home to the base, do a day’s SAS training, and then run the ten kilometres home again. As their commanding officer commented, “These are not the types of people who put on their best performance when their girlfriend is in the stand and the crowd is cheering them on. They are the people who can keep going when they are wet, cold, tired, hungry, maybe injured, far from home, and no one is looking.”

Because of the nature of the work they do, they operate in great secrecy. We rarely read of their exploits, we never read of their techniques or capabilities, we never see photographs that would enable any individual to be identified, and we only find out their names after they have left the ADF.

Also because of the work they do, they have less of the regimented training and exercising of the mainstream infantry, and have greater freedom to innovate, and to acquire non-standard equipment and acquire it quickly. In the interests of maintaining and enhancing the capabilities that can give them an edge, they have a licence to cut certain corners.

This does not mean, however, that they have a licence to operate outside the boundaries of the Law of Armed Conflict. In the course of operations that depend on speed and surprise, and in which there is no front line, they must make split-second decisions that can result in innocent civilians being killed or injured. But there is no exemption from the requirement to treat captured insurgents or detained suspects humanely, and as far as possible to avoid harming the civilian population.

Unfortunately, by 2016 there had been sufficiently credible reports of soldier misbehaviour on operations for the chief of special forces, Jeff Sengelman, and the chief of army (now the chief of the defence force), Angus Campbell, to ask the inspector-general of the ADF to conduct a formal inquiry with the assistance of NSW Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton.

The allegations — detailed by Fairfax journalists in recent weeks — cover abuse of unarmed Afghan civilians, assault of a prisoner in custody, use of force beyond what is acceptable under the laws of armed conflict and, within the SAS itself, bullying and intimidation of fellow soldiers — and even a claim of one soldier assaulting another. Added to that are claims of a cover-up: claims that SAS patrols — typically groups of five or six men — may have failed to report accurately incidents in which Afghans had been subjected to the use of force, including acts of brutality perpetrated against unarmed men.

Generals Sengelman and Campbell would not have made the decision to establish the investigation lightly, and would have needed to be convinced that there was more to the allegations than scuttlebutt exchanged over a few drinks or, as has been counter-alleged, disgruntled soldiers smearing a tall poppy.

Incidents of the types that have been alleged are not to be tolerated, and the military leadership is to be complimented on taking them as seriously as they have. No matter how difficult the circumstances of the conflict — and these soldiers are fighting in very difficult circumstances — the rules concerning the treatment of adversaries, prisoners and civilians must be followed.

It is when the rules force inconvenient decisions that they perform their most valuable service. It is precisely because the circumstances are so difficult — fighting with no front line, not knowing who is friend or foe — that our soldiers must be scrupulous in their behaviour. Whatever outcome we are seeking in Afghanistan, it will not be achieved without the support and confidence of the Afghan people, especially the rural Afghans among whom we operate. For every one of these people we kill, assault or humiliate, we will have an extended family that hates us.

The allegations raise a fundamental issue for the ADF as a whole, of which I am sure the leadership will be acutely conscious. No unit, no matter how valuable, can be permitted to make its own rules. If they set out to do so, they are setting themselves up as a rival power centre (“Doesn’t matter what the hierarchy says, this is the way we do things”) and no organisation can tolerate that. The chief of the defence force’s writ must run throughout the ADF; if he says (as I’m sure he does) that we must abide by the Law of Armed Conflict, treat prisoners appropriately and so on, then that is what must happen. And the leadership must support those soldiers who blow the whistle on misbehaviour by taking their claims seriously.

For the nation as a whole, it is in our interest to treat all foreign combatants as we would expect others to treat ours. Atrocities perpetrated by our adversaries do not excuse misbehaviour by our soldiers: we are supposed to be better than them.

To me, the ambiguity of modern warfare and the vagueness of our mission in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, raise yet another issue. To my mind, it is not acceptable to ask young Australians to go overseas to kill people without a clear sense of an achievable purpose that has been tested by debate in parliament, and without any deployment being authorised by parliament. We cannot continue to allow deployment decisions to be made, as the deployment to Afghanistan was, at the whim of the prime minister of the day. •

The post How, and why, do we go to war? appeared first on Inside Story.

Rather than incoherence, see the complexity of a relationship that now stretches across many elements of Australian life. Note a key lesson of the five icy ages: the Chinese system is always united and coherent in its proclaimed anger, while Australia debates with itself as much as it argues with China. A monolithic party in China confronts a system where the proper job of parties is to brawl; that makes icy ages messy for Australia but also strangely useful, even clarifying.

The saga of the changes in diplomatic climate begins with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. When China stood up, Australia turned away.

First icy age (1949­–72): Siding with the United States, Australia refused for twenty-three years to give diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic. After long and arid coldness, the Whitlam government’s recognition in December 1972 created an era of warm optimism. The return of a Coalition government in 1975 made the warmth bipartisan, especially as prime minister Malcolm Fraser — a pragmatic panda-hugger — saw China as an ally in confronting the Soviet Union.

Second icy age (1989–91): Bob Hawke’s tears flowed after the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June 1989. Australia bashed at China, suspending ministerial visits, aid and loans and stopping military contacts. The action that had the most profound effect — and turned out to be hugely beneficial — was Hawke’s decision that Chinese students and citizens in Australia didn’t have to return to China. With family reunions added in, that saw 100,000 settling here, the biggest wave of Chinese migration since the gold rush of the mid nineteenth century.

The onset of the second icy age was sharp. Australia’s first ambassador to China, sinologist Stephen FitzGerald, said that Australia had been guilty of naive euphoria about China — “we have seemed to lose all perspective” — and argued that Tiananmen marked the end of “official intoxication with China.”

Early the following year, though, Australia’s ban on ministerial visits was lifted. China was too important to shun. Another year later, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s official history, the “hiatus in relations” ended in 1991. Emerging from its short pariah period, China joined APEC in 1991 simultaneously with Taiwan and Hong Kong, a moment of equivalence unimaginable today.

Third icy age (1996): China attempted to put John Howard’s government, elected in March 1996, to the sword. Ministerial visits froze and Australian businesses in China screamed that they were being punished. The new government had offended on numerous fronts. Howard’s ministers criticised Beijing’s missile-test menacing of Taiwan; Howard’s call to reinvigorate the US alliance struck Beijing as an endorsement of a containment policy. Chinese commentators fretted that Japan and Australia would be “crab claws” gripping China. The perceived Australian slights piled up: cutting aid loans, a ministerial visit to Taiwan, the PM meeting the Dalai Lama. As Howard conceded in his memoirs, it was “a rocky start.”

The thaw came when Howard met with China’s leader, Jiang Zemin, at the APEC summit in November 1996. Howard rates that conversation “as about as important a meeting as I held with any foreign leader in the time I was prime minister.” It was the start of what Howard calls one of his greatest foreign policy achievements — “the great duality” of strengthening the alliance with the United States while building an ever-closer economic relationship with China.

Howard sat down with Jiang, he recalled, “determined to focus on the things that we had in common and to put aside those things that could never be resolved between our two nations.” He told Jiang that respecting the different heritages and politics of Australia and China meant not lecturing each other: “Encouragingly, as we walked out of the meeting, the President said to me in English: ‘Face to face is much better, isn’t it?’”

Howard’s course was set. He was deeply pragmatic, conceding China’s prerogatives, promising mutual respect (in his case, respect for China’s power) and seeking to focus on trade. It worked marvellously. The China boom lifted Australia’s boat and sailed it serenely into a golden economic era.

Fourth icy age (2008–09): Beijing thought the new Mandarin-speaking leader, Kevin Rudd (Lu Kewen), understood and loved China. Trouble was, Lu/Rudd knew China’s complexity and duality and spoke truth to power.

The Rudd sharpness shaped the 2009 defence white paper. His various offerings on China were bookended by significant speeches, two years apart, in Beijing and Canberra. The Beijing University speech in April 2008, four months after taking office, was a hopeful, opening effort to dance with China. His Morrison Lecture in Canberra in April 2010, two months before he was cut down by caucus, showed signs of the frostbite caused by the fourth icy age.

In Beijing, speaking in Mandarin, Rudd offered honest criticism and sought to be a zhengyou, a true friend who “offers unflinching advice and counsels restraint” on contentious matters. He proposed “a straightforward discussion” about “significant human rights problems in Tibet.” China decided it was going to have problems with Lu Kewen.

Two years later, reflecting on the icy age, Rudd described three chilly scenarios: China as threat; China as direct competitor with the United States for control of the international system; and China as self-absorbed mercantilist bully.

In the meantime, the diplomatic pressure from Beijing had thrown up a notable document, the October 2009 Australia–China joint statement, whose ceasefire terms will be a useful template for the eventual end of hostilities in this fifth icy age. The statement came out of the bombast and official snubs dished out by Beijing in July, August and September 2009. When the row became a resolution in October, Canberra avoided the need for a symbolic kowtow and managed to get a balanced deal adorned with language about mutual respect and equality. It was the kind of diplomatic boilerplate that matters.

Here are the five paragraphs of that 2009 Australia–China statement with my added translations of the diplomatese.

1. The set-up paragraph: Australia and China agreed on the “great potential and prospects” for what is described as a “comprehensive relationship.” China and Australia will promote the “long-term, sound and steady growth of the comprehensive and cooperative relationship on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.”

Canberra translation: We heard you yelling at us. You’ve had your say, now please consider your enduring interests — and show some respect.

2. The key paragraph on the end of the conflict: “The two sides noted their different national conditions could lead to differences of one type or another. The two sides should respect and take into full consideration the core interests and major concerns of each other [and] properly handle differences and sensitive issues in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, non-interference and equality…” Australia then reiterated its one-China position on Taiwan, but more pointedly offered an explicit statement of respect for “China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including in relation to Tibet and Xinjiang.”

Canberra translation: No Kevin Rudd meeting with the Dalai Lama and no more visits for a while by Uighur leaders. But, as with paragraph 1: show some respect.

3. The geoeconomics paragraph, covering market principles, Chinese investment and the huge benefits for each side of the trade synergies: “Recognising that the combined GDP of our two economies is greater than US$5 trillion, the two sides agreed that China and Australia enjoy strong economic complementarity, and it serves the common interests of both sides to advance economic, trade and investment cooperation on the basis of reciprocity and mutual benefit.”

Canberra translation: Your GDP is US$4.4 trillion. Our GDP is US$1.01 trillion. You’re bigger but we still count.

Also in the geoeconomics paragraph, the free-trade agreement. The negotiations were four years old. Time to try again, the statement suggests, and Australia still gets in its language about a “comprehensive, high-quality, balanced and mutually beneficial” deal.

Canberra translation: We won’t settle for the trade deal you foisted on the ASEANs, and we need a much broader deal than the Kiwis achieved. The Howard government started this agonising process so there’s not too much political pain for us if it drags on. Show some political will and kick your officials. If you’re not up to it, we’ll go elsewhere and see if Japan or South Korea can do “comprehensive and high-quality.”

Then comes the Foreign Investment Review Board bit: “The Australian side stated in clear terms that it welcomes investment from China, as China welcomes investment from Australia. Australia sees China’s increased investment interest as a positive development that will further consolidate the Australia–China economic relationship.”

Canberra translation: Read our lips: WELCOMES!

4. The geopolitical clause: “The two sides agreed that China and Australia share important common interests in promoting peace, stability and development in the Asia-Pacific region.” The usual institutions get a mention: the United Nations, G20, APEC, the East Asia Summit and the Pacific Islands Forum.

Canberra translation: I won’t mention your military expansion if you don’t mention my white paper.

5. The people-to-people clause: Education, culture, sports, tourism and the media.

Canberra translation: On culture and language, the Mandarin-speaking prime minister handles his own translation.

Icy periods between nations are difficult, challenging and even dangerous. Along with the perils of thrills and spills, though, chills are illuminating. The reality of the pushes, the pulls and the power plays is revealed. Differences have to be discussed, if not resolved. Dispute, not agreement, is to the fore and must be dealt with as the temperature drops.

Icy ages seldom get to a catharsis. As long as catastrophe is avoided, a rethink has its uses. Even after the let’s-move-on moment is reached (agree to disagree, or do a deal) the chill influences the future trajectory. Such periods force a reset. They do this because governments that throw the switch to cold can also recalibrate to warmer settings. That’s the positive message of history.

The fifth icy age disrupts the usual rhythms. This time the domestic dimensions of the wrangle loom large. This is more than a foreign affairs stoush — it has domestic dimensions that increase the political chill factor for both sides.

Previous icy ages tended to focus on things happening in China’s sphere. Today’s icy age has more of its action on Australian soil, because China’s sphere reaches into more Australian interests. As the balance of power moves steadily China’s way, so the blowback spills our way.

The elements of the chill — domestic and strategic — gathered last year. Australia held its tongue about Donald Trump, to hold firm to the alliance, while its language about China became shriller. Privately describing China as a “frenemy,” prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s major Asia policy speech in Singapore in June offered a “dark view” of a “coercive China” seeking regional domination.

In November, Australia’s foreign policy white paper emphasised the friendly side of China as frenemy; that’s as it should be in an official document. Its starting point, though, is a stark fear of China’s challenge to the United States and the “rules-based” order so prized by Australia. Having described that central reality, the paper reaffirmed Australia’s seventy-seven-year commitment to the US alliance and its enduring belief in America’s role in Asia.

The domestic dimension of the cooling was dramatised in December by the fall of a Labor senator seen to be doing China’s bidding because of donations from Chinese business. Almost at the same moment, the prime minister announced legislation to ban foreign political donations and broaden the definition of espionage. To make the point in the most pointed way, Turnbull used Mandarin to quote Mao’s famous line about China standing up to state that Australia will stand against foreign interference. Chilly!

Introducing the legislation to widen the reach of foreign interference and espionage law, Malcolm Turnbull took direct aim at China in a section of his speech headed “Protecting our democracy.” Turnbull used the cover of “media reports” but the legislation is based on the government’s understanding of what China is doing. Here is how he talked about China:

Media reports have suggested that the Chinese Communist Party has been working to covertly interfere with our media, our universities and even the decisions of elected representatives right here in this building. We take these reports very seriously.

Our relationship with China is far too important to put at risk by failing to clearly set the terms of healthy and sustainable engagement. Modern China was founded by the statement that Chinese people have stood up. And today, and every day, the Australian people stand up and assert their sovereignty in our nation, with our parliament and with our laws.

As the normal customs of Oz politics apply, even in an icy age, the “stand up” line got plenty of kicks, particularly from Kevin Rudd, commenting in Mandarin on Chinese social media. “Frankly, it was irresponsible and very problematic for Turnbull to say that ‘the Australian people have stood up,’” he wrote. It was “an insult to Chinese people, to Chinese Australians, and to Australians.” In another post, he said, “I have just criticised Turnbull on Australian television because he derailed China–Australia relations for his domestic political interests. That is very irresponsible.”

A significant date in any icy age is when governments cease to deny there’s a problem and start openly discussing what’s wrong. Icy age five is now acknowledged.

China’s ambassador to Canberra, Chen Jingye, complained to the Australian about “a growing lack of mutual trust” that could hurt trade: “We have seen a kind of systematic, irresponsible, negative remarks and comments regarding China which has caused adverse impact on bilateral relations.”

Malcolm Turnbull’s version is that “tension” in the relationship is caused by “misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of our foreign interference legislation in some of the Chinese media.” Blaming the media is standard stuff in the early stage of an icy age. Once tensions are acknowledged, governments can’t wave it off as a journalistic beat-up. The “misunderstandings” line is useful for leaders feeling the freeze. The tyranny of the talking points is the need to talk, so they blame the conflict on mistake or misapprehension. Don’t believe it. No misunderstanding here.

China knows the push-pull power-play basis of this process as much as we do. In the official grievance game, Beijing is an old master. The formal expression of affront was given by China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, at her regular press conference, where she rejected the claim of Chinese interference in Australia and then ramped up to a broader charge of Australian poor faith and prejudice.

“First, with regard to political infiltration, we have responded to it on multiple occasions,” she said. “There are normal people-to-people exchanges between countries and normal exchanges and cooperation can be conducted in various fields. If one views normal exchanges as infiltration, he had better lock himself in a dark room and live in isolation. People with such a mindset should reflect on themselves.

“Second, regarding China–Australia relations, the normal and friendly exchanges and cooperation between countries should be underpinned by reliable and strong mutual trust. Without mutual trust, exchanges and cooperation in other areas would be impossible. We hope that the Australian side can make concrete efforts to discard its prejudices and discriminatory practices against China, join hands with China to step up mutual trust and create enabling conditions and a relaxing atmosphere for our exchanges and cooperation across the board.”

These are Beijing’s justifications for applying the diplomatic squeeze. You can reject its version of the dispute while accepting the twin points are a useful definition of what the icy age is about.

Australia is arguing about China’s power and role in Asia. Added to this, Australia is now arguing about China’s effort to exert power within Australia. Getting a reset on those two issues will be extremely difficult. But the rethink has started in Australia.

The icy age asks Australia to think about itself, not just about the relationship with China, as the chill blows through many Australian worlds: security, economics and trade, society, diplomacy and politics. The orbits of these worlds converge, shifting political tides and disrupting social weather.

Traditionally, dragon-slayers worry about China as a security threat, a revisionist power eating at Australia’s interests. The slayers tend to come from the security and counterespionage realm — SecWorld — but other worlds feel dragon alarms.

Panda-huggers dominate the economic realm of EcWorld. Two-way trade is worth $150 billion (more than the United States and Japan combined). The Australian’s economics writer David Uren sees it as Australia’s most intense trading relationship since dependence on Britain faded in the early 1950s: “China takes a third of our exports of goods while its students and tourists provide a quarter of our services income. China also provides more than a fifth of our imports.”

As geostrategic and geoeconomic concerns grow, gravitational wobbles make EcWorld and SecWorld snarlier and snappier, and iciness spreads to other worlds.

SecWorld has upset the usual role of the diplomats from DipWorld, according to Geoff Raby, the former deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who was Australia’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011. As China adopts “an increasingly muscular foreign policy stance” and challenges US pre-eminence, Raby writes, many in Canberra have taken fright: “In response, the Security Establishment (Defence, ONA, ASIO, ASIS, PM&C’s International Division, and the think tanks they fund such as ASPI) some time ago concluded that the China relationship was too important to trust to DFAT. The foreign minister’s, and hence her department’s, role in managing this critical relationship has become inconsequential.”

More than a Canberra turf wrestle, this is a case of worlds converging. As Raby notes, “China today permeates Australian society — some form of Chinese is the second most widely spoken language in Australian homes; fee-paying Chinese students largely support Australia’s higher education sector financially, while Chinese tourists have long been the biggest spenders. They are now also the most numerous. All of these trends will continue to deepen.”

The line about “permeates Australian society” points to that notable difference between this fifth icy age and the previous four. Much of today’s action is on Australian domestic turf — social and political — in SocWorld and PolWorld. We’re arguing about ourselves as well as China: the way we do politics, how we run and pay for universities, the life of a multicultural society. The policy issues have become personal: the 2016 census found that 2.2 per cent of Australia’s population was born in China and 5.6 per cent have Chinese ancestry.

When he introduced the foreign-influence legislation in December, Malcolm Turnbull said the focus is on foreign states and their agents, not the loyalties of Australians from a foreign country. “There is no place for racism or xenophobia in our country,” he said. “Our diaspora communities are part of the solution, not the problem.”

It was a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to keep SecWorld separate from SocWorld. But the parliamentary review of the proposed legislation, the subsequent government amendments, and the range of public submissions all show the impact on a range of Oz worlds.

They’re also evident in the clash of the petitions between two groups of Australia’s China scholars. Coming from the panda-ish side, the Concerned Scholars of China see no evidence that China aims to compromise Australian sovereignty, and disagree with key claims about Chinese influence made in support of the national security legislation:

Instead of a narrative of an Australian society in which the presence of China is being felt to a greater degree in a series of disparate fields, we are witnessing the creation of a racialised narrative of a vast official Chinese conspiracy. In the eyes of some, the objective of this conspiracy is no less than to reduce Australia to the status of a “tribute state” or “vassal.” The discourse is couched in such a way as to encourage suspicion and stigmatisation of Chinese Australians in general. The alarmist tone of this discourse impinges directly on our ability to deal with questions involving China in the calm and reasoned way they require. Already it is dissuading Chinese Australians from contributing to public debate for fear of being associated with such a conspiracy.

A dragon-ish response came from another group of scholars who say that the debate isn’t driven by “sensationalism or racism” but responds to “well-documented reports about the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Australia.” They offered this checklist:

● Espionage and other unlawful operations by Chinese officials or their proxies on Australian soil
● Attempts to interfere in political elections
● Direct and indirect control of Chinese-language media in Australia
● Intimidation of Chinese Australians (both Australian citizens and permanent residents) for their political views and activities in Australia
● The use of political donations and agents of influence in attempts to change Australian government policies
● The takeover and co-opting of Chinese community groups to censor sensitive political discussions and increase the Chinese government’s presence in the community
● The establishment of Chinese government–backed organisations on university campuses, used for monitoring Chinese students
● Interference in academic freedom
● The cultivation of prominent Australians in attempts to sway public and elite opinion
● The covert organisation of political rallies by the Chinese government.

On the evidence of the previous three icy ages — under Hawke, Howard and Rudd — today’s chilliness will pass when both sides decide enough is enough. An icy age is a diplomatic device to inflict damage and denote displeasure. Eventually, other purposes must be served. A balance between row and kowtow will be restored.

Canberra and Beijing will have to agree on the terms of the thaw. That requires them to agree on what the argument is about. Then the leaders will meet and the language will swing from rancour and recrimination to mutual respect and shared interests.

The reset, though, will reflect a permanent change in the international weather system — the growing power of China. It will also show the many faces of China within our society. The terms of the eventual thaw will run through many Australian worlds. ●

The post China and Australia’s fifth icy age appeared first on Inside Story.

While Macron was careful to stroke the American president’s sensitive ego, he surprised many with a robust speech to Congress in which he reaffirmed the value of multilateral trade, reminded political leaders of the need to persist with the Iran nuclear deal and reaffirmed the importance of the Paris climate agreement, from which Trump has so blithely moved away. But will the French president’s soft-power strategy win concessions from Trump? Many doubt it, but only time can tell: diplomatic influence takes time and works beyond the media glare.

What was also striking was Macron’s courting of the next generation of American decision-makers at a very informal discussion with students at Georgetown University. This has become a standard feature of his international itinerary: whether he’s in India or Africa, he insists on addressing a young audience, leveraging his own relative youth to extoll the benefits of French higher education and French research and development, and projecting the message that “France is back” on the global economic and political stage.

Macron’s visit to Australia is one of a long list of international engagements, coming on top of visits to many other European countries. His arrival in Sydney brings his tally of continents to five of the seven, and no other French president has spent so much of his first year globetrotting. Where does the Australian visit fit into Macron’s political strategy? First of all, it’s important to remember that he is seeking to seduce different publics: an international one, a European one (to position himself as the next great European leader) and a national one back in France. The latter — as recent protests have highlighted — is far from being wholly supportive. For this Australian visit, a New Caledonian audience can be added, for he will visit Nouméa next, just a few months before a referendum decides whether the territory accedes to full sovereignty or retains links to France.

In this respect, Macron’s trip is full of symbolism. He will arrive in New Caledonia in time to take part in the remembrance services for the unrest in 1988 that triggered the independence negotiations and led to the Nouméa agreement of 1998, which allowed for this year’s referendum. In keeping with his self-proclaimed wish to be a “Jupiterian” president, above social divisions and political squabbles, he has been careful to stress that he won’t take any position on the referendum itself. But he has signalled that he will make an important speech before leaving the territory. It’s possible that the talks in Australia will have some influence on its content.

Macron’s Australian visit crowns four years of collaboration on the first world war centenary celebrations, which culminated in the opening of the John Monash Centre in Northern France last week. The timing puts the spotlight on the history of the military alliance and more broadly on defence collaboration, especially as it bears on the fight against Islamic terrorism. The two countries have shared terror-related intelligence since the deportation in 2003 of a French citizen, Willy Brigitte, who planned to establish an al Qaeda cell in Sydney.

At the intersection of defence and trade, Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, secured the $50 billion contract that will see a French company build twelve submarines, designed in Cherbourg, for the Australian navy. The project led to new links between the Brittany region and South Australia, the centre of the Australian government’s new naval shipbuilding plan.

In this respect, Macron’s visit was partly after-sales service. But he also has a far more ambitious strategic vision than his predecessor, which was apparent in talks at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base, which was designed to forge a strong Franco-Australian partnership to strengthen Indo-Pacific cooperation. The “security diamond” that links Australia to the United States, Japan and India is likely to be a particular focus: in the face of growing Chinese involvement in the region, this originally Japanese initiative is designed to pursue the associated objectives of a rules-based regional order, free trade, and security for smaller Southeast Asian and East Asian countries.

During his visit to India in March, Macron aligned himself strongly with prime minister Narendra Modi’s foreign-policy agenda. France has a particular interest in the Indian Ocean. Alone among European countries, it maintains a base there, an acknowledgement of the ocean’s importance as a trade and communications route. (Three-quarters of all European trade travels through the Indian Ocean and it is criss-crossed by internet cables.) Like other Western leaders, Macron is concerned with the need to manage China’s growing presence in the region, all the more so because of Trump’s erratic leadership. China has secured a military base in Djibouti, for example, a country that was once part of the French zone of influence on the Horn of Africa.

Macron’s interest in the Indo-Pacific region is part of a broader objective: not only to become the de facto leader of the European Union but also to be the leader who fulfils the underlying French vision that fuelled the EU’s creation, to give his country a leading role in the Western alliance. In this, he is perhaps the antithesis of Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, who made the decision to put the French armed forces back under NATO central command, and much more heir to presidents François Mitterrand and Charles de Gaulle, who, despite their different political allegiances, saw “Europe” as the vehicle for France’s influence. Both men pursued economic power, but only insofar as it could push France’s cultural influence; both saw in the European Union’s multi-level, rules-based governance a civilisational model. To his credit, Macron sees the need to combat climate change, and to honour the progress made at the Paris conference in 2015, as a major aspect of this model and has reminded prime minister Malcolm Turnbull of his own earlier commitment to action on climate change.

Macron and Turnbull do share common ground but have divergent priorities. For Australia, Macron’s visit is a golden opportunity to push forward negotiations with the European Union on a free-trade agreement. This has been an objective of the European Commission for a while, but Brexit gave the project much more impetus. As Britain plans its withdrawal from the European Union, Australia fears a repeat shock, in reverse, of what it experienced when it was locked out of the British market following Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973.

Macron is very mindful, however, of the European Union’s crisis of legitimacy as a result of the global financial crisis — or rather, as a result of the way it managed the crisis under the leadership of Angela Merkel. By imposing austerity across member countries, European policy-makers have kept economic growth anaemic everywhere except in Germany itself. At a Brussels summit in October last year, Macron warned of the dangers of pushing ahead with free-trade treaties when public opinion is hostile. A number of non-government organisations, trade unions and politicians have accused the treaties of undermining social norms, environmental protections and health standards.

As a consequence, negotiations for the Canada–Europe Trade Agreement were fraught, and the deal could still be derailed if one country vetoes it. Further complicating Europe’s position is the eternal problem faced by French governments, the need to manage an agricultural sector that has been under great pressure. As a result, official declarations about Macron’s visit to Australia have stressed that negotiations would only concern bilateral commercial agreements.

Big French companies are of course in favour of such a free-trade treaty with Australia. The current involvement of French construction giants Vinci and Bouygues in Melbourne’s infrastructure revamp has demonstrated the potential for expanded operations here. More broadly, French business is acutely aware of the fact that Australia’s economy is highly interdependent with China’s and that the country could be a useful platform to make headway in the Asian market.

But business doesn’t have to worry about securing popular support. Macron, on the other hand, is acutely aware of its importance following the wave of social protest triggered by his attempts to move France to a system of collective bargaining and to prepare the country to meet the European Commission’s directive on the liberalisation of railway transport, which set 2020 as the deadline for France’s main national lines to be opened to competition. With the railway system running at a loss, this delicate issue overlaps with the question of public debt. The strengthened EU rules established following the Greek financial crisis make it imperative for France to reduce its budget deficit.

The French government’s attempt to turn the national railway, the SNCF, into a private company has met with union resistance. A decent level of public support exists for the strikers, though it is eroding as disruption continues. In many ways, the SNCF — by binding the country with a network of lines that radiate out from Paris — is a symbol of the social pact French governments struck with France as a whole after the liberation from Nazi occupation. What people fear is that the profitable lines surrounding major cities will be retained but the periphery will be left to its own devices with possible negative social and environmental consequences.

The French presidential campaign made it clear that French society is deeply divided: the half of France that still operates within a national rather than international economic environment feels it has been abandoned by governments. Some have dubbed Macron’s attempt to reform the SNCF his “Thatcher Moment,” recalling the Iron Lady’s confrontation with mining unions in the mid 1980s. Macron has remained firm in the face of the protests, and will be hoping that En Marche! members of the National Assembly, under party leader Richard Ferrand, can swing popular opinion over to its program of liberalisation.

One test will be the next electoral contest, in 2019, when the French people choose their representatives to the European Parliament. European elections have traditionally attracted less interest than national elections in France, but Macron’s promise to engineer a change of Europe’s direction, combined with the political discontent evident in other European countries, means they could be much more decisive for national politics.

During his election campaign, Macron undertook to reform the European monetary union to give the European Union the capacity to mutualise debt and drive large investment projects. But the recent German federal elections confirmed what many had suspected: Germany will not go along with such a reform.

For a while, with the retirement of Wolfgang Schäuble (the architect of austerity) and the debates within Germany’s Social Democratic Party, or SPD, a change in German policy seemed possible. It was hoped that Germany would face up to the unsustainability of its incredible trade surplus (8 per cent of GDP, more than China’s widely criticised figure) and allow the grave economic balances between countries to be corrected. The SPD’s decision to once again join a “grand coalition” and the appointment of Olaf Scholz as finance minister dashed those hopes: Scholz is just as much a fervent believer in the virtues of a “schwarze Null” (a “black zero,” or balanced budget) as Merkel and he will not push for more national spending to rebalance exports and imports between Germany and the rest of the eurozone.

To put it differently, even though Merkel’s leadership has been weakened, Germany will continue vetoing the reforms many economists now realise are needed to resolve the imbalances and recover economic growth in Europe. Added to this is the fact that the countries that have been through punishing austerity measures and have reduced their budget deficits are unlikely to follow France in a stand-off with Germany.

Macron is desperately hoping that labour reform in France will be enough to deliver some economic growth and secure French popular support for his European vision. He also hopes that his international stature will encourage not only the French electorate but also other countries to stand by him. In France, his new party does not yet have a solid electoral base and the proposed reforms are therefore a major gamble for Ferrand’s government.

Emmanuel Macron was in many ways elected by default, as the result of the disintegration of the French Socialist Party, the fear surrounding the possibility of a French Trump, Marine Le Pen, and the corruption allegations against the candidate from the right, François Fillon. It is fair to say that he is walking a tightrope and it remains to be seen whether his charisma and the hope he has inspired — both of them on display in Australia this week — are enough for him to deliver the change that France, Europe and perhaps the Western world are calling for. ●

The post A Macron moment appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet the reports seem to be based on something. Fairfax journalist David Wroe is well respected, and judging by the fact that his sources are notably reticent and he attended a Lowy Institute security workshop just last week, it could be based on information from intelligence agencies.

Plausible deniability is built into the story. Wroe argues that a dual-use facility will be developed incrementally around the Luganville Wharf on Santo Island. He isn’t claiming that we will see it immediately transformed into a base for troops ready to protect China’s interests in Vanuatu. And those interests — beyond fishing, possible future seabed mining, and a handful of business migrants with whom the Chinese party-state has a troubled relationship — are negligible.

Incremental or otherwise, we are a long way off a permanent Chinese military presence in the Pacific. Military-to-military ties in the region are minimal (Timor-Leste is the only country hosting a Chinese defence attaché) and only two other countries in the South Pacific — Papua New Guinea and Fiji — have defence forces. The Vanuatu Mobile Force is a paramilitary outfit answerable to the police and will likely stay that way, although it has aspirations that the People’s Liberation Army could conceivably feed.

Perhaps foolishly, I made an on-the-record prediction that China is likely to have a base in the South Pacific within the next five to ten years. Despite the fact that Luganville would make an excellent harbour, Vanuatu would not have been my first pick: Tonga, Fiji and even Papua New Guinea look more likely. It might even be the case that this week’s controversy isn’t about Vanuatu at all — that it’s really an amplified message to Pacific leaders from Australia’s political and defence establishment. Papua New Guinea, whose foreign minister is currently visiting China ahead of the APEC summit on a promise that China will “promote greater development of [the] bilateral strategic partnership,” won’t have missed the memo.

President Xi Jinping will be visiting Papua New Guinea for the first time in November for the summit, and will announce substantial aid, military and commercial initiatives. Canberra’s message could be that two out of three are welcome. More scholarships and help for PNG’s cashflow crisis are likely, but those providing this information seem to hope it won’t extend to defence matériel or an exchange of defence attachés.

The messaging could also have a domestic dimension. In diplomatic terms, there’s a case that China has been putting in more effort than Vanuatu’s “strategic partner of choice” (that’s Australia, according to foreign minister Julie Bishop). Vanuatu’s prime minister, Charlot Salwai, has been to China twice in two years but has yet to visit Australia. Canberra gives more aid than Beijing does; but Chinese aid is responsive to the needs of Vanuatu’s leaders. Moreover, further cuts to the Australian aid budget have been mooted, with entire sectors said to be in treasurer Scott Morrison’s crosshairs.

But let’s entertain the notion that the intelligence provided to Fairfax has some basis. Leaving aside Vanuatu’s potential strategic importance, another explanation emerges if we step back from “China” to unpack which Beijing-linked figures are active on the ground in Vanuatu.

The main Chinese contractor on the Luganville Wharf is the Shanghai Construction Group, or SCG. This company, like the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation and various arms of China Railway Group, is ubiquitous across the Pacific. I’ve come across them in many places, and even helped extract one of their managers from a police lock-up (despite the clumsiest effort at bribery in recorded history). The SCG is ambitious and more than willing to lean on and lubricate Pacific officials to achieve its goal of rapid expansion across the region.

In the case of the wharf, where Australian spooks might see a calculated plan to link to the airport, expand communications facilities or maintain and refuel ships, SCG sees Phase II, III and IV. Chinese contractors are legitimately looking for more work, and once you’re established in a remote island nation with plant and labour on hand, why not find ways to keep working rather than pack up and go home?

While these companies are usually state-owned, giving them the heft to negotiate finance from the Chinese state, their Pacific-based managers enjoy considerable autonomy. Just as Chinese companies reverse-engineer aid projects by pitching them to agencies back home in coordination with Pacific partners, a reverse-engineered facility is not out of the question. The China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation in particular was heavily involved in the Djibouti base.

A space-tracking facility to coordinate with Chinese research and space-tracking ships makes more strategic sense than a naval base. WikiLeaks cables revealed an offer to build a radar array in Timor-Leste to monitor shipping in the Wetar Strait. The offer, reported to US officials by then deputy prime minister José Guterres, was declined. China did build a space-tracking station on Tarawa atoll in Kiribati in the late 1990s, although targeted dollar diplomacy saw the government there flip recognition to Taiwan in 2003, so the equipment couldn’t have been crucial to Beijing’s efforts. But space is a higher priority now, one of three “strategic frontiers” for the People’s Liberation Army’s Strategic Support Force.

A fully fledged base, Djibouti-style, is unlikely. Vanuatu takes its non-aligned status seriously, and it’s not clear what People’s Liberation Army troops would do in the middle of the Pacific, far from crucial sea lanes and commercial interests. While it’s unwise to rule out anything in Xi Jinping’s new era, the current version of this tale looks baseless. •

The post In Vanuatu, it’s he says, Xi says appeared first on Inside Story.

According to the grand rise-of-Asia narrative, we are seeing the end of the era that began when Vasco da Gama set out from Europe in 1497 in search of new trade routes to Asia, and launched the 500-year epoch in which the West both ruled and created the rules. Against this broad sweep, Donald Trump’s arrival is a mere symptom, not a cause, but he will accelerate the trend in unpredictable ways.

Asia’s rise is the new normal, a defining element of our times, and certainly of the twenty-first century. Australia has been living amid its expansion for so long that the response can be a blasé “ho-hum, what’s new?” Yet almost everything alters when epochs change. New truths emerge and old verities collapse. New rulers strain against old rules.

One of the elemental changes is the erosion of the West’s power to dominate global politics. Gideon Rachman’s statement of this is a conventional rendering of the new normal, but beneath that “normal” the ground shifts and roars. “For more than five hundred years, ever since the dawn of the European colonial age,” he writes, “the fates of countries and peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas have been shaped by developments and decisions made in Europe — and, later, the United States.” He goes on:

But the West’s centuries-long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close. The root cause of this change is Asia’s extraordinary economic development over the last fifty years. Western political power was founded on technological, military, and economic dominance, but these advantages are fast eroding. And the consequences are now defining global politics.

Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator of London’s Financial Times, is an Atlanticist marvelling at the power shift to the Pacific. His new book (published in the United States with the title Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline) is built around the themes of Asia up, America down and Europe out.

Asia’s resurgence, he writes, is “correcting a global political imbalance of political power that has its origins in Western imperialism. In that sense, the rise of Asian powers is an important step towards a more equal world.” But his account of US decline is counterpointed by a “largely positive view of the role of American power in the world.” America’s policing of the rules, he argues, offers the best chance for a just world:

The idea of a multipolar world, without dominant powers and guided solely by the rule of law, is theoretically attractive. In practice, however, I fear that just such a multipolar world is already emerging and proving to be unstable and dangerous: The “rules” are very hard to enforce without a dominant power in the background.

Asia rises, but is divided. Rachman points to two significant obstacles to the Asian century. The first, corruption, eats at the ability of the coming powers, China and India, to create trustworthy institutions for a globalised system: “Popular rage about corruption is a common theme that links democratic India and undemocratic China.” The second, and more serious, is the divisions and rivalries within Asia: “For the foreseeable future, there will be no Eastern alliance to supplant the Western alliance.”

Asia’s rise will be even quicker if it’s accompanied by an American retreat, real or perceived. Image can swiftly shape reality in international affairs, and Rachman worries the notion that America is losing its grip on world affairs is “in danger of becoming conventional wisdom — from Beijing to Berlin to Brasilia.” In power politics, vacuums are always filled, but there’s much jostling, misjudgement and mishap along the way, especially if the occupant of that supposed vacuum vehemently denies that it’s shifting.

Rachman thinks that if the United States has the will then it has the resources to stay near the top of the global rules game. But while America grapples with relative decline, he says, Europe is slipping and slinking out of the contest. Turning his eyes to his own turf, this Atlanticist frets that Europe, which wrote the manual for the world’s system of states, is losing its right to sit at the top table: “The European powers are in precipitous decline as global political players.”

Much changes in the shift from the Enlightenment to Easternisation. Britain has decided to go solo, leaving a smaller Europe led by a Germany that’s determined to stay out of fights. Britain’s “self-isolation,” Rachman writes, is “a potentially shattering blow to European self-confidence.”

The military dimension of Europe’s retreat is what Rachman calls a “breathtaking” reduction in French and British military might over the past forty years. Europe, he says, is gambling with its own security:

The cumulative effect of America’s growing reticence, Germany’s semipacifism, and defence cuts in Britain and France is that the NATO alliance — the bedrock of Western security since the end of the Second World War — is in disrepair. The sense that NATO’s decade-long mission in Afghanistan has effectively failed has further sapped the West’s interest in acting collectively around the globe.

A key feature of our rapidly shifting era is China’s expanding view of its power and prerogatives in relation to the United States. At the end of the twentieth century, China was still following Deng’s admonition to hide and bide — hide its power and bide its time. At the start of this century, it was still easy to sketch the comfortable view that the deep intertwining of the American and Chinese economies and their mutual interest in the global system would define the relationship.

By the time of the global financial crisis in 2008, as America crashed into recession, China had decided it would rise on its terms, not abide by American understandings. The power contest has quickly become intense and sharp, as Rachman illustrates:

Over the course of the Obama administration’s eight years in power, America came increasingly to see China as more a rival than a partner. Quite how far the balance had tipped was brought home to me in the spring of 2014, when a senior White House official told me that he regarded the relationship as now “80 per cent competition and 20 per cent cooperation.” I was so surprised that I got him to repeat the formulation, in case I had misheard — “80 per cent competition,” he said again.

If it took Obama’s team two terms to arrive at that view of China as 80 per cent rival, that perspective is one of the few settled elements of the Trump worldview.

The national security strategy Trump issued in December attacked China as a revisionist power, challenging “American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” seeking “to displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region.” The companion national defence strategy issued in January states that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.” America ranks a clash with China ahead of the threat from jihadists. As the Economist headlined, the next war looms as great-power conflict.

Australian official language is more restrained than America’s, but Canberra is just as vexed about what sort of ruler China aims to be. Australia’s 2016 defence white paper fretted constantly about the need for international rules, using the word “rules” sixty-four times, forty-eight of them in the formulation “rules-based global order.”

To see US–China rivalry only in bilateral terms, though, is to miss much that is shaping Asia’s future. Widening the frame beyond the world’s top two economies to include the third-biggest economy, Japan, is what Richard McGregor offers in his new book on Asia’s reckoning and the struggle for global dominance.

McGregor’s focus is on the “cold peace” between Japan and China — the tangled emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship. “The story of Japan and China,” he writes, “is one of stunning economic success and dangerous political failure.” China harbours “a sense of revenge, of unfinished business” about Japan. The two countries seldom find equilibrium, he says, and rarely manage to treat each other as equals.

Pondering Asia’s future, McGregor is uncertain about what course the US will take: perhaps it will turn its back on the world under an isolationist president, or maybe Pax Americana can survive, with a resilient American economy and refreshed alliances robust enough to hold off an indebted and internally focused China. “The spectre of a renewed Sinocentric order in Asia, though, is upending the regional status quo for good, whatever path the US might take,” McGregor writes:

Geopolitically, the three countries have increasingly become two, with Japan aligning itself more tightly with the US than at any time in the seven decades-plus since the war… As its power has grown, China has begun building a new regional order, with Beijing at the centre in place of Washington. The battle lines are clear.

China’s rise and Japan’s relative decline have fed a poisonous cycle. McGregor quotes a Chinese saying — “two tigers cannot live on one mountain” — to illustrate the view of many Chinese that their competition with Japan to be Asia’s dominant indigenous power is a zero-sum game: “What once seemed impossible and then merely unlikely is no longer unimaginable: that China and Japan could, within coming decades, go to war.”

McGregor is one of the outstanding Asia hands of this generation of Australian journalists. He started as an ABC correspondent in Tokyo, moved to newspapers, and eventually served as chief of the Shanghai, Beijing and Washington bureaus of the Financial Times. His previous book, on the Chinese Communist Party, The Party, was a revelation, built on a framework of fine reporting. Asia’s Reckoning has the same strengths; this is history that draws vivid force from the notebooks of a journalist who did daily duty as the past few decades unfolded.

McGregor describes how, after Japan established diplomatic relations with China, the two enjoyed a high point of “seemingly amicable relations from the late 1970s until the 1980s” as China’s leaders reached out to Japan for investment, technology and aid. Zhou Enlai’s line was that the two countries had enjoyed 2000 years of friendship and fifty years of misfortune. That playing down of history did not become the prevailing view.

Sino-Japanese rapprochement was commercial and diplomatic, but issues of war and history were merely covered over like land mines left just under the surface. As the conflict over history built, McGregor writes, “a corrosive mutual antipathy has gradually become imbedded within their ruling parties and large sections of the public.”

The Chinese government has played the history card — demonisation of Japan — in a desperate effort to maintain its own legitimacy. After the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, McGregor writes, Japan became “collateral damage” to Beijing’s most pressing priority: to rebuild the party’s standing after having unleashed the military on its own people. Beijing “opened a vast new political front to ensure that such protests never got off the ground again.”

Popular anger must be directed at Japan, not the party. Beijing has stoked rage with “the decades-long party campaign to burnish its patriotic lustre with an unrelenting diet of anti-Japanese history and news.” Beijing’s first use of the now regular criticism of foreigners “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” was directed at Japan. McGregor quotes the view that the party has raised young Chinese on a diet of “wolf’s milk.”

McGregor offers a masterful account of the complex fifty-year dance between China, Japan and the United States, describing “a profound interdependence alongside strategic rivalries, profound distrust and historical resentment.” His book stays true to one of the central maxims of news journalism: report what you see, don’t be a seer. So McGregor offers little about what might come next: about whether China, Japan and the US are heading to a smash, a muddle through or a major realignment. Granted, publishing at the dawn of Trump throws even more variables into the choices and changes confronting the world’s three biggest economies. Spare a moment’s compassion for the author of a narrative who has to finish his work with the arrival of The Donald. Flux all around and the fog of the future abounds.

The history McGregor offers has plenty of evidence the reader can use to construct two vastly different futures for Japan. I’d call these opposed visions Strong Japan and Comfortable Japan. Marking the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration/Revolution this year is a reminder of how Japan has twice during that period shown the ability to make huge shifts in its governance and society in order to respond to external challenges.

Strong Japan foresees a Tokyo that refuses to bend to Beijing. Japan reclaims its rights as a “normal nation,” building its military strength as America’s key Asian ally and leading Asia in both balancing against and engaging with China. This is prime minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of Japan, reaffirmed by his victory in the October general election. Strong Japan is expressed in the unusual role Abe has taken in leading Asia’s response to Trump: saving the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump dumped the trade treaty, reshaping the Japanese constitution, and making a fresh effort to create a “quadrilateral” alliance of democracies linking Japan, the United States, India and Australia.

McGregor’s version of Strong Japan includes his belief that Japan will not be fighting on its own if it does go to war with China in coming decades. He offers a significant judgement about the resilience of the Japanese and Chinese systems in contemplating conflict — and calculating the impact of a defeat: “In Tokyo, a military loss would be disastrous, and the government would certainly fall. But that would be nothing compared to the hammer blow to China’s national psyche should Japan prevail.” He cites the view that such a loss would be terminal for the Chinese Communist Party, marking the moment for regime change.

Comfortable Japan, by contrast, sees Abe as a political outlier who won’t be emulated by future prime ministers. In this version, Japan matches the decline of its population and economy by declining gently to middle-power status. This Japan embraces the peace of its pacifist strain, no longer wanting to serve as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier. The US–Japan alliance fades away, dismissed as the strange joining of two nations with vastly different histories and values. Putting aside its old nightmares about being betrayed or abandoned by a US turn to China, Japan would drift out of Washington’s orbit. Tokyo could quietly decide that the cost of resisting Beijing is too high.

Comfortable Japan would accommodate China as the new ruler. For the Japanese, this would be portrayed as Japan’s turning back to Asia. In China, the Community Party would proclaim victory in the history war and start to turn down the heat.

If Richard McGregor won’t make any bets on the future in his book, Hugh White puts all his money on red. White thinks China is going to win and America is going to leave. His prediction is that Comfortable Japan will beat Strong Japan because of tensions in the alliance with the United States:

Japan is the key to East Asia’s emerging order as China’s power grows and America’s wanes. Japan’s alliance with America has been the keystone of America’s strategic position in Asia. While the alliance lasts America will remain a major regional power, and when it ends America’s role in Asia will end with it. So we can best understand how America’s position in Asia might collapse by considering the future of the alliance.

The alliance might look robust, but China’s growing wealth and influence has changed the equation:

For America, the costs of the alliance are growing, while the benefits are not. China’s rise makes it both a more valuable economic partner and a more formidable military adversary, and so the costs to America of protecting Japan against China go up both economically and strategically… By the same token, the benefits of the alliance to Japan are falling, as US support in a crisis becomes less certain. This worries Japan more and more as both China and North Korea look more and more threatening. There will come a point when Tokyo reluctantly concludes that America simply cannot be relied upon any longer.

White dismisses the Strong Japan option as too hard. Japan has all it needs to break the nuclear taboo and get nuclear weapons; the difficult part would be explaining the nukes to its own people and getting acceptance from Asia.

A Strong Japan would have to create a coalition of like-minded countries, including Australia, to balance China’s power and prevent Beijing from dominating the region. White judges that the other countries won’t join — all have their own interests with China and all would be reluctant to accept Japan’s direction and serve Japan’s interests — and so middle-power status is more or less inevitable.

In Canberra, Hugh White is always one of the smartest men in the room — and these days one of the most controversial. His customary cheeriness prevails, despite the storms he’s stirred with his writings on Australia’s choice between China and the US. One of the bravura habits of Hugh is his ability to walk into a conference room or lecture hall armed with only a takeaway coffee (muffin optional) and a single sheet of blank paper; the paper is folded down the middle and, before the coffee has cooled, he jots down a series of notes on both sides of the fold. Then he delivers a flawless speech which is both to time and on topic. It’s the performance of a formidable and disciplined intellect, well attuned to the rhythms of Canberra.

After university in Melbourne and Oxford, Hugh White arrived in the national capital in the late 1970s to work as an intelligence analyst in the Office of National Assessments. He jumped to journalism in the parliamentary press gallery (and sharpened his prose style) as defence writer for the Sydney Morning Herald before joining the office of defence minister Kim Beazley and then becoming international adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke. As the defence department’s deputy secretary for strategy and intelligence, he wrote the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper. He was the inaugural director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and is now professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.

White’s seer service was displayed in his previous Quarterly Essay, Power Shift: Australia’s Future Between Washington and Beijing, published in 2010. This new Quarterly Essay proclaims that the issue of choice is fading and the result is looming.

The onrush of China has been so central to this decade that it’s difficult to summon up the hysterical response eight years ago to Hugh White’s heresy: the proposition that America should cede some power to negotiate a new regional order, retaining a lesser but still substantial American strategic role in Asia to balance China’s power. As an example of the convulsive response to this proposition, here’s Greg Sheridan in the Australian in September 2010, attacking White’s “astonishing,” “ridiculous” and “weird, weird” essay:

Professor Hugh White of the Australian National University has done something remarkable. He has written the single stupidest strategic document ever prepared in Australian history by someone who once held a position of some responsibility… His central thesis is that the growing strategic competition between the US and China is almost certain to produce deadly and convulsive conflict unless the Americans can be persuaded to give up their primacy in Asia and share power with China as an equal.

Back then, I told White to send Sheridan a big Christmas card of thanks: the gnashing gusher about astonishing weirdness ensured Hugh’s essay had to be read by everyone who mattered in Canberra, and many in Washington. Today we’d be blessed if we’d achieved the comfort of the Washington–Beijing power-sharing agreement that White advocated in 2010. Now he thinks the chance is gone.

White’s new essay judges that the rivalry may proceed peacefully or violently, quickly or slowly, but the most likely outcome is becoming clear:

America will lose, and China will win. America will cease to play a major strategic role in Asia, and China will take its place as the dominant power. War remains possible, especially with someone like Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But the risk of war recedes as it becomes clearer that the odds are against America, and as people in Washington come to understand that their nation cannot defend its leadership in Asia by fighting an unwinnable war with China. The probability therefore grows that America will peacefully, and perhaps even willingly, withdraw.

It’s happening already, says White. And although it is “not what anyone expected,” the process can’t be reversed.

What does Australia face in Rachman’s era of Easternisation and what Hugh White describes as a new regional order delivered by a profound shift in Asia’s distribution of power?

Rachman thinks Australia “faces an acute strategic dilemma,” even as it greets “the rise of Asia with exuberant enthusiasm, treating it as an unparalleled opportunity to secure Australia’s prosperity long into the future.” The dilemma facing Australia and New Zealand deepens if Southeast Asia becomes a Chinese sphere of influence. “Australasia,” says Rachman, “risks becoming an isolated Western outpost, cut off from its political and cultural hinterland. As a result, the vision of China asserting its influence across the South China Sea and in Southeast Asia set off alarm bells in the Australian elite.”

The fear of a coercive China bending Southeast Asia to its will has driven Australia to change its definition of the region from the Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific. “The notion of the Indo-Pacific emphasises India’s importance and challenges the idea of a region that inevitably revolves around China,” says Rachman.

It also stresses the central importance of the Indian Ocean, as well as the South China Sea. And it makes the Australians feel less lonely. Rather than being stuck out on the edges of the Asia-Pacific region, Australia could style itself as at the centre of a vast Indo-Pacific region framed by the two democracies of the United States and India.

Hugh White’s account is of an Australia little prepared for what it faces, especially a US retreat from Asia which, under Trump, “is probably becoming irreversible.” Canberra didn’t see this coming because Washington didn’t expect it, and we have got into the habit of seeing the world through Washington’s eyes. Australia’s misjudgement, White writes, was to depend more and more on America as its position became weaker:

America has no real reason to fight China for primacy in Asia, shows little real interest in doing so and has no chance of succeeding if it tries. Until our leaders realise that, they will not address the reality that we are, most probably, soon going to find ourselves in an Asia dominated by China, where America plays little or no strategic role at all.

White has cemented his unpopularity in official Canberra because his vision of America vacating the region is completely at odds with the views of the Turnbull government. Its November 2017 foreign policy white paper does describe a new, contested world of great-power rivalry where America’s long dominance of the international order is challenged, but its conclusion is that the US will keep winning:

Even as China’s power grows and it competes more directly with the United States regionally and globally, the United States will, for the foreseeable future, retain its significant global lead in military and soft power. The United States will continue to be the wealthiest country in the world (measured in net asset terms), the world’s leader in technology and innovation, and home to the world’s deepest financial markets. The Australian Government judges that the United States’ long-term interests will anchor its economic and security engagement in the Indo-Pacific. Its major Pacific alliances with Japan, the Republic of Korea and Australia will remain strong.

The structure and conclusion offered by the Australian government can encompass the competition described by Richard McGregor and stretch to take in Gideon Rachman’s Easternisation. But Hugh White describes another world.

We are unlikely to face a single sliding-door moment — a big, one-time choice. We will make constant choices because that is what diplomacy and the world of states is all about. We can no longer chant John Howard’s reassuring mantra that we will not have to choose between our history and our geography.

Our geography presses. China, the United States and Japan — along with India and Southeast Asia — will all be integral to the way we weigh our options and make selections. The constant effort will be to maximise flexibility and minimise zero-sum calls. And Australia isn’t alone in experiencing this angst about our Asian future: it is shared by the other middle powers that will gather at the ASEAN summit in Sydney next month.

China and the United States will push and woo Australia. “We will be able to defy Chinese pressure if we choose,” writes White, “but China will be able to inflict heavy costs on us if we do. It will not be able to dictate to us, but it will be able to shape our choices very powerfully.” A foretaste of how this will go is the Turnbull government’s pushback against China over cyber espionage and perceived interference in our political system, and China’s angry response. This foreign policy quandary has deep domestic roots: in Australia’s census, 1.2 million people declared themselves of Chinese heritage and about 600,000 were born in China.

China’s geopolitical aim is to turn Australia into a neutral, to detach America’s oldest and closest ally in Asia. America fears that Australia will be “Finlandised,” slowly slipping into China’s orbit. White quotes a senior official in the Obama administration venting his frustration about Australia: “We hate it when you guys keep saying, ‘We don’t have to choose between America and China’! Dammit, you do have to choose, and it is time you chose us!”

For his part, Donald Trump threatens to bring a frightening clarity to one of the essentials of the Asian security system: the US military guarantee to Asia, which is of such importance that any future peacetime threat to the formal and informal alliance system will most likely come from the United States itself. Short of war, only major new US demands — or US failures to deliver — could imperil the value of its multi-tiered alliance system in Asia.

A superpower always has the potential to underdeliver or over-demand. Washington will underdeliver if it doesn’t have the means to fulfil its security guarantees to its Asian allies, followers and even free-riders. That underperformance will show first in US political will or regional commitment rather than in the sinews of US military power.

The other end of the same equation is a United States that demands too much from its allies, causing them to baulk. Trump is forcing Asia to ponder both problems, especially the nightmare of an America that could underdeliver by departing.

Even if China were still hiding and biding and America wasn’t being roiled by its president, Australia would confront tougher decisions because of the relative power and wealth we bring to Asia’s table. The key word is “relative”: our long-term relative decline as a power and an economy in Asia continues as it has for decades. That doesn’t signify Australian decline or failure — merely that we are growing at a slower rate than a lot of others in the pack. An ever more prosperous neighbourhood is obviously better for us as well as them, but regional success challenges our power and our choices.

The times will require an independent foreign policy because the times will be tougher. We will fashion our own suit, not ride the coat-tails of others. Australia must be clear about what it sees, and precise in describing it. Our pride in the Australian tradition of straight talking must be matched by even straighter thinking.

An independent foreign policy will demand a capability for independent thinking. For a long time, when Australia talked about China it was actually talking about the United States; that American lens was why we didn’t give diplomatic recognition to China until 1972. Over the past decade, there’s been a flip. Now when we talk about the United States, often we’re really looking at China.

No longer can we afford to allow either Washington or Beijing to frame the other in our thinking. Nor can we see Japan’s strategic options solely through the fifteen-year-old trilateral strategic dialogue of the United States, Japan and Australia — any more than we’re going to deal with India only through the resurrected quadrilateral of the US, Japan, Australia and India.

Australia must see others in the region as their own agents with their own agendas. Lots of independent players will inevitably mean many surprises. Depending on your temperament, it’s an exciting new era or terrifying in its uncertainty. Foundations shift and structures shake.

As a great joiner, Australia wants to be in every conversation and club; but that is just the starting point. Then it’s a matter of how the various clubs and cohorts and Australia itself can contribute to Asia’s future. Independence is more easily declared than displayed; it’s not one of our strongest habits. Just as our geography is going to force us to confront choices, the times will demand independent thought and sometimes independent action. It’s no contradiction to say that an Australia best able to define and declare its independent interests will be better placed to be an ally of the United States, a partner to China, a friend to Japan and a fellow middle power to ASEAN nations.

Australia confronts a rapidly changing Asian system, beset by rivalry and great-power contest. “In this dynamic environment,” says Australia’s foreign policy white paper, “competition is intensifying, over both power and the principles and values on which the regional order should be based.” Power. Principles. Values. We have a core interest in the rules of this game and how the region is ruled, but Australia’s future in Asia doesn’t look much like what we knew during the bipolar stand-off of the cold war or America’s two-decade unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Time to run the ruler over what’s left and start to work for the rules we want. ●

The post Asia’s rise: the rules and the rulers appeared first on Inside Story.

NPRs are the most authoritative unclassified statement of how Washington views its nuclear forces. Or at least that’s the theory. The problem is that presidential declarations, strategic planning and presidential authority are not always in sync. The declarations often supply the dramatic headlines; planning usually leans towards quietly maintaining continuity; presidential authority can be a wild card.

Let’s start with the declarations. Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric offered more than its share of quotable quotes on nuclear issues but often seemed inconsistent and provided few specifics. On some points, however, he seemed clear. He suggested the winding back of the US nuclear umbrella shielding allies, even if doing so encouraged the likes of South Korea and Japan to build their own bombs. The problem, he argued, was that these countries were freeloaders who should be forced to stand on their own feet. He also claimed that Barack Obama had woefully neglected America’s military, including its nuclear forces, and so they needed urgent attention.

But it was never clear how much Trump understood these matters, despite absurd boasts like, “I’ve studied this [Iran nuclear] issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else…”

As president, Trump has maintained that style, at one stage proclaiming himself a genius. When under pressure, though, he flipped from rubbishing the nuclear umbrella to affirming that it remained in place. This was probably the result of advice that sticking to his campaign guns could dissipate the strategically invaluable Western alliance and open the door to greater North Korean, Russian and Chinese adventurism. The rehabilitation of the nuclear umbrella seemed like a turn back to orthodoxy.

Then he appeared to go beyond normal deterrence. Thinly veiled warnings were made that he’d use nuclear weapons if North Korea merely threatened (rather than began) hostilities — even though Pyongyang habitually makes threats and has been prone to stepping over red lines. Trump’s “fire and fury” moment was, perhaps, the starkest threat of first use of nuclear weapons ever made by an American president, even going beyond Washington’s “massive retaliation” declarations of the 1950s. By strongly implying that the United States would fire nuclear weapons in response to rhetoric rather than an actual attack, Washington injudiciously put its credibility on the line. The world was used to America’s traditional strategic permissiveness, but this crossed over into melodramatic bluster in a way that could lead to strategic incontinence and mass slaughter.

So, at the beginning of 2018, we have a president more noted for bombastic performances than policy coherence. Fortunately, in principle, the NPR provides an institutional moment to offer a carefully considered and exhaustively reviewed official statement of policy on arguably the most important part of Trump’s job description.

In practice, NPRs emerge out of Washington in-fighting. Typically, the struggles over bureaucratic interests embroil the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department of Energy and nuclear weapons laboratories. Strategic theories are disputed, and presidential advisers jostle for influence.

Ultimately, it’s for the president to adjudicate. But it’s unclear how engaged Trump has been in the process and how much of the NPR reflects his thinking. It’s worth noting that it was after a Pentagon strategy meeting last year that Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, referred to the president as a “moron.” And the NPR doesn’t sound like Trump: it sounds more like the voice of the nuclear weapons establishment as packaged by former general and current defense secretary James Mattis.

The earlier Summary of the National Defense Strategy set the context for the NPR, declaring: “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.” The NPR continues the message, naming China and especially Russia as great power challengers undermining world order.

The hundred-page NPR has two major themes: deterrence (including the nuclear umbrella) and modernisation. In that sense, it’s business as usual, with adjustments that are more evolutionary than revolutionary. Even so, three aspects of the NPR are noteworthy for signalling a recasting of policy.

First, disarmament has been demoted. While Obama declared the abolition of nuclear weapons a priority for US policy, Trump doesn’t seem that interested. (We should, though, be wary of overstating this point. Obama’s achievements fell radically short of expectations and abolition remains an ostensible long-term goal in Trump’s NPR — although this sounds hollow coming from a president who brags about the size of his “nuclear button” and won’t even advocate a nuclear test ban treaty.)

Second, the administration will spend big to update the arsenal. Most of this was planned by Obama, with Washington already set to spend US$1.2 trillion on nuclear forces in 2017–46, including US$400 billion for modernisation. But the NPR does call, controversially, for two new types of relatively low-yield nuclear weapons for US submarines, on the assumption that the current arsenal of about 4000 relatively large nuclear warheads is inadequate.

This proposal reflects a view that North Korea, China and Russia believe that Washington is overly reluctant to use its older, bigger weapons — that US nuclear deterrent threats might, under some scenarios, be a bluff. Moscow, in particular, is accused of devising strategies to use a few “battlefield” nuclear weapons to test US/NATO resolve in, say, the Baltics. The remedy is said to lie in America’s deploying newer and smaller weapons which would be seen as easier to use, thereby restoring the believability of the deterrent. There’s nothing new in this logic. Since the 1960s, fears of putative “deterrent gaps” have repeatedly been employed to justify additions to the US arsenal, also known as arms racing.

Third, there’s now more emphasis on US nuclear weapons deterring not just nuclear attacks but also a wider range of threats. The belief is that American nuclear forces should help stop China, Russia and North Korea from trying their luck with any kind of major attack. So, the US is boosting its planning and capacity to escalate non-nuclear conflicts into nuclear war. Again, the option of escalating a regional or limited war is not new; in fact, it has marked US policy since the 1940s. What’s different today is that the range of crises that might be deemed worthy of American nuclear threats — and therefore nuclear attacks — has supposedly increased.

Of course, crossing the nuclear threshold raises the prospect of “nuclear war-fighting.” For political reasons, that idea is explicitly rejected in the NPR. But the passing denial runs directly counter to the substance of the document.

While on the topic of politics, only time will tell how much of this agenda gets through Congress. Spending large sums on arguably unnecessary and foolhardy new weapons while cutting taxes and proclaiming budgetary rectitude will sound strategically dubious as well as economically illiterate to many.

Compared to the Obama years, is the United States more likely to drop a nuclear bomb? The NPR pre-emptively denies the charge. Using the jargon, it says Washington is not “lowering the nuclear threshold.” But this denial fits uneasily with a commonsense reading of a document that is, after all, largely a call to enhance the usability of nuclear weapons.

Ultimately, the answer is not to be found in the NPR. It lies in international political developments (especially reckless behaviour by North Korea, Russia and China) and in Trump’s brain.

Trump’s brain is critical here for two reasons. First, the NPR does not determine crisis management or wartime operations. Instead, it guides peacetime policy, although admittedly it lays the bureaucratic groundwork for a greater role for US nuclear weapons. Second, orthodox post-1945 readings of the US Constitution give the president enormous discretionary power as the commander-in-chief. There’s no formal restraint on the president — no requirement for cabinet approval, for instance — when it comes to pressing the button. There’s been limited discussion about the possibility of the military’s refusing to obey an order that contravenes the laws of war, but the only practical obstacle between a presidential command and execution of nuclear first use would be mutiny.

Until now, this has not been a major cause of concern, at least not in the United States. But today, perceptions of Trump’s inadequacies give the matter salience. Even so, efforts to invoke Congress’s constitutional war powers to rein in presidential authority over use of the weapons have failed. (The matter has also fuelled interest in article 25 of the Constitution — dealing with the president’s removal due to incapacity — but that’s a slender reed in this context.)

Trump has raised the temperature of the nuclear debate. This, combined with the wording of the NPR, indicates that Washington now leans towards a greater readiness to use nuclear weapons. Whether, in practice, this makes nuclear disaster more or less likely partly depends on one’s views as to (a) the validity of deterrence theory and (b) the wisdom of extending the theory to encompass more potential conflicts. Does the prospect of US nuclear escalation significantly lessen the likelihood that Russia, China and North Korea would engage in non-nuclear hostilities? Or does it not? If the theory works, nuclear and major conventional war is about to become less likely. As to whether Trump’s temperament is more prone to escalation, that needs a psychological rather than a strategic analysis.

Questions about the wisdom and utility of expanding deterrence threats have featured in strategic debate for decades. The post–cold war tide of opinion has been mostly against further leveraging nuclear threats for broader strategic purposes. The prevalent view in the strategic and arms control communities has been that nuclear weapons ought to be held back as much as possible, reserved only to deter nuclear attack.

Trump’s administration has rejected that logic. But, in fairness, so too did every previous president, at least publicly. They bequeathed to Trump the world’s most effective nuclear arsenal — together with an entrenched first-use option. Not even Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama, well aware of the moral mess intrinsic to the option, would let it go. •

The post President Trump’s button appeared first on Inside Story.

Standing in the central atrium of Canberra’s foreign affairs building, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull launched the white paper as the government’s vision of the next decade of “uncertain and dangerous times.” A leader who projects beaming optimism as his personal motif spent a lot of time discussing the paper’s “clear-eyed and hard-headed” approach to an era of rapid change, political uncertainty, strategic ambition and foreign interference.

The United States and China stand at the centre of the paper in the key relationship that will decide much of the next decade. The third paragraph puts it simply: “Today, China is challenging America’s position.”

Shared economic interests may not be enough to produce a sharing of power that suits Beijing or that Washington can accept:

They have a mutual interest in managing strategic tensions, but this by itself is not a guarantee of stability. Compounding divergent strategic interests as China’s power grows, tensions could also flare between them over trade and other economic issues.

Last year’s defence white paper was loud and staunch in its confidence in the US alliance and its belief that America is in Asia to stay. Coming to the end of the first year of the Trump presidency, the foreign policy white paper is needier and more fretful. The subtext of the declarations of deep Oz affection for the United States is the stark question Canberra now faces: what happens if America goes AWOL, heading east of Guam (or even Hawaii) just as Britain once departed east of Suez?

The white paper’s answer is a pledge to do everything possible to see that the nightmare never happens, with repeated affirmations that the US alliance is good for Australia and good for the region:

The alliance is a choice we make about how best to pursue our security interests. It is central to our shared objective of shaping the regional order. It delivers a capability edge to our armed forces and intelligence agencies, giving Australia added weight and regional influence.

The chapter discussing stability in the Indo-Pacific treats the US and China as a linked topic. This is striking. The United States no longer stands alone in our pantheon, but now shares the central pillar with another.

Throughout the paper, the love for the United States is invariably followed by a paragraph on the deep friendship with China. Malcolm Turnbull might worry, in private, about China as a “frenemy,” but this official statement of the Oz worldview is notable for being most China-friendly.

As policy documents, white papers are always significant for their hierarchies and lists. The country hierarchy starts, as you’d expect, with the United States and proceeds to China, Japan, Indonesia and India. Canberra’s embrace of the Indo-Pacific concept gets another big run.

As promised, the Pacific islands and Timor-Leste get particular attention, with one of the eight chapters devoted to our enduring partnership with Papua New Guinea, stepping up engagement with the islands and supporting Timor. The remember-the-Pacific emphasis means the region gets a place in the five objectives of fundamental importance to Australia’s security and prosperity:

• promote an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo-Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected
• deliver more opportunities for our businesses globally and stand against protectionism
• ensure Australians remain safe, secure and free in the face of threats such as terrorism
• promote and protect the international rules that support stability and prosperity and enable cooperation to tackle global challenges
• step up support for a more resilient Pacific and Timor-Leste.

On the light and optimistic side of the ledger, the paper devotes a page to “dynamic Asia” and the prediction that Asia’s miracle still has much more to give:

The scale of Asia’s transformation is unprecedented. In a little over three decades the region went from one in which more than a billion people lived in extreme poverty to one with more than a billion in the middle class… Over the next ten years, a billion more Asians will join the middle class creating a consumer market larger in number and spending power than the rest of the world combined. Their choices will reshape global markets. By 2030, the region will produce more than half of the world’s economic output and consume more than half of the world’s food and 40 per cent of its energy. By then, more than 600 million additional people will live in the region’s cities.

Power shifts don’t get any bigger than that. As the white paper comments: “For Australia, the stakes could not be higher.” ●

The post Bright hopes, dark visions appeared first on Inside Story.

This approach leaves North Korea’s weapons program intact and steadily growing, raising the prospect that America will have to learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, as the US Pacific Naval Commander, Admiral Scott Swift, perhaps unintentionally acknowledged last week. Worse, it leaves America’s strategic credibility seriously weakened — and that has implications far beyond the North Korean nuclear issue itself. A decline in the United States’ authority in Asia erodes the entire regional order and helps to reinforce China’s challenge to US leadership.

Credibility matters so much because the leading position of the United States in Asia has depended ultimately on the belief, among allies and potential adversaries alike, that it is both willing and able to defend its interests and fulfil its commitments by force if need be. It is the strength of that belief that has made the actual use of force unnecessary, because no one has doubted what the outcome of a military confrontation would be.

But doubts grow every time the United States threatens military action and then fails to follow through. Allies increasingly fear, and rivals increasingly hope, that Washington will not stand by its commitments in a crisis. As that happens, US leadership erodes, and in Asia today that means Beijing’s bid to build a new Chinese-led order moves ahead.

So Washington needs to stop making these empty threats. It must either resolve to use armed force to destroy North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, or it must learn to live with them.

The problem with using force is that no credible military options exist. There is no reasonable chance of destroying or even significantly degrading North Korea’s weapons programs without provoking a major war on the Korean peninsula, with a very grave risk that nuclear weapons would be used.

That’s because there is no quick, cheap “surgical strike” option. Two stark realities confront any idea of a limited series of precisely targeted strikes to destroy the critical elements of Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.

First, there is no reliable intelligence on the locations of many of the key facilities, so it is impossible to know what to hit. Second, many of them are deeply buried in tunnels and thus impossible to destroy, even if they could be found.

Any limited-strike campaign would thus have little chance of significantly degrading, let alone eliminating, Pyongyang’s weapons programs. Moreover, it would certainly provoke major retaliation by the North against South Korean, Japanese and US targets.

And that would leave Washington with a tough choice about how to respond to such retaliation. To do nothing would look weak, but to counter-retaliate would risk a spiral of escalation leading swiftly to full-scale conflict.

So the problems with using force are clear. The problem with not using force is that nothing else seems at all likely to curtail North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Trump has looked to Beijing to use its unique position as Pyongyang’s major trading partner to impose the kind of devastating economic pressure that alone seems likely to bring Kim Jong-un to heel.

But China has no intention of doing that. The most obvious reason is that economic pressure strong enough to force Kim to back down would also be strong enough to risk the collapse of his regime, and Beijing does not want to deal with the resulting chaos.

The deeper reason is that the current situation works to Beijing’s advantage. Of course, China would much prefer that Pyongyang did not have nuclear weapons, but it seems willing to live with them, confident that its own nuclear forces will deter any North Korean attack against it. And, more importantly, the North’s growing nuclear forces serve China’s interests precisely because they pose such an insoluble strategic problem for the United States.

In the ruthless zero-sum contest for strategic primacy in Asia, Beijing wins when Washington’s inability to disarm North Korea makes it look weak.

This is especially true now that the North seems on the threshold of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, that could mount a nuclear attack on the United States itself. A North Korean ICBM poses no new threat to China, because it is already within reach of the North’s shorter-range missiles, but it fundamentally transforms the risks for the United States.

The danger for Washington is not just that Kim Jong-un might order an unprovoked attack on US cities — the certainty of massive nuclear retaliation makes that extremely unlikely. More importantly, Pyongyang’s ability to target the United States undermines the confidence of US allies like South Korea and Japan that Washington would be willing and able to protect them from Pyongyang’s nuclear threats.

And that uncertainty serves Beijing’s interests. It undermines these critical US alliances that are central to the United States’ strategic position in Asia, and correspondingly advances China’s bid to replace the United States as Asia’s leading power. It is thus very unlikely that China will do much to help the United States solve its North Korea problem.

All this shows the depth and complexity of the strategic challenges facing the United States in Asia today. They will only be made worse by the kind of empty bluffing we have seen so far from the Trump administration.

A much more considered policy is needed. And that must start with a fundamental re-examination of US aims and objectives in Asia, and a coldly realistic assessment of the costs and risks that they would entail. •

The post A costly bluffing game appeared first on Inside Story.

The philosophy of the baling-wire way is that of an affluent status-quo power. We like things as they are and want ’em to continue. That practical doing-things orientation drives Australia to be an international joiner. We always want to be in the club, to have a seat at the table, to be part of the game. Membership matters.

Our approach to Asia demonstrates the joiner instinct. Australia aims to be Asia’s odd-man-in. When your only natural regional partner is New Zealand, the constant diplomatic need is to foster the habit of belonging. To be in the club is to have a voice and some chance of influencing the discussion. Being handy with the baling wire, Australia can keep the show on the road.

Great powers do the architecture and the grand strategy. Australia pitches in with the practical stuff. This is both a limitation and a strength of doing it the way we do.

Part of being a pragmatic operator is knowing when the tractor is finally cactus or the ute is rissoled. Sometimes the old model of doing things delivers no more. So the pragmatist goes looking for new things that work. Australia’s history shows we might not be too good at foreseeing the big shifts, but we have a capacity to jump when it hits.

If lots of stuff needs to be changed or made anew, a pragmatic response is to ditch the baling wire, to reach high and go big. That was what Australia did in a period of golden diplomacy at the end of the cold war, launching APEC and being there when Asia was attempting to lash together new security architecture.

Australia’s national character makes it natural for the polity to focus on the practical, day-to-day doings of foreign policy. Yet in contrast to our military tradition, Australia has little appetite for heroic or ambitious international action. As Allan Gyngell observes in a masterful history of our diplomacy, Australia is “surprisingly young” at foreign policy:

There is something about foreign policy that has always made Australians a little uncomfortable. That’s not to say Australia hasn’t developed effective, in some ways distinctive, traditions of diplomacy. It has had creative foreign ministers and made its mark on the world. But the ceaselessly interactive processes of foreign policy, the adjustments and compromises it requires, the close attention it demands, its backroom dimensions, its unheroic nature; these don’t sit easily with Australians. In part, that is why defence and security policy has been much more central to their sense of themselves in the world.

Australia’s habit of mind about international affairs is so practical – or unambitious – we didn’t bother with an independent foreign policy until we were well into the second world war, forty years after the birth of the nation. This was not absent-mindedness. It was loyalty to Britain, as the nation that did our foreign policy for us, plus a hard-headed decision not to do anything that hinted at lack of faith in the strength of the British military guarantee.

Gyngell’s account of how Australia makes its way in the world begins at that point, in 1942, when Australian and British security were no longer inseparable. It was then that Australia ratified the Statute of Westminster, a law enacted by the British parliament back in 1931 to establish beyond doubt the international standing of its overseas dominions. At that moment in 1942, a reluctant, realistic and fearful Australia assumed full sovereignty over its international affairs.

The core emotion that drives Australia’s view of the world is offered in Gyngell’s title: fear of abandonment. Here is a country that has always scanned the horizon for sails. At first, the convicts of the British settlement prayed for the ships that brought food and supplies. Later, Australians feared unfriendly sails, arriving to challenge what Gyngell calls “an audacious claim to a vast continent.”

Gyngell believes that some will see fear of abandonment as too timid a motivation for a great country’s foreign policy:

But it has also been the driver of one of the most consistent and commendable aspects of Australia’s worldview – its rejection of isolationism; its conviction that Australia needs to be active in the world in order to shape it, and that gathering combinations of allies, friends and ad hoc partners is the best way of doing this. That will be a tradition worth defending in the years ahead.

In using this fear as his theme, Gyngell follows in the tradition – and the book titles – of other Australian diplomats: Gregory Clark (1968) In Fear of China; Malcolm Booker (1976) The Last Domino; Alan Renouf (1979) The Frightened Country; Rawdon Dalrymple (2003) Continental Drift: Australia’s Search for a Regional Identity; Richard Woolcott (2003) The Hot Seat; and Philip Flood (2011) Dancing with Warriors.

The place of this tradition was expressed in the 1986 review of Australian diplomacy by the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Stuart Harris, which saw Australia as “geographically isolated” but living “increasingly closely with neighbours with cultures, traditions and languages which are largely alien to it.” As Harris reported, “Countries still achieve their international objectives by threat, bribe or persuasion. Australia has limited capacity to bribe and less to threaten.”

Instead, Australia deploys the tools of persuasion: diplomatic skills, logic, cultural affinities and contrasts, interests and ideology. Gyngell gives a detailed Canberra-coloured rendering, because this has been his life’s work.

Allan Gyngell joined the Department of External Affairs in 1969. (The department was renamed Foreign Affairs in 1971.) He served as a diplomat in Rangoon, Singapore and Washington and rose to become the senior foreign policy adviser to prime minister Paul Keating (1993–96). Keeping his home in Canberra, he became the founding executive director (2003–09) of the Sydney think tank the Lowy Institute for International Policy – doing the commute with the aid of audio books. He returned to the public service to become the head of Australia’s intelligence community as director-general of the Office of National Assessments (2009–13).

Gyngell delivers diplomatic history written with the understanding of an insider. He gives away no secrets but offers sharp judgements along with the facts. He describes his book as the work of a practitioner, not a scholar, shaped by a public service culture that values “accuracy, dispassion and balance.”

The bespectacled Canberra wise owl dissects the world in a quiet, even voice. He traces the big foreign-policy themes (and the key Australian politicians who made the policies): Asia and decolonisation; the need for great and powerful friends; the openings to Asia; the “post–” world after the end of the cold war; and the long national security decade that began as the twentieth century ended.

A mass of detail is compressed into 400 pages. If you aren’t interested in Antarctica or the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Uruguay Round, skip the page to the next exciting bit. The dogs bark, the caravan moves on, the mosaic keeps moving. What is left out is any consideration of the bureaucracy and the operating parts of the machine; that’s in the different but complementary book Gyngell wrote with Michael Wesley in two editions (2003 and 2007), Making Australian Foreign Policy, which deals with the “actual, erratic, contingent way in which foreign policy making takes place” in Canberra.

Gyngell identifies three broad foreign policy responses in Fear of Abandonment:

• Australia wants to embed itself with what Robert Menzies famously called “great and powerful friends.” Without such friends, Menzies said in 1949, Australia “would be blotted out of existence.”

• Australia seeks to shape the environment around it. Bob Hawke called for enmeshment with Asia. John Howard wanted Asian engagement. Paul Keating said Australia would seek security “in – not from – Asia.”

• As a country “with weight in the world but not enough of it to determine outcomes through its own power,” Australia seeks multinational organisations, rules and norms to create a rules-based international order.

Once the bureaucrats/policy practitioners have lined up the forces of power and policy, they turn to the crucial role of personality. Who is the leader and what do they want? Allan Gyngell once described Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, which reimagines the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, as one of the best books “about politics – not just the politics of the Tudor court, but politics full stop… Not so much an historical novel as an astonishingly contemporary novel set in the past.”

As a man who served leaders as different as Keating, Rudd and Gillard, Gyngell responded to the portrait of the Tudor courtier trying to balance the needs of state policy and the demands of his king. So, in charting Australian foreign policy, Gyngell inserts regular pen portraits of the political kings and princes who have presided.

The description of John Howard is a good example. Gyngell describes him as a traditionalist but also “an adroit opportunist.” Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister could be seen as a public administration innovator, especially in the creation of the National Security Council that now sits at the peak of the policy process, delivering a higher degree of ministerial involvement.

Gyngell describes Howard as

a practical man and suspicious of conceptual analysis. Indeed, the words “practical” and “realistic” were favoured adjectives in his description of a good foreign policy. Howard’s way of thinking about the world always began from a domestic political core – a sense of what the Australian people wanted – and worked its way outwards to policy conclusions… He frequently framed policy around the avoidance of choice. Australia did not have to choose, he insisted, between its geography and its history, between “multilateral institutions and alternative strategies to pursue our national interests”; between its economic relationship with China and its alliance with the US.

Gyngell offers a sharp rebuttal of Howard’s line about Australia’s not having to choose between the United States and China:

This mantra, comforting but untrue, would be used in some variant by the Australian governments to follow. In fact, such choices would have to be made almost every day. This was the beginning of the delicate balancing act between Australia’s economic and strategic interests in which all future Australian policy-makers would have to engage.

As Gyngell notes, every Australian strategic planning document of the twenty-first century has come to the same conclusion: the roles of the US and China and the relationship between them are the most important factors shaping Australia’s future. In the final pages of this book, Donald Trump appears. Gyngell sees him as emblematic of the challenge to the globalising world that Australia has known and largely embraced throughout its modern history:

Now a push-back against globalisation is gathering strength across the world, from Indiana to Indonesia. Identities are becoming more atomised and the evidence of slowing globalisation is mounting in trade and investment data, migration trends and the rates of treaty-making. The counter-globalising mood fuels a new protectionism that could have calamitous economic consequences and a new nationalism that might spark fresh military conflict.

In these strange times, the pragmatic habits of baling-wire diplomacy won’t be enough. Gyngell says that Australian diplomacy too often lacks ambition, and that Canberra is reluctant to wield the power it has available. The preference is for diplomatic caution, hunkering down in the company of allies, content in the slipstream. More than this will be needed. “In a world whose largest components are propelling themselves erratically in uncertain directions, the slipstream will be a dangerous place for Australia to linger,” he concludes. “The country’s diplomatic capabilities are about to be tested again.”

If Australia’s international understanding of the previous century was based on fear of being abandoned, our approach to this century must reflect all the ways that we belong, and we must have the skills and ambition to help shape this journey. •

The post The fearfully pragmatic heart of Australian diplomacy appeared first on Inside Story.

The signs of trouble were on display during the election campaign. Among Trump's security themes, three were particularly prominent: a promise to destroy radical Islamic terrorism, especially Islamic State, within months if not weeks; a commitment to greatly increase US military strength; and a pledge to put “America First.” He also criticised America’s overseas allies, advocated better relations with Russia, and called for a tough line on China and Iran. In each case, he brashly advocated a break from past practice.

One thing that worked in favour of Trump the iconoclastic candidate was the failure of US strategic thinking following the declaration of a war on terror after 11 September 2001. The weapons of mass destruction fiasco; the invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed; and dropping the strategic ball in Afghanistan – these have cost trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives and an incalculable amount of American credibility. Meanwhile, China’s resurgence continued, Iran’s role in the Middle East grew, and Russia became aggressively self-confident. Civil war continued in Iraq and Afghanistan despite the moral and legal obligation on the invading powers – America, Britain and Australia – to ensure a basic level of post-war order.

A new approach seemed to be in order. Perhaps the new president could bring something valuable to the table, as he promised?

Typically, Trump had claimed back in 2015 to know more about Islamic State than American generals. He had a “foolproof” plan to bring about “total victory” over ISIS “very, very quickly.” Later, he said:

There is a way of beating ISIS so easily, so quickly and so effectively and it would be so nice… I know a way that would absolutely give us absolute victory…

[It’s] so simple. It’s like the paper clip. You know, somebody came up with the idea of the paper clip and made a lot of money and everybody’s saying, “Boy, why didn’t I think of that, it’s so simple.” This is so simple, so surgical, it would be an unbelievable thing.

Trump said his plan had to be kept secret to avoid tipping-off the enemy. But there’s no evidence he had any special insight into ISIS or the best way to deal with it. Time will tell if the commander-in-chief really has a heavily camouflaged magic bullet, but he’s already passed his implied deadline to destroy the organisation. ISIS has indeed been squeezed hard on the battlefield, but this reflects strategies adopted before Trump’s election. In any case, the difficulties ahead are considerable.

Thwarting potential terrorists is an ostensible aim of Trump’s immigration policy. Critics see his position here as essentially racist and encouraging the inflammatory and counterproductive idea of a war against Islam. Add to this his earlier comments suggesting families of terrorists ought to be killed, and the claim that torture works (and should be “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and it’s easy to understand why US officials might be alarmed about how relations with the Islamic world could unfold.

America’s fight against ISIS hasn’t been hampered by lack of money. Despite Trump’s claim that US forces are dangerously depleted, the defence budget is running at a relatively high level in historical terms. In any case, aside from a small fraction of the air force, the military component of the war on terror mostly involves special forces rather than the big-ticket items that dominate the Pentagon’s budget. Even so, Trump has called for an extra US$54 billion per year (an almost 10 per cent increase), despite the fact that the United States continues to spend more than double the combined totals for Russia and China.

Trump’s thinking is simple: the stronger the US military, the safer the country. This is not a new idea; every president has said much the same thing. Indeed, President Barack Obama had already set in train significant and costly military upgrades. But Trump’s bombastic rhetoric suggests he wants to go further:

We’re also putting in a massive budget request for our beloved military. And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military – all of our military. Offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before… nobody is going to mess with us, folks. Nobody.

It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history. No one will dare to question – as they have been, because we’re very depleted, very, very depleted… Nobody will dare question our military might again.

Strategic dominance is being equated with security. The overwhelming focus is on hard power. This point was underlined by the fact that the military spending boost would be partly funded by cuts to the US foreign service and overseas aid, something that 120 retired American generals and admirals described as short-sighted and counterproductive.

The prominence given to the US military is often difficult to separate from one of the oldest tricks in the book – highly politicised flag-waving. This merges with another conspicuous feature of Trump’s agenda, “America First,” a close relative of his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

On one level, strident nationalism has been standard fare in US politics for as long as anyone can remember, mostly playing to a domestic audience and without significant ramifications, at least since the Second World War. This time, though, it seems different. First, Trump disparaged longstanding US allies. During his election campaign, he called NATO – a cornerstone of post-1945 American foreign policy – obsolete, and suggested he favoured the break-up of the European Union. He generally considered traditional US allies to be freeloaders who had become prosperous at America’s expense. He also implied that the US security guarantee could no longer be taken for granted, which critics worried would undermine deterrence in Europe, South Korea and Japan.

Since his election, though, Trump has back-pedalled, presumably at the prompting of those in his cabinet with more experience in world affairs. The US security umbrella over South Korea, for example, is currently being strengthened by a new missile defence system.

Most remarkable is the fact that the nature of the relationship between the Trump administration and the Kremlin is unclear. At one extreme are suggestions that President Putin is a brilliant puppet-master, or has significant leverage over Trump’s administration. Trump’s defenders, on the other hand, say that he simply wants to break through the deadlock of the past several years and take US–Russian relations into an era of peaceful cooperation. This would presumably mean working closely together on Syria, for instance.

When it comes to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, candidate Trump appeared to lean towards letting bygones be bygones and moving away from sanctions. If Democrats had proposed this sort of reset, Republicans would have shouted appeasement. Yet it makes sense for two of the most heavily armed states in the world, which between them account for a very large proportion of the world’s nuclear weapons, to try to get along. Not that this is predestined: their perceived national interests often diverge, and Putin might be just as uncertain as anyone else about where Trump will jump next.

And Beijing? During the election campaign, Trump said China was “raping’” America with unfair financial and trading practices. He has also questioned America’s “One China” policy, a hot-button issue for Beijing, though he soon backed off. In January, Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said that Chinese access to disputed islands in the South China Sea “is not going to be allowed.” If the threat had been followed through, this could easily have started a shooting war; in the event, the idea seems to have been shelved or abandoned.

But the waters off China remain a combustible mix. In addition to the South China Sea and Taiwan, a dangerous dispute has been simmering between Beijing and Tokyo in the East China Sea. And both Beijing and Trump seem prepared to play the nationalist card, although in the South China Sea it is Beijing, with a more direct stake, that has the stronger hand. Whether that’s enough to contest America’s strategic edge remains to be seen. Perhaps in a crisis Trump will imagine himself a brilliant poker player, in which case the scope for miscalculation and inadvertent escalation will be considerable.

Something similar might be said of the Iran issue. Candidate Trump heavily criticised the complex multilateral deal struck in 2015 between the community (led by the United States) and Tehran to defuse Iran’s nuclear program. The agreement was the subject of one of Trump’s more worrying campaign pronouncements on security: “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran… it is catastrophic for America… I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me.”

On advice from his more level-headed colleagues, Trump could back away from this overheated rhetoric. That would be a good thing: the deal was the best that could realistically have been hoped for. Yet he has kept the door open to ditching it, which might spur Iran to resume its nuclear program. Where US policy would go after that is anyone’s guess. Abandoning the diplomatic answer worked out in 2015 would imply moving towards armed conflict.

Trump has so far been remarkably quiet about two other major security challenges: Afghanistan (and the related problems in Pakistan) and North Korea. This is despite the fact that the military operation in Afghanistan represents America’s longest war, with still no end in sight. It’s probably fair to say that Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do (although it must be said that his predecessors were also short on effective answers).

North Korea – less integrated into the system (and more dangerous) than Iran – is a wildcard that could destroy North East Asia. Apart from containment, though, it’s unclear what Washington can do. Time will tell whether the blustering showman in Trump will be provoked into reckless behaviour by the even more reckless North Korean leader. Both men seem animated by the “performance” aspect of their roles, something that could work out well or very badly.

This brings us to who, if anyone, will become the central figure in Washington’s foreign and defence policy-making. Will it be Trump, possibly steering policy via hit-and-run tweets? Or secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who (apart from his early South China Sea comment) has so far kept a low profile, and may already have been sidelined? It could be the dubious Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist, perhaps working with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, neither of whom is likely to inspire much confidence outside the administration. Many US soldiers and diplomats, as well as most foreign leaders, are probably hoping replacement national security advisor H.R. McMaster and secretary of defense James Mattis (both well regarded former generals) will provide a steadying influence.

Trump’s presidency started inauspiciously. The crassness of his campaign style carried over into his tenure and looks set to continue. Within weeks, he lost his first national security advisor, the deeply unsuitable Michael Flynn. Trump’s first high-profile security initiative, to prevent entry into the US from a range of Muslim countries, ran into constitutional and court challenges. His response was a swaggering “See you in court.” It didn’t happen; he pulled back and his team spent weeks redrafting the ill-conceived executive order.

All this feeds concerns that Trump prioritises self-importance and dramatic impact (including unpredictability) over the likely consequences. Apparently convinced of his superior gut instincts, he shows little sign of reflecting deeply on issues. Applied to global security matters, this self-belief often looks like strategic illiteracy. Stay tuned. •    

The post “Offensive, defensive, everything” appeared first on Inside Story.

The election of a wealthy media celebrity on the promise of making America great again confirms Beijing’s view that the United States is in terminal decline. And if, as promised, Trump abandons the alliance system and the liberal order that Washington has maintained through decades of investment in diplomacy and regional security in the Asia-Pacific, then it’s game over for Pax Americana and win-win-win for China.

As far as Beijing is concerned, Trump can breach protocols on the status of Taiwan, throw up trade walls, call out currency manipulators, and do any number of deals intended to make life difficult for Beijing, but so long as his transactional approach to world affairs undermines the rules-based order and throws alliance partners into a spin, it’s a welcome trade-off. The Chinese leadership is confident that if it comes down to a knuckles-bared fistfight over trade, territory and regional influence, China will win in a knock-out.

Unless Canberra moves adroitly, Australia could be knocked out too. Moving adroitly doesn’t mean siding with Beijing in any dispute with Washington, as some have suggested. Rather, it means calling out China as readily as we do the US when its behaviour threatens the values and principles that underpin our security and wellbeing as a nation.

China’s leaders have long complained that the principles, rules and alliance networks associated with the postwar order – an order imposed by the US – limit their country’s room to manoeuvre. Today, they argue, Washington’s writ should no longer apply in Asia. In a recent policy statement on Asia-Pacific security, Chinese authorities declared that “ and regional rules should be discussed, formulated and observed by all countries concerned, rather than being dictated by any particular country. Rules of individual countries should not automatically become ‘ rules.’”

China is not the only state constrained by “ rules.” All states in the Asia-Pacific region are effectively constricted by a regional security regime designed after the war to inhibit arbitrary or aggressive behaviour by one state towards another. Japan’s margin for movement, for instance, is far narrower than China’s. Until recently, Japanese nationalists have been kept on a tight rein by a postwar constitution, drafted under the supervision of American occupation forces, instituting a liberal-democratic form of government and formally renouncing the sovereign right to wage war. Following China’s aggressive posturing, however, Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe has hinted that the restrictions imposed by the postwar order no longer apply to his country either. In anticipation of a visit to Hawaii in December 2016, he is reported to have told colleagues that “if I go to Pearl Harbor, the ‘postwar era’ will come to a complete end for Japan and the United States.” If China takes off the gloves, it can expect other states to do the same.

China’s chaffing at its place in the postwar order differs from Japan’s chiefly in its lack of any tangible foundation. Beijing alleges from time to time that America’s alliance network is an existential threat to China, that open global markets primarily serve American interests, that concern for human rights is merely an excuse for meddling in domestic affairs, that currency movements are manipulated by devious American markets, and that the freedoms enjoyed by the liberal media and academy in the West mask underlying anti-Chinese sentiment. All these claims are contestable. What cannot be denied is that China has adopted its own Leninist party-state constitution, that it does as it pleases around the globe, and that it points its nuclear-tipped missiles towards every point on the compass. Nobody is stopping it from doing so.

Americans also point out that China has been the primary beneficiary of the regional stability underpinned by US security guarantees. American journalist John Pomfret, author of a major recent study on US–China relations, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,notes that, apart from a short spell during the cold war, “the United States has been, if anything, the prime foreign enabler of China’s rise. America’s open wallets, open society and open universities have been key factors in China’s ascent from a Third World backwater to a global economic power.” Early American generosity built China’s finest hospitals and universities, American power ended Japan’s horrific occupation of China, American diplomacy secured the region in the postwar era, and America’s commitment to open trade underpinned China’s rapid economic development.From an American perspective, China’s Communist Party would sooner undermine the path that carried China to prosperity than acknowledge that China’s accomplishments were not the Party’s alone.

Australians may not care one way or the other about Chinese revanchists or aggrieved Americans. If they pointed to evidence of American hypocrisy in violating the rules and principles the US lays down for others, they would not be alone. Still, it’s worth asking what the end of a liberal rules-based system, however imperfect, could mean for Australia.

China’s alternative to Pax Americana is not the absence of order, but a new kind of order, one grounded in values that are not universal and rules that are anything but liberal. Unlike America, China will never be accused of hypocrisy: it has no intention of breaching the hierarchical authoritarian principles that underpin the Communist party-state. The Chinese Communist Party is already using local media and other avenues to extend these values into Australia and other countries in violation of the universal rights and values championed by countries working in the liberal tradition.

Put simply, China’s government promotes obedience to authority ahead of freedom, champions hierarchy over equality, and demands submission of individual and community interests to those of an authoritarian state. It could be argued that some of these priorities have merit in the abstract, but there is nothing abstract about them when the authority to be obeyed is the Communist Party of China.

Christopher Ford of the Hudson Institute has spelled out what extending Chinese Communist Party values under a new regional order could mean for states in the region. Beijing aspires to refashion the regional political order after its own hierarchical, authoritarian and deferential style of government. The new order it envisages would see political authority operating “along a vertical axis of hierarchical deference to a lead actor, rather than along a horizontal axis of pluralist interaction.” All states falling under the shadow of this new order would need to accept their place within a framework of authority centred in Beijing, and abide by norms and rules set in Beijing. What this would mean for business and civil society abroad is unclear but, as a mark of deference, governments in the region would be expected to eschew conduct or commentary that might possibly offend the government or people of China. Under Chinese rules, respect for particular national values cannot be separated from ritual displays of respect for the regime in Beijing that sets and polices them.

An idea of how this might work in practice can be gauged from China’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea and the historical arguments mounted on its behalf. Chinese officials frequently point out to Australian business leaders and diplomats that Australia has no skin in the game and hence no business inserting itself in the process of claims settlement in the South China Sea. Nothing could be further from the truth. Australia’s future security and territorial sovereignty require concerted defence of the principles underpinning the existing rules-based system for resolving disputes over land and maritime sovereignty in the region.

Beijing’s maritime claims are based not on commonly understood general rules governing maritime sovereignty but on historical claims unique to China – on Chinese rules, as it were. If Beijing were truly committed to norms, it would have defended its position on maritime sovereignty by contesting specific findings of the arbitral tribunal’s decision on the Philippines’ South China Sea case in July 2016 while respecting its overall jurisdiction in the case. Instead, Beijing chose to ignore the tribunal’s jurisdiction. Its claims to disputed maritime territories are based not on commonly accepted rules and norms, but on particular historical claims to seas and territories over which no tribunal outside China is permitted to exercise jurisdiction.

In laying claim to disputed territories, Beijing reaches back centuries to establish historical ownership over land and maritime territories that can then be forcefully “reclaimed” as its own. A country can never invade itself, and so China’s leaders believe that by claiming to be recovering “lost” territories they can never be accused of invading anyone.

Beijing’s elliptical style of historical thinking seems to inform the judgement of retired state and federal political leaders in Australia who insist, from time to time, that China is a peace-loving nation that never has and never will extend its authority by force. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser presented this argument most starkly in his book Dangerous Allies (2014).The claim fails to explain how China grew from a modest state in the lower reaches of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers into a vast continental power stretching from the deserts of central Asia to the peaks of the Himalayas, and north to Siberia, without apparently conquering the territories it incorporated. The propensity of Australian leaders to repeat China’s claims can be explained by reference to classical Chinese military strategy, most clearly set out in Sun Zi’s Art of War, in which artful deception of the leaders of rival states is a key tactic in any successful conquest.

When this kind of history rules, anything goes. What kinds of historical claims could Australia find itself open to if it were to concede China’s historical claims to the South China Sea? In the absence of contestable principles of governance, could China claim Australian territory without, in its own terms, “invading” Australia?

On 25 November 2016, the Chinese naval training vessel Zheng He, named after a famous fifteenth-century Chinese admiral, docked in Sydney Harbour. According to the local Chinese-language press, China’s consul-general, Gu Xiaojie, welcomed the vessel in Chinese with these words:

The Chinese nation is a peace-loving nation. Adhering to the road of peaceful development is the serious choice and solemn commitment of the government and people of China. Six centuries ago Zheng He’s fleet, vast as it was, did not occupy an inch of territory belonging to other governments. Today the development of China’s naval forces has one aim only, to preserve peace, and is not aiming at expansion or regional hegemony. The Zheng He comes in peace and is certain to return home laden with friendship.

The consul-general’s claims bear little relation to history. It is not true to say that China has never expanded by force or occupied territory belonging to other states. Nor were Admiral Zheng He’s voyages peaceful argosies. History aside, at this moment the People’s Navy is advancing China’s territorial expansion at the expense of the Philippines, Vietnam and other neighbouring states. While spinning stories of historical ownership and peaceful intent, China is seizing territory and building military bases in the South China Sea from which it can project hard power into adjacent territories, including US bases in the region and ultimately Australian territorial waters. It has done so peacefully only in the sense that it has advanced in incremental steps, as Ross Babbage has put it, “below the threshold that would trigger a forceful Western response.”

So it has always been. China has historically expanded through incremental conquest and periodically contracted after defeats. Sometimes the conquests have involved Chinese forces invading neighbouring territories and folding them into China, as with Yunnan and Tibet in the south. At other times, neighbouring forces have invaded China and brought their conquered territories with them. When the Manchus conquered China in 1644, they brought the vast lands of Manchuria into China where they became known as the Northeastern Provinces. In the 1750s, China invaded the immense territories to the west, incorporating those into the country as Xinjiang.

These were not peaceful conquests. In the western conquests of the 1750s, for example, the Qing emperor ordered the massacre of the dominant Dzungar Mongol community in what is known as the Dzungar Genocide. An estimated 500,000 Dzungar Mongols were killed and the remainder were taken into slavery. The history is little known because once Xinjiang was incorporated into China the Dzungar were no longer around to recount their own genocide.

Three centuries earlier, at the time of Zheng He’s voyages, the Ming emperor was mounting massive invasions into continental Southeast Asia and across the northeastern reaches of the lower Himalayas. Part of the invaded territory was incorporated into China as Yunnan Province. Another part fell within what we know as Vietnam; it was subsequently wrested back by locals and is now considered Vietnamese territory. Zheng He’s voyages were historically associated with these fifteenth-century Ming conquests.

There was little that was peaceful about Zheng He’s own ascent to the position of admiral. He was a Muslim of Persian descent whose family is thought to have been associated with the Mongol rulers of China before the founders of the Ming Dynasty drove them out. As a boy, he was captured and castrated by Chinese forces during the Ming invasions of Yunnan. He ascended the Ming military hierarchy through association with an able member of the Ming imperial family, Zhu Di, who seized power in a military coup from his nephew, the reigning emperor, before executing thousands of the nephew’s loyal followers.

Zheng He’s fabled naval expeditions were not especially peaceful either. His well-armed troops engaged in fighting and kidnapping en route and set up maritime defence posts on far-flung alien territories. His fleets established military bases in Malacca and Samudera to control maritime passage through the Straits of Malacca. At one point they returned to China with the captured ruler of a Sri Lankan kingdom.

In a rules-based order, these troubled histories and the disputes they generate would be of interest to few but historians. But in a regional order based on contested national stories, China’s claims to historical precedents begin to matter at the highest levels of government.

In a formal presentation to the joint houses of the Australian parliament on 24 October 2003, China’s president, Hu Jintao, laid the foundations for the recent visit by the training ship Zheng He when he told parliament:

Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what they called Southern Land, or today’s Australia. They brought Chinese culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the local people, contributing their proud share to Australia’s economy, society and its thriving pluralistic culture.

At the time President Hu was speaking, China was still largely playing by the rules. His reference to Zheng He’s fabled expeditionary fleets reaching Australian shores raised a few eyebrows among historians, but his remarks were allowed to pass in the belief that they were merely ceremonial. Can we now be so sure?

If we concede that China’s primary test of maritime sovereignty is a historical claim to seas once traversed by its own fleets, then it would be prudent to ask whether President Hu’s speech to the Australian parliament could one day support a historical claim to sovereignty over Australian territory. Could there come a time when Beijing will claim Australian territorial waters as it now claims the South China Sea?

In this light, China’s actions in the South China Sea should concern all Australians. President Hu’s historical claim to continuous Chinese contact with the Australian continent over a period of six centuries, initiated by the Chinese state and carrying prior naming rights to what we now call Australia, is all but identical to the historical claim that Beijing is mounting in support of its territorial and military expansion in the South China Sea. In each case, the claim asserts that state expeditionary forces sailed a particular sea long before anyone else, made contact with local peoples, named their lands, and maintained continuous contact for centuries thereafter, presumably until European colonial powers intervened to “contain” China. In an order where historical claims trump commonly agreed norms and rules, failure to challenge President Hu’s claims at the bench of history could place Australian territorial sovereignty at risk.

President Hu’s assertion that the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores is based not on historical documentation but on generations of myth-making by popular historians in China. These myths gained currency beyond China a decade ago when an Englishman, Gavin Menzies, published a book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which claimed that Zheng He discovered America, New Zealand, Australia and other places besides. Menzies’s facile arguments were exposed over a number of years by Australian historian Geoff Wade, most memorably in an ABC Four Corners documentary in 2006. Nor is there any evidence to support popular Chinese claims of the “discovery” of Australia. And yet Hu Jintao’s words have neither been challenged nor denied in parliament, and stand as a matter of record.

President Hu’s words also invite Australians to reconsider the historical arguments underpinning Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea. Chinese state expeditions and merchant junks sailed through the seas and straits, but they did so alongside ships of numerous other states and principalities, including Southeast Asian and South Asia polities, and even distant Persia. Zheng He’s voyages retraced routes mapped out by earlier Islamic navigators and traders. If history rules, then China’s exclusive claim to the South China Sea is a weak one.

These historical details counted for little when China appeared content to operate within the liberal order. In a new order based on unique historical claims, territorial disputes are presumably arbitrated through critical evidence-based historical inquiry. And yet, under Communist Party rule, no historian in China is permitted to challenge any of the government’s historical claims, and the views of foreign historians who challenge them are categorically denied and suppressed. In 2004, for example, sixteen scholars who jointly published a book on the history of Xinjiang covering the Chinese conquest and the Dzungar massacres were denied visas to enter China for telling that history. The book has been banned in China ever since.

Historical claims made by Chinese leaders on Australian soil can still be challenged, however. If the gloves are off, Australia’s political representatives in federal parliament should ensure that the historical record is corrected by formally refuting President Hu’s speech to parliament.

Alternatively, to avoid embarrassment to premier Li Keqiang ahead of his mooted visit to Australia this new year, Beijing could reaffirm its respect for the “ rules” cavalierly dismissed in its recent policy statement on Asia-Pacific security. Together, Beijing and Canberra should acknowledge that these rules underpin the prosperity and security of China, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. •

The post Handing the initiative to China appeared first on Inside Story.

Back in 2008, optimists expected the Democratic presidential candidate to renew America’s sense of moral purpose, not least by working towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. The newly elected president reiterated the abolitionist idea in a speech in Prague in 2009, and a few months later received the Nobel Peace Prize.

That was an age ago. Since then, the United States has intervened in the civil war in Libya, expanded military operations from Iraq into Syria, extended its military presence in Afghanistan, and escalated drone strikes in a range of countries. At about US$600 billion a year, Obama’s military spending has been considerably more than twice the combined totals for Russia and China. (The gap between these potential adversaries and the Western alliance widens even more if you factor in the military spending of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Australia, who spend about US$200 billion combined.)

Post–cold war nuclear arms reductions, which had gathered considerable momentum from the early 1990s, actually slowed down after Obama took office. You read that right: George W. Bush got rid of more nuclear weapons than Obama did. And in 2010 Obama signed off on a Nuclear Posture Review that included retaining, with some tweaking, the longstanding US option to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis. Despite speculation a few months ago that Obama might sign an Executive Order banning first use, nothing to that effect has emerged.

On top of all that, Obama has approved a three-decade nuclear weapon modernisation program costed at between US$500 billion and US$1 trillion. And as recently as October, the United States voted against a UN move to advance negotiations on prohibiting nuclear weapons, instead preferring much more incremental steps. To critics, this seemed likely to postpone abolition indefinitely.

Nevertheless, progress has been made in reducing nuclear danger. An arms reduction treaty was signed with Russia in 2010; in that same year, Obama led the way on global efforts to tighten controls over nuclear materials; and in 2015, the US president sealed a deal to bring Iran’s nuclear program under control. While significant, though, these steps hardly match earlier hopes.

Why the shortfall?

The answer has to do with a mix of domestic and global politics. On the home front, conservatives ran hard interference, using the unjustified and even preposterous suggestion that Democrats were soft on defence to score points and block policy. For years, Republicans have been motivated by suspicion of agreements as well as bloody-mindedness towards Democratic Party administrations. That’s part of the reason why Congress still stubbornly refuses to ratify the 1996 nuclear test ban treaty signed by Bill Clinton when he was president. It also accounts for the often ill-founded – and sometimes hysterical – opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, a deal that most arms control experts strongly support.

As well, parts of the Washington bureaucracy, including some within the Pentagon, dragged their feet over more ambitious arms control measures. Among other things, those sceptical of the abolitionist project said America’s extensive alliance arrangements – especially the nuclear “umbrella” provided to Japan, South Korea and NATO – constrained how far prudent disarmament could go.

The global context shifted, too, closing the window on more significant progress. Critics are sometimes too quick to blame Washington alone for slow movement on disarmament. This often has more to do with these critics’ desire to strut their anti-American credentials than with proper analysis. The fact is, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Take Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Having poisoned diplomacy with his illegal action in Ukraine, he’s also recklessly waved the nuclear stick. Large increases in Chinese military spending have also contributed, as has Beijing’s belligerent behaviour in the South China Sea. In fact, the semi-fascist nature of the Chinese government places limits on any US president wanting to coax Congress towards deeper nuclear reductions. Iran’s earlier efforts to push the nuclear non-proliferation treaty towards breaking point also played a role, as have North Korea’s continuing breaches of almost every convention you can think of.

In other words, global conditions have not been conducive to radical advancement of the abolitionist agenda.

It’s too early to tell how a President Trump will change the prospects for arms control. His pronouncements have often been vague, contradictory or even muddled. On the positive side, he might manage to improve relations with Russia, potentially permitting continued downward pressure on nuclear force levels. On the other hand, he has suggested that the selective spread of nuclear weapons might be a good thing. This merges into an implied backing away from key alliances: as Washington pursues “America First,” countries like South Korea could fill the strategic vacuum with their own nuclear deterrent.

A strong theme among nearly all the Republican candidates in 2016, including Trump, was rabid hostility to Obama’s Iran package. Such noisy, almost rabble-rousing, rejection of diplomacy implies that war with Tehran could be back on the agenda. This will partly depend on whom Trump listens to. Alas, John Bolton is one name mentioned here. Picture him as the Voldemort of global security, with a long record as a malevolent spoiler of arms control; in recent years, he’s been a vocal advocate of tearing up Obama’s deal and bombing Iran.

But Trump also says that, apart from fighting Islamic State, he wants to step back from the armed interventionism associated with previous administrations. Yet he claims the US military is under-resourced. It seems he wants the Pentagon to do less with more.

Among Trump’s blustering back-of-the-envelope strategic musings is the declaration that “I’m going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody – absolutely nobody – is gonna mess with us.” But if he is to ramp up spending on nuclear weapons beyond current projections, where would the money come from? The question arises because he’s also called for tax cuts combined with massive investment in urban infrastructure and a big boost for conventional military forces. This sort of thing used to be called voodoo economics.

Besides which, a push to increase nuclear capabilities any further makes little strategic sense. Existing, pre-Trump strategy already permits the US to indefinitely deploy over 1500 operational nuclear weapons, with thousands more in reserve and a major modernisation plan already factored in. So, after he theatrically rearranges the window dressing for political effect, it’s easy to imagine Trump sitting back and allowing nuclear weapons policy to follow tracks already laid down.

In short, Obama’s legacy could be to provide the remarkably suspect Trump with an entrenched and increasingly well-tuned nuclear arsenal. Many of Obama’s supporters will see the irony; some of his more ardent and naive fans from 2008–09 might feel betrayed. •

The post Obama’s nuclear legacy appeared first on Inside Story.

In practice, the shift in ASIO’s priorities at the beginning of this period sometimes put it at odds with governments of both complexions. Blaxland and Crawley reveal that Labor’s Bob Hawke took a tougher stand than the organisation did after evidence emerged that Valeri Ivanov, a KGB official based on the Soviet embassy in Canberra, was cultivating David Combe, a former national secretary of the Labor Party. Combe was looking for work as a lobbyist with a wide range of potential clients, including Soviet trade officials. After listening to surveillance tapes, attorney-general Gareth Evans and foreign minister Bill Hayden were less convinced than Hawke that Combe had stepped over the line, and keener to protect civil liberties. Evans is quoted as saying there was little in the bugged conversations “that might constitute a viable charge of impropriety, or even worse, against Combe.” Hayden even opposed Ivanov’s expulsion, though eventually he agreed to boot him out.

Also in contrast to Hawke, ASIO director-general Harvey Barnett was not initially concerned about Combe. As he wrote in his memoirs, Tale of the Scorpion, the organisation didn’t see Combe as a target, and gave him “the benefit of every doubt.” Ivanov was expelled, and Barnett sent a message to all staff congratulating them on a job well done.

Blaxland and Crawley fault Barnett for being “apparently oblivious” to the implications of Combe’s behaviour. Although they don’t see it this way, once the government had expelled Ivanov and banned Combe from having any contact with ministers, Barnett reached the entirely reasonable conclusion that any national security risk had abated. But Hawke, understandably, wanted to make clear that Combe wasn’t receiving favourable treatment from his government, and decided to order an investigation into his actions. Nothing adverse was found.

Barnett had also clashed with Hawke’s Liberal predecessor, Malcolm Fraser, after he was asked to investigate – for prosecution purposes – the leak of a top secret report on the history of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, or ASIS, which I published in the National Times in 1981. Barnett accurately predicted that any investigation would prove pointless. Bill Hayden’s reaction to that leak provides an intriguing insight into his complex character. According to Blaxland and Crawley, he rang ASIO with the information that one of his longstanding staff members appeared to be responsible. Yet ASIO’s investigation found no evidence to vindicate Hayden’s decision to dob in this intensely loyal employee. Oddly, Hayden himself had a reputation – sometimes misplaced – for leaking.

Following an earlier spate of leaks when I was based in the Australian Financial Review’s Canberra bureau in the late 1970s, Fraser wanted ASIO to tap my office phone. Blaxland and Crawley reveal how senior public servants convinced Fraser that all phones in Parliament House, including in the Press Gallery, should remain off-limits.

These episodes are a reminder of how far the pendulum has swung in the intervening decades. Federal police no longer hesitate to raid Parliament House, access its IT system and seize thousands of documents, as they did in their current investigation into a leak of commercial information from NBN Co. Draconian legislation, passed with bipartisan support in recent years, provides stiff jail sentences for anyone who leaks or receives classified information.

Blaxland and Crawley strongly criticise ASIO for failing to stop the KGB recruiting one or more moles within ASIO after 1971. (In fact, it has failed to detect any moles whatsoever, if indeed any existed, since it was established in 1949.) A later director-general, Dennis Richardson (1996–2005), declined even to ask to see the files after new allegations arose, instead viewing ASIO’s role as overwhelmingly devoted to preventing terrorism. At one stage, Richardson shifted all the organisation’s counterintelligence staff onto trying to prevent terrorists from killing people.

In their chapter on moles, the authors provide no hard evidence – let alone an official ASIO acknowledgement – that any moles existed, despite a number of interesting leads. It shouldn’t be assumed that they nevertheless existed but were too smart to be caught – nor that ASIO was too dumb, or too compromised by the KGB, to catch them. It may simply be that there were none to be caught, however diligently ASIO tried. And it did, after all, conduct extensive surveillance, tapping phones, bugging premises and following embassy staff. We also know that earlier, after Vladimir Petrov defected as the KGB head in Australia in 1954, he admitted – and a royal commission accepted – that he hadn’t managed to recruit informants within any government department or agency.

It seems strange, then, that when co-author John Blaxland was asked last week on ABC Radio’s PM whether the book provides the first “official acknowledgement” that ASIO had been penetrated by the KGB, he agreed that it did and said this was a “major concession” by the organisation. I asked ASIO if it had confirmed that a mole did indeed exist some decades ago, despite the absence of such an acknowledgement in Blaxland and Crawley’s chapter on moles. The response: “There is no intention for ASIO to comment further” on the references in the official history to the penetration of the organisation. Given the lack of official confirmation in the book, it is a little hard to understand why Blaxland said on the ABC that the organisation acknowledged it had been penetrated.

When Blaxland was asked if ASIO knew what information was passed on to the Soviet Union, he said it is almost impossible to know the complete truth “in the hall of mirrors.” The more pertinent phrase is from the former head of counterintelligence for the CIA, James Angleton, who said he found himself living “in a wilderness of mirrors.” This might be the one thing that Angleton, a delusional alcoholic, got right in career during which he claimed that an ever-increasing number of senior figures, including Henry Kissinger, were working for the KGB. The damage these wild accusations caused may lead to a strong suspicion that he was acting on behalf of the KGB, but that is not the same thing as hard evidence.

The only information we know to have been passed from Australia to Moscow dates back to the end of the second world war, when the Soviet Union was an important ally that took the predominant role in defeating Nazi Germany. A couple of Australian diplomats passed some low-value documents to a Communist Party official, Walter Clayton, who passed them on to the Soviets. After about a year, the KGB lost interest in receiving any further information from these sources. Among the documents, only a British assessment of the likely postwar situation in the Mediterranean might have interested the Soviets, if it hadn’t been such bland stuff. Leaked to an Australian newspaper, it would have been worth only a few paragraphs, at most, in the foreign pages (if it escaped wartime censorship).

The deeper question of whether all espionage activity is damaging, and the culprits should always be caught and punished, goes unchallenged in this volume, despite the fact that Australian governments routinely instruct ASIS to break other countries’ espionage laws. More importantly, it’s possible to identify numerous cases in which apprehension has been a disaster.

The cold war generated several cases when false alarms, poor judgements or unnecessary secrecy nearly resulted in a nuclear war. One of the most frightening involved a 1983 NATO exercise called Able Archer, which simulated both a nuclear and a conventional military response by NATO to a Soviet conventional invasion of Europe. The Soviets thought the exercise was for real and almost responded with nuclear weapons. But Russian spies in NATO headquarters and London convinced their superiors that the “attack” was only an exercise. Fortunately, the spies hadn’t been caught before they prevented a horrendous war. The danger would never have arisen if NATO had given the Soviets accurate information about the exercise, rather than sticking to a reflex, but extraordinarily dangerous, commitment to secrecy. Spying can be a stabilising activity, and catching those responsible might sometimes end in disaster.

When William Pinwill and I were researching our book Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS’s former head, Ralph Harry, told us that German chancellor Willy Brandt’s ultimately successful policy of detente between East and West Germany in the 1970s and 80s partly depended on espionage. “The success of Brandt’s moves was greatly facilitated by the presence of a senior Soviet bloc agent in Brandt’s own office,” Harry told us. “That way the Communists knew he was sincere.”

The United States recognised the stabilising influence of espionage when it agreed with the Soviets to facilitate electronic eavesdropping as part the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty, SALT I, which sought to limit the number of nuclear armed ballistic missiles. This provision meant they couldn’t encrypt telemetry communications during missile tests, which in turn ensured that each side’s signals intercepts could verify that the other was complying with the treaty.

Despite claims from some defectors (a notoriously unreliable breed), the official history provides no hard evidence that the Soviet bloc had spies in ASIO or any other government agency or department, let alone evidence that valuable information was passed back to Moscow. If this did occur, the information could have been stabilising, or it could have been less benign. We still don’t know. •

The post Enemies old and new appeared first on Inside Story.

Several good books have been written about the tests, but Britain’s refusal to release hundreds of thousands of pages of relevant material hobbled their authors. The addiction to secrecy also frustrated Jim McClelland’s royal commission into the tests, which proved to be a model of how a good commission should perform.

Although much remains unjustifiably secret, Tynan, a senior lecturer in James Cook University’s graduate research school, has taken advantage of recently declassified files to reinforce her prodigious research into one of the most shameful episodes in Australian history. Atomic Thunder gives readers the most comprehensive insight yet into the enormity of what happened during the tests and associated trials.

Tynan’s starting point is Britain’s vainglorious decision to develop nuclear weapons, which was quickly followed by prime minister Bob Menzies’s staggering irresponsibility in allowing these dangerous tests to go ahead without answers to basic questions about what they involved and the risks they posed. 

Menzies refused to seek independent advice from highly qualified Australian scientists such as Mark Oliphant, who had worked on the American bombs. Oliphant’s sin was that he didn’t like the idea of killing millions of people with nuclear weapons. Instead, Menzies relied on advice from a nuclear weapons zealot, Ernest Titterton, a British citizen living in Canberra, who unswervingly insisted there were no dangers at all. McClelland showed that Titterton’s first and only loyalties were to Britain and nuclear weapons. (It would not have surprised if he had eaten two teaspoons of plutonium on TV, claiming it was a health tonic he took every day.)

The policy-making structure ensured the effects on the local Aboriginal population were ignored, as were the dangers to the British and Australian service personnel exposed to radiation at the test sites, and to other Australians living much further away.

Atomic Thunder unambiguously demonstrates that the most dangerous tests were the ones falsely described as “minor trials” at Maralinga. The worst of these, “Vixen B,” used high explosive to blow up plutonium, much of which was widely distributed as radioactive contamination. Frequent dust storms in the area repeatedly stirred up plutonium particles – and still do – which could be readily inhaled or ingested by unsuspecting Maralinga workers, Indigenous kids, unsuspecting tourists and many others. 

The British maintained ridiculous levels of secrecy, partly to prove to the Americans that they were trustworthy and partly to hide the nature of these trials, the worse of which focused on developing the UK’s fission and fusion bombs. 

These were not lab experiments. Big explosions created partial fission reactions and horrific plutonium contamination. Tynan nails this in her book – unlike a docile media that failed to report anything about the trials at the time.

The chapter on the Roller Coaster investigation shows that the British knew at the time that the extent of the plutonium contamination at Maralinga was far bigger than what they had reported to the Australian government. The government then relied on the false estimates, wrong by a factor of ten, to indemnify the British in 1968 for any future liability to clean the site up properly.

Deceit also applied to the standard weapons tests, including a bomb detonated in a ship’s hull. The British high commission told a silly lie to an Australian scientist worried about the grossly inadequate clean-up of the contaminated Monte Bello site: “Everyone knows when you explode a nuclear weapon on a ship, the whole ship is vaporised.” No one knows that for the simple reason it’s not true. As Tynan points out, the islands were contaminated with radioactive debris, including pieces from the ship’s large driveshaft.

It’s possible to see a direct line between the complex of forces described in Atomic Thunder and what is happening today. Immediately after the census computer system crashed recently, for instance, the ABC and other outlets turned to people like Peter Jennings, who heads the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an organisation partly funded by arms manufacturers. Although Jennings could not possibly have known what had happened – no one did at that stage – he claimed that the Chinese government was the likely culprit. Given he couldn’t know, why ask him, let alone broadcast his incorrect answer?

As Media Watch later explained, the computer system basically crashed because it was overloaded, not because it was under attack by foreigners. Yet nonsense about a “denial of service attack” still pervades media accounts of what happened, including a recent Radio National Breakfast report. Before journalists add to the momentum building for a war with China, they should read Atomic Thunder from cover to cover to better appreciate the dangers of relying on “experts” embedded in a rambunctious national security establishment. 

Tynan’s focus on the damage done by secrecy has a compelling resonance at a time when a powerful new security establishment dominates much of Australian politics. Unlike the tepid D Notices of the 1950s and 60s, new laws now provide seven years’ jail for a journalist or anyone else who publishes or releases anything that might hold the security chiefs to account.

There is bipartisan political support for jailing journalists if they report anything about “a special intelligence operation,” even if it is badly bungled or inherently foolhardy. Journalists are not allowed to know what’s a special operation and what’s not, but that lack of information is no defence against a conviction.

It would be almost impossible to report a modern-day equivalent to past scandals, such as the reckless Australian Secret Intelligence Service raid on the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. The trainees wearing masks who ran around the premises with silenced machine guns were lucky not to be shot by the Victoria Police, who had not been included on the need-to-know list.

Following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer – the head of the hyper-secret Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons – said in a courageous speech at Los Alamos in 1945, “secrecy strikes at the very root of what science is, and what it is for… It is not good to be a scientist, and it is not possible, unless you think that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge” and that it is “a thing of intrinsic value to humanity.”

I would like to think something similar applies to journalists. It certainly applies to authors like Tynan. •

Brian Toohey spoke at the launch of Atomic Thunder in Sydney on 27 September.

The post The price of secrecy appeared first on Inside Story.

Australia is not unusual in its concern for trade routes. Reporting recently on European attitudes to the possible election of Donald Trump as US president, Politico concluded with a warning that “cash-strapped EU governments” might be “on the hook for indirect benefits of US military spending, like the protection of commercial sea routes.”

This concern is based partly on memories of the role played by attacks on commercial shipping in previous wars, most notably during the second world war. But no one is expecting a “total war” attack on merchant shipping, as in the Battle of the Atlantic; in a world of nuclear weapons, such a war is unlikely to last long enough. What worries policy-makers is the possibility of struggle for control of strategically important routes. And the most popular candidate at the moment is the South China Sea, where China has long advanced territorial claims rejected by its neighbours and by the United States.

Given the possibility that protecting commercial sea routes could involve significant spending, it is worth asking exactly what the costs and benefits might be. The costs can be measured straightforwardly enough using defence budget statements, but how can we determine the benefits?

Surprisingly enough, it turns out that we can estimate the benefits of open commercial shipping lanes (or, equivalently, the costs of losing access to such lanes), at least to within an order of magnitude. Moreover, we do have two real-world examples to help us assess how useful naval power might be in protecting sea routes. Both cases involve crises that led to the closure of the Suez Canal, in 1956 and again in 1967.

The 1956 crisis is important not only because it represents the only significant attempt, since 1945, to use military force to forestall a perceived threat to commercial shipping lanes, but also because it ended in complete failure. The crisis began with the decision by the Egyptian government, under the effective dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser, to nationalise the Suez Canal, previously under British and French ownership. Coming after conflicts over a variety of other issues, Nasser’s plan prompted the British and French governments, in secret collusion with Israel, to launch a military operation to regain control of the canal.

Although the Egyptians were defeated militarily, their forces sank all the ships in the canal, thereby blocking it. Condemnation of the Anglo-French attack, most notably by the Eisenhower administration in the United States, led to their humiliating withdrawal. The canal was cleared and reopened after four months.

The 1967 crisis, which began with the Six-Day War, resulted in the closure of the canal for eight years. This lengthy period provides useful evidence of the impact of such a closure, evidence that has been neatly analysed by James Feyrer and summarised in an article for VoxEU.

Feyrer begins by working out the average increase in shipping distances between countries caused by the canal closure. For any given country, these increases can be weighted by trade flows to give an average effect. For a few countries, like India and Pakistan, the trade-weighted increased shipping distance was large (about 30 per cent) and so, it turns out, was the impact on trade and economic activity. Mostly, however, the effect was smaller. For example, the increase for Britain was 3.3 per cent and for France 1.5 per cent.

Feyrer estimates that, in the long run, a given proportional increase in shipping distances – say, 10 per cent – produces a reduction in trade of about half that proportion (in this case 5 per cent). Further, he estimates, a reduction in trade produces a reduction in national income or GDP that is about 25 per cent as large.

To produce an estimate of the total impact, we need one more number: the ratio of seaborne trade to national income. This is hard to measure precisely, but a figure of around 15 per cent looks reasonable. With this in mind, we can run the numbers for Britain and the Suez Canal closure. A 3.3 per cent increase in shipping distances should produce a 1.6 per cent reduction in trade, which is equivalent to 0.24 per cent (0.016 x 0.15) of GDP. The loss in GDP is 25 per cent of this, or around 0.06 per cent of GDP. The corresponding number for France would be about 0.03 per cent.

Is this a lot or a little? An obvious basis of comparison is defence expenditure, which is typically around 2 per cent of GDP, and is commonly thought of as being equally divided between armies, navies and air forces. On that basis, naval expenditure amounts to about 0.6 per cent of GDP, ten times the cost to Britain of the blocking of the Suez Canal.

To compare these two numbers properly, we need one more piece of information, which is more speculative than those discussed so far. How much difference do navies make to the openness or otherwise of commercial sea routes? On the historical evidence, it might seem, not very much. The one major intervention since the end of the second world war, Suez in 1956, produced exactly the outcome it was supposed to avoid.

Advocates of military expenditure can always argue that it’s only because of powerful navies like that of the United States that we don’t see lots of attempts at closing sea lanes. This argument, like the case of Lisa Simpson’s tiger-repelling rock, does not admit a definite refutation. Still, given the relative magnitudes, the counterfactual in the absence of naval expenditure would have to be a chronic state of crisis ten times as bad as the blocking of the Suez Canal.

Would a crisis in the South China Sea, presumably caused by a Chinese attempt to claim control, have such a huge adverse effect? It is routinely pointed out that the volume of trade passing through the South China Sea (US$5.3 trillion on one authoritative estimate) is very large. But the great majority of this trade (around US$4 trillion) is going to or from China. Obviously, the Chinese government can control this trade in any way it chooses using domestic policies, and has no interest in blocking it. The remaining US$1 trillion or so of trade (about 1.5 per cent of global GDP) might, in the event of a crisis, be forced to take more circuitous routes, as happened when the Suez Canal was blocked. But using the same method as was applied to Suez, it’s easy to see that the total impact would be modest.

On past experience, it seems highly unlikely that an economic analysis of this kind will have any effect on military policy discussions. Vague claims about economic interests loom large in such discussions, but attempts to pin them down to concrete realities are generally ignored. The century beginning with the first world war and running through to the trillion-dollar quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan has seen countless demonstrations that, under modern conditions, war is almost invariably an economic disaster for all concerned. That fact hasn’t stopped these wars, and preparation for wars, being considered an essential part of a national economic strategy, and it seems unlikely to do so in the future. •

The post Keeping the sea lanes open: a cost–benefit analysis appeared first on Inside Story.

On Monday night on SBS, the popular lifestyle series Dogs: Their Secret Lives, midway through its run, took on a whole new dimension when it was juxtaposed with the first episode of the new documentary series SAS: Who Dares Wins. A focus on dogs as complex individuals whose pathologies and idiosyncrasies require finely tuned interventions was followed by a portrayal of humans as pack animals, being barked at and put through fiercely punishing routines.

For years I was addicted to the National Geographic series The Dog Whisperer, presented by the charismatic Cesar Millan, whose mantra “exercise, discipline, affection” (strictly in that order) served me well in dealing with many of the more difficult humans I encountered in the workplace. Millan is, I’m sure, a difficult personality himself, but on camera he is a genius and his capacity to draw some of the most crazed dogs in America into a “calm submissive” nirvana is little short of superhuman. So dominant a presence has he been in dog TV that for years it was almost impossible for any other presenter to break through. Mark Evans, host of Dogs: Their Secret Lives, has managed to do it using the principle of antithesis.

Like Millan, he does his consulting through home visits, but where Millan arrives on the doorstep shoulders braced, head high, glowing with vitality and good cheer, Evans slides into the nearest seat and hunches over for some earnest dialogue with the dog owner.

As a former chief veterinary adviser to the RSPCA, Evans has dealt with a lot of worrying situations, most of which arise from misfired human–animal relations. Perhaps he is right to approach these situations with a seriousness that contrasts starkly with Millan’s blithe assumption that if you take a few common errors out of the mix, all will be well. Evans comes across as the kind of person who, if you were worried, would be worried with you, whether it was about the dog, the washing machine or your lost luggage.

Evans is fascinating to watch in his own way. His expressive face, with the mobile eyebrows, creased forehead and deep, green eyes, is a picture of empathic concern. In one of his more ambitious animal rescue efforts on another program, a crocodile gave him a kiss. Fortunately it was wearing a jaw strap at the time, but it left him with a badly split lip so that, in further empathy with his canine clients, he has to eat by tearing the food into chunks with the side of his mouth.

This week’s episode of Dogs: Their Secret Lives was about dogs suffering from mental health problems. We had Max the German shepherd, “an anxious dog with a number of issues,” the most serious of which was a habit of spinning out. Max had worn the lawn bare by turning in circles over it all day long. Then there was Roxy, a three-year-old Staffie with post-traumatic stress. She was attacked in the park as a puppy and won’t go out now, not even as far as the front gate. Biscuit, a bearded collie who was a lovely family pet, was prone to psychotic outbreaks at the sight or sound of a heavy vehicle. We saw her attempting to launch a flying attack at a double-decker bus, restrained on a leash by an owner who went in fear of her life every time they ventured onto the pavement.

The three patients were subjected to a process of expert diagnosis from Evans and his team of specialists. No miracle results were promised, but the remedies were prescribed with the most impressive consideration for the wellbeing of the dogs. They got to play games for treats, wrestle with plastic toys or race around an agility course while their humans looked on hopefully.

Humans are a weird species. In SAS: Who Dares Wins, the fun runs of the canine agility course were exchanged for a combat fitness course involving a forced march over a 3000-foot mountain peak in South Wales – and back again, with the clock ticking.

Ant, the chief instructor, addresses an assembly of thirty potential civilian recruits who have been driven to the remote military base like cattle, in the back of a truck. He singles out a victim immediately.

“Take ya fuckin’ cap off. Who do you think you are?” It’s a question that gets asked a lot on television these days, but for this guy, it’s strictly rhetorical.

Anybody who thinks they’re anybody will get into strife in this situation. The first exercise is to write a story about yourself on a piece of A4 paper. No preparation, no warm up. Just write it and drop it in the box. Everything you say will be held against you. Jon, a trainee stuntman with the looks of young Sylvester Stallone, makes the mistake of boasting about his strong-man credentials. “I don’t mean to say it arrogantly,” he announces to camera, “but I should squash everyone else.”

In the instructors’ meeting Jon’s A4 page is tossed across the table. “Fuckin’ show pony.” Mick, a thirty-five-year-old with a history of various addictions, fares a bit better, especially since he’s been developing a second life as a comedian. After making it through the most gruelling of the physical trials, Mick is called in for “TQ” (tactical questioning). This is ordeal by sarcasm, a mock-interrogation process for which candidates are brought in with a black bag over their heads. The bag is whipped away, and two inquisitors stare at Mick for some time before one says, “Gettin’ a bit twitchy?”

Mick doesn’t bat an eyelid. “I’m used to big audiences like this,” he says.

The script might have been written by an HBO team. Television viewers are all too familiar with scenes like these, but the reality is brought home in the physical trials. The recruits are kept awake for seventeen-hour stretches, sleeping for only three or four hours at a time, and are called up in some freezing predawn hour for the final marathon. As the camera pans up and back, they are seen crawling like ants along the trail through the ancient landscape.

A closer shot picks up the rearguard, toiling up the hill barely able to stay upright. “Horrendous,” one manages to say.

Failing to stay on your feet means total collapse. “I’m done,” says one guy as he hits the ground. Another is hyperventilating and has to be carted off by the medical team. In the final assessment, the team of instructors, themselves veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, focus on the question of who would “have your back” in a combat zone.

What kind of species are we, to treat our companion animals with such depths of concern and give each other no quarter? SAS is certainly good television, but there are questions to be asked about how we watch this kind of trial by endurance. It taps into an ancient narrative about the one who wins through – the unlikely hero who has deep inner resources to draw on – and the failure of the obvious or self-appointed champion. But this isn’t a story. Those who break during the ordeals of the selection process may be the lucky ones. It’s those who go home years later, scarred for life by the horrors of war, whom we should be thinking of. They don’t figure in the mythos.

Nor do many others who find themselves playing a crucial role in the war zone. I finished my Monday evening’s viewing with the Lateline exclusive on an Iraqi asylum seeker known as “Khaled.” Khaled had worked along with his father as an interpreter for US forces in 2007, and according to his record of service he was “an invaluable asset to the team serving with honour and distinction.” That’s the kind of reputation all those aspiring SAS recruits would have had in their sights.

It was dangerous work. One night, Khaled’s father made the mistake of answering the door and was shot – thirteen times. He was dead on arrival at the hospital and, knowing his own life was now in immediate danger, Khaled fled the country. He made his way to Australia by boat, and was granted a temporary visa. But one night he was picked up by police in a carpark and peremptorily searched. Accused of using offensive language, resisting arrest and being in possession of a car without a licence, he was sent to Villawood detention centre, where he remained for the next eight months.

When his case was eventually heard, the charges were dismissed (though he admitted to having no driver’s licence). But under legislation brought in by the Rudd government, the charges alone were sufficient to warrant the cancellation of his visa.

The chapter of miseries continued. Khaled was suffering from post-traumatic stress and began self-medicating with ice. There were petitions on his behalf to minister Peter Dutton, who declined to intervene. Then, without any given reason, he was taken out for transfer to Christmas Island. In a fit of rage, he lashed out and smashed a surveillance camera. So there were more charges, and more extended delays awaiting a court hearing.

After two years in detention, Khaled signed an agreement for deportation back to Iraq, a document in which the Australian government disclaimed any responsibility for what might happen to him. The waiver clause, according to legal specialists, was highly unusual.

He was sent back to Basra, the very place where his father was shot, and presented with a bill for $20,000 for the costs. Speaking to Lateline on the phone, he stressed the acute danger he was in.

So who has Khaled’s back? It’s a somewhat urgent question. His narrative is not of the kind that draws would-be heroes to train for the SAS. It doesn’t fit with any stirring national mythos. You could say he’d been treated worse than a dog, but that would be a preposterous understatement. •

The post Unleashed appeared first on Inside Story.

Australia has a new prime minister who enthuses that there has “never been a more exciting time to be alive… and there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian.” Malcolm Turnbull could just as easily say that it doesn’t matter whether Australia is excited or afraid. Coming ready or not, Asia’s era is here and Australia has no option but to take a front row seat. Indeed, we have little choice but to get on stage and be one of the players.

As a nation that often served as an offstage spear carrier for Europe or the United States, Australia finds itself where the big stuff will happen. Fear as much as excitement is a logical response. That curse about living in interesting times has landed close to home.

Asia’s biggest challenge in the twenty-first century will be to do a better job of avoiding the world wars Europe imposed on the last century. A question almost as potent is how Asia will reshape a global order created by Western ideas about the role of the nation, the purpose of the state and the rights of the people.

If Asia delivers a century that is lucky as well as smart, we won’t get definitive answers to these questions of war and order. The only conclusive answer would be if disaster arrives, delivering the bloody conclusion that Asia has failed.

Asia’s greatest interest, its central mission, is to keep the excitement running and manage the power shift peacefully, if not smoothly. Keep striving and driving and pray not to crash. In this endeavour, with its many signposts but, we hope, no disastrous endpoint, fresh maps have arrived from one of Australia’s finest international relations scholars, Michael Wesley, and from that modern Metternich, Henry Kissinger. Both thinkers are grappling with what Asia will become and what it will do to everybody else.

At ninety-two, Kissinger has produced what may be his final substantial statement on the state of the world. He tackles what he sees as the ultimate problem of our day, “the crisis in the concept of world order,” and the ultimate challenge for statesmanship, “a reconstruction of the international system.”

Michael Wesley’s version of the same conundrum is that Asia’s powers “feel little investment in or loyalty to the rules and conventions” the West built. People in the West, meanwhile, fear a challenge to international business, law and security “that appears to them both unjustified and unconscionable.” The result, he writes, “is a global economy of increasing interdependence but declining trust, of collective concern about instability but eroding consensus on what to do about it.”

The idea – or ideal – of the “international community” is invoked more now than in any previous era, Kissinger muses, but there is “no agreed set of goals, methods or limits.” He worries that we are entering a period “in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future.”

Kissinger has always seen America as an ambivalent superpower, and here he devotes a chapter to that familiar theme. The difference now is how much that ambivalence is shaped by intimations of impotence rather than omnipotence. “From perhaps 1948 to the turn of the century marked a brief moment in human history when one could speak of an incipient global order composed of an amalgam of American idealism and traditional concepts of balance of power,” he writes. “Yet its very success made it inevitable that the entire enterprise would eventually be challenged, sometimes in the name of world order itself.”

Perhaps this is the dirge of an old man watching the light fade. Consider, though, that Kissinger – the realist’s realist – has spent his whole career thinking about power and how to direct or survive it. As the former US national security adviser and secretary of state notes, the life gave the man his life’s work: “Having spent my childhood as a member of a discriminated minority in a totalitarian system and then as an immigrant to the United States, I have experienced the liberating aspects of American values.” He returned to his native Germany at the end of the second world war as a soldier in the conquering US army, experiencing geopolitical conflict in the most personal way.

In World Order he grapples haltingly with the troubling thought that American values may not define this century. Of his previous books, the one that sits closest is Diplomacy, published in 1994, not long after America won the cold war and the Soviet Union vanished. Its first chapter was titled “The New World Order.”

Now Kissinger returns to that new order, and any sense of triumph is gone. He starts with Europe’s role in creating the modern state (through the Westphalian principle) and a pluralistic international order, then adds the balance of power that prevailed, for good or ill, from Napoleon until the final triumph at the end of the cold war.

A century ago Europe had a near monopoly on designing global order. Today it worries about itself and turns inward. It will become just one of several regional units alongside America, China and perhaps India and Brazil. As Kissinger writes:

Is the world moving toward regional blocs that perform the role of states in the Westphalian system? If so, will balance follow, or will this reduce the number of key players to so few that rigidity becomes inevitable and the perils of the early twentieth century return, with inflexibly constructed blocs attempting to face one another down?

Kissinger sees little role for the Middle East in the emerging world of blocs because the region is in chaos, consumed by all of its historical experiences simultaneously: “empire, holy war, foreign domination, a sectarian war of all against all.” Vast areas could fall to anarchy and extremism as “religion is ‘weaponised’ in the service of geopolitical objectives.”

If the Middle East is a saga of state failure then Asia is a stunning story of state success. Yet it has no regional order, says Kissinger, because there is no Asian consensus “about the meaning of the journey they have taken or its lessons for twenty-first-century world order.” He predicts two balances of power emerging – one in South Asia, the other in East Asia – neither of which will easily achieve equilibrium.

During the cold war, the dividing lines were defined by military force. Kissinger argues that Asia’s twenty-first-century balance should not have the military equation as its key measure. The modern Metternich seeks a new way: “Concepts of partnership need to become, paradoxically, elements of the modern balance of power, especially in Asia – an approach that, if implemented as an overarching principle, would be as unprecedented as it is important.”

The idea of Asian partnership restraining Asia’s competing powers is also central to Michael Wesley’s Restless Continent. The Australian National University professor agrees that the rise of great powers in Asia (Japan, China, India, Russia and perhaps, in time, Indonesia) will question the content and extent of the international order, and suggests the rules of the game may be shifting from Western-flavoured order to spheres of influence:

This century’s international relations could see a gradual crumbling of the globalism that has prevailed for half a millennium. The next phase of world order could very well be one of disarticulation, whereby Europe, America and Asia’s great powers compete to build zones of influence and deference around their borders and with regions and countries of importance, such as resource suppliers. In between would be stretched an increasingly threadbare tissue of global rules and institutions.

Wesley writes of the new age that has already dawned in Asia, driven by opposed dynamics of rivalry and interdependence. The giant dance of enmity and engagement, repulsion and embrace, clashes and constraints is being played out on a continent-wide stage that will shape the world.

To say that Asia is beset by mixed emotions is to underplay the strength of these forces – and of habits of state hierarchy rather than equality, and of the scars of history. Wesley thinks it inevitable that a triumphant Asia will demand the right to rewrite the rules of global and regional order. Yet the “scale and pace of their rise means that Asia’s larger states are often afflicted by ‘strategic claustrophobia’ – a fear that either by accident or by design, they will be denied the markets, resources, energy and investment they need to continue their brittle internal evolution.”

Wesley’s thinking is as robust as Kissinger’s and – no small compliment, this – his writing is as good as Dr K’s. Kissinger has ever been the master of mordant mots to lighten the ponderous bureaucratese of international affairs, and Wesley, too, handles the heavy with a deft touch, reaching high but writing tight. His distillation of ideas is intense and the liquid of the language is clear. Although he ranges across centuries, he gets the job done in less than 200 pages. Grand strategy and big history written for a time-is-short age: catch the idea, pare, stir in history, boil, then cut again.

The two writers differ markedly in their treatment of the role of the United States in Asia’s new geopolitics. Kissinger sketches America’s relative decline while always returning to the central role it must play in the Asian Century. Wesley briskly notes that decline as a given then turns his attention to Asia.

Thus, Kissinger offers this on his penultimate page:

A purposeful American role will be philosophically and geopolitically imperative for the challenges of our period. Yet world order cannot be achieved by any one country acting alone.

This is an instruction to Washington as much as a description of Asia’s potential.

Wesley sees Asia as “the first continent to emerge from under the umbrella of American strategic dominance, which has muted the latent power rivalries of most countries for seven decades.”

What do you get when you mix the decline of America as the strategic hegemon, Asian economic success and Asia’s burgeoning national pride? Wesley’s answer: “Asia has become a great arms bazaar.”

Naval power is the modern expression of Asian pride and paranoia: “Thanks to a cascade of maritime weapons purchases along Asia’s southern tier, American sea command is crumbling.” The end of unquestioned American sea command, Wesley writes, means “the lines of what can be credibly challenged and what will be safely enforced are moving.”

Wesley defines Asia “in its entirety” from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean; 4.4 billion people, 60 per cent of the world’s population, soon to produce more than half the world’s economic activity.

He offers four reasons why it is Asia that will shape global order, not Europe or Africa or the Anglosphere.

Scale: The revolutions in everything from communications to industrial organisation to knowledge creation “have reinserted populations back into the productivity equation, delivering major advantages to poorer but stable societies. In no geographic location has this been more pronounced than Asia.”

Governance DNA, or “muscle memory”: “The sheer persistence of government in Asian societies, through cycles of expansion, decline and conquest, is a major reason for their historical glory and sustained development today.”

Cultural and civilisational pride: Having emerged from Western domination, Asian states reassert their self-worth. Cultural chauvinism is awake and thriving, feeding Asia’s deep-seated hierarchical struggle. “A competitive cultural dynamic is deeply ingrained across Asia: as each society is determined to regain a sense of pride by investing in a sense of its historical greatness, it touches off a jealous response from its neighbours.”

Location: Proximity caused economic dynamism and military rivalry to spread across Europe and “then burst forth from the continent to reorder the world.” Asia has entered the same dynamic of power, ambition and deepening rivalry “driving a domino effect of prosperity and rivalry across the continent.”

Enriched and empowered, Asian states have a growing sense of entitlement, demanding the rights and prerogatives of regained place.

Asian interdependence should be as strong as Asian rivalry. Wesley thinks Asia will be unable to give war a chance:

Without recourse to decisive war or transforming political integration, Asia’s international relations will settle into a pattern of rivalrous interdependence. Asian states will grow ever more important to each other’s growing prosperity and continued development, while at the same time, their strategic mistrust and power competition will grow.

His rivalrous interdependence is Kissinger’s new Asian order, in which partnership is as central to the power balance as the military stand-off.

If Asia maintains peace, it won’t be a harmony. Think of a fluid equilibrium that constantly throbs and surges – the giant enmity–engagement dynamic. Networks must balance the nukes. Interdependence must outweigh the irrational. Pride must meld with partnership. Asia triumphant must deliver new forms of order.

The post Restless continents throbbing and surging appeared first on Inside Story.

To hear inhabitants of a nation that ranks fifth according to land mass, and is the world’s largest island, describe their homeland as “small” seemed odd to others that day, including some Chinese visitors who later quizzed me about what on earth it meant. But they immeduately understood the response I relayed from a strategist I had talked to. With armed forces numbering no more than 60,000 at any one time, a vast territory to police, and extremely lengthy coastlines, and in an age when the natural barriers of sea and ocean were no guard against external threats, Australia’s sense of vulnerability made a certain kind of sense.

It is in that context that the security relationship with the United States seems sensible. Militarily, only someone reckless or insane would question it – and this, more than anything else, accounts for why Australia has been an even more faithful ally of the United States than Britain has been. Unlike Britain, Australia fought with American troops in Vietnam. Its soldiers have put in particularly distinguished service in Afghanistan. Australia has compensated for its sense of vulnerability by staying resolutely close to America.

These days, though, Australia faces a more complicated strategic choice. The glib explanation is that while its security is well guarded by being close to the United States, its economy increasingly depends on Asian neighbours, the principal one being China. China’s dominance of trade in the region is posing this sort of issue for many other countries, but for Australia, with its security needs, the issues are particularly sharp and uncomfortable.

If we stick to the mindset of feeling “small,” though, a policy maker would need the wisdom of Solomon to sort out how to balance fidelity to the United States with preserving good relations with China at a time when these two powers are experiencing fractious relations. The moment of choice hasn’t arrived – yet – but the nightmare scenario is that late one night a call will come from the White House declaring that “it’s either them or us.” It never needs to happen; the sting is in its potential.

One way of managing the dilemma would be to stick resolutely to the mantra that, no matter what, Australia will remain close to the United States. But policy-makers and politicians are loath to make tomorrow’s people hostage to what might seem like self-evident truths today. Things change. Who can say with 100 per cent certainty that moving away from the United States won’t make sense ten, twenty or thirty years down the line. Once policy becomes dogma a country is in real trouble. We must always be pragmatic.

The other response is to diversify. But the menu of choices is slender. For security, the United States is irreplaceable. Who else would fill the gap in terms of personnel, common vision or sheer hard power? But China is becoming indispensible as a source of growth. Australia might be signing free-trade agreements with South Korea and Japan, and eyeing opportunities in India and Indonesia. But none of these countries, in the short to medium term, will step into the space China occupies. And offering the Australian public a few years of austerity while trade with China is whittled down in the hope some other country might replace it would only be contemplated by the bravest or most zealously xenophobic politician. At the moment Australia is governed by people who fit neither of these descriptions.

So the response is to stick resolutely to the status quo, hoping like Dickens’s Mr Micawber that something will turn up. The problem with this approach is that it isn’t the people of the future who are the hostages of fortune, as the first option outlined above proposed, but the people living in Australia today. We continue to live in terror of the phone call in the night and the moment of choice.

There might be another path, though, and it comes back to the sense of being a “small” country. While this is a reasonable description of one type of reality (size of military personnel, overall size of population), the reason I found, and continue to find, this self-description so grating is because in almost every other sense it undersells Australia and denotes a lack of confidence that simply shouldn’t exists.

Take the relationship with the United States. In a very trivial way, “small” Australia is sensible to stick close because it too relies on a stronger partner to care for it. In that scenario, though, Australia is little more than a parasite, and parasites have every reason to fear the moment of rejection. Is the link with America simply a way of dealing with this fear? How about the other vast commonalities and bonds that join the two countries – a common language, a common view of the world, shared political values, much shared culture, huge people-to-people links underpinned by a high regard for each other… The list goes on.

If the Americans really wanted to jettison a partner like this, it would mean jettisoning a part of its own identity, because we are so like each other. The cultural, political and social links between the two countries are that close. And in any case, there is something Australia has that no other country has, and which the United States appreciates profoundly, and also needs – the country’s enormously important strategic location. Precisely where would America find a substitute for this?

Very ironically, Australia’s rules-based society, its highly educated population, good social welfare and strong institutions, is also extremely important for China. The simple truth is that China likes Australia for the same reason that the United States does: it is a place of great stability. In a sense, all the local dismay at dysfunctional politics in Canberra is a tribute to just how easy the country is to govern. Its need for interventionist, crisis-fighting leaders is relatively low. This means they often have to fill their days dealing with crises of their own making. Believe it or not, that is ultimately preferable to the alternative.

Changing the psychology of Australian officials, and perhaps some of its people, about the amazing attributes and strengths of this country, and the fact that it is liked and admired by its key security partner and its greatest economic one, allows space for one more liberating thought. America is not having a security relationship with Australia because it has been begged to do so, nor has China increased its trade here as an act of charity. Both get a huge amount from this relationship.

Australia needs a far more dynamic vision of its role in the world, and a better sense of self-confidence in its diplomacy. Self-deprecation is fine up to a point, but not when it makes a nation look and sound slavish. Australia doesn’t need to beg either American or China to maintain good relations. It should regard these as privileges on both sides. And if the call ever comes in the middle of the night, one hopes the prime minister who takes it has the confidence and eloquence to point this out, and to ask the president to call back the next day, in working hours, with a more sensible request. •

The post Thinking bigger appeared first on Inside Story.

Years on, the question of the United States’s power versus China has become even more vexed. Almost daily come declarations that America’s best days are over, and equally fervent claims that its best days are ahead. Others argue that China’s time in the sun is imminent, and yet others, often within China, say that the great moment, if it ever comes, lies decades ahead.

The problem with this debate is that it is not entirely clear what we are measuring, how we are measuring it or, indeed, whether we can compare what we are measuring in each case. On the measure of trade, China is already demonstrably dominant in many areas. It is the largest trading partner to over 140 countries across the world and, on some measures, has become the world’s largest economy. But as any economist will quickly add, this means very little. Per capita, China is still poor. And trade flows can illustrate vulnerability as much as strength: a lot of China’s trading involves the energy and resources it doesn’t have and needs to import. And its exports are, or mostly have been, low-tech and high-input.

Are we talking about military dominance then? Once again, while China’s army and navy budgets and its technical capability have made leaps and bounds over the past few years, no sensible analyst would say that China comes even close to US fighting capacity. It last saw combat experience in the late 1970s (against Vietnam, and it lost). It has one rudimentary aircraft carrier compared to the United States’s fifteen and France’s two. And if its technical ability was so great then it wouldn’t be so relentless in its attempts to steal the intellectual property rights of others.

The only forms of power and influence beyond these are cultural, diplomatic and symbolic. Culturally, China often seems enslaved by its worship of all things American. The number of Chinese films, pop stars and artistic figures that have succeeded in the United States is tiny. In China, Brad Pitt, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lady Gaga and Game of Thrones rule the roost. Diplomatically, China has one true ally in its own backyard – North Korea. The United States has treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, Malaysia and, to a point, Taiwan. More importantly, it has military installations and capacity throughout the region.

Only symbolically might China claim some parity with its rival. It seems to be a powerful country, and it often gets spoken about as a powerful country. But in terms of real, physical, tangible assets, the odd thing is not how strong China appears but how weak the world’s second-largest economy actually is.

One complicating factor in this debate is that we need to add a different kind of space to the fields in which influence can be exercised. Once upon a time there was physical space alone, which was mapped out through a series of wars, colonisation campaigns and diplomatic battles. These days, there is also the digital world, and however hazy that notion is, conquering it as a means pursuing profits and propagating ideas is as important as the conquest of the “real.”

Ironically, China’s historic mindset gives it an advantage in attempting to control and annex this virtual space. At a recent symposium in Sydney the eminent Chinese expert on the cold war, Shen Zhihua, observed that in the past Chinese leaders had no real concept of physical boundaries. They regarded themselves as a civilisational force, with some idea of what was inside and outside their sphere of influence but no need to depend on crude borders in the way the European powers had done since the 1648 Westphalian arrangement.

So it is little wonder that China regards the virtual world as a place where it can resist boundaries that don’t suit it and impose them where it does. The Chinese government has asserted surprisingly effective control over its own citizens’ access to the internet. (Even Gmail is now mostly inaccessible, despite proxy servers.) Yet it has also wandered illicitly in the online world, perhaps even managing to get full lists of American government workers. China’s ability to have its online cake and eat it too is an example of how Beijing seizes opportunities for influence and power where it can most easily blur the edges. This seems like the strategy of a country that knows it is weak and needs to rely on guile.

A similar case in point is the seemingly interminable argument over the South China Sea. Bill Hayton’s recent book on this issue at least supplies some clarity. As he shows in The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, if a claim in this region were to be taken to the International Court of Justice today, the best China might get would be a small number of the islands. Historical records simply don’t give the amount of detail that China would need to be able to extend its territory right out to its “nine-dashed line,” which reaches as far as 1500 kilometres from China, up to the coast of Malaysia. Anyone reading Hayton’s book will begin to suspect that, far from being a claim over highly speculative mineral and resource rights (which he shows are unlikely to be anywhere near as valuable as they are sometimes painted to be), or a real attempt to appeal to historical rights, the disputes in the South China Sea are symbolic. A frustrated China is trying to prove that it can assert at least some influence and power in its own backyard. So far, it has done a remarkably poor job, raising the hackles of its neighbours, irritating the United States back into the region in a more active way, and even forcing Australian politicians to look up from their domestic obsessions and deliver an opinion. Here, too, we see a power that looks not strong but weak.

We will probably look back on this phase of US–China relations as a battle to control agendas, set conceptual parameters and promote different visions of what power really is. China is not ready to take anything like the role the United States has, culturally, militarily, politically and economically, not because it can’t see it happening one day but because Beijing doesn’t want this role and doesn’t buy into the US power paradigm. What it seems to be doing instead is trying to change the framework and the terms of reference in order to render the question of China’s being the new United States almost irrelevant.

The good news for China is that its exploration of a new kind of power is likely to attract interest and tolerance. The bad news is that the residual need for a dominant player – a need felt in the United States, sometimes extremely strongly, and in much of the rest of the world – is unlikely to go away soon. This leaves us in an era of shadow boxing, in which the real debates and conflicts are not about what they seem to be. The South China Sea is not really about physical space; it is about political and diplomatic influence. And the tussle over cyber-espionage is not really about stealing other’s secrets; it is about who gets to set the rules for this new type of space.

The only thing that is real is the United States’s sense that it is losing its might, or at least its prowess. But the suspicion must grow that they are worrying about the wrong thing, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. The real question is not about how the United States cedes top slot to China but about how it works in a world in which the two countries have parity. And that question must be answered not in Beijing but in Washington. •

The post Power envy appeared first on Inside Story.

Today, that enduring assumption is itself being questioned – and how! With a sudden intensity, a widespread perception has taken hold. Britain is in retreat from the world. It lacks a coherent strategic stance and clear priorities. Its illusive security outlook overburdens its meagre and ramshackle armed forces. Its ambitions and resources are growing ever more widely apart. Its cultivation of unsavoury allies is joined by a knack for alienating well-disposed ones. Its governing class, veering between have-it-all and let-it-be, has brought the country to irrelevance at best, perilous weakness at worst.

The targeting may be scattershot, the headlines a touch overdone, the prescriptions often vague. There is no consensus on what is to be done. But the dismay in much current policy analysis and media comment, much of it from establishment figures or outlets, is genuine.

For example, a Financial Times editorial – “Britain’s Drift to the Foreign Policy Sidelines,” published on 6 February – says that Britain needs to make “a realistic judgment about what kind of security player [it] aspires to be”; otherwise, it will continue “lurching from halfhearted engagement towards strategic irrelevance.”

The Economist – “Britain’s Strategic Ambition Has Shrivelled Even More Than Its Defence Budget,” on 14 February – is more sanguine, but still regrets “the country’s diminished appetite to be a leading security player on the world stage.”

The New Statesman – “The Long Shadow of Decline: Is Britain Bowing Out of the World Stage?,” on 26 February – echoes the concern. It suggests that “a mood of war fatigue, coupled with prolonged austerity, is leading to a marked and perhaps permanent decline in British influence,” reflected in the fact that David Cameron is “wholly absent as a significant actor on the world stage.”

If the discrete worries are not new, their coalescence and urgency is. The immediate reasons are twofold. The first is the rise of Islamic State, which in June 2014 expanded rapidly across northwest Iraq from its Syrian bases. Air strikes and Kurdish efforts have since stalled the main advance, but the group still holds most of the areas it has seized. Its example continues to inspire affiliates across a wide arc (for example Libya, Somalia, and Nigeria). Its absolutist ideology, skilfully parlayed by social media, has also attracted new recruits to its territory, among them young men and women from the West. British officials say that at least 600 have gone from the United Kingdom, most travelling more or less freely via Turkey. Several of IS’s gruesome snuff videos, including those in which two British aid workers were killed, feature a man speaking with a London accent now identified as a Kuwaiti-born former student in computing at the University of Westminster.

Britain’s security agencies are in overdrive in chasing the threat of returning jihadists and those radicalised here, as well as protecting targets abroad. The attacks in Paris and Copenhagen have concentrated many minds, though memories also remain fresh of the brutal murder of an off-duty soldier in south London in May 2013 by two British jihadists from Nigerian Christian families. A complex and many sided challenge is a good candidate for “the too difficult box” (a useful coinage of the former Labour minister Charles Clarke).In tackling it, only an optimal mix of strategy, resources and (above all) ideas is likely to prove effective. In Britain as elsewhere, that is still elusive.

The second reason for acute concern is the belligerence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The annexation of Crimea, followed by pro-Russian militias’ seizure of swathes of eastern Ukraine, is the starkest example. A ceasefire agreed with Putin by two European Union heavyweights, Angela Merkel and François Hollande, proved shortlived, but was widely cited as illustrating Britain’s increasingly marginal and voiceless foreign policy stance. “Where is Cameron? He is clearly a bit-player. Nobody is taking any notice of him. He is a foreign-policy irrelevance,” was the caustic verdict of Richard Shirreff, an army general who until 2014 served as NATO’s deputy commander in Europe. Cameron’s subsequent deployment of seventy-five trainers to Ukraine’s beleaguered military has tended more to reinforce than dispel the impression.

The three Baltic states – like Ukraine, part of the former Soviet Union and containing large Russian minorities – now feel vulnerable. An incursion there would oblige Britain, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty that binds the alliance’s twenty-eight members, to act. Already, Britain has promised to commit 1000 troops and four Typhoon fighter jets to a new NATO force designed to support the Baltic states in an emergency. What it would be prepared to do in the likelier event of sustained “hybrid warfare” – the classic Soviet and now Putinesque blend of destruction and deceit, more insidious than overt attack – is uncertain.

Russia’s airforce and navy are also conducting regular unannounced forays close to UK territory to test its defences. Britain has had to scramble its Typhoons on eight occasions in the past year to intercept and escort Russian visitors. The provocation (Putin’s favourite word) may be mainly symbolic – though by switching off electronic signals, the Russians have risked collision with civilian planes – and the impact largely psychological. But in context, the conclusion that the “post–cold war” in Europe is indeed over, and a more insecure era begun, is unavoidable. “Russia has become a danger,” is the bald judgment of John Sawers, the former head of the intelligence service MI6.

These two transnational emergencies loom large, and Britain is far from alone in facing them. But its ability even to contribute to a shared effort, alongside all its other commitments, is diminishing. Defence spending has declined since 1981 from 8 per cent of gross national product, or GDP, to 2 per cent (by comparison, health spending in the same period is up from 7 to 12 per cent). The Royal United Services Institute analyst Malcolm Chalmers estimates that on current growth and spending projections, the headline figure could fall to 1.88 per cent in the financial year 2015–16.

Britain’s military has been repeatedly trimmed by a series of reforms impelled as much by a managerialist response to financial constraints as by strategic reassessment. The last strategic defence and security review, conducted in 2010, prepared the way for an 8 per cent cut in spending, which has become three times that in real terms. The size of the core army is approaching 80,000 – its smallest since the post-Napoleonic era of the 1820s – and may go even lower. There have been no maritime patrol aircraft since 2010, following the abandonment of the costly Nimrod program. This in a country with the thirteenth longest coastline in the world. In late November, the periscope of a suspected Russian submarine was glimpsed close to the Faslane base in western Scotland which hosts Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines; Aviation Week reports that Canada, France and the United States were requested to assist the search, and provided four maritime patrol aircraft of their own.

The inquests continue into the army’s performance in the attritional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where 453 and 179 personnel died and thousands were injured. A vote in parliament in September 2014 allowed Britain to re-engage in Iraq by joining the United States–led aerial assault against Islamic State; it was exactly a year since the government had lost a motion endorsing such action against Damascus after the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians near the city. A degree of fanfare accompanied the later vote, though the sum of Britain’s reported contribution to “Operation Inherent Resolve” is a handful of bombing raids of indeterminate utility, along with the deployment of seventy special-forces personnel.

A scathing report by the House of Commons defence select committee, published on 16 February, says it is “shocked” by military chiefs’ “inability or unwillingness” to explain the United Kingdom’s objectives in Iraq, and “troubled by the lack of clarity over who owned the policy – and indeed whether such a policy existed.” The committee, headed by Rory Stewart – a Conservative romantic in the derring-do mould of The Thirty-Nine Steps who has worked in both Iraq and Afghanistan – concludes by warning against a “lurch from over-intervention to complete isolation.”

On the other side of the scale, two enormous aircraft carriers are being built to carry military jets that the country cannot afford to build and barely to purchase, in the service of an unreal policy of global power projection. (The ships are due to enter service in 2017 and 2020, at a projected cost of £6.2 billion.) The replacement of the Trident nuclear system will be even more pricey, though on a longer-term span. The policy of “continuous-at-sea deterrence,” operated by four Vanguard-class submarines based at Faslane in western Scotland, reaches the end of its service life in the 2020s. Estimates for the successor program go up to £36 billion, along with what the analyst Nick Ritchie calls “important conventional military opportunity costs.” Britain can still boast – if that’s the word – of being the fifth biggest military spender in the world, but resources without judgement and leadership can become a burden.

The contrast between questionable grandiosity and mundane practicality, with little realistic ambition in between, is striking. More relevant is the dysfunction of strategy: what is the present mix, or any mix, of military tools for? Where does cyberwarfare fit in, and how does it relate to the hard kinetic type? A phalanx of academic ex-officers is on the case. Jonathan Shaw, in his new booklet Britain in a Perilous World: The Strategic Defence and Security Review We Need, puts intellectual confusion at the heart of his diagnosis. (“All who work in Whitehall should be trained and educated in a common executive methodology.”) The next strategic defence and security review, beginning after the election on 7 May and due for completion before the end of 2015, will have its work cut out.

These military dilemmas are matched by diplomatic ones. Britain’s principal ties, with the European Union and the United States, are in neither case serene, though this is also a by-product of wider restlessness: Ukraine, Syria–Iraq and the Greek debt crisis are the tip of a piling diplomatic agenda, with equally grave issues in the next tier, from the packed boats breaking on Europe’s Mediterranean shores to climate change, corruption, cybersecurity and China.

Britain’s high diplomacy has long been a juggling act, with Europe, America and the Commonwealth the putative objects of its dexterity. A conceit rather than a doctrine, with Winston Churchill the inevitable progenitor (in another “hand of history“ flourish), this offered itself after 1945 as the most painless way of finessing the nation’s loss of status (and empire) while preserving the sense of options infinitely open – a vital consideration for a state whose imaginative kernel is absolute sovereignty.

Churchill’s notion of “concentric circles” with Britain as the pivot point – a native equivalent of Charles de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” – has given sterling service over the decades. Much mocked but never replaced, it has suffered minimal damage even from great changes (Britain’s entry into the then European Economic Community in 1973) and fallouts (with Washington over its invasion of Grenada, with the Commonwealth over South Africa, both in the 1980s). In practice, the Commonwealth has receded from view, to become more a fixture in the summit, sporting or royal calendar than any sort of magnet. That shift left an ever-mutating argument over primacy, with Europeanist sentiment (marketeer in the early years, then centre-left, now pragmatic) vying with pro-American. The latter was by default mainly geopolitical during the cold war, but given an ideological gloss in the Reagan–Thatcher years, which several waves of “Anglosphere”-mania have tried to refurbish without much success.

The hard centre of the UK–US alliance – the “special relationship,” as by law it must be described in every article touching on the subject – is intelligence and security cooperation. This extends to the multilateral “Five Eyes” and subsidiary networks. The co-presence of Australia, Canada and New Zealand (and the reported shunning of Germany’s wish to join the gang) is suggestive of the civilisational assumptions that underlie such “deep state” programs. For Britain, the Washington–London dimension has a double bonus: as the last redoubt of a claim to shared glory, and a screen against boring old reality.

Matters of war and security ensure the future of that link, though little love remains. Britain’s credibility with Washington “rests on a knife-edge,” says Michael Graydon, former chief of the air staff, writing in the Financial Times on 1 March. “Informed sources on both sides of the Atlantic say so, yet ministers deny it. This is denial on a grand scale.” History and politics can still kindle the embers, just as Barack Obama’s domestic priorities and pivot to Asia have made for cooling. But in most ways Britain’s value to the United States is a subset of its membership of the European Union.

Like their counterparts on the American right, the libertarian-Anglosphere wing of the Conservatives and the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, dream of a global association of laissez-faire true believers – once Britain is free of the “Soviet-style” European Union. With its nostalgic echo of “imperial preference,” that fantasy has always made Churchill’s concentric circles look like reinforced concrete. The proposed free-trade agreement between the United States and the European Union (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP) has tipped into farce.

Membership of the European Union has become the main focus of Britain’s foreign policy. Its place in the union is underpinned by hard realities of trade, law, policy, migration and geography, if sometimes concealed by the routine abrasiveness of much of its political and media discourse about “Europe.”

But bonds can decay in ways that put unions in peril, as the near misses of Scottish independence and “Grexit” (Greece’s exit from the eurozone) have shown. A chain of factors has led Britain closer to a vote on withdrawal from the European Union. In particular, since 2010 the Europhobic and anti-immigrant UKIP has attracted many Tory defectors to its ranks (as well as Labour voters), propelling these two issues even higher up the political agenda. David Cameron, leading a coalition government with the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, responded to the threat in 2012 by promising to negotiate new terms of membership inside Europe that would entail some “repatriation” of powers or opt-outs from collective decisions, and then seek endorsement of the deal in a plebiscite (probably in 2017, though more recently 2016 has been mooted).

The artful dodge resembled that of the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in 1975, who for similar reasons of political and party management initiated a referendum on the EEC following some cosmetic adjustments to Britain’s terms of entry two years earlier. The vote for “staying in” was 67 per cent. Cameron can only dream of such a clear victory; the corrosive effects of years of “Euroscepticism,” the associated failure to build a positive case for membership beyond bean-counting, and a thinning of the European project on the continent itself, all augur badly. (All too have close parallels in the battle for Scotland.) Even more relevant, many EU states – beset by their own problems, bruised by the Greek experience, and wearied by perennial John Bull-ish animosity – are not well disposed to accommodating a revised settlement with Britain (which all other twenty-seven member-states would have to ratify).

Indeed, clumsy official rhetoric and high-pitched media coverage of immigration and abuse of the welfare system have caused needless disputes with sympathetic partners such as Poland and Romania. Worse, the instinct to indulge distorted and evidence-light views in these areas grants the country’s regiment of isolationists – left and right versions increasingly melting into one – an unearned credence.

Inevitably, Cameron’s contrivance has prolonged uncertainty about Britain’s position in the European Union, which worries business and financial sectors without doing much to halt the UKIP tide (though that party’s own internal strains, including between respectability and prejudice, are shaping up well to do the job).

Where pettiness leads, “Brexit” – Britain’s exit from the European Union – is more likely to follow. To achieve that outcome, a contract will be needed between embittered nativists and the enlightened globalisers who dream of a Singapore-on-the-Thames. The ensuing civil war would not be pretty.

For all that, a revised status quo may yet – as with Scotland’s independence vote – have the edge over outright break-up. Anti-EU feeling is wide but shallow. The benefits of membership are real. A vote for withdrawal could well precipitate Scotland’s exit from the United Kingdom. And a strong case can be made that the EU grain is now closer to the “inter-governmentalism” favoured by Britain than to the “integrationism” of the union’s pioneers.

Moreover, Europe’s overall economic lassitude, the unending eurozone crisis, and the example of harsher populisms and leaderships on the continent (as in Hungary) have made Britain seem a bit less recalcitrant. A recent growth spurt is luring even more workers from Europe and beyond, creating a positive economic dynamic, if a regressive political one. A lasting recovery or another bubble? Much depends on what the answer turns out to be.

Britain’s uncertainty over Europe clearly owes much to immediate political circumstances. But in a long-term context it can also be seen as the latest phase of a “refusal to commit” to just one direction in foreign policy. The menu of the post-1945 banquet is ever full – a special relationship with Washington, a post-imperial world role (a reduced form of destiny, but destiny nonetheless), the “independent nuclear deterrent,” membership of the United Nations Security Council. All this, and Europe too. Churchill lives. In that 9/11 anniversary interview, David Cameron even offered an impromptu variation on the eternal theme: “We care about what happens in the world and we’re a global player.”

Given its inheritance, it’s arguable that Britain has handled its foreign and defence policy in these postwar decades pretty well. Old alliances have been kept, new ones built, enemies overcome or kept at bay, disasters survived, dark chapters smoothed over. The show has been kept on the road, even if much of the pain (as in the late colonial wars and the post-1989 ones) was kept hidden from public view and is still to be acknowledged. The state has been able to contain the gravest internal challenges – Irish Republican Army and jihadist bombs, Scottish nationalism – without fatal damage to its democracy.

What may underlie some of the present angst is that rival performers are putting Britain’s juggling act under exceptional strain. An asymmetrical and multipolar era is undermining traditional bases of power and creating new threats to those with the biggest stake in them. A new information and technology order is shredding the authority as well as the operating model of those who play by older rules of securing consent. In defence and diplomacy, even more than in business and journalism, these dilemmas have no easy answers, for they go to the heart of the state.

They also tend to be bypassed in agendas for reform, where officialdom’s trigger instinct is towards the politically and financially expedient. In the military area, this means amalgamating forces and outsourcing functions while aspiring to “do better with less.” (This is the guiding principle of the government’s reform of the civil service, which it claims has achieved both gains in efficiency and substantial savings.) The approach neatly avoids the implications of current transformations of power – for example, in assessing the actual strategic value of expensive long-term projects, and the role of the arms and equipment companies that service them.

While ministers dutifully chop, their retired predecessors and former military chiefs worry about governments’ blinkered motivation. (Michael Graydon describes the most recent strategic defence and security review, in 2010, as “another budget-driven exercise, which lacked intellectual rigour and did deep damage to Britain’s military power.”) A prominent demand is that the government pledges to maintain defence spending at a minimum of 2 per cent of GDP (as recommended by NATO, though Britain is one of only five out of twenty-eight members to meet the target), with advocates citing the promise that the overseas aid budget will continue to hit the 0.7 per cent of GDP recommended by the UN. Less explicit in the argument over figures is the concern that an ageing society of endemic indebtedness is shrinking an overstretched state’s capacity, or at least willingness, to meet its many security commitments.

In diplomacy, too, cost-conscious managerialism is the dominant approach to reform, eclipsing more fundamental issues of purpose, priorities and, not least, expertise. Property sales, staff reductions and ambassadorial twitter feeds are among the motifs of recent years. In 2014, Rory Stewart noted that only three of Britain’s fifteen ambassadors in the Arab world spoke Arabic, and called for “more emphasis on language, political reporting, and deep country knowledge.”

The Conservative foreign secretary William Hague, for all his underworked mien, sought new uses for the vast, deserted corridors of what is still the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or FCO. He reopened the department’s library and language school, a welcome lurch towards seriousness continued by his successor, the lugubrious Philip Hammond, who in February launched a “diplomatic academy” designed to improve the “knowledge and skills” of FCO staff of all grades.

In the craving for relevance, “soft power” offers itself as a legal high. (The term is defined by its architect Joseph Nye as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion.”) It’s true that the United Kingdom has a lot of it, reaching mass and niche markets alike: the BBC, educational services, music and film stars, luxury and design brands, royals, soccer’s premier league with its mega-clubs and huge Asian fan base, English itself. The advantage to government is maximum credit on minimal direct investment.

But there are spots on this sun. Britain is not just living off its capital but running it down. A substantial decline in the teaching of foreign languages at all levels cascades throughout society to corrosive effect. (The fact that since the 1990s the country has become more diverse linguistically than at anytime in its history doesn’t alleviate the situation but makes it more troubling). The estimable BBC World Service’s progressive closure of radio language sections, for the most otiose cost-cutting reasons; the culling of area specialists and “lesser” languages by university departments; the closure of libraries and the mass liquidation of books; the narrowing of foreign coverage by newspapers and broadcasters (with honourable exceptions) – these are among the quieter signs of a broader psychological withdrawal from the world.

Very few of the anxieties about Britain’s foreign or defence policies (or lack thereof) seem likely to be debated in the grinding election campaign, at least beyond the ritual exchange of gaseous soundbites. All politics is now ultra-local. David Cameron is rigidly following the week-by-week “grid” of policy themes and high-profile announcements laid down by the hypnotist in Conservative central office, Lynton Crosby.  

The Labour leader Ed Miliband, marginally ahead in most polls, is even more reticent. After five years he has yet to make a single speech on Labour’s foreign policy plans, nor is he ever questioned on the matter. Cameron, who told the Economist a year before becoming prime minister that he regretted not having enough time to think about foreign affairs, at least is only acting parochial.

There’s no sign either that Britain’s place in the world will be uppermost in the minds of many voters. But relatively few seem to embrace a retreat. A Chatham House–YouGov survey among “the British public and opinion-formers,” published on 30 January, finds that overall “there is support for an ambitious British foreign policy and leadership role.” Over 60 per cent in both categories believe that Britain should aspire to be a “great power”; a majority of the public says that Britain has a responsibility to maintain international security, contribute troops to peacekeeping missions, and help lead the global response to climate change.

Today’s alarm may prove to be momentary, the flurry of warnings pass. But the underlying problems they identify are enduring. The crises in eastern Europe and Syria–Iraq will mutate, and others keep coming. The belief that Britain can escape their effects or turn its back on them is a grand illusion. In part this is because the country’s history, interests and demographics irrevocably connect it to the world, in part because the walls between foreign policy and domestic policy are continuing to erode.

These truths will have to be relearned in the coming years. How painful will the lesson be? The combination of international danger and zombie election makes it hard not to recall the closing words of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938:

And then England – southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass this way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from seasickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

The post Retreat, Britannia? appeared first on Inside Story.

At a time when many in the rest of the world are asking China to be more active and take a greater role as a stakeholder, albeit on Western terms, it seems ironic that its current leader should make this point in Canberra. Australia is a fellow member of the UN Security Council and a major player in the G20, the World Bank and other global forums, and yet it seems not to have impressed Xi with any strong vision of its relations with the country he leads.

There is certainly a constituency in Australia that would be antagonistic to the very notion of having a strategy. To them, you shouldn’t hedge yourself in with self-imposed limits. You leave yourself maximum room for manoeuvre and, in the words of the great economist John Maynard Keynes, change your mind when the facts change. The most that many in this camp would accept is that a country needs a sense of its national interests, and goes out to defend these. At the moment, that means sticking by the United States, no matter what, and building up complementary alliances wherever else you can.

Xi’s words should at least begin a process of considering whether this approach is sustainable. At times, Australia’s stance comes dangerously close to outsourcing all the deeper thinking about strategic interests and global roles to the United States. If Washington says something should happen, it happens. If Washington vetoes it, then Australia follows suit. (Witness Tony Abbott’s quick reversal of his initial interest in being part of the Chinese-instigated infrastructure bank.) Ironically, this seems to work in every policy area barring the one in which Australia might well argue it really should follow in the slipstream of the United States – action on climate change. The embarrassment of holding a climate-light G20 a few days after the United States and China announced a major deal on carbon emissions only served to underline, at least to Chinese officials, that Australia is kept in step by the United States when it matters to it, and then simply kept in the dark when it doesn’t.

Like the United States, Australia welcomes a strong, peaceful, cooperative China. No surprises there. And yes, it wants a China mostly in our own political image – just like America does. It has a common conceptual language with China on many economic issues, and like the United States it has trouble when the dialogue gets to values and rights. Australian companies love the Chinese market, and Australians on the whole see value in getting benefits from the Chinese economy and its links with their country. But these things simply add up to a framework for pragmatic engagement. Even the free-trade agreement, which was levelled off when Xi was in Canberra, doesn’t go much further towards answering the question of what Australian policy towards China really is.

It isn’t as though the question hasn’t been exhaustively considered by policy-makers and their political masters across Australia. And in many ways, it might be more accurate to talk about a multi-strand policy, involving individual states and the federal government, rather than a unified position. This is not unusual: the European Union could be accused of having not one policy towards the People’s Republic but twenty-eight, reflecting the number of member states. What is odd is that Australia sounds like it has a policy, and does the things that a country with a policy might do – but when the going gets tough (under pressure from America or from domestic interests) the policy vanishes. The cause célèbre is the Australia in the Asian Century white paper, issued to great fanfare in 2012 as the herald of a new era of regional engagement, with China at the centre. Those seeking this report now have to rummage around in the online archive of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Britain did a similar thing, specifically about China, in 2009, and that paper too has more or less vanished from cyberspace.

Does this mean that, in its heart, Australia doesn’t want a policy? The signs are that it wants to look like it has a China policy, but that thinking about what the world will look like in a decade’s time, when China will be a bigger, stronger, more prominent global force, is really too demanding. Australia’s policy is therefore to make as much for itself materially as it can, and leave to others the heavy lifting of working with China to integrate it more closely into the global system. That means sticking predominantly by the United States, no matter what, tactically defending specific national interests from time to time (including perverse obstruction on climate change) and leaving it at that. In essence, work with the United States.

Were China a more predictable partner, this make-hay-while-the-sun-shines approach might do the job. But in a number of key areas, all of which affect Australia, that isn’t the case. The vulnerability of China’s growth is something Chinese leaders past and present have all drawn attention to. China’s unity is also much more fragile than outsiders might believe. (Chinese leaders certainly aren’t complacent about the issues on their vast western borders.) Its political model is undergoing very real reform, not towards what many in the outside world might want but certainly towards something more law-based and accommodating of the needs of the emerging urban middle class. Its environmental problems are simply vast.

In any of these areas, China could all too easily receive a killer blow. And a killer blow to its stability and prosperity would in many ways be a killer blow for Australia. To daydream about the shifting interests of India or another market is, in the short to medium term, simply to indulge in fantasy. Like it or not, it is China or nothing for Australia’s future growth and prosperity.

The point of a policy is to try to deal, at least, with scenarios that involve some future influence and dynamic interaction. An Australian policy towards China would therefore need to look at China’s domestic challenges, admit they are directly linked to Australia’s own interests, and then work out where it might have influence. In some areas – such as technology and ideas transfer or deeper intellectual engagement – this would be to focus on the clear positives. In others, it would mean dealing with more challenging topics – how to mitigate partial pandemics or an environmental collapse in China, if they were to happen, for instance. A policy also has to think the unthinkable. If China did implode or collapse, what would Australia do? One of the merits of thinking through doomsday scenarios is that it sharpens minds and makes everyone intent on avoiding them, however unpleasant the process of thinking them through might be.

A policy is not simply a risk strategy. Australia has proved quite good at thinking through the risks of China’s rise regionally. But a fundamental part of its thinking should now be about what sort of China might exist in ten to twenty years, and in what ways that country is important and influential for Australia, and Australia for it. This is a positive part of policy formation.

Those who remain sceptical about the need for a strategic vision like this should remember that even if Australia doesn’t have a vision about China, China certainly has one about it. That vision was outlined by Xi Jinping last week, when he talked about an Australia that would increasingly be part of the economic, and therefore the geopolitical, realm of a China-influenced world in which the luxurious isolation of the past is over. After all, China has had a culture of strategic thinking for thousands of years. Look at the words of Confucius in the Analects: “To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.” And in terms of future economic and security challenges, that is precisely the mistake that the Australian government has been making. Xi’s visit offered the chance to change that. Let’s hope it is taken. •

The post Australia’s vanishing China policy appeared first on Inside Story.

First to break ranks was Anthony Albanese. In an interview with SkyNews shortly after he and his colleagues voted to enact the government’s Foreign Fighters Bill, he conceded that the legislation had not received sufficient parliamentary scrutiny. Although Labor leader Bill Shorten initially disagreed with that assessment, he subsequently wrote to the prime minister, Tony Abbott, asking him to refer the legislation to the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor for review. So far, Abbott doesn’t appear to have taken up the proposal. That is perhaps no great surprise: the Coalition government doesn’t seem to set much store by the office of the Independent Monitor. Earlier this year it tried unsuccessfully to abolish the office, and it has left the position unfilled since the inaugural Monitor, Bret Walker SC, stepped down in April.

Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus is the most recent Labor MP to propose increased oversight of Australia’s new national security laws. In an interview with the Saturday Paper late last month he suggested that the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, or PJCIS, should be given greater powers to scrutinise the work of the intelligence and security agencies. He pointed to Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament – a committee, he says, “which has full access to operational information” – as an example of what an enhanced PJCIS might look like.

It is true that the British committee has some advantages that the PJCIS does not enjoy. As Dreyfus highlights, it not only examines the expenditure, administration and policies of the intelligence and security services but also – unlike its Australian counterpart – oversees their operational activities. But its capacity to inquire into operational matters is constrained: it may oversee operational matters when the prime minister asks it to, or when those matters are of “significant national interest” but not part of an ongoing intelligence or security operation. In these circumstances, the committee is granted impressive powers to elicit information from the agencies.

Those powers are not unlimited, however. According to the legislation governing the committee, the heads of Britain’s three intelligence and security agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, can inform the committee that the information it seeks “cannot be disclosed because the secretary of state” – the relevant government minister – “has decided that it should not be disclosed.” The secretary of state may decide that disclosure is not in the interest of national security or that the material is “sensitive.” The term “sensitive” covers information that might compromise the operational methods of the intelligence and security agencies, might reveal details of particular operations, or has been provided by a foreign agency or government that has not consented to its disclosure.

These exemptions add up to an extremely broad constraint on the Intelligence and Security Committee’s powers – a constraint that might be exploited by a government that wished, for example, to cover up some embarrassing information. More importantly, the system places responsibility for disclosure with the subject of the oversight, not with those given the job of overseeing it.

The British committee doesn’t have to wait for operational matters to be referred to it by the prime minister; it may also initiate an examination of any matter on its own terms. Where it does so, though, its already limited access to operational material no longer applies. The committee’s consideration of the matter will be “limited to the consideration of information provided voluntarily” by the security and intelligence services. In other words, when the committee seeks to provide oversight beyond that asked of it by the government, it relies on the willingness of the security and intelligence agencies to provide the relevant information, which they are under no obligation to do.

Where the committee is granted access to operational material, it must give the prime minister the opportunity to censor the content of any report it intends making to parliament. Redactions have been frequent, and the committee has been criticised for being too accepting of the government’s requests.

The problems don’t end there. Each of the nine members of the Intelligence and Security Committee is appointed by the house of parliament in which he or she sits, which is standard practice for the appointment of members to committees in the UK parliament. What is different about the Intelligence and Security Committee is that the statute under which it was created requires committee members to be nominated for parliamentary approval by the prime minister. Members of parliament considered too critical of the intelligence and security services are unlikely to be appointed. In these ways, the Intelligence and Security Committee can be vetted, obstructed and censored by the same government whose agencies it is required to oversee.

While Mark Dreyfus’s proposal to reform the PJCIS certainly merits consideration, it shouldn’t be seen as a substitute for improved parliamentary scrutiny of legislation or better use of existing oversight mechanisms. The Independent National Security Legislation Monitor already has access to the classified material held by Australia’s intelligence and security agencies and by government departments, and the inaugural Independent Monitor, Bret Walker SC, used these powers to good effect. (Walker examined all of the relevant Australian Federal Police files each time a control order was either issued or considered, as well as every file created by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation regarding a questioning warrant.) Although the Independent Monitor must report to the prime minister in the first instance, the PM has no power to alter or redact the contents of a report or prevent it from being published in the parliament.

These powers make the Independent Monitor a powerful office of oversight – or potentially so, given that the role is vacant. Rather than tinkering around the edges of the parliamentary committee system, it makes more sense to invest in this existing system of oversight.

Labor must also play its part in scrutinising the intelligence and security agencies. While it is in opposition, it needs to provide effective parliamentary scrutiny of any new legislation that seeks to enhance the already extraordinary powers of the intelligence and security agencies. If it worries less about being seen as “soft on terrorism” and more about holding the government to account, then maybe Labor can avoid having to find new ways of retrospectively moderating legislation it helped to enact. •

The post Buyer’s remorse appeared first on Inside Story.

On the defection of Vladimir Petrov, the organisation’s most public coup, ASIO had been right and the charges made against the organisation by Dr H.V. Evatt, leader of the Labor Party, had been fantastic and silly. Yet Bert Evatt seemed so certain that the organisation had been a dupe of a Russian false-flag attempt, or perhaps was a witting player in a cunning plot by prime minister Robert Menzies to rob him of an election win, that some mud stuck. Labor figures regarded the organisation with deep suspicion; ASIO officers, stung by the slur on their professionalism, began to do some of the partisan things Labor critics were alleging they had always done.

David Horner’s The Spy Catchers — the first of a projected three volumes — is a biography of the organisation rather than a history of the Case, the Petrov Affair, the Royal Commission into Espionage, or the Communist Party of Australia. But these were, of course, the focus of so much of ASIO’s attention between its birth in 1949 and the end of this volume. It’s a sympathetic but far from uncritical read, not least in its detail of how shenanigans at the royal commission disrupted ASIO’s early neutrality and made some of its members come to think of themselves as warriors in a war against communism, in which Labor was, at best, on the sidelines. It shows how, for perhaps fifteen years, some in ASIO ceased to be cool, careful and scholarly public servants focused on threats to the nation’s security, and instead focused rather more on justification, insurance and survival.

Of itself, little in the book is new. Any number of excellent studies have examined the early Cold War in Australia, the Communist Party, the highly secret Venona counterintelligence program inside what became the US National Security Agency, and the Case, Petrov and the personality of Evatt himself. Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair, for instance, published after the story of Venona had finally emerged, was written after extensive interviews with Sir Charles Spry, who had headed ASIO from a year after its inception.

Horner had more access and more detail about what ASIO officers were doing, and has a few more names to add to the mosaic. But his story — so far at least — occasions no significant surprises. Its detail about the Case, though absorbing, tells little that is new, even as it again confirms, against continuing doubters, the reality of Soviet espionage in Australia, the involvement of people associated with the Communist Party, and the absolute need for some sort of security function in government.

But for those who have doubts, there are still questions, as the book itself acknowledges. It is plain, for example, that there were public servants, particularly in what was then the Department of External Affairs, who were passing on information they thought interesting to Wally Clayton, a mysterious and secretive member of the Communist Party’s senior apparatus. Clayton was in charge of maintaining the party’s internal security, especially against infiltration by agents of police and security services. He had managed many of the party’s “illegal” activities during that time, early in the second world war, when Stalin was in a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and the party was opposing involvement in the war. The party became legal again after Hitler attacked Russia, and by 1943 the Soviet Union had diplomatic and trade representation in Australia, as well as a number of Soviet journalists working for Soviet news services and undoubtedly acting as spies.

It is clear that Clayton was seeking out information, not least about politics and the war effort, that would be of interest to his party’s Australian executive. It is clear that at least until 1954 the Australian party followed all of the twists and turns of Soviet policy; that it was, in effect, controlled by the Soviets, and that its Australian members regarded the interests of the Soviet Union as their own. It is clear that Clayton passed on at least some of the material he gathered to Soviet spies, mostly those posing as journalists. And it is clear enough that Clayton took some direction about intelligence tasks from his Russian contacts, and that he tried, diligently, to carry out these tasks (or, perhaps, orders).

All of this was more or less known, as part of the Case, even before the defection of Petrov and, later, his wife Evdokia in April 1954. A trained but not very competent officer, Petrov had been assigned to keep an eye on the Soviet émigré community but had inherited a bigger task, unbriefed, when his senior officer left and was not replaced. By this time, though, the Communist Party’s attraction was much faded and the Cold War was under way, so there was hardly any effective espionage going on. Most of those who had cooperated with Clayton were inactive, or off the scene.

But if the documents Petrov brought confirmed earlier information about the Case, there were still questions about Soviet spying, the answers to which we still do not know. Information from Petrov, and from other Soviet defectors in Canada, Britain, the United States and Europe, showed that there were generally two Soviet organisations gathering intelligence information, usually without any reference to each other. What came to be known as the KGB (or the NKVD or MGB) was focused on political, diplomatic, economic and general scientific intelligence; a separate organisation, known as the GRU, collected military and defence intelligence, including anything that could be divined about weapons systems, missiles and nuclear bombs.

Typically, each of these organisations ran two separate networks of spies: one was “legal,” controlled by a person operating under diplomatic or trade cover; another was an illegal network, under much deeper cover, often controlled by a Russian who had been infiltrated into the country concerned, and reporting back via entirely different networks. In ideal situations, none of these networks knew anything about the others, although, in extremis, it was not unknown for agents of one network to be instructed, from Moscow, to make contact with a specified agent of another.

We “know” there was a legal KGB operation in Australia from the middle of the war, and we know that it had some successes, if hardly spectacular ones, from about 1943 to 1948. We know nothing about the operations of any illegal KGB network, although there is reason to believe that it existed. We know absolutely nothing about GRU operations during the period, but we do have reasons to suspect they were occurring (without any connection with Clayton). Neither ASIO nor other operations ever gained useful counterintelligence about such activities, or exposed any networks or spies.

It might be tempting to suggest that if any such spy networks had existed, they would have been found; ergo, they probably did not exist. If that is the case, we must ask why the Soviet Union, which tended to have a similar order of battle in all countries of interest, adopted a different model for Australia, and why Clayton might have been used as a spymaster despite a different pattern of practice elsewhere.

It is trite to add that a mole in ASIO might have been very useful in helping steer ASIO activities away from operations threatening to expose other networks. And we know that the more cynical agencies sometimes throw crumbs — important agents of legal networks, for instance — in the way of security services by way of distraction. Horner’s authorised, if uncensored, history is alive to all such speculation and self-doubt. But its access to the files leaves the reader no wiser or more able to judge.

Just as significantly, we are little wiser about whether those who passed on material to Clayton, or who gossiped with him generally about their jobs, knew that they were giving him information to be passed to Moscow. They could hardly have failed to know that they were passing it on to the party, but in that highly conspiratorial organisation — membership of which was more akin to being in the Society of Jesus or Opus Dei than the Gould League of Bird Lovers — there was nothing particularly odd about relentless discussion of politics, the awfulness of capitalist politicians and the plight of Mother Russia. Mere rules about security did not overrun comradeship, even if they should have done. And that’s quite apart from the attractions of big-noting oneself, and exaggerating one’s role in affairs, to progress socially or in party circles.

Clayton, wittingly passing on information, and particularly purloined documents, may have been gathering information more for party purposes than for direct transfer to Moscow. After all, he and his colleague Ted Hill were still the party executive officers most concerned with maintaining the party’s operations even if it were subsequently declared illegal again. They stashed printing presses, paper and equipment around the nation and bought safe houses. They also maintained stocks of unofficial members, whose help could be called on in emergencies, who were continually screen-ed not only for being in security employ, but also for deviation from the latest line from above.

Even ASIO itself is still unsure, after all these years, about whether those who gave information to Clayton did so wittingly. Or whether some others, such as Fergan O’Sullivan, Rex Chiplin and Rupert Lockwood, who gave briefing materials about Australian journalists and political conditions to the Russian embassy, should be regarded as spies. Unwise perhaps, disloyal perhaps, and certainly snide. But Chiplin published the materials leaked to him in party newspapers (and KGB reports quoted the paper not the source documents); and while it is undoubtedly true that the KGB “studied” the reports of O’Sullivan and Lockwood, it does not appear to have regarded them as sufficiently compromised, or “on the small hook,” to have given them intelligence duties.

Likewise, its close scrutiny of the Communist Party gave ASIO much information about membership lists, discussions at meetings, and strategies in trade union elections. It was clear enough that there were people in the party who believed in revolution against the established order; it is a good deal less clear that anarchy, or civil war or sabotage was being actively plotted. It was never quite clear who was dangerous, but always obvious who was zealous. The better ASIO got at surveillance, the more it came to appreciate that the party was full of personalities, factions, feuds, unresolved arguments and, increasingly, doubt. Doubt about Stalin and Stalinism. Doubt about the communist dream. Doubts after revolts in Poland, East Germany and Hungary. Doubts about the value of keeping on keeping on.

Among all this, the Case remains the most fascinating, the most exhaustively interpreted and perhaps — as reflected in our modern-day security institutions — the most enduring part of the ASIO story.

For thirty or so years, about a dozen Australians, at most, knew something about the Case. Even most of these knew only tiny bits, and had no idea of the big picture, or the big pictures beyond that. Around the rest of the world, perhaps another fifty knew any details of the Australian Case, and perhaps fewer knew how it fitted into the bigger picture.

It was a secret so important that the wrapping paper of the secret was more important than the secret itself. Indeed, even the next layer concealed secrets more important than anything outside it. They were secrets so big that Britain, after the war, had to contemplate whether its loyalty to Australia was more important than its alliance with the United States. For a long time, it seemed as if Australia might win that tug of war, if only because America scarcely trusted even Britain with some bits of the secret.

The Australian Case was different from the American Case, or for that matter the British Case, though they fitted into a pattern. In all Cases, the secret of the first veil was that spies had undoubtedly passed on political and defence secrets to Soviet agents in the 1940s and might still be doing so. The British Case had revealed the treachery, in relation to details of the atomic bomb, of the British scientists Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, and had provided clues to Soviet networks in Britain and its colonies. The American Case showed how the Russians had obtained details of atomic bomb construction at Los Alamos from, among others, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Australian Case showed that Wally Clayton had been collecting political and defence information from contacts in the Department of External Affairs, and from the office of its minister, Bert Evatt, and passing it on to Russian agents.

To the Americans, the Australian espionage was all the more disgraceful because of what appeared to be a complete lack of security consciousness. Add to that the fact that Washington viewed the Chifley Labor government, and its foreign minister Evatt, as dangerously left-wing.

But if those in the know about the secret of the first veil wanted something done about the Soviet agents and their local helpers, they didn’t want that process to hint at the secret of the second veil. Indeed, it would be better to do nothing about the first secret than to put the underlying secret in jeopardy. The underlying secret was that American knowledge about the Cases came from decryption of Russian codes through a quantum leap in the sophistication of message-reading by what eventually became the world’s biggest and most secretive spying organisation, the National Security Agency.

The Soviet Union, a great home of mathematics, had impressive, virtually unbreakable codes. They involved double encryption using a code dictionary to turn words into numbers, and then applying one-time sets of random numbers. With the numbers used once only, and then for a limited volume of text, deciphering messages using all of the familiar forms of pattern-seeking seemed impossible, the more so in pre-computer days when the capacity to apply brute force, searching through billions of possible combinations, was very limited. Yet some brilliant intuition was used to solve major parts of the dictionary, helped by the fact that, for a short time, Soviet code-masters issued the same one-time sets to different areas.

Some of the messages spoke of the spying and gave clues about who the spies might have been. But the fact that American code-breakers could read some Soviet spy traffic was a secret much more important than the knowledge that espionage had occurred, or the catching of particular spies. These were merely battles; the ongoing intelligence might help the United States and its allies win a war. If the Russians didn’t find out that America was reading some of its secret intelligence, further cryptological breakthroughs might come, more traffic from more sources might be intercepted, and the Soviet Union might fail to realise that some of their spies had been compromised.

Behind that were other ultra-secrets of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s — that the British and the Americans had been intercepting, and often decrypting, the secret messages of the armies, navies and air forces, together with the diplomatic and trade communications, of their enemies and their friends for ages, ultimately reaching the point spelled out by the WikiLeaks and Snowden leaks of the 2010s. This intelligence had helped the allies win the war against Germany and Japan, but wartime security had concealed the extent of the contribution. Even the security-conscious in rival countries, and sometimes friendly countries, had no idea of how extensive and clever the processes had become.

Inside the Case was another secret that only a tiny few of those very few who knew the first layer were allowed to know. And inside that were other secrets, so secret that, for some guardians of the western alliance against the Soviet Union, whole nations were expendable in the interest of maintaining them. At one point in 1948, for example, the Americans asked Britain to choose, in effect, whether it wanted to be an ally of the United States or of Australia. It could not be both. Because the Case showed that Australia was lax about security, and because the Americans saw the Labor Party — which was in government at the time — as tantamount to communists, they would not show Britain anything it might pass on to Australians.

It was a secret so terrible, and powerful, that the initiates had to live all of their lives with restrictions on the right to travel. Indeed it became a gnostic faith into which one was “indoctrinated’’ in stages, after which one saw the world differently.

The first bits of the puzzle only passingly affected the Soviet Union; indeed, Moscow knew at least something of it. It was the fact that even before the second world war British and American cryptographers had succeeded in decoding some of the secret messages being passed between German and Japanese military units and diplomats. With some, particularly Japanese diplomatic traffic, they could decipher messages within twenty-four hours: indeed, had the Americans been more diligent, they could have deduced that Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked.

In due course, Americans, Australians and the British were able to listen to tactical messages between army, naval and air units; orders and reports going to Tokyo from local commands; a good deal of the material coming from Japanese embassies in Europe (including Berlin and Moscow); as well as information about merchant shipping, supply and reinforcement, and espionage activities.

The British, Polish and French were also reading a good deal of the German military traffic, after making critical breakthroughs in learning to decipher messages encoded by the “unbreakable” Enigma machines. Some of the techniques, some of the personnel (including Alan Turing), some of the places (including Bletchley Park), and the pioneering work on computers are now the stuff of thrillers and television series, but the secret — that the Allies could read much of the German army traffic, intermittently a good deal of the U-boat traffic, and a lot of the diplomatic codes — was an ultra-secret for more than twenty years after the end of the war.

So secret and important was the edge this gave that it was seen as more critical than winning any actual battle. It would be better to lose an army if some plausible explanation — aerial reconnaissance, say, or a human spy — could not be concocted to explain how enemy movements had been anticipated, because the moment the enemy suspected its codes were being read the edge would be lost.

Many admirals, air marshals and generals were out of the loop because they could not necessarily be trusted. When there was critical information to be passed on, even to people in on the secret, it would usually be attributed not to code-breaking but to some other source, in case the Germans were reading our mail (as, of course, they were trying, with some success, to do). Important “ultra” information was also passed, as information from spies, to Moscow once the Soviets became allies, particularly from 1943 on.

The official war histories, the generals’ memoirs, and the popular accounts of military campaigns made no reference to allied access to many of the enemy’s communications. Some reputations — Montgomery’s, for instance — may have suffered had it been known how much help had been received. For decades, however, the secret stayed safe. After the war, the intelligence partnerships became more formalised, more extensive, more effective and, of course, increasingly focused on the Soviet Union and its satellites. Australia, along with New Zealand and Canada, was a very junior partner to America and Britain in the exclusive “Five Ears” English-speaking club from 1943, but our geographic position in Asia and, later, the window on parts of the USSR and on China provided by Pine Gap and Nurrungar, made us a valuable provider of raw material.

In 1943, a few senior Australians, all military bureaucrats, knew something of these intelligence arrangements, although none had gone beyond the first layer of secrets. But no politicians knew, nor did they need to. But then came the Case, and in perhaps the most embarrassing way possible.

The Soviet Union was spying on Australia. Its ability to do so, at least in some form, was known, and followed the arrival of Soviet diplomats and journalists mid-war. Russia’s heroism in standing up to Hitler’s onslaught had earned it admirers, and the Communist Party of Australia, slavish in its following of every aspect of the Soviet line, was at a membership peak of more than 20,000. There were people of communist, or leftish views in the public service, the army and the intelligentsia — and in any event, was not the Soviet Union our ally against Germany and Japan? The Soviet diplomats and journalists were sending copious reports back to Russia, usually via radio to China’s wartime capital Chunking; but though they were recorded, they could not be read.

One day during the war, however, the Russians gave a Japanese diplomat a confidential British assessment of how the British colonial world might look after the defeat of Japan. The diplomat cabled it home, adding that he believed it had been obtained by a Soviet diplomat in Canberra. The Americans could read the Japanese diplomatic traffic, and were able to compare their knowledge of the contents of his cable with a Russian cable from Canberra. It provided one of the first significant insights into Soviet codes. On another occasion, a Chinese naval attaché passed on a report to Chunking in a code that was broken by the Japanese; carefully enough read, it could have tipped off the Japanese that their own codes were being read. The message from the attaché contained cabinet-level information to which he should not have had access.

The British didn’t tell Australia that some Russian diplomatic cables were being read and that these had pointed to spies in the Australian public service. They pretended that the information came from an agent who had defected from Moscow. Australia was told it had been cut off from intelligence sharing, and that it could only redeem itself, if at all, if it so improved its internal security that Americans would know material was not being leaked.

In time, a very few learned something about Venona. Most of those checking out the clues had no idea of the provenance of the information. Nor did those they confronted, some of whom confessed to their involvement.

Much the same information had disclosed the names of Klaus Fuchs, who was convicted in 1950 of supplying information to Moscow, and the Rosenbergs and chemist Harry Gold, who had helped pass nuclear secrets. In those cases, as during the Petrov royal commission, courts, tribunals and inquiries were told nothing of the role of code-breaking, or why Americans were so supremely certain of the justice of their case. Ultimately, the three judges of the Petrov royal commission were briefed about the specifics of their case, but only to persuade them to assist in devising a report that made no reference to how the Case had actually come about.

Venona was to be a secret for more than forty years. Details, and intercepts, are not on the National Security Agency’s public website. We know, thanks to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, how much further technological surveillance continues today. One cannot, however, fail to think that there are still secrets — about Russian spies, about spying on Russians, about spying in Australia, and about spies in ASIO — to emerge. It might well take an unauthorised history of ASIO to reveal them. •

The post Secrets within secrets appeared first on Inside Story.

This second tranche of national security reforms for 2014 is necessary, the government argues, because the existing legislation fails to adequately address “the domestic security threats posed by the return of Australians who have participated in foreign conflicts or undertaken training with extremists overseas.” The bill includes measures intended both to prevent “foreign fighters” from travelling abroad to engage in terrorist behaviour, and to deal with them more effectively on their return.

Some of the amendments are more controversial than others. The cessation of welfare payments to people whose passport or visa has been cancelled on security grounds has not attracted significant attention, for example. But many of the new measures seek to expand the scope of existing offences significantly, and others aim to grant an even greater range of powers to the foreign affairs minister, the attorney-general and ASIO. These powers are above and beyond the unprecedented new powers conferred on ASIO by the first tranche of national security legislation, which has just passed both houses of parliament.

In response to the rise of the Islamic State, the government seeks to make a number of changes to the Criminal Code’s provisions relating to terrorist organisations. It is already an offence under the Criminal Code for a person to intentionally provide training to, or receive training from, a terrorist organisation. The government is concerned that this does not cover circumstances in which there are “no formally defined teaching and learning roles in a training session” – for example, “where a group of like-minded individuals decide to acquire weapons and meet at a location to practice using them.” The bill aims to criminalise participation in training with a listed organisation. This might indeed fill a rather narrow gap, but it is unlikely that it will significantly improve the Commonwealth’s ability to prosecute suspected terrorists; the Criminal Code already includes a range of offences that would capture this type of behaviour, including the very broad offence of possessing a thing connected with preparation for, engagement in, or assistance in a terrorist act.

The government also wants to update the grounds on which a terrorist organisation can be listed under the Criminal Code. At the moment, the attorney-general can only list an organisation if it directly or indirectly counsels or urges the doing of a terrorist act, directly or indirectly provides instruction on the doing of a terrorist act, or praises terrorism where there is a substantial risk that such praise might lead a person to engage in a terrorist act. If the bill passes, the attorney-general will also be able to list a terrorist organisation on the grounds that it promotes or encourages terrorism, regardless of whether that encouragement or promotion has actually caused others to engage in terrorism.

The government has rather run with this concept of advocacy. The foreign fighters bill also introduces a new individual offence of “advocating” terrorism. Again, the definition has been drawn broadly; as with the grounds for listing a terrorist organisation, it extends to situations in which a person encourages or promotes the doing of a terrorist act or terrorism offence and is reckless as to whether another person will engage in that conduct as a result. A terrorism act or terrorism offence need not actually occur for the offence of advocating terrorism to have been committed. This could have a serious chilling effect on the ability of individuals to comment freely and legitimately on issues relating to politically and religiously motivated violence, such as current events overseas.

While these amendments might capture behaviour far removed from the actual doing of a terrorist act, perhaps of even greater concern is the innovation covered by the term “declared area.” The bill grants the minister for foreign affairs the power to declare such an area if she is satisfied that a listed terrorist organisation is engaging in hostile activities in that area. It is automatically an offence to enter, or remain in, a declared area. This is an extraordinary offence that is likely to criminalise a range of legitimate behaviours, including, for example, religious pilgrimage. While the government is not technically reversing the onus of proof, as some initially feared – it is a defence for a person to show that he or she has entered or remained in the declared area solely for a legitimate purpose – the offence is framed in such a way that it has essentially the same effect. The prosecution need not establish that the person has travelled to that area for the purpose of engaging in terrorism or other unlawful activities.

The government has, perhaps, recognised the extraordinary nature of this offence by building in a ten-year sunset clause. But this may not be much of a protection. The government has shown a total disregard for the sunset clauses in the existing anti-terrorism laws. Four of Australia’s most controversial measures are currently subject to a sunset clause – control orders, preventative detention orders, anti-terrorism stop, search and seizure powers, and ASIO’s questioning and detention powers are all due to expire within the next two years – but the foreign fighters bill seeks to extend all of those sunset clauses by a further ten years.

This approach negates the whole purpose of including a sunset clause in legislation, which is to ensure parliamentary debate at a future date on controversial measures that may have been enacted in haste during a period of crisis. Extending the period of the sunset clause during a new security crisis denigrates the legislative process. Parliament is being asked to rush these measures through again, for the sake of national security, with the promise that it will have the opportunity to review and debate the measures properly ten years down the line. And there is nothing to stop a future government from adopting this tactic again, extending the sunset clauses without providing the opportunity for full review and debate, or worse, simply repealing the sunset clauses (thereby making the legislation permanent) as attorney-general George Brandis originally proposed.

There is no need to extend the sunset clauses on these measures now. It would be preferable for parliament to debate the foreign fighters bill now and come back to the question of control orders, preventative detention orders, anti-terrorism stop, search and seizure powers, and ASIO’s questioning and detention powers when the legislation was originally due to expire. If it then saw fit to extend the life of the legislation again, it could do so following the proper parliamentary process.

The ten-year extension of the control order and preventative detention order regimes and of ASIO’s questioning and detention warrant powers is of particular concern for two reasons. First, the control order powers are not simply being retained in their existing form. The government is seeking to expand the grounds on which a control order may be issued to include instances where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that a person has provided, received or participated in training with a terrorist organisation; engaged in a hostile activity in a foreign country; or been convicted of a terrorism offence in Australia or overseas.

That last provision is worth highlighting. Control orders could be used in cases where a person has been convicted of a terrorism offence in any foreign country, whether or not that person had received, by Australian standards, a fair trial. For example, a person could be convicted of a terrorism offence in absentia by a foreign court for engaging in legitimate opposition against an oppressive regime.

Second, the control order and preventative detention order regimes and ASIO’s questioning and detention warrant powers have all been recommended for repeal by those whose job it is to oversee the laws. In his 2012 review of the national security laws, the former Independent National Security Legislation Monitor Bret Walker SC recommended the repeal of each of the powers. In the same year, the COAG Review of Counter-Terrorism recommended the repeal of the preventative detention order regime. Despite the use of preventative detention orders for the first time since their enactment earlier this month, Walker stands by his recommendation for their repeal. The powers are “worse than useless,” he said recently, “because you can't question a person while they are being preventatively detained.”

There is no doubt that the current situation in Syria and Iraq poses an unprecedented threat to the safety and security of Australians at home, and it is right for the government to take action to prevent the possibility of a terrorist attack occurring on these shores. But any new measures, or the expansion of existing measures, must add something that is missing from the current counter-terrorism regime. The raids in Sydney and Brisbane two weeks ago show that the police and ASIO already have significant resources at their disposal. If we are going to give up some of our freedom, as prime minister Tony Abbott’s recent statement to parliament suggested we must, then any new anti-terrorism measures must be enacted with the full participation of parliament.

As Lord Hoffman remarked in the 2004 Belmarsh case, in which the UK Law Lords found that the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights:

The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.

When it considers the foreign fighters bill in the coming days, parliament should heed that advice. •

The post Real threats to the life of the nation appeared first on Inside Story.

ACCORDING to over-excited headline writers, Washington’s current fiscal mess will cause crippling reductions in American military power. Don’t believe it. These reports are exaggerated, and often include the trimming of previously projected increases among the “cuts” to the Pentagon’s budget. In any case, all the evidence suggests that the United States will continue spending massively on its military.

The Pentagon’s ostensible financial crisis needs to be put in perspective. According to US Congressional Budget Office figures, even if the biggest cuts currently being discussed were implemented, “base” defence expenditure (which understates the total by excluding combat operations and a number of other items including nuclear weapons) would still run at the 2007 level. In other words, the base military budget would be the same in real terms as it was following years of considerable growth under president George W. Bush.

To frame matters differently, most estimates put total annual US defence spending at more than twice the combined defence budgets of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Add to that the fact that many of the world’s other biggest military spenders (Britain, France and Japan, for example) are friends of the United States, and the West’s strategic advantage becomes even more pronounced. A bit of trimming here and there won’t change that balance.

This level of spending seems paradoxical. A nation in reduced circumstances led by a Nobel Peace Prize winner is splurging mind-bending amounts on extra weapons it doesn’t seem to need. What’s going on? Three common but misleading explanations need to be dealt with before the question can be answered.

First, the war on terror hasn’t been the primary driver of the boom in military spending over the past twelve years. The major expansion was actually signposted in Bush’s 2000 election campaign, well before the 11 September 2001 attacks. Hunting al Qaeda hasn’t been especially expensive for the Pentagon, either, as it mostly involves intelligence operations, law enforcement and cooperation. It does draw in some military assets, particularly special forces, but these represent only about 2 per cent of defence funding.

Second, the budget isn’t driven by the challenge of rogue Third World states. The list of these is shorter than it used to be, and the often ramshackle condition of these remaining regimes would make them relatively easy prey for US forces.

Third, although spending is at Cold War levels, it isn’t driven by a need to prepare for a third world war. The Soviet Union, with its contingency plans for global conflict and tens of thousands of tanks poised in Central Europe, no longer exists. In this respect, the United States is safer than it has been for decades.

So why the taxpayer generosity, running in excess of US$500 billion per year? Domestic politics is one reason. Appeals to patriotism and a sometimes self-righteous world view, together with a politically shrewd distribution of jobs, help shield the Pentagon from rigorous scrutiny. This domestic factor can give Republicans an edge in political wrangling. The party often seems to define American greatness in militarist terms that appeal to many flag-waving voters. Democrats are made to look soft, and implicitly un-American, when they argue that buying extra weapons might be poor policy.

But while conservatives often desire more weapons, they also usually want less military activism. They especially want less Pentagon involvement in helping failed states; endeavours like these are typically dismissed as expensive, bound to fail, and the kind of social work that is beneath the dignity of the US military. Republicans tend to emphasise maximising strategic power rather than actually using it (except perhaps in the case of blasting Iran). So, in a reversal of the logic they apply to other sections of the public service, they effectively call for the armed forces to do less with more.

This doesn’t mean there’s an absence of strategic reasons for substantial military budgets. International security doesn’t just happen. The likes of Saddam Hussein in 1990 or Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in 1995 weren’t simply misunderstood and then subjected to gratuitous Western attacks. They were political monsters threatening the peace. Similarly, provocative behaviour by North Korea and Iran is not simply a figment of the neo-conservative imagination.

But these rogue states are comparatively small fry. The big fish is China, with its rapidly developing military capabilities. Before we look at China, though, we need to step back and consider how American power is viewed in a global context.

On the one hand, Washington’s periodic tendency to militarise foreign policy can look deceitful, ugly and disruptive of good global order, as it did during the Vietnam and 2003 Iraq wars. On the other hand, the potential for world politics to throw up nasty threats like North Korea means that Washington, when well-led, is seen as a global sheriff and insurance policy: it’s there to keep the peace and help fix things if they go bad.

This insurance function means that defence analysts must speculate about future dangers. They have to think about the next twenty years, not just today. When they do that, the uncertainty about the unfolding security environment is not just a challenge but also an opportunity. Elastic terms like “potential” and “conceivable” threats provide an analytically vague but politically loaded and bureaucratically useful rationale for open-ended spending on insurance premiums.

Enter China. While it’s true that on one level Beijing’s defence program is unremarkable – it’s modernising what used to be called the world’s biggest military museum – there’s still reason for concern. For instance, there’s no sign Beijing will halt its military spending at any point that its neighbours would find comfortable. Moreover, extrapolations using China’s current rate of economic growth have been used to conclude that it could overtake US defence spending within the next few decades. Add to this China’s territorial claims in the region, its authoritarian nature, its opaque decision-making, and budget propaganda that is believed to greatly understate its military outlays, and there’s been little inclination to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt.

This helps explain the nervousness among allies, such as Australia, when the deterrence and insurance associated with the primacy of the United States seems in danger of being eroded by the budgetary shambles in Washington and growing Chinese power.

But this cloud has a silver lining for Western strategists. It’s almost as if Beijing has fallen into a role written by the Pentagon’s version of central casting. Aside from the factors already mentioned, China seems to be testing the underlying assumption that America ought to remain top dog.  So China is a handy symbol: it signifies an enduring need for high American force levels and ceaseless military modernisation.

So much for perceptions and framing of policy. In practice, the United States has a significant strategic edge over China that is likely to persist. Beijing has to grapple with problems of its own, including questions of legitimate governance and the sustainability of its growth rates. Washington, meanwhile, is at the centre of a global alliance network that Beijing can only dream of. The United States also possesses marked advantages in military capabilities that took generations of effort to establish; and, despite its problems, it can sustain annual defence spending of over half a trillion dollars while devoting a declining proportion of its GNP to the effort. Furthermore, although Beijing has been closing the gap, Washington isn’t passively waiting for a hypothetical crossover point to Chinese supremacy.

That last factor points to bigger issues. Some analysts see in it the potential for sharper competition, an intensified arms race and a greater risk of war. Others see it as reassuring that Washington is making the effort to maintain deterrence. In American eyes this deterrence does not result from an old-fashioned balance of power, which is viewed as a recipe for a disastrous 1914-style contest between near equals. Instead, deterrence is to be perpetuated by keeping a crystal-clear imbalance of power in Washington’s favour. While America’s current fiscal muddle fuels concern among observers about the long-term viability of the strategy, it doesn’t mean its obsolescence. Don’t write-off the United States just yet. •

The post Imbalance of power appeared first on Inside Story.

MILITARY drones are all about distance — the distance between the operator and the weapon, the distance between the high-flying drones and their targets on the ground, the distance between achieving military or anti-terrorist objectives and the possibility of politically unpalatable casualties. David Sanger’s book, Confront and Conceal, shows how drones (and cyberwarfare) have become an integral part of US policy during Barack Obama’s presidency. Under the Drones, a collection of essays edited by two Stanford academics, shows how the United States lacks knowledge about the faraway places where the drones operate.

Sanger, the New York Times’s chief correspondent in Washington, discerns an “Obama Doctrine” at work in the United States’s recent foreign policy initiatives, though he says the White House refuses to use that label. “When confronted with a direct threat to American security, Obama has shown he is willing to act unilaterally — in a targeted, get-in-and-get-out fashion, that avoids, at all costs, the kind of messy ground wars and lengthy occupations that have drained America’s treasury and spirit for the past decades.” In Confront and Conceal Sanger describes how the Doctrine has operated in relation to Afghanistan–Pakistan, Iran, the Arab Spring, and China and North Korea.

The Abbottabad raid to kill Osama bin Laden is the most spectacular example of the Obama Doctrine in action, and Sanger gives it saturation coverage, drawing heavily on press analysis at the time. In his view, the raid shows that Obama will not hesitate to use military force to advance Washington’s direct interests, in this case, its interest in eliminating bin Laden. Less familiar and less clearcut are the contrasting stories of Libya and Syria, where the popular uprisings fully tested the doctrine. “As Libya fell,” Sanger summarises, “and the pictures leaking out of Syria grew more and more horrific, the questions about Obama’s consistency grew more urgent, around the world and in Washington.”

In both countries, American interests were less directly at stake; altruism of a sort came to the fore. In Libya, it was relatively easy for the United States to invoke a responsibility to protect Libyans from their own government, to rule out sending American ground troops, and to leave most of the heavy lifting to NATO. The US role was to be “limited in scope and finite in time.” Obama said that NATO always complained of never being allowed to take the lead; now it was NATO’s chance. After initial bombing by the United States, France and Britain took over the air campaign. This was the first NATO operation in sixty years of US–Europe military cooperation that was not led by the United States. It was also cheap and almost free of (NATO) casualties.

While the president insisted that Libya set no precedents, within months he had to deal with Syria, which seemed to display the same essential ingredient — a government slaughtering its own citizens — and have the same claim for intervention. Administration officials argued that Syria was different because Russia and China had vetoed intervention at the Security Council. Privately, however, a senior State Department official conceded that “the only reason that we’re not doing the same for the Syrians is that it is hard” — “hard to sell to the public,” Sanger adds, “hard to win an international consensus, and much harder to execute from the air.”

Complicating the situation is the fact that Syria has close ties with both Iran and Russia, the Syrian government’s forces are strong and well-armed by comparison with Gaddafi’s, and — again unlike Libya — the Syrian opposition forces are fractious and divided. Crucially, Syria is harder to bomb than Libya; most of the fighting is in crowded urban neighbourhoods, raising the prospect that bombing would cause heavy civilian casualties. The Obama Doctrine seems to work best in sparsely populated countries led by lunatics.

Sanger’s treatment of the doctrine at work in Iran is fascinating, particularly for his description of “Olympic Games,” a computer worm that the Americans successfully inserted — at least for a time — into the operating systems of the centrifuges in Iranian nuclear plants. Given Julia Gillard’s recent cybersecurity initiative, it is timely to read of American efforts in this field, particularly the implication that the inevitable flip side of cybersecurity is cyberwarfare. We need to watch for further developments on Russell Hill as well as on the Potomac. Meanwhile, cyberwarfare is the Obama Doctrine in operation, par excellence: targeted, clean, free of casualties at home, and carried out without the knowledge of the enemy until it is too late.

THE other key component of the Obama Doctrine is the use of drones; Sanger’s chapter is headed “The Dark Side of the Light Footprint.” Military drones are pilotless flying vehicles, armed or unarmed, precisely guided using satellite imagery by operators at a remote location, usually thousands of miles away from the drone base and the target. Obama has taken to drones with relish: Sanger says that the president had authorised roughly 265 drone strikes by April 2012 (with an unknown number since then), mostly in Waziristan, Pakistan, seeking out al Qaeda and Taliban targets, and in Yemen and Somalia.

The political and economic advantages of drones and worms are clear. Sanger quotes an anonymous senior intelligence official (from the context, this could be John Brennan, whom Obama has nominated to become head of the Central Intelligence Agency) at the heart of American drone and cyberwarfare operations, who says, “We have a keener awareness than ever of what it costs, in blood and treasure, to go into a country on the ground, and how difficult it is to extract yourself once you are there.”

Sanger considers the moral and legal questions attending the use of drones, and also explores — as much as possible, given the secrecy — how decisions are made at Obama’s drone-targeting Tuesday meetings. He notes the anger these attacks create among civilians in target areas but suggests that the weapons are becoming more accurate. He describes some of the successful attacks, discusses the main types of drones (named, suitably ominously, Predator and Reaper) and claims that the US Air Force is training more drone operators than traditional pilots.

While Obama has missed opportunities to explain the rationale for using drones, US government representatives — sensitive to charges that drones are simply a form of targeted assassination — resist claims of widespread “collateral” civilian deaths from drone strikes. The president has spoken of a “targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists,” some commentators have found it difficult to distinguish between drone strikes and exploding cigars (with which the CIA failed to blow up Castro) or magnetic car bombs (with which the CIA, or perhaps Mossad, succeeded in blowing up an Iranian nuclear scientist and his wife). The administration has come to describe deaths by drone strike as “lawful extrajudicial killings” and an administration lawyer has pointed out that a mistake made by a B-2 stealth bomber can kill many more innocent civilians than one made by a drone.

Washington also claims it only uses drones when it has been invited by a country to use them against targets in its territory, or when a host country is unable or unwilling to suppress threats, or where there is no functioning government. Sanger calls all of this a “delicate dance,” which seems a polite description.

Sanger detects unease within the administration about how dependent on, even addicted to, drones the United States has become, particularly as the weapons have become more accurate. An Australian officer with experience of borrowed Israeli-owned drones in Afghanistan likened using them to using crack cocaine. While Simon Jenkins in the Guardian Weekly recently described drones “and their certain proliferation” as “the greatest threat to world peace,” far greater than nuclear weapons, a reader comment in the New York Times probably comes closer to the American consensus: “I don’t see the secondary deaths of civilians where terrorists are hiding in their houses as any different than a ground attack on the same place — we are just saving American lives. I bet when tanks replaced horses someone complained of the brutality.”

DRONES will continue to appeal to governments attracted by the idea that foreign interventions can involve fewer military casualties, and so we can expect some moves in Canberra to explore the use of this technology. Meanwhile, we rely mainly on American sources to keep abreast of the drone saga. Confront and Conceal, completed in April 2012, is generally easy to read, if it tends to ramble in those sections where Sanger seems to have been driven more by the need to make use of work previously written for his newspaper than the need to support his argument. He is certainly a more elegant writer than Washington’s best-known journalist, Bob Woodward, although he has a disconcerting penchant for three-word descriptions of key players (“clean-shaven, square-jawed and baby-faced”; “built like a fireplug… short and bald”).

Sanger does manage to get a surprising number of his interlocutors, fireplugs and all, including Hillary Clinton and senior White House staff, to make mildly controversial statements on the record. This adds to the “authoritative insider” tone of the book. He briefly criticises Obama for walking away from commitments and not following through on his key themes, but otherwise he is broadly supportive. “At the government’s request,” Sanger writes, he has “withheld a limited number of details that senior government officials said could jeopardise current or planned operations.”

Australia rates only a sprinkling of mentions, three times to note the plan to base American forces in Darwin (which is seen as a linchpin of Obama’s approach to China and Asia) and once to quote an inconsequential remark by Hillary Clinton to Kevin Rudd. When Sanger describes planned troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, he mentions only the United States, the Netherlands, Canada and France.

China and North Korea get considerably less coverage than the United States’s residual concerns in the Near and Middle East, suggesting that Obama’s “pivot” towards East Asia has not yet quite captured the imagination of the New York Times. On the other hand, there are some gossipy paragraphs about Kim the Youngest and Xi Jinping, China’s latest heir to Mao, and a concluding comparison between Sparta–Athens and US–China relations.

JUDGING Under the Drones just by its title, a reader might expect analysis of the impact of the Obama Doctrine on the ground, but the book contains just three references to drones and four to the president. It draws our gaze instead to the people and culture of the Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands, the main target area for the drone campaign. The essays, mostly by contributors (thirteen men and four women) based at American universities, cover the history of the region, the overlaps between religion and ethnicity, the origins of the Taliban, the role of religious schools (madrasas), the potential of Sufi Islam as a moderating influence, the political significance of truck decoration (esoteric but fascinating), the history of the media in Afghanistan, and the role of women in the drug trade. The editors contribute a useful introduction and a slightly less useful epilogue.

The essays began as papers at a workshop at Stanford in December 2009. While many of the authors hail from Afghanistan or Pakistan, their time on American campuses has infected some of them with a turgid, jargon-ridden style that makes reading their work akin to stumbling through wet cement. Despite this drawback, the collection is essential for readers who wish to understand more about this region.

The editors claim that the book’s main purpose is to “contest the prevailing discourse on the region, which we find to be simplistic, inaccurate, and alarmingly dehumanising” and to restore “a sense of history.” The book largely succeeds in its aim, leaving the reader with the impression that the history of the borderlands has previously been distorted to suit the interests of successive governments in distant Kabul and the perceptions of successive invaders.

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi’s chapter on “Quandaries of the Afghan Nation” is a stand-out. Hanifi argues that Afghanistan is “a British colonial construction in both material and ideological terms” and that “Afghan elites have uncritically absorbed and reproduced colonial frameworks of reckoning about themselves and their homeland.” These knowledge deficiencies are evident in uncertainty over the meaning of the word “Afghan,” in widely varying estimates of the population of Afghanistan (somewhere between thirteen and thirty-three million) and in the erroneous belief that “the explicitly Persianate state of Afghanistan” is dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group originating in northern Pakistan and northern India.

These misperceptions have plagued Western occupiers of Afghanistan. Hanifi traces the influence of British colonial officials from the late eighteenth century as it was transmitted through Mountstuart Elphinstone’s influential book An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815) to the American anthropologist, Louis Dupree, whose book Afghanistan (1973) portrayed Afghans as inward-looking, even xenophobic, and the country as “Kabul-centric.” (At the same time, Dupree disdained proficiency in the key local languages, Persian and Pashto.) Hanifi says Dupree’s influence — and thus Elphinstone’s, dating back two centuries — is still profound in American policy-making and tactics on the ground. Hanifi argues that “the American imperial apparatus has reproduced much of the British colonial mindset toward Afghanistan across a wide range of public and private institutions and organisations.”

Although Hanifi slips into jargon for his concluding paragraphs (“Rethinking the postulates behind the faulty colonial predicate of Pashtun domination…”) his piece is a salutary warning about the dangers of imperial intervention based on outdated playbooks — or indeed any playbook that is used as a substitute for evidence and common sense.

Also illuminating is Thomas Ruttig’s chapter, “How Tribal Are the Taliban?,” which considers the ethnic, religious and ideological motivations of the Taliban and the stages of their development. Apart from some individuals, argues Ruttig, “the Afghan Taliban have not bought into al Qaeda’s jihadist agenda.” Their agenda is “exclusively Afghan. They want to force the Western ‘occupation forces’ to withdraw and to re-establish their Islamic emirate.” For this, they need Arab money, which sometimes comes through al Qaeda, but al Qaeda needs the Taliban more. Ruttig suggests that the tendency of the Karzai government to see the Taliban problem as soluble by economic and social measures underestimates the Taliban’s essentially political motivations.

IT WOULD have been good to read more about the impacts of drones on the borderlands, particularly on women and children, but Under the Drones’s long gestation from conference to book may have precluded this. What emerges, however, is an understanding that the issues afflicting this ancient land are far too complex to be settled by lobbing skyrockets at them. Claiming that drones are intended as a “surgical” means of taking out terrorist enemies with minimal collateral damage does not meet the case: drone warfare risks exacerbating tensions among the local population, most of whom have no “links to al Qaeda” and desire none, and increasing hostility towards the people doing the lobbing.

Greater knowledge of local factors might have led the Americans to question the drone strategy, despite its political attractiveness. Similar hopes are held for drones as were held for carpet bombing in Cambodia and Vietnam, another high-tech strategy that tried to slice through a tangle of nationalist, ethnic and ideological issues in a war zone only dimly understood by the invaders — relying, moreover, on knowledge passed on from previous Western occupiers (the French in Vietnam, the British in Afghanistan and Pakistan). President Johnson picked out bombing targets in North Vietnam, just as President Obama decides on drone targets today. Forty years on from Vietnam, the weapons may be more precisely targeted but there are still unlearned lessons.

It is ironic that the United States, whose self-image (“American exceptionalism”) is driven so much by its history, seems to have so little appreciation of the history of Afghanistan and Pakistan or even the fact that this history might be important. Historians from Tacitus to Paul Kennedy have written about imperial powers which were inspired and burdened by a sense of mission as well as the normal dose of arrogance. In decline, these powers may lash out with whatever tools are at their disposal. Even when their targets are far away, drones and computer worms require considerable care in handling. Ancient arquebuses and faulty cannons are not the only weapons that tend to injure those who fire them.

There is a bigger issue, too: the threat of a new arms race. “Precisely,” Sanger says,  “because drones and cyberwarfare have the potential to change the way we fight the wars of the future, the legal and moral questions raised by these weapons need to be part of the public conversation, and an international one.” Indeed.

Where does that leave Australia? Will we run in the new arms race and, if we do, where will we deploy our drones and worms? Perhaps there is enough distance in the Australian–American alliance for Australia not to be lured by the apparent efficiency of drone warfare and cyberwarfare into foreign adventures in which our lack of historical awareness would come back to bite us. As the editors of Under the Drones conclude, our knowledge of contested regions like the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands is set within frameworks determined by the intervening powers and the national governments nominally in control of the region. We (the United States and its “allies”) have little understanding about the lives of the local people and thus little sense of the likely reactions to intervention. There is a “politics of knowledge” and we play it badly, whether the tools we use are Predators and Reapers, worms or SAS patrols.

The post Drones in the distance appeared first on Inside Story.

The title begins with Australia’s diplomatic and economic aspirations to be an active and engaged middle power on the international stage. The brilliance is in the Dreaming, invoking the Aboriginal idea of all that is known, understood and told to each generation. Together, they conjure up a distinct Australian way of looking at the world. And you can add to this another important layer of meaning running through the book – a sense that nightmares can lurk within these dreams.

Dreaming contains sixteen essays and is the eleventh volume in a series, stretching back to 1950, sponsored by the Australian Institute of International Affairs. My long membership of the institute makes me a biased witness, but the very longevity of the series offers support for the claim that it is an impressive and unique contribution to the recording and understanding of Australian foreign policy.

In telling the story of Australia in world affairs from 2006 to 2010, Dreaming lays out the understandings, the dreams and the dark possibilities of an Asian Century marked by fundamental shifts in power. The book captures a five-year period while simultaneously describing longer-term trends.

For the fourth time, the joint editors are Professor James Cotton and Professor John Ravenhill. This is a balanced partnership: two sharp intelligences, seasoned by Ravenhill’s wry eye and Cotton’s dry humour. They have achieved some coherence in a volume that describes three governments – John Howard’s final term, Kevin Rudd until June 2010, and the early days of Julia Gillard’s administration – and offer chapters dealing with Australia’s relations with the United States, China, Japan, Europe, South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia and Africa, with the challenges of “environmental foreign policy,” and with Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit as an experiment in making foreign policy.

A joint essay by Cotton and Ravenhill opens the collection. They describe the elements of Australia’s “middle power” effort, arguing that it is more than simply a matter of size but also denotes the nation’s ambition, capability and credibility. Using these measures, they award Australia low marks, judging that during those five years, “Australian policy-makers may have dreamed of assuming a middle power role on the world stage, but they were destined to play a minor part, a character torn between a realist mien and more noble impulses.”

The second chapter, by the distinguished journalist Geoffrey Barker, surveys the character and legacy of John Howard’s prime ministership. In typical style – astute and acerbic – Barker tracks how Australia’s second-longest-serving leader used the tactics perfected by the longest-serving, Robert Menzies, to politicise aspects of foreign and security policy for domestic political purposes. The Barker acid is leavened by appreciation for a political master: “While Howard liked to project himself as a warrior prime minister, he was a complex and calculating warrior, capable of flexibility and subtlety. His conduct of foreign policy was at once conservative, conventional, populist and realist.”

With his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, Howard called for a foreign policy based on a hard-headed pursuit of interests, seeking practical outcomes rather than pursuing grand theories. Barker pronounces this “the foreign policy of a wealthy and cocksure provincial power.” Titled “Global Deputy, Regional Sheriff,” the chapter concludes that Howard and Downer positioned Australia as “an uncritically loyal appendage, a ‘deputy sheriff,’ to the United States – a phrase that Howard detested after effectively assenting to it during an interview.”

In his chapter on Australia and the United States, Cotton notes that one of the last acts of President George W. Bush was to invest Howard with the Congressional Medal of Freedom. Cotton points out, however, that despite the claims about a close partnership between the two men, Howard “only appeared three times” in the Bush memoirs.

Such evidence can be an unreliable guide. Paul Keating worked closely with Bill Clinton in the late 1980s and early 90s to establish the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, but doesn’t appear once in Clinton’s autobiography. Howard, by contrast, pops up twice in the Clinton book, and three mentions from Bush means that Howard has lifted his score.

Whatever their many differences of personality and policy, Howard, Rudd and Gillard have been as one in their devotion to the American alliance. Cotton, though, detects signs that Australia’s elite is reassessing American power and whether Australia can rely on the US security guarantee.

In similar fashion, Jian Zhang finds paradoxes in the effort by Australia and China to forge a true friendship. “While the relationship grew deeper, became more broadly based and assumed unprecedented prominence for both countries,” he writes, “it also became exceedingly complicated, controversial and difficult to manage.”

The future of US power and the complexities of China’s growing power – and particularly “the likelihood of major destabilising changes” – drive Hugh White’s account of defence policy. He writes that the Rudd government’s defence white paper, released in 2009, could not reach a clear conclusion about the fundamental questions raised by China’s rise and was “ambivalent about China’s intentions and the legitimacy of its growing military capability.” According to White, a former deputy secretary of the Defence Department, strategic and defence policy drifted during the five years as power shifted in Asia. Defence was preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, and little was done to fix the “deep systemic problems” within the department.

AND what of diplomacy? In musing on Australia’s middle power aspirations, Cotton and Ravenhill argue that the instruments of diplomacy were seriously neglected during the Howard–Downer period and that this continued under Rudd. They describe it as “a little ironic” that after Rudd was shunted from being leader to become foreign minister he started to lament the lack of resources available to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT. In a speech in 2010 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the department’s establishment, Rudd acknowledged that failure: “The truth is DFAT was starved for a decade... I am acutely conscious of a core fact: we now have 18 per cent fewer staff abroad than we did in 1996, while in the rest of the Australian Public Service there are now 12 per cent more staff.”

In his chapter, Michael Wesley tracks this “slow withering” in the resources, staffing and policy creativity of DFAT. He identifies three broad forces that saw DFAT lose its supremacy over Australia’s foreign policy: the overwhelming of the foreign policy machinery by the logic and demands of national security; the expansion of the foreign policy community to include a broad swathe of government agencies; and the slow institutionalisation of a presidential system centred on the prime minister.

One of John Howard’s most significant and enduring contributions was his creation of the National Security Committee of cabinet. An important element of the innovation was the regular attendance and participation of secretaries and agency heads from the Prime Minister’s Department, DFAT, Defence, the Defence Force, ASIO, the Office of National Assessments, and the Australian Federal Police. As Wesley notes, “Never before in Australian government has a prime minister had such regular and unmediated access to agency heads, and never had the prime minister’s policy deliberations with his ministers been so augmented by the views and direct advice of the heads of those ministers’ departments.”

The formal line is that the officials took part in discussions while only ministers made the decisions, but this presidential system remade the way Australia’s leaders and bureaucrats debate and do policy. Wesley concludes that the changes made by Howard and adopted by Rudd effectively joined up foreign policy and security agencies, but that “the growing dominance of national security over foreign policy risks mortgaging Australia’s international policy to narrow national security considerations.”

THROUGH the collective effect of its separate essays, Dreaming stands as the equal to the ten previous volumes in the series. And the title easily passes the Clive James test: book titles may not be a “true study, but they are a lasting interest” and a first clue to the sensibility of the writer.

To judge whether Middle Power Dreaming is the best-ever title for a book on Australian foreign policy, I asked some gurus for their list of great titles (rather than best book). The eventual field: Coral Bell’s Dependent Ally; Richard Casey’s Friends and Neighbours; Alan Renouf’s The Frightened Country; Malcolm Booker’s The Last Domino; Rawdon Dalrymple’s Continental Drift; Greg Sheridan’s Living with Dragons; Alison Broinowski’s About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia; Christopher Waters’s The Empire Fractures; Gregory Pemberton’s All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam; and Richard Woolcott’s The Hot Seat: Reflections on Diplomacy.

Because of the multiple layers it conveys and its almost poetic effect, Middle Power Dreaming beats them all as a title, elegantly capturing the essences of a complex work in three words. •

The post Dreams and nightmares appeared first on Inside Story.

How persuasive readers find this argument will depend on how pessimistically or optimistically they view the strategic possibilities White is canvassing. There is certainly force in his concerns about the risks of conflict between the United States and China, but his proposed solution leaves complex and contentious issues unresolved.

The China Choice is a work of clarity and passion, elaborating on concerns White raised in his seminal 2010 essay, Power Shift. But, perhaps inevitably, the book seems somewhat equivocal. White is dealing with historical uncertainties: he has focused on the drift towards US–China competition for political, strategic and military superiority, but it is not clear that power-sharing would solve the problem.

Anticipating that he might be accused of appeasement, White argues that China is fundamentally unlike Nazi Germany. “China is ambitious, but it is also cautious and conservative,” he writes. “It seems willing to balance its desire for increased influence with its need to maintain order and to avoid too direct conflict with the United States.” If that’s so, it would seem to blunt the urgent edge of White’s appeal for power-sharing – as, of course, might China’s massive $1.2 trillion holding of US debt in bills, notes and bonds (a reality that should concentrate the minds of hawks in Beijing and Washington).

White seeks to demonstrate strategic toughness by insisting that Washington must be willing to go to war if Beijing exceeds strategic limits set by Washington after the United States forsakes its primacy in the Asia-Pacific region, apparently by conceding China a sphere of influence. He wants America to keep a big stick in reserve, suggesting his own deep uncertainties.

He argues that America’s choices are to resist China, quit the region, or accommodate China. But might not the two powers move automatically towards a new strategic equilibrium if a “cautious and conservative” (and rich) China continues to rise relative to the United States? Such an equilibrium would be preferable to dangerous rivalry and would avoid the complexities of a European-style concert of powers.

White makes the familiar argument that the pace of China’s economic growth and rising productivity is undermining the relative strategic position of the United States. Perhaps so. But last week’s landing of an American exploration vehicle on Mars was a powerful demonstration of ongoing technological excellence and innovation. The United States is hardly a nation in decline, and it is still more powerful than China on many measures, including military resources.

White also seems willing to downplay Beijing’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in ASEAN and in the South China Sea in recent times. Too often, Beijing looks like a bully trying to test the strategic resolve of the United States and other countries in the region. There is a case for standing firm until Beijing shows more propensity for compromise. In fact, White might have conceded too much too soon to China, even if his power-sharing argument is accepted. American resilience may still blunt or delay the Chinese charge towards global economic (and military) primacy.

Above all, perhaps, White’s argument requires largely uncritical tolerance of China’s egregious domestic human rights abuses. White’s view is that China has lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty and that accepting the legitimacy of its authoritarian regime is preferable to a major war. That may be admirably pragmatic and utilitarian, but given China’s record (remember Tiananmen Square) it represents a surrender of western moral values that could consign Chinese citizens to extreme suffering with only impotent western objections.

Despite these reservations, The China Choice is essential reading for policy-makers in Canberra. As White writes: “There are no good outcomes for Australia if the United Stated States and China become bitter rivals”. No one would dispute that observation, but White may be asking the United States to pay a high and possibly unnecessary price to placate China. •

The post The price of China appeared first on Inside Story.

ON 19 APRIL this year, the day India launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile, US State Department spokesman Mark Toner faced a barrage of questions from journalists. The successful test flight of Agni V had exploded into the headlines that day, and Toner’s interrogators demanded to know what it meant for the world. His response was curious. He didn’t dwell on the fact that Agni V was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead for distances of up to 5000 kilometres. He omitted to mention that the missile put major Chinese cities within striking distance of Indian nuclear weapons. He didn’t speculate about India’s military aims and intentions. Instead, he did something quite baffling: he launched into praise. India, he said, had been “very much engaged in the community and nonproliferation issues,” had attended nuclear security summits, and could demonstrate a “solid nonproliferation record.”

The contrast with the alarm and condemnation triggered by North Korea’s failed rocket launch less than a week earlier was striking. India’s testing of a nuclear-capable long-range missile had given its jubilant leadership two causes for celebration. Agni V not only delivered a world-class ranking among the handful of states with ICBM technology, it also provided clear evidence of a critical diplomatic triumph – evidence that emerged more slowly and subtly than the deafening roar of the launch.

India had won tacit US support for its nuclear missile program.

THE launch of India’s first ICBM, and the subdued and oblique response of the United States, is only the latest chapter in India’s perplexing nuclear history. In 1998, when India tested nuclear weapons and became an overtly nuclear-armed state, the widespread condemnation and sanctions placed it firmly in the category of nuclear pariah. Yet Indian fortunes shifted not long after. Relations with Washington warmed, and seemingly overnight New Delhi received unprecedented rights to civil nuclear trade with the United States. By 2008 a civil nuclear agreement was in force between the two countries, and India had been granted significant trading allowances by key non-proliferation institutions. India had turned into a nuclear friend. As the journalist Ravi Nessman commented on the day of the Agni V test, “The world has grown to accept India as a responsible and stable nuclear power.”

A historical perspective can often shed light on puzzles like this one. But the further you look back in time the more paradoxical India’s promotion to privileged nuclear partner of the United States appears. In 1968, India refused to become a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. Its key complaint was that the treaty was discriminatory, since it permitted countries that had tested nuclear weapons before 1 January 1967 – the so-called Nuclear Weapons States – to retain them, even as it foreclosed the nuclear option to everyone else. But India was equally keen to defend its legal right to develop and test nuclear weapons. In 1974 it exercised this right in defiance of the community, and conducted a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” which New Delhi claimed was not a weapon. The reading of the test was different, and the United States led the way in consolidating global non-proliferation laws and barring India from multilateral trade in a range of sensitive technologies, including nuclear ones.

The campaign against “nuclear India” continued. Well into the 1990s, any kind of nuclear trade or collaboration between India and the global nuclear community was unthinkable. And when New Delhi startled the world with its tests in 1998, the United States emerged as one of its most vociferous critics. Washington’s angry response reverberated far and wide: in the G8, which blocked assistance to India from financial institutions, and in the UN Security Council, which made it clear that India, tests or no tests, would be denied formal NPT recognition as a Nuclear Weapons State, even if it signed.

For decades, it seemed, India had existed firmly outside the written and unwritten rules of the global nuclear game, a game largely devised, played and refereed by the United States. The civil nuclear agreement concluded between Washington and New Delhi a decade after India’s tests was exceptional not simply because it symbolised a turning point in a relationship that had long been hostile. In giving India the right to civil nuclear trade, the United States now explicitly recognised India as a “responsible nuclear state” in the global nuclear game, which was tantamount to both picking it for the team, and letting it onto the pitch.

Washington aimed to ensure that New Delhi would acquire “the same benefits and advantages” as other states with “advanced nuclear technology,” effectively granting it a similar status to the Nuclear Weapons States. But perhaps the most striking part of the deal was that India had still not signed the NPT, ratified a test ban treaty or agreed to any other significant constraints on its nuclear weapons program. It was being offered civil nuclear trade and technology with no real guarantee that its weapons program wouldn’t indirectly benefit. The kinds of legal exceptions granted to India outside the NPT were unprecedented. Not only was India being invited to play, but a very special set of rules was being created to accommodate it.

EXPLAINING the acceptance of a nuclear India requires a much closer look at India’s complex nuclear past, or more precisely, the two curiously contradictory histories that the Indian state has interwoven since independence. While the usual questions asked about India’s pathway to the bomb are concerned with why India went nuclear and tested its weapons when it did, the equally compelling story of why India did not test for so many years is seldom explored.

The story begins soon after independence in 1947, when the country’s early leaders were ardent advocates of nuclear disarmament. Both the first UN document to suggest halting nuclear tests and the first study of the consequences of nuclear weapon use were initiatives of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in the mid-1950s. Indian diplomats played a significant role in drawing up the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibited countries from testing in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water, but not underground. India was the fourth signatory after the top nuclear powers of the time, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.

From India’s vantage point, success at global disarmament activism could deliver a number of rewards. Disarmament promised a reduction in global tensions and the removal of the danger of nuclear war. Developing countries such as India would be able to devote resources to economic development rather than to a costly arms race. But disarmament would only be feasible if the major powers with nuclear weapons could be coaxed into letting them go. In the context of the Cold War, a successful role for India in persuading the world’s most powerful enemies to disarm would bring an enormous boost to India’s prestige. Championing disarmament was not only about security, it was about status.

India’s campaigns continued for decades. In global forums, Indian diplomats pushed again and again for the world to renounce nuclear weapons. At the same time, Indian scientists were developing ever more sophisticated atomic energy technology, and with it, a nuclear weapons capability. While the twin efforts at disarmament and nuclear development appeared contradictory, they made perfect sense. For an emerging post-colonial state that saw sophisticated technology as an important proving ground, mastering the atom was a way of demonstrating modern scientific and technological credentials, both at home and to the world. The official line was that the development of nuclear capabilities needn’t be at odds with India’s disarmament aims. India could develop nuclear material and expertise but was restrained enough not to turn it into usable weapons. Indeed, in their pro-disarmament speeches, Indian diplomats foregrounded this uniquely principled approach to the atom as something the rest of the world could observe and learn from.

Once a moral stance on the nuclear issue had been adopted, it was difficult to back away from. India’s adherence to principle in part explains why it didn’t test nuclear weapons for nearly a quarter of a century, despite being well able to do so. Moreover, the repeating refrain of nuclear restraint meant that New Delhi’s nuclear policy implicitly followed many of the rules of the global nuclear game, even though India had not signed the NPT. Though in possession of nuclear know-how, India did not test between 1974 and 1998, and it did not export that know-how to others. Up until 1998, India was building a record of restrained nuclear behaviour and a pro-peace image that would one day prove crucial in facilitating a positive reading of its nuclear past.

A number of motives help explain why India suddenly decided to break the pattern in 1998. Certainly, the existence of nuclear threats, overt and covert, from China and Pakistan and pressure to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the mid-1990s were factors. Domestic politics, in the form of a strategically minded Hindu nationalist leadership hoping to harden India’s “soft” image, was another. But it was also clear from the jubilant response of the Indian urban public to the first nuclear tests in May 1998 that the bomb had enormous domestic value as a symbol of global prestige. Overnight it placed India on the same level as a select club of nuclear-armed states, at the top of the global hierarchy.

Perhaps more interesting than the “why?” of India’s tests however, is the question of how India managed to make its new position mesh with its longstanding claims to nuclear responsibility and restraint. In the wake of the tests New Delhi was at pains to reassure: India had peaceful intentions, would voluntarily abstain from further nuclear testing, would limit itself to the minimum number of weapons needed for a credible nuclear deterrent, and would never be the first to use those weapons. Above all, it was claimed, India had an excellent track record of non-proliferation, never having sold or traded its nuclear secrets or technologies with others.

Although India’s curious mix of demonstrations of strength and declarations of restraint in 1998 puzzled and frustrated onlookers, the swiftly painted portrait of a principled, responsible nuclear power was ultimately persuasive beyond India’s borders. In 2007, as Washington worked together with New Delhi to formulate the terms of the civil nuclear deal, a key interlocutor for the United States, R. Nicholas Burns, described India as “a largely responsible steward of its nuclear material” that “had played by the rules of a system to which it did not belong.” India’s nuclear self-narrative had suddenly emerged in the unlikeliest of places: official US policy discourse.

CERTAINLY, there are several drivers behind the blossoming friendship between the United States and India. Since India’s economy began to gain momentum from the early 1990s, the benefits of closer economic engagement have weighed heavily in US calculations. US leaders have also begun to appreciate the potential of India’s growing influence in Asia, possibly as a balance to that of China. Moreover, the US-India relationship has been helped by India’s neat fit into the category of a “friendly” democracy and its role as a valuable global partner in key areas such as counter-terrorism. As former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal argued just days after the launch of Agni V, the absence of American disapproval over the test suggests that India’s missile program is broadly in line with US interests. Yet interests cannot explain everything. They cannot explain why India merits a different kind of thinking when it comes to the highly sensitive area of nuclear cooperation, especially given New Delhi’s continued refusal to sign the NPT. Above all, they cannot explain how the United States has come to trust India with the bomb.

The key difference between India and North Korea, or India and Iran, is that New Delhi has persistently and successfully cultivated an image as a responsible nuclear power. The credibility of this image would have been unthinkable without the great Indian diplomatic resource of decades of “restrained” behaviour and principled policy discourse. Put differently, by drawing on its complex nuclear history, India has worked at persuading the United States that its nuclear intentions are benign.

Current research as part of a larger UK-based project on The Challenges to Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds is exploring exactly how this trusting relationship with the United States came about. It shows how trust was built both interpersonally within high-level negotiations between senior US and Indian officials, and between powerful political, business and civil-society communities in both countries. Intensified trade linkages, Track II (or informal) diplomacy and the efforts of US-based Indian diaspora groups all contributed to knitting the two leaderships closer together. Teaching and learning about India’s nuclear past was a central part of this broad-based engagement. Less than a decade after the 1998 tests, the exceptional nuclear deal between India and the United States signalled that India had drawn resourcefully on its history to complete the journey from nuclear rogue to nuclear partner.

Much of the wider community, too, has accepted the line that India is a responsible nuclear power. The original civil nuclear agreement with the United States had the support of Russia, France and Britain. In September 2008, the forty-five members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group reached a consensus and backed their assessment of India’s nuclear trustworthiness by granting exceptional trading privileges. These privileges meant that India became the first nuclear-armed state outside the NPT permitted to engage in nuclear commerce with the rest of the world. Even the Australian government softened its line when it agreed to the sale of uranium to India in December 2011.

China and Pakistan, naturally, remain a resistant barrier to the spread of nuclear goodwill towards India. As India’s historic rivals in Asia, this is hardly surprising. Both are potential targets of India’s nuclear weapons and missiles. An early official justification for India’s 1998 nuclear tests was that India perceived a nuclear threat from both countries, although subsequent statements aimed to reassure the world that India would never play the role of aggressor in a nuclear exchange. India’s official line on the Agni V test was that the missile was “not any country-specific.” Yet reading between the lines, many have inferred that strategic Chinese cities are potential targets within its extended range. The striking distance of previous versions of the Agni missile covered the territory of Pakistan.

China, in particular, has voiced disapproval over the concessions granted to India outside the NPT. The September 2008 meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which granted India privileged trading rights, faced strong opposition from China, but US pressure finally tipped the balance of the group towards consensus. Increasingly, Beijing appears to be treading carefully when it comes to official commentary on India’s nuclear-related activities. It is as eager as India to project and maintain an image as responsible emerging power. This helps to explain the official response to the Agni V test, in which the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin stated that India and China were “not competitors but partners.” Different sentiments appear to simmer within, however. China’s influential tabloid, Global Times, ominously warned that “India should not overestimate its strength” and would not profit “from being arrogant during disputes with China.”

Pakistan, for its part, appeared to answer to Agni V with a missile test of its own. The shorter range but newly upgraded Hatf IV Shaheen 1A ballistic missile was launched on 25 April amidst Pakistani claims that it was “not a direct response to Agni V.” Whether or not Pakistan’s missile was an exercise in military posturing, it was undertaken with an appropriate measure of responsibility. Before Shaheen 1A took to the skies, Pakistan had taken care to inform India of its plan to test.

India’s successful launch of Agni V has underscored the increasingly free hand it has won since 1998 over its own nuclear destiny. The test signalled India’s entry into an elite club of only six other states with ICBM capabilities. But more significantly, it reaffirmed the success of a recent Indian diplomatic project. India has earned a different kind of global prestige through the broad-based acceptance of its status as a responsible nuclear power. When it comes to testing nuclear missiles, it pays first to make friends in high places. •

The post How the world warmed to a nuclear India appeared first on Inside Story.

By Robert Cornall and Rufus Black
Prime Minister’s Department

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State

By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
Little, Brown and Company | $45

COME for a stroll through the parliamentary triangle of Canberra to see how the 9/11 decade transformed the role and riches of the national security community and built new bureaucratic castles.

The walk starts in front of a memorial, simple yet telling, in a secluded corner across the road from the entrance to the House of Representatives. It bears the names of ninety-one Australian citizens and residents who died in Bali in October 2002. As much as the 9/11 attack, the Bali bombings set Canberra’s course for the subsequent decade and the dramatic expansion of the intelligence agencies.

Leaving the memorial and walking down Kings Avenue reveals how expanding institutions always mark their rise with bricks, concrete and marble. The first stop is the new headquarters of that nominal brain of the intelligence octopus, the Office of National Assessments. This is the first time ONA has had its own building – previously it was a sub-tenant of ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, in the Russell complex at the other end of Kings Avenue.

It’s only six months since ONA moved into this refurbished heritage building, renamed to honour Justice Robert Hope, the man who designed Australia’s intelligence structure and defined the formal divisions that drive it today. It’s a tribute to Hope that his two reports (in 1977 and 1984) prescribed what are still the institutional architecture, the official language and many of the assumptions of Australian intelligence. Or perhaps it merely marks the way the secret world protects its own institutions. The intelligence community has had remarkable organisational stability, even structural stasis, while enjoying an extraordinary decade of growth.

Walk another minute down Kings Avenue to the new HQ of the Australian Federal Police, freshly installed behind the bollards and barriers around the Edmund Barton building (previously the home to agencies such as trade, agriculture and environment). Along the way, you’ll notice how the 9/11 decade caused a mushrooming of concrete barriers around Canberra’s public buildings, pushing out perimeters; since Bali, this is a bomb-conscious city.

The shift of the AFP from its old central office across the lake in Civic to the parliamentary triangle is a mark of the way its role and resources surged because of Bali. Although it is not formally enrolled as part of the intelligence community, the AFP is now a key player. Coppers and spooks are defined by their differences as much as their similarities; during the decade, those tensions erupted in some spectacular turf wars between the AFP and the big beast in the intelligence community, ASIO.

Continue on across Kings Avenue bridge towards the longstanding Defence Department complex on the hill at Russell. Defence didn’t need to add any new buildings to its collection to underline its central place in the Canberra universe; the more important achievement for defence workers was to expand the number of car parking spaces.

Then, to see the undoubted winner in the edifice stakes, walk alongside Lake Burley Griffin until you reach a tiny 150-year-old building, Blundell’s Cottage. You’ll need no instruction to lift your gaze from the stone cottage to the giant structure that arcs behind it, the biggest and most expensive construction project in Canberra since the new parliament building was completed in 1988.

Cast your eyes over ASIO’s new central office, big enough for 1800 people, the largest monument to what the 9/11 decade did to Canberra. The new office can still be defined as part of the parliamentary triangle – a geographic zone that is home to the institutions with true power in the national capital – and depending on the way the symbolism is worked, ASIO’s staff will stare across the lake at the High Court or lift their eyes to the giant flag that flies above Parliament House.

All these new offices tell a story of expense and expansion. In 2000, the combined budget of the six agencies in the intelligence community was $325 million; by 2010, the figure was $1070 million. The system has blossomed. The six bodies that style themselves the Australian Intelligence Community are:

ASIO, the spooks who catch spies and terrorists, fighting foreign interference and internal threats.

ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service), the spies who operate beyond Australia’s borders; established in 1952, its existence was not made public by government until 1977, on Justice Hope’s recommendation.

The Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation, or DIGO, the agency that works with satellites, targets and maps, producing “geospatial intelligence from imagery.”

The Defence Intelligence Organisation, or DIO, the merged intelligence arms of the army, navy and air force since 1970.

The Defence Signals Directorate, or DSD, which intercepts and guards signals, communication, cryptography and computers.

The Office of National Assessments, sitting at the top of the intelligence community, answering directly to the prime minister.

GROWTH like this always demands a reckoning. What were the misses, mistakes, mishaps and muddles during this major injection of cash and people? How well have the agencies worked to protect Australia’s security? Well, the assessment has been done and the public news is all good: Australia is blessed by the balance, efficiency and competence of the intelligence community.

The task of peering into Australia’s secret world was given to Robert Cornall (secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department during the 9/11 decade until he retired in 2008) and Rufus Black (ethicist, management consultant, theologian and Master of Melbourne University’s Ormond College); together, they were the Independent Review of the Intelligence Community. Perhaps Black provided the independence while Cornall looked after the reviewing of his own legal handiwork.

Putting “independent” at the front of the inquiry’s name gives a little reassurance, but the forty-eight pages released to the public in January read like a publicity pamphlet. The review’s public pages say that the “dramatic” growth in spending will call for continued attention to maintain “the culture that sustains the balance between security and liberty.” But Cornall and Black affirm that Australia got the balance right in the 9/11 decade with a raft of laws “creating new terrorism offences and conferring new powers – particularly on ASIO and the Australian Federal Police.”

Success is measured this way:

The Australian Intelligence Community has helped keep the Australian homeland safe from terrorist attacks for a decade despite a series of major plots. Those disrupted plots resulted in thirty-eight prosecutions and twenty-two convictions. Other potential plots have not been allowed to develop thanks to more than eighty foreign nationals being prevented from coming to Australia on security grounds and more than fifty Australians being denied the opportunity to travel to train for, support or participate in, terrorist activities.

This is one of the few points at which the review gives some evidence for its assertions (although nothing is offered to prove that any of those twenty-two convictions relied on the new anti-terrorist powers). The reason the inquiry gives for withholding the evidence behind its conclusions is almost a classic statement of the circular mentality that so cocoons the secret world: “The Terms of Reference called for a broad investigation into many highly classified or sensitive areas of the agencies’ operations and resulted in detailed recommendations, which cannot be made public.”

With that gap at the heart of what has been released, the two men go on to declare that Australia’s investment in building up the intelligence agencies has been “justified and rewarded with more capability and increased performance.” The intelligence agencies are working well together, they say, and are “beginning to work more effectively with the other members of the recently expanded National Security Community. This evolution will take time – as is the case with any requirement for a significant shift in corporate behaviour...”

A translation of that reference to working together and corporate culture might be: ASIO and the AFP seem to be talking, despite the odd spectacular stoush. In the failed 2007 prosecution of Sydney medical student Izhar Ul-Haque, the judge threw out the AFP case because of the pressure applied to the student by ASIO interviewers. Later, roles were reversed when the AFP detained Mohamed Haneef while it strained to find a terrorist link between the Brisbane doctor and his cousins involved in bombings in Britain, despite repeated advice from ASIO that the doctor was innocent.

Cornall and Black found that management was better attuned to chanting the “altogether now” mantra than were the worker bees, who were more concerned with tending to their traditional patches. Working relationships at the leadership level across the agencies are described as “particularly strong” while at lower levels “some issues remain.”

Look beneath the reassurance to find the gaps and the bumps hinted at by the review. Even as the report finds the existing structure is working well, it repeatedly tells the story of change and agencies that have “evolved substantially.” This means that some contradictions peep out from beneath the confidence that the balance is right and that “there is no need to consider any significant restructure of the existing agencies.” The structure bequeathed by Hope still does the job, even as Cornall and Black see a world in which the threats keep shifting.

JUSTICE Hope’s central logic was a firm division between the agencies that collect intelligence and those that assess it, to “avoid the dangers of a large, all-embracing central secret intelligence organisation.” The Hope structure – embraced and re-endorsed by the new review – sees ASIS, DIGO and DSD as collection agencies, with ONA and DIO doing the assessment. Only ASIO is to have both collection and assessment roles.

Reality is eating away at this neat division. The demand to work together is directed at linking up the silos of the separate agencies. The embrace of the self-created concept of the Australian Intelligence Community is an attempt to talk away differences. The positive view is that this reflects collegiate cooperation; the negative description turns to concepts such as groupthink and a dangerous lack of contestability about the conclusions reached by the Community.

While the intelligence structure created in the 1970s endures, consider how the world has repeatedly changed. Astounded by the end of the Cold War (and a victory, at that), the intelligence types had a slow decade in which their relevance faded. The galvanising moment came with the attacks on New York and Washington, and soon the Bali bombings marked the arrival of the threat on Australia’s doorstep. In fact, Bali delivered more than a dreadful shock; it left a deep sense of both failure and apprehension.

After Bali, the belief took hold that an attack on Australian soil was just a matter of time: not if, but when. That fear lingers. Cornall and Black speak of “inevitable” terrorist shocks. This is our version of America’s Yellow Alert syndrome – a seemingly permanent state of warning about the risk of terrorist attack.

The Australian notion of who will deliver that hit, though, has evolved significantly. Initially, the enemy was foreign, produced and directed by al Qaeda and affiliates such as Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia. As the decade wore on, though, the face of the enemy changed. No longer was the threat external; now, it was home-grown. The foe could live next door. The dark realisation was that Australia was growing its own potential terrorists, as likely to radicalise themselves as to be formally directed by some foreign force. The Australian intelligence and security system grew in response to a shifting understanding of the terrorist danger. Perhaps the future was becoming clear.

No such luck. By the time the second decade of the twenty-first century arrived, the attacks were frequent – but from cyberspace, not terrorists. Cyber attacks have joined terrorism at the top of Australia’s security threat list – the dire new duo of globalisation.

For the Australian Defence Department, cyber attack is the assault that happens many times a day: 200 a month in 2009, 700 a month in 2010. This is the Australian end of what has driven a deep rethink of the concept of security and seen the United States create a distinct new domain of warfare. The Mario Brothers are off to war. Recruits must be able to stare at screens for hours and possess dancing fingers and dexterous thumbs. The Australian signals intelligence alliance with the United States and Britain, which grew so important in the Cold War, is being reworked.

In what amounts to a bit of Canberra happenstance, ASIO’s new HQ is across the road from the Defence Signals Directorate. The neighbourliness will be useful in what has quickly emerged as a common sphere of concern. Not so long ago, DSD (signals nerds peering overseas) was the silo that was the greatest distance from ASIO’s patch (domestic spooking). Suddenly, they are both trying to navigate a new domain. DSD is the best example of how the Hope dichotomy – strict separation between collection and assessment – is breaking down. In the cyber domain, DSD has to collect, assess, protect and fight.

Add to this the oldest intelligence concern of all – a clash of great powers. Geopolitics is back. Australia is doing a lot of thinking about a country with a name that starts with C and ends with a, and it’s not Cuba. This coyness is reflected by Cornall and Black. The public version of their review can’t utter the word China. Instead, the “new era for intelligence” is being delivered by “the dawning of the Asia Century.” Navigating in a world adjusting to the “impact and importance” of emerging world powers will be “one of Australia’s greatest strategic challenges.” The intelligence community might have to change as much in this decade as it did in the last.

MEANWHILE, the cyber domain is drawing Australia closer to the United States in the same way that the 9/11 decade drew Australia deeper into the American orbit. Although our intelligence community is a micro-organism compared to the gigantic American system, the alliance influences much that Australia does, and often the way it is done. And this means that recent developments within the American security state offer all sorts of insights into what Australia is doing now and the challenges it faces.

The idea of the security state is at the core of Dana Priest and William Arkin’s book Top Secret America, in which these two Washington Post writers provide an outsider version of what Cornall and Black did from the inside. Australia turns up just once in the book, in a discussion of the CIA’s intimate relationships with some foreign agencies. These intelligence links are so strong and important they are seen as able to survive political differences, mishaps or publicity:

The relationship between the CIA and its partners is actually much firmer than the headlines would have readers believe. And for a handful of countries, such as Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, Jordan, Poland, France and Saudi Arabia, the relationship with the CIA is steadfast. Even when relations go haywire in public, deep in the sock drawer, business remains brisk. This is a function of common interests.

What gets a country deep into the inner drawer with the CIA? Poland wants an alliance to guard against Russian influence, and in return gets help and finance for a Polish commando force “allowed to do things Americans could not.” Jordan provides undercover agents “who participated in snatching terrorists from around the world.” Britain is able to destroy terrorist websites without going through the legal process demanded of US agencies. Priest and Arkin don’t speculate about how Australia got on the list, but having done duty for more than forty years hosting the CIA-operated Pine Gap, one of the largest satellite ground stations in the world, perhaps Canberra is seen simply as a rusted-on ally.

Priest and Arkin map a decade of extraordinary growth within and beyond the sixteen agencies of the US intelligence community, a decade in which the community became an “overgrown jungle of top secret organisations.” The United States has built so “gigantic” a counterterrorism apparatus – the authors’ Top Secret America – that it is now possible to speak of a US terrorism–industrial complex in the same league as the military–industrial complex. Some 850,000 Americans now have top secret clearances, 250,000 of them contractors; around 1200 government organisations and nearly 2000 companies work on top secret programs involving counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence; agencies and companies do top secret work at 10,000 locations across the United States; and Top Secret America churns out 50,000 intelligence reports a year, “a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.”

Because of the “exponential growth and ever-widening circle of secrecy,” this collection of agencies has became “inert under its own weight and size.” And, write Priest and Arkin, one of the greatest secrets of all is the system’s “disturbing dysfunction.” They track the development of “stress duress” interrogation techniques; the use of the drones that have revolutionised warfare and upped the temptation and the tempo of targeted assassinations; the evolution of the Joint Special Operations Command, which has become “the president’s personal weapon against terrorists” and ultimately killed Osama bin Laden; and the way that war, intelligence and security are increasingly run by contractors and corporations, employed by the US government and military.

The “unrestricted flow of private industry into Top Secret America” has made security more expensive. Contractors make up 29 per cent of the workforce in US intelligence agencies but cost nearly half of the personnel budgets. Defence contractors cost 25 per cent more than federal employees. Contractors work in every US intelligence and counterinsurgency agency. “What started as a clever temporary fix has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal government is still even able to stand on its own.”

Only God has a clear understanding of what happens in every secret compartment of the US system, Priest and Arkin write; no one else would have the time or capability, even if they could get clearance to see all those secrets. The “poor quality of congressional oversight” gives little confidence that the politicians have much control, while “the government has fallen into the bottomless well of official secrets.”

As part of a solution, the two reporters argue that no material should be classified top secret unless it truly meets the official definition of what top secret means: public disclosure would cause “exceptionally grave harm” to national security. WikiLeaks has just conducted an uncontrolled experiment that suggests making enormous amounts of classified material public doesn’t actually cause grave harm; Priest and Arkin argue that the experience of the last decade shows that breaching the wall of secrecy seldom produces damage:

Despite all the unauthorised disclosures of classified information and programs in scores of articles since September 11, 2001, our military and intelligence sources cannot think of any instance in which security has been seriously damaged by the release of information. On the contrary, much harm has been done to the counterterrorism effort itself, and to the American economy and US strategic goals, by allowing the government to operate in the dark, by continuing to dole out taxpayer money to programs that have no value and to employees, many of them private contractors, who are making no significant contribution to the country’s safety.

The conclusion offered is that only 1 per cent of current top secret information deserves the classification. The US government should have its own WikiLeaks moment. There might be some embarrassments, Priest and Arkin write, but not much in the way of grave harm:

More secret projects, more secret organisations, more secret authorities, more secret decision making, more watchlists, and more databases are not the answer to every problem. In fact, more has become too much. The number of secrets has become so enormous that the people in charge of keeping them can’t possibly succeed.

After the shocks that gave us the 9/11 decade, one of the continuing challenges will be to persuade those inside the secret world – and not just in the United States – that it is safe to give up so much secrecy. •

The post Hope’s ghost lingers in a secret security world appeared first on Inside Story.

MOST women members of the Australian Defence Force will not experience sustained frontline combat duty any more than do most male members of the military. So, in practical terms, there is probably less than meets the eye to the federal government’s decision to allow women to serve in all combat roles within five years.

But in terms of defence force equity it is a notable advance. It removes another vestige of discrimination against the presumably few ADF women who want to be frontline infantry fighters and who can demonstrate the required skills to do so.

The decision means that no combat roles will any longer be closed to women just because they are women. There may be other good reasons to exclude individuals from specific roles, but they will not automatically include gender, and that is no bad thing given the sometimes appallingly unequal treatment endured by women in the military.

To its credit, federal cabinet is moving cautiously by introducing the change over five years to enable training programs to be developed for women who want to take up infantry combat roles. The five-year phase-in will also reveal how many women want these onerous jobs and what percentage of them are likely to be physically capable of doing the work.

It is hardly surprising, as defence force chief Major General David Hurley says, that there will be mixed reactions within the ADF. But the important issue is not how many women eventually assume these combat roles. It is that the government has opened up the last 7 per cent of military positions from which women have been excluded solely on the basis of their gender. That reflects progress and the ADF’s need to maintain adequate numbers of front-line troops.

The decision has provoked a predictable response from the Australia Defence Association, or ADA, and its spokesman, former Lieutenant Colonel Neil James. Reflecting and pandering to prejudices and Rum Corps attitudes in some army circles, James has attracted media attention by harrumphing that the government’s decision will increase the risk of “disproportionate” female battlefield casualties.

James has branded defenders of the government’s decision idealists, ideologues and theorists who do not appreciate the horrors of frontline combat and the bio-mechanical differences between men and women. The ADA alone is clear-headed and logical; all others are sloppy thinkers.

While Mr James frequently criticises the journalists to whom he seeks to peddle his words of wisdom, and has little time for civilian judgement on any defence policy issues, his analysis of the decision to open frontline combat roles to women has its own flaws and fatuities.

First, he does not explain his claim that female battlefield casualties will be “disproportionate.” Disproportionate to what? To the total number of ADF members? To the total number of women in the ADF? To the total number of infantry personnel in the ADF?

An ADA policy statement suggests female infantry casualties are likely to be disproportionate to male casualties “chiefly because they would be exposed to higher risks over time” than men doing the same job. The ADA believes the risks would be higher because most women eventually would probably lose intense person-to-person physical confrontations in prolonged direct combat. This sounds suspiciously like “the weaker sex” argument; it takes no account of leadership, professionalism, motivation, esprit de corps, training and equipment or the capability of opposing forces.

Second, James does not explain the basis for the ADA view. How can he know female casualties will be disproportionate before it is clear how many women will eventually take part in intense combat? It is possible, indeed likely, that the numbers will be so low that it will not make much sense to talk about disproportionate casualties.

Thirdly, and most interestingly, James’s complaint reflects the confused ADA policy on women in combat – a policy that is apparently the product of his own intellectual exertions and his very apparent dislike of the journalists on whom he relies to report his views.

As noted, it is essentially a “weaker sex” argument hiding behind a façade of acceptance of the fact that women already perform many frontline combat tasks in the navy, air force and army. The ADA essentially believes women can be employed in combat roles where “force is applied from a distance” but that they should not be expected to fight enemy male soldiers “continually in a person-to-person physical sense and as a permanent and core part of their job.”

But obviously there are dangers in both distant and close quarters combat. To join the ADF is to accept the risk of death or injury. What makes the difference in modern high-tech warfare has less to do with gender than with the training, equipment and attitude of the rival combatants.

The ADA says it supports the right of individual women to choose whether to accept combat risks. But it also says “the exercise of such choice needs careful monitoring to ensure it is truly free and reasonable.” But monitoring by whom? And what sort of criteria would satisfy “truly free and reasonable” in these circumstances?

For a man who claims a monopoly on truth and objectivity, Neil James has a lot more thinking to do before he mounts a convincing case against eliminating gender inequity in the ADF. •

The post Defending defence equity appeared first on Inside Story.

IT IS not often that a government has the chance to save around $40 billion by buying the best available product rather than trying to design and build what will almost certainly be an inferior version. Yet Julia Gillard’s government seems determined to press ahead with the immensely complex task of designing and building twelve huge submarines at a likely cost of over $40 billion to replace six trouble-plagued, Australian-designed Collins class subs. Never mind that a high-quality submarine fleet can be bought from overseas for under $3 billion – less than it will cost to try to keep two decrepit Collins class boats operationally available until the future subs are due to arrive in 2025. Despite the political and fiscal damage it is inviting down the track, Cabinet seems unwilling to pull the plug on the project initiated by Gillard’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd.

Rather than wait forever for Defence to offer to scrap the project, Cabinet should ask the Productivity Commission’s Gary Banks for an independent report. In a wide-ranging speech at a conference in Melbourne last week, Banks queried the case for locally designed and built submarines “when imported alternatives could be purchased for a fraction of the cost and risk.” He went on: “The justifications sometimes offered for ‘build rather than buy’ policies – skilled job creation or technological spillovers – even if they had some merit in the past, have little credibility today, given the pressing need for such skills in mining and associated industrial activities.” A lot has changed since the 1980s when Bob Hawke’s defence minister, Kim Beazley, chose to build the Collins at Port Adelaide in the electorate of his close Labor colleague Mick Young. Owing to the resources boom, there are now severe skills shortages in areas crucial to submarine construction, including welding, integrating electronic systems and project management.

On the same day that Banks spoke, the chair of the Defence SA Advisory Board, retired general Peter Cosgrove, told the Australian that buying “cheaper” off-the-shelf naval vessels from overseas would compromise Australia’s ability to maintain and upgrade its ships. But Australia already maintains advanced weapons systems without having to design and build them. No Australian government would dream of trying to design and build its own jet fighters – an easier task than designing and building a submarine. Yet the air force is happy to rely on Australian industry to maintain the high performance fighters and other planes it buys from overseas.

Cosgrove really pushed his luck as a lobbyist when he claimed that Australia had a good record of building naval vessels and could “build ships as cost-effectively as other shipbuilding nations.” In February, an understandably frustrated defence minister, Stephen Smith, scrapped six locally designed and built landing craft that were never cleared for service, despite being delivered in 2005. According to Smith, they were too big to fit into their designated space on board larger transport ships and too heavy for the ships’ cranes to lift.

Perhaps Cosgrove should have a look at the record of one of his defence advisory board’s favourite shipbuilders, the Australian Submarine Corporation. The Howard government nationalised the ASC following the difficulties it experienced in building and maintaining the Collins at Port Adelaide. Nevertheless, it is now the lead contractor to build the navy’s three large air warfare destroyers using a Spanish design. Welding and other bungles by one of the sub-contractors have delayed the project by two years and blown out its $8 billion budget.

ASC is by no means to blame for all the problems with the Collins. Although the United States doesn’t operate conventionally powered submarines, Beazley chose an unproven US combat control system instead of an established European version. The US system was a complete dud and $1 billion was spent to replace it – unfortunately with another difficult US design. Design problems have also added greatly to maintenance costs. The failure of Australian-built generators (but not those built in France) is an unhappy example. The hatch on a Collins is one metre across but the generators are 1.093 metres, which means they have to be taken apart so they can be removed for major repairs. A senior defence official, Kim Gillis, told a Senate committee that it would take two to three weeks to remove a generator from a normal ship, fix it and put it back, but it takes twenty-three to twenty-five weeks for the Collins.

Submarines are never cheap to maintain, but the six Collins class boats are exceptionally expensive. They can be out of the water for four or more years at a time. Usually, no more than two are operationally available at any one time – and sometimes none. The annual maintenance bill is now close to $400 million and rising, and the subs will have to be cut in half to replace the faulty diesel engines. Yet Defence not only plans to keep some of the boats going until 2025, it wants to undertake costly upgrades. There are good defence preparedness and cost grounds for replacing the Collins now and abandoning the folly of trying to design and build an even bigger version.

FORTUNATELY, options exist that would give our submariners much better, more reliable submarines at a lower cost. All are smaller than the Collins, let alone its proposed replacement in 2025, but big is not always better with submarines.

The Collins displaces 3050 tonnes. According to Defence sources, the preferred new sub – dubbed the Son of Collins on Steroids – is expected to displace 4500 to 5000 tonnes. The main alternatives are three medium-sized boats – the Swedish A-26, the German Type 214, and the Spanish S-80 – which range from 1600 tonnes to just over 2400 tonnes. Unlike the Collins, all three make use of air independent propulsion systems, such as the fuel cells, to achieve a much lower noise signature in an operational zone than if diesel engines are used to recharge the batteries. Because the Swedish and Spanish boats are new designs that won’t be proven for several years, the 1700-tonne Type 214 offers the best chance in the near future to improve Australia's submarine capability (and save money) by replacing the Collins.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Andrew Davies and a former submariner, Sean Costello, estimated in 2009 that the cost in 2020 for twelve new Australian-designed submarines of 4000 tonnes (less than Defence’s preferred size) would be $36.5 billion, compared to $8.8 billion to build twelve upgraded Type 214 submarines in Australia. These figures were in 2009 dollars and used an exchange rate of 70 US cents per Australian dollar, compared to 107 cents today. The calculations also made the optimistic assumption that local construction only adds 30 per cent to costs. A more up-to-date estimate for designing and building a 4500–5000 tonne submarine locally would probably be over $40 billion, compared to well under $5 billion to import twelve Type 214s.

Australia does not need twelve subs unless there is a severe decline in its favourable strategic outlook. Six is enough, particularly as the navy has had trouble crewing more than two. In a recent paper, Dangerous Luxuries, US army officer Colonel John Angevine concludes that Australia’s 2009 defence white paper (which recommended the twelve big subs) wrongly focused on procuring “high end” weapons systems to deal with an implausible threat from China. Angevine says the more likely requirements are for humanitarian and other operations at the lower levels of the military continuum. The assessment of Australia’s intelligence agencies is that the country would have many years’ notice of a serious military threat emerging, thus allowing time for more subs to be acquired.

Six new 214s could be imported for well under $2.5 billion. Buying near-new 214s from Greece and Portugal would be even cheaper. Either way would cost less than struggling to keep a couple of Collins barely operational. The 214 would also give Australian submariners a chance to work with the most advanced conventional subs available and let our anti-submarine forces train against a much tougher target than the Collins.

The Collins has a crew of forty-five compared to twenty-seven for the Type 214, which was designed by HDW, a German company that employs 850 design engineers. HDW has sold 156 submarines since 1960. Six navies have purchased a version of the 214 that has a reputation as a reliable, highly capable submarine. The 214 matches the Collins’s endurance of around forty days and its range of 19,000 kilometres, but is quieter and dives deeper.

Rex Patrick, a former submariner with experience on the Oberon, Collins, Type 214 and other conventional subs, as well as the Los Angeles nuclear class, has written extensively online about the merits of medium sized submarines. Now an undersea warfare trainer in Australia and overseas, Patrick says the enormous cost differential between a modern off-the shelf submarine and the proposal for a unique Australian designed one cannot be justified on the basis of capability difference. “If any of a number of the multitude of risks inherent in a grand plan of this scale were to materialise during project implementation,” he says, “the impact on Australia’s submarine capability, already in a perilous state, would be catastrophic and the impact on national security would be unprecedented”. He describes the sustainment costs for the Collins as “obscene” compared to its lack of availability.

THE GOVERNMENT is yet to make a final decision on a replacement for the Collins, other than saying that it must be built in Adelaide. If Rudd’s proposal proceeds, Australia will have the world’s largest modern conventional submarine. But smaller subs are harder to detect, more manoeuvrable and able to operate in shallower waters. This helps make them devastatingly effective at their primary role of “sea denial” – deterring hostile ships from approaching Australia and, if deterrence fails, sinking them with torpedoes and missiles. The greater stealth of small to medium sized subs usually means that they are also better at gathering intelligence, and at least as capable overall of laying mines and putting special forces ashore.

Relatively small subs also have an impressive record of “sinking” powerful surface ships during exercises. South Korea is building the Type 214 to replace its earlier version, the Type 209. Although smaller than the more capable 214, the 209 has been an outstanding participant in the biannual US-led naval exercises off Hawaii, RIMPAC. In the 2004 exercise a single 209 sank all the “enemy” surface ships, including the US navy’s most advanced nuclear aircraft carrier, the John C. Stennis, which was surrounded by a destroyer screen. The 209 survived the two-week exercise undetected and without mechanical troubles. Unfortunately for those who want to keep the Collins in service until 2025, for the first time in over thirty years Australia did not send a submarine to last year’s exercise. None were operational.

The US navy has responded to the threat from smaller subs by leasing two of the Swedish Gotland class to help train its carrier battle groups based at San Diego. The US training also recognises that two relatively small, low-cost subs can greatly complicate the defensive task of big surface ships by lurking in two different locations within the target zone.

A large replacement for the Collins might have slightly greater endurance, but at a much higher cost. Patrick says a larger-hulled submarine can have greater fuel storage capacity but also requires more energy to propel it through the water. This in turn creates a need for larger diesels, larger batteries, larger main motors, more auxiliary equipment, more personnel and greater stowage capacity. He says the laws of diminishing returns soon kick in. Because the Type 214 matches the lengthy endurance requirements the navy set for the Collins, its smaller size should not be a serious issue, particularly as Australian submarines are regularly replenished in ports to our north. If desired, a long-range submarine tender could provide additional support.

Submarines are useful. But so are other military capabilities that don’t cost $40 billion. Subs have a limited intelligence-gathering ability whereas sensors on cheaper planes and satellites can cover a wider range of requirements. Subs have no role in Afghanistan; closer to home, they are no use for peacekeeping or disaster relief in the South Pacific.

Unlike the Collins, the large replacement submarines that Rudd’s 2009 white paper recommended would carry 2500 kilometre–range US Tomahawk cruise missiles for attacking land targets. Smaller hulled submarines can also carry land strike missiles, although none at present have the Tomahawk’s range. But it makes no sense to spend $40 billion to fire a relatively small warhead onto a target that could be hit by planes operating with much greater speed, flexibility, frequency and firepower. Slow-moving submarines costing over $3 billion each don’t offer more value in this role than a $200 million advanced fighter capable of destroying targets that are thousands of kilometres apart within a twenty-four hour period. Often, pilotless planes would be even more cost-effective.

The 2009 white paper envisaged that the huge size and cost of its proposed submarines could mainly be justified by their ability to mount a unilateral cruise missile attack on mainland China during a conflict in which Australia had no help from its allies. Once the submarine had fired its missiles, however, it would have to make the long journey back to Australia to reload and return for another go the following month. Although far more Western air power has been pounding Libya’s skimpy defences for four months, that government has not surrendered. China is not Libya. It could retaliate savagely on the military and trade fronts.

While the thinking behind the white paper contemplated Australian submarines “tearing a limb off an Asian giant,” ultimately China could only be persuaded to surrender by an invasion in which land forces marched against millions of patriotic Chinese defenders until Beijing was occupied. Australian invaders would be chewed up in a horrific human mincing machine long before they reached Beijing. The Son of Collins on Steroids is part of a dangerous Rudd fantasy. His successor should escape without further delay. •

The post Luxury vessels appeared first on Inside Story.

AN EMINENT international think tank has issued a grim new warning about the potential threat posed by more than 20,500 nuclear weapons still held by eight nations headed by the United States and Russia. The 2011 yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, highlights the apparent determination of the United States and Russia to retain their nuclear arsenals and efforts by India and Pakistan to develop new ballistic and cruise missiles and to produce fissile material for military use.

SIPRI’s concerns are supported by numbers. There are still more than 5000 deployed nuclear warheads, overwhelmingly Russian and American, among the 20,500 warheads still in existence, and India and Pakistan are engaged in a nuclear weapons arms race to increase their current arsenals of around one hundred warheads each. The prospect of total nuclear war between the superpowers may have diminished since the end of the Cold War, but it has obviously not been eliminated. Now, alarmingly, Islamist terror groups are actively seeking access to nuclear weapons – and only a fool would bet on the security of Pakistani warheads.

World nuclear forces, 2011

Source: SIPRI Yearbook 2011. Some figures are rounded.
* “Deployed” means warheads placed on missiles or located on bases with operational forces.

But while nuclear weapons are rightly the primary focus of international disarmament efforts, they are not the only sword of Damocles suspended over the heads of humanity. Much less openly discussed threats from biological weapons may be no less dangerous. For terror groups biological weapons may be a simple and devastating alternative to nuclear weapons.

It was one of the oddities of the end of the Cold War that while US and Soviet leaders wrestled openly over reducting their then-vast nuclear arsenals of more than 60,000 warheads there was little open discussion of the enormous Soviet biological weapons program, conducted in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The disturbing story is told in David Hoffman’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Dead Hand. His argument, in brief, is that American leaders did not push the Russians publicly over the biological weapons program because they wanted to maintain the momentum of nuclear weapons negotiations, and Russian leaders would not come clean about the program because they did not want to acknowledge that they could not control the generals and scientists in charge of germ warfare.

The historic summit meetings between Presidents Reagan and Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and other top-level meetings that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, had some success in helping to reduce US and Soviet nuclear weapons stockpiles from their 1989 total of 61,380. But the Soviets would not unveil their biological weapons program, even when it became known that between sixty-five and 105 people had been killed in 1979 when anthrax spores escaped into the atmosphere at a biological warfare laboratory near the Russian city of Sverdlovsk. The programs continued unabated.

As Hoffman reveals, it was not until 1992 that Yeltsin, in an aside during an interview with a Russian newspaper, acknowledged the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak and attributed it to “our military development.” Later, in an address to the US Congress, he promised “no more lies,” but, Hoffman notes, “the deception went on.”

In a chilling epilogue reflecting on the efforts of terrorists to acquire nuclear and biological weapons, Hoffman writes: “It is difficult to build a working nuclear bomb, but less difficult to cultivate pathogens in a laboratory… Today one can threaten a whole society with a flask carrying pathogens created in a fermenter in a hidden garage – and without a detectable signature.”

In fact there has been little progress in recent years towards the elimination of either nuclear or biological weapons. As SIPRI deputy director Daniel Nord says, “The nuclear weapons states are modernising and are investing in their nuclear weapons establishments. So it seems unlikely that there will be any real nuclear weapons disarmament within the foreseeable future.” The 2010 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or START, signed by President Obama and Russian President Medvedev, will modestly cut strategic nuclear forces but, as the SIPRI annual report says, the two countries “appear determined to retain their nuclear arsenals for the indefinite future.”

Certainly there has been no serious move by either side to revive the proposals that surfaced at the 1986 Reagan–Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik, when the two leaders discussed cutting warheads by 50 per cent and eventually eliminating them entirely. The meeting broke down over Reagan’s refusal to limit “Star Wars” research to laboratory experiments, but the meeting gave the leaders a momentary glimpse of a nuclear-free future.

It may be that nuclear weapons attract most attention these days not just because they can destroy nations as functioning modern entities but also because they are easier than biological weapons to identify, count and quantify. Biological weapons may, however, be the greater peril to mass populations. They can easily be made portable, and genetically engineered pathogens can quickly produce devastating casualties in large urban areas. As Hoffman notes, Russian institutes once involved in germ warfare remain closed to Western cooperation. “What is behind the closed doors?” he asks. “And most importantly, what has become of the scientists with know-how to create pathogens that can be carried in a shirt pocket? What are they working on today?”

SIPRI is one of several international bodies pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Others include the Australia–Japan International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament and the recently established Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University in Canberra. Credit for the establishment of these organisations is due primarily to former Labor foreign affairs minister, Gareth Evans, now chancellor of ANU. Evans has for many years been obsessed (some would say magnificently obsessed) with nuclear weapons elimination. In 1995 he set up the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, but the election of a Coalition government eventually ensured its report received only token support.

The Canberra Commission’s report anticipated by twelve years the appeal by four US Cold War elder statesmen for the elimination of nuclear weapons. In late 2007, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn made international headlines when they urged the elimination of nuclear weapons in terms little different from those of the commission. In 2009 in Prague President Obama pledged to cut nuclear weapons stockpiles, saying they were a dangerous Cold War legacy.

But words are cheap and progress is glacial – and biological weapons, also a Cold War legacy, have received nothing like the detailed attention devoted to nuclear arsenals. The Australia–Japan commission, and the new ANU centre, would enhance the value of their work by alerting policy-makers to the issues surrounding elimination of biological as well as nuclear weapons. They might start by seeking answers to Hoffman’s questions. •

The post Difficult questions about disarmament appeared first on Inside Story.

FOR sixty years the ANZUS alliance has been the holy grail of Australian security policy. It is the alliance on which Australia ultimately relies for national survival in the event of an armed attack that it can’t repel alone.

But questions are emerging about the long-term value of ANZUS to Australia as economic malaise continues to plague the United States and Chinese economic and military power continues to grow in an increasingly multi-polar world. The key questions, perhaps, are whether ANZUS is approaching its use-by date and whether abandoning the treaty would substantially affect Australia’s long-run strategic circumstances.

There would most likely be a balance of gains and losses – gains in terms of national autonomy and losses in terms of access to high-end US intelligence and to some US military technologies – with the exact impact on Australia’s regional influence harder to gauge. Obviously it would be better for Australia to plan for and manage these contingencies rather than confront them unprepared.

Judging by the recent visits by prime minister Julia Gillard to Washington and Beijing, the Australian government is not ready to address the issues publicly. It wants the security benefits of the ANZUS treaty and the economic benefits of the lucrative and growing relationship with China, and it thinks it can have them both.

This might be increasingly difficult if, as the latest defence white paper estimated in 2009, the strategic primacy of the United States declines after 2030 – only nineteen years in the future. Even if the United States manages to remain the world’s greatest superpower after 2030, its approach to the ANZUS treaty could be affected profoundly if it finds itself in strategic competition with an increasingly powerful China. The United States might become unwilling or unable to deliver on even qualified security guarantees to Australia. China might seek to put pressure on Australia to put its economic relationship with Beijing ahead of its ANZUS commitments.

In these circumstances Australia might be unable to maintain a Washington–Beijing balance. It might find itself increasingly alone in a hostile world, surrounded by Asian giants – one of the deepest and most abiding fears in the Australian political consciousness. Australia might also, as the 2009 white paper suggests, find itself faced with a hard-pressed American ally seeking Australian assistance in handling more regional crises and a belligerent China demanding that it desist.

How then to avoid snubbing the United States or kowtowing to China? One way would be to decide now to depart the ANZUS alliance on good terms with the United States and without Chinese pressure. Australia would then be able to calculate its vital national security interests and act as an entirely independent agent. In some ways this might enhance regional respect for Australia.

Departing ANZUS would, in fact, have limited security consequences for Australia. The most basic fact about the treaty is that it does not provide unqualified security guarantees. ANZUS obliges the Australian, New Zealand and US governments only to consult with each other if there is an armed attack on any one of them.

As J.G. Starke, QC, noted in his magisterial 1965 study, The ANZUS Treaty Alliance, “there is no pledge of American support to Australia and New Zealand in all circumstances. Unlike the old-fashioned types of military alliances there are no automatic commitments to go to war… nor obligations to aid and assist each other on all occasions and in all places.”

The questions therefore arise: What are the limits of the alliance security guarantees and what is their value in a changing world? Have successive Australian governments been right to pay the ANZUS treaty insurance premium in Australian blood and treasure in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan? Under what circumstances can Australia rely on US military assistance if it comes under armed attack?

The 2009 defence white paper says that “Australia would only expect the United States to come to our aid in circumstances where we were under threat from a major power whose military capabilities were simply beyond our capacity to resist.” It acknowledges that the treaty does not commit Australia or the United States to specific types of actions, but “it does provide a clear expectation of support.”

The white paper leaves no doubt that the “major power” of concern to Australia is China. “[T]he pace, scope and structure of China’s military modernisation have the potential to give its neighbours cause for concern if not carefully explained, and if China does not reach out to others to build confidence regarding its military plans,” the white paper says.

But how is Australia’s “capacity to resist” to be judged? And how is the level of “support” to be defined and assessed? The only clue in the white paper is the confident assertion that “for so long as nuclear weapons exist, we are able to rely on the nuclear forces of the United States to deter nuclear attack on Australia.” That might be an optimistic assessment in the event of a major global emergency involving confrontation between Washington and Beijing.

Yet the benefits of ANZUS to Australia have been important. They were summed up ten years ago by Gary Brown and Laura Rayner in a paper for the Parliamentary Library, “Upside, Downside: ANZUS After Fifty Years.” Brown and Rayner argued that the treaty had contributed to Australia’s sense of security in its region, given pause to possible aggressors, and provided Australia with regular access to the US military and government at senior levels.

They also noted that the treaty gave Australia preferential access to US military equipment and technology and allowed Australia to maintain a technological edge in its region. It also enabled Australia to receive valuable intelligence and to train and exercise with US forces and to develop interoperability with them. Being an ally of the United States allowed Australia to project its influence further and wider, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, than its size would otherwise warrant and helped to keep the United States engaged in the Western Pacific region.

Similar benefits are detailed in the 2009 white paper, which says the alliance “gives us significant access to materiel, intelligence, research and development, communications and systems and skills and expertise that substantially strengthen the ADF. Without access to US capabilities, technology and training, the ADF simply could not be the advanced force that it is today…”

But while the white paper doesn’t focus attention on the downsides of the alliance, Brown and Rayner offer a comprehensive summary. They note that the alliance does not provide Australia with any guarantees of assistance. In some circumstances, they argue, the United States may be unable or unwilling to provide direct military assistance to Australia.

Brown and Rayner argue that Australia’s dependence on the United States for key materiel and resupply means that the Australian Defence Force cannot sustain any but the most minor operations for any length of time without American materiel and logistic assistance. They contend that this situation enables the United States to dictate the terms on which Australia conducts military operations.

Moreover, they say, the rising cost of military technologies is pricing the United States out of the market as an ally with which modestly resourced states can cooperate or interoperate effectively. And they argue that although the alliance relationship has given Australia excellent access to the highest levels of the US administration, there is little indication that this access translates into effective influence.

Despite high-flown rhetoric and pledges of support from American politicians and officials over many years, the US commitment to ANZUS has never been as strong as the Australian commitment. That may simply reflect the relative size, military power and global importance of the two countries. Australia has needed the alliance more than the United States has needed it. The question now is whether that need will remain a paramount consideration in Australian security policy.

It is worth noting, in parenthesis, that the treaty has been invoked only once, and then only symbolically, when John Howard, heading home from the United States after witnessing the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, decided that Australia would support the United States to fight terrorism under the terms of the treaty.

Article IV, the action clause of the treaty – or what Starke called “the key or operative provision” – says: “Each party recognises that an armed attack in the Pacific area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.” Article III commits the parties to “consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific.”

Compare that with the action clause (Article 6) of the earlier North Atlantic treaty, which declares that “an armed attack on one or more of the parties is deemed to include an armed attack on the territory of any of the Parties…” Despite heroic efforts by the architects of ANZUS to argue that the two clauses carry the same weight, it is difficult to see how a mere obligation to consult matches an obligation to regard an attack on one as an attack on all. The current defence white paper declares explicitly that Australia would expect US aid only if threatened beyond its capacity to resist. Australia clearly expects to meet some threats without US aid, which suggests that it does not expect more than consultation in some eventualities.

AUSTRALIAN proposals for a “Pacific pact” date back at least to the 1930s. But the seeds of what was to become the ANZUS treaty were probably sown in February 1949, when Labor’s foreign affairs minister H.V. Evatt told parliament that Australia wanted a Pacific defence agreement.

Evatt’s move came against the background of the completion of the North Atlantic treaty negotiations in Europe. Australia at the time was deeply afraid of resurgent militarism in Japan, which had been defeated just four years earlier. It was witnessing the communist victory in China and growing communist insurgencies in Vietnam, Malaysia, Laos and Burma. The invasion of South Korea by the Chinese-backed North Korean communists was just over the horizon. The world was an alarming place for a country like Australia with an abiding fear of being left alone among the Asian hordes.

With the election of the Menzies government in December 1949 and the appointment of Percy Spender as foreign affairs minister, Australia’s diplomatic pursuit of a pact gathered increasing momentum. Spender is universally credited with overcoming US reluctance and securing the ANZUS treaty for Australia. “The shaping of a Pacific pact became a political obsession with him,” wrote Starke. “In proposing this goal he showed tremendous verve, sense of timing, elasticity, capacity to guide public opinion, and negotiatory skill.”

Adopting arguments first made by the Chifley government, Spender urged a Pacific pact primarily to address Canberra’s fears over possible remilitarisation by Japan. He also said a pact would allow Australia to send troops to world trouble spots like the Middle East without having to worry about whether it would have sufficient forces at home to deal with any emergency that might arise.

While recognising Australia as a valued friend that had contributed importantly to the allied victory in the second world war, the Americans were initially resistant to Spender’s vigorous advocacy. They were more concerned with the postwar spread of Soviet communism in Europe and with the communist victory in China. They wanted a peace treaty and warm relations with Japan to ensure that it did not fall into the communist orbit. They were also concerned by open British hostility to Australia and New Zealand’s joining a Pacific pact with the United States (and possibly others) if Britain were not also a member.

A fundamental difference was that Australia wanted a “tough” peace settlement with Japan and hoped for an ANZUS treaty action clause declaring, like the NATO treaty, that an attack on one party would be deemed an attack on all. The Americans wanted a “soft” settlement and indicated that they were not necessarily contemplating a NATO-style action clause. If it wanted a treaty, Australia had no choice but to accept the seemingly softer agreement-to-consult formulation.

The complex diplomacy that led to the ANZUS treaty’s being signed on 1 September 1951 is detailed in a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade book, The ANZUS Treaty 1951, published in 2001 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the alliance. It is a wide-ranging anthology of documents and cables on the treaty negotiations from 1949 to 1952.

A brief introduction notes that the North Korean attack on South Korea in June 1950 helped to push the Australians and the Americans towards agreement. A visit to Canberra in February 1951 by John Foster Dulles, special representative of US President Harry Truman, yielded a draft treaty eventually judged, however grudgingly, as acceptable by the British government. Two months later the tireless Spender was appointed ambassador to the United States and Richard Casey took over as foreign affairs minister.

The foreign affairs department documents reveal the Australian government’s struggle with the action clause formulation. Prime Minister Robert Menzies warned Spender that Australia “should not push the United States too hard for formal obligation.” The secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Watt, told Spender, “Australia should be on its guard against any very loose or uncertain arrangement” and “should try to get the tightest guarantee which we can.”

Spender, in a key cabinet submission, seemed to reflect an ambiguity in Australia’s attitude towards the treaty. He said Australia’s “first objective” should be to try to obtain US consent to an agreement “that would provide for mutual assistance in the case of an attack on any of the parties from any quarter.” Then he said Australia’s object “would in fact be to confine the obligations to an undertaking to consult with the other signatories,” but noted that this “would not give Australia the kind of guarantee needed.” He said Australia would aim to make its agreement to an undertaking to consult “conditional on a firm independent guarantee of Australia’s security against attack from any quarter.”

Spender appears to have accepted that the United States would not agree to a NATO-style action clause and that he would have to accept, as the best deal available, an undertaking to consult subject to firm US security guarantees to Australia.

After the treaty was agreed Casey sought to put the best construction on it, telling parliament in July 1951 that the US Secretary of State had said the fates of the United States, Australia and New Zealand had been joined “and the intention is that an attack on one should be regarded as an attack on all and that all three would resist together.”

Nine months later, in April 1952, he told parliament the unvarnished truth: “The precise action to be taken by each party in the event of an armed attack is not specified.” But Casey insisted the obligations were real. “[I]t is not so much the wording of the obligation which matters as the determination of the parties to resist aggression,” he said. Those words seemed to reflect the triumph of Australian hope over the reality of the treaty language.

Spender’s cabinet submission and Casey’s parliamentary statements raised questions about whether the ANZUS commitment was less definite than the NATO commitment. The issue absorbed Starke, who noted that in 1954 Dulles told Casey that the United States believed the ANZUS obligations provided “all the freedom of action and power to act that is contained in NATO.”

Relying on Dulles’s comment, and remarks by Casey and the New Zealand minister, Frederick Doidge, that the NATO and ANZUS clauses were effectively identical, Starke concluded: “It would seem of little point… to contrast these corresponding articles of the two treaties in a sense unfavourable to ANZUS.” The practical reason for the use of different wording in article IV of ANZUS, he wrote, “was to facilitate approval by the United States Congress of the Treaty.”

Here Starke seems to have lost his usual forensic acuity and placed his trust in remarks made by three politicians with a shared interest in putting a construction on Article IV most likely to reassure their national electorates at the time. Starke does not offer compelling independent arguments for his conclusion, but he does suggest, interestingly, that the vagueness of the term “armed attack” in Article IV “has suited the parties because it draws no firm line and leaves the potential aggressor guessing.” He also suggests that ANZUS “to some extent formalised a de facto relationship of alliance between the parties which had received particular expression during the second world war and in the course of the Korean hostilities…”

But legal analysis of the treaty terms is less significant than how the treaty has actually operated over its sixty-year life. How has it helped to preserve US, Australian and New Zealand national security? How willing have the parties been to assist each other when they faced security challenges? Have the benefits of the treaty justified the costs?

In his comprehensive 1991 study, Crises and Commitments: The Politics and Diplomacy of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1965, the historian Peter Edwards argues that the ANZUS treaty was the price Australia obtained for its acquiescence in the “soft” peace treaty with Japan. It was also partly Australia’s reward for its swift and substantial United Nations military response to the invasion of South Korea by Chinese-backed North Korean forces.

But Edwards notes that the treaty did not grant Australia direct access to American strategic planning, which was one of Australia’s major goals at the time. The alliance has evolved since then, but in the earlier years of the Cold War it seemed to do as much to complicate Australian relations with Washington as it did to reassure Australia that it enjoyed the protection of US power.

In the early 1950s, Edwards shows, the United States put pressure on Australia to assist the French, who were facing military defeat in Indo-China. But the Department of External Affairs argued that Australia would be unwise to agree to the use of Australian troops, as requested by the United States. The Americans, through John Foster Dulles, maintained their pressure, prompting a worried Casey to write in his diary that the United States might change its attitude to Southeast Asia if Australia and others did not respond. Spender, in Washington, reported that the government had to consider, if it failed to respond to Dulles, how the United States would react if and when areas closer to Australia were in jeopardy.

The matter was resolved by the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and subsequent international negotiations, but it was an early lesson in the potential costs of the alliance.

In the mid 1950s Menzies, concerned about communist guerrilla threats, planned to send troops to Malaya and to introduce conscription for military service. He obtained general assurance in Washington of US willingness to help defend Malaya but was “not fully satisfied with the extent of American support,” according to Edwards. Nevertheless he announced that Australia, Britain and New Zealand would contribute forces to a strategic reserve in Malaya. The United States said it would attack China with nuclear weapons in the event of war, but offered no troops under the ANZUS treaty.

Edwards also notes major differences between the United States and Australia over Indonesian claims to West New Guinea and over the Indonesian confrontation with Malaysia. Australia supported the Dutch decision to exclude West New Guinea from the transfer of the former Netherlands East Indies to Indonesia; the Americans stayed neutral, believing that a friendly Indonesia, incorporating West New Guinea, would be valuable to the West. Edwards argues that the issue had the potential to divide Australia and the United States, and that Australia ultimately had no choice other than to accept the incorporation of West New Guinea. Again the ANZUS treaty proved irrelevant.

Indonesia’s confrontation of Malaysia in the early to mid 1960s prompted Australia to seek assurances under ANZUS of US support in the event of an Indonesian attack on Australian forces in Malaysia. According to Edwards the Americans agreed to act only in the event of “an overt attack, and not in cases of ‘subversion, guerrilla warfare or indirect aggression.’” Support would be limited to the use of air and sea forces and logistic support. In other words, writes Edwards, “the use of American troops was excluded.” Again, ANZUS did not help Australia.

At the same time, Australia found itself under pressure to contribute to intensifying American efforts to defend Vietnam from communism. Vietnam at the time was of less concern to Australia than Indonesia’s confrontation with Malaysia, but, Edwards writes, “The United States made it clear… that American support for Australia in the event of a substantial conflict with Indonesia depended partly on Australian support for the American role in Vietnam.” Australia went to war in Vietnam as an ANZUS obligation and between 1962 and 1975 lost 500 troops killed and 3129 wounded. It was part of the alliance price.

Partway through that conflict, in 1969, President Richard Nixon announced his “Guam doctrine,” which had obvious implications for the ANZUS treaty. While the United States pledged to keep all of its treaty commitments, it also declared that the United States expected allies to take care of their own military defence. “[W]e shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defence,” President Nixon said.

Prime Minister John Howard faced the reality of the Guam doctrine in 1999 when he urged President Clinton to assist Australia in East Timor during the country’s greatest foreign policy crisis since Vietnam. Clinton refused to put American troops on the ground with Australians, but pledged (and delivered) diplomatic, logistic and intelligence support and an “over-the-horizon” seaborne deterrent presence to support Australia’s deployment as head of the seventeen-nation INTERFET force. ANZUS worked – but it did not yield American boots on the ground.

THERE is no doubting Australia’s commitment to ANZUS. It has taken Australian troops to Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. The dead are many and the toll continues to mount. Successive Australian governments, Coalition and Labor, have genuflected before the treaty, accepting its costs and uncertainties as justified in the pursuit of national survival.

Generally, Australia and the United States have managed differences skilfully – including during the 1984 crisis when New Zealand’s prime minister, David Lange, banned visits by nuclear-armed ships and the United States suspended its ANZUS obligations to New Zealand. If anything, the crisis brought Australia and the United States closer as the AUSMIN forum replaced the ANZUS council.

Yet, as many commentators have noted, the major test may be yet to come. How would Australia respond in the event of a crisis in United States–China relations? Would it stick with its old democratic ally at the cost of its new and still evolving economic relationship with communist China? It is not a question any Australian politician wants to address.

Former prime minister John Howard managed the ANZUS relationship with great skill. He dispatched Australian troops to fight with the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he ensured the deployments were small compared with the 5000-odd troops he sent to East Timor. Moreover he moved within twenty-four hours to correct foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer when he suffered a brainsnap in China in 2004 and declared that ANZUS did not require Australia to fight alongside the United States in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Howard earned the accolade “man of steel” from President George W. Bush after he invoked the ANZUS treaty in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the United States. Howard got significant political mileage in Washington for what were in fact small and cautious troop deployments under ANZUS. The question is whether future Australian prime ministers will be able to act similarly and maintain good relations with the United States and with China (which Howard also managed to achieve).

If the answer is “no,” or “not certain,” then it would seem reasonable to consider whether ANZUS is past its use-by date – at least in its present form. So what might replace it? And what would be the implications for Australia?

A decision to rescind ANZUS would obviously shock the Asia-Pacific region. It is an old treaty and part of the framework of regional relations. Australia and the United States would have to manage both substantial and symbolic political fallout.

But in a post-ANZUS world there is no reason why Australia and the United States would not remain close and friendly, linked by language, history and democratic values. Australia would inevitably have more guarded security relations with China, which remains a brutal communist power engaged in a major long-term military expansion. Australia would, as it has so often done patchily throughout the ANZUS years, seek to maintain military forces superior to others in the region and compatible with US forces.

Australia would continue to exchange intelligence with the United States; it could continue to host critical joint facilities like Pine Gap if the Americans wanted them. It would continue to acquire the military equipment American firms are permitted to sell to countries like Australia. Political and military exchanges with the United States would be franker and more fruitful than those with China.

A significant cost to Australia could be a loss of access to high-end US intelligence collections, especially highly classified real-time satellite imagery. The United States might also be less willing to make certain advanced weapons technologies available to Australia if it departed ANZUS. These costs would have to be balanced against the benefits.

Australia would have more freedom to take a more independent, realist and pragmatic view of its international policy and national interests, which do not always coincide with those of the United States. There would be no obligation to consult in the event of a crisis, but the parties would be able to do so if they felt it was in their interests. Australia would not feel an obligation to sign onto every war the Americans want to fight, but there would be nothing to stop Australia from joining military coalitions when it felt its interests were directly engaged.

Australia would not have the comfort of possible US assistance under ANZUS if attacked, although it could probably expect help in circumstances where the United States perceived its national interests to be at stake. There would be questions about extended US nuclear deterrence, but that would be doubtful anyway under ANZUS if China’s nuclear capabilities became competitive with US capabilities. No American president would risk sacrificing an American city to protect an Australian city from nuclear attack.

In a post-ANZUS world Australia would have to play smarter diplomatic and defence games – developing regional relationships and participating, as it does now, in regional security and economic groupings. It would also have to continue building forces that would give potential aggressors reason to pause before threatening Australia, as it is doing in the current major sea, air and rearmament program described in the 2009 white paper.

It may be true that ANZUS complicates military planning for any hostile power considering an attack on Australia because it cannot be sure that the United States will not come to Australia’s aid. But equally, Australia cannot be sure of US support in every circumstance. ANZUS may give rise to Australian expectations of US military assistance in the event of a major attack, but it does not guarantee it.

So things probably would be little different from how they are under the ANZUS arrangements. Australia might find itself more exposed to a hostile world, but it would also have more independence to act or not to act as its national interests and the balance of global power demanded. If so, departing ANZUS would arguably reflect growing national self-confidence and maturity.

ANZUS has generally served Australia well and Australia has unquestionably paid its dues. But the first half of the twenty-first century bears little resemblance to the second half of the twentieth century. Times change. Treaties that seemed sacrosanct can become less relevant. Australians need to start thinking about the continuing relevance of ANZUS to their vital interests. It is a challenge that cannot be evaded with fatuous political rhetoric crafted to flatter great powers. Great powers are smarter than that, and Australia needs to be smarter too. •

The post Has ANZUS passed its use-by date? appeared first on Inside Story.