The Australian prime minister’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update has many strengths, but it does not address the critical factors of diplomacy and development. Australia’s unbalanced strategic posture risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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There is a mismatch between the urgent need to respond to the supposed recent deterioration in Australia’s strategic circumstances, and the timeframe for investments proposed in Australia’s recently-released 2020 Force Structure Plan. Bringing capabilities into the ADF inventory within the next 20 years doesn’t seem to be the priority for government, despite the apparent deterioration in the strategic environment.
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Author: Greg Raymond | The Conversation (Australia) | 22 November 2018 What strategic developments did the 2016 Defence White Paper not anticipate? Do any of these point to a need to radically change Australia’s defence posture? Which of these equate to risks that increased defence spending can obviate? Although written in late 2018, it’s arguable that this article’s observations and judgements have stood the test of time, perhaps taking on greater resonance in the wake of the
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The Australian Prime Minister compares the current strategic environment to “the existential threat we faced when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s”. If he believes current global circumstances are comparable to those that preceded the Second World War, the response in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update is inadequate. If he doesn’t, his references amount to fear-mongering.
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There is little to quarrel with in Hugh White’s assessment of the uncertainties in East Asia. His counsel to the government on the way forward for strategic policy, on the other hand, is less satisfactory.
To embark on a major expansion of Australia’s military forces is not the way to protect Australia.
Conceptual confusion is evident in the speechmaking of leading Australian political figures as the post World War II era’s structured international arrangements of durable institutions and agreed norms – designed to facilitate peaceful dispute resolution and cooperation on security, economic and social matters between nations – are challenged by the United States and others.
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The much-used phrase ‘shared values’ is regularly used as the basis for international relationships and alliances. It can be used to selectively point to values found in political, social or economic ideologies, or in religious or ethical systems – and to divert attention away from substantive issues or conjure up imaginary communities of interest. In the context of the Australia-India Strategic Partnership, does the use of the phrase mask the real strategic purpose of the agreement?
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Australia’s Prime Minister recently said that Australia always respects the sovereignty of other nations, and simply expects the same in return. But cases like Kosovo, Crimea, Jammu-Kashmir and Hong Kong illustrate the tension between sovereignty and self-determination – and the significance of precedent-setting. Recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank requires careful, nuanced consideration. What position will Australia take?
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The recent report ‘Eyes Wide Open: Managing the Australia-China Antarctic Relationship’ contains a lot of information about China’s activities in Antarctica and usefully sets out aspects of the Chinese-Australian relationship.
But are the report’s recommendations a disproportionate reaction to a manufactured crisis regarding China’s presence and activities in Antarctica?
Grand strategies are the territory of great powers, while other states see their strategic independence incorporated into another state’s grand strategy. The comfort that Australia embraced while enclosed in an American grand strategy can’t last, and hard choices lie ahead. In the shifting power balance, Australia will need to recover its autonomy.
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According to a report released in January 2020 by the Bennett Institute (Cambridge), many large democracies are now at their highest-ever recorded level for democratic dissatisfaction, including the UK, US, Brazil, Mexico and Australia. Many large democracies are now at their highest-ever recorded level for democratic dissatisfaction, including the UK, US, Brazil, Mexico and Australia A report released in January 2020 by the new Centre for the Future of Democracy at the Bennett Institute, University
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The report from Australia’s Commission for the Human Future sets out clearly and with insight the major and inter-dependent challenges that will persist beyond the pandemic – including global warming, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, resource scarcity and wealth inequality. Action is vital, but how to respond seems as elusive as ever.
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ASPI’s Peter Jennings and Michael Shoebridge have recently foreshadowed a potential military crisis in North Asia, possibly as soon as late 2020 or early 2021. Amongst other extraordinary measures, Shoebridge calls for the ANZUS Treaty to be invoked. Jennings calls for the Australian Defence Force to be placed on the highest levels of readiness and for defence expenditure to be boosted to around 3.2% of GDP. Are their conclusions supported by the evidence they proffer?
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New security issues presented by global warming, and now, pandemics, constitute existential threats. They go to the heart of national security, showing that the scope of national security policy needs to transcend traditional defence and law enforcement models by comprehending climate change, human security against pandemics, environmental degradation, food security, water shortages and refugee flows – to identify just a few issues.
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Australia’s strategic quandary emerges from its status as an ally to a great power. If it abrogates its responsibility to set national policy aims by joining in a coalition in which one great power antagonist determines the goals of the war it cannot claim to have a strategy. It cannot claim to be linking Australia’s national priorities to the military actions. Its fate would be in the hands of its great power ally.
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Writing in ASPI’s The Strategist, Michael Shoebridge rightly points out that how the US rebounds from the COVID-19 crisis will be important. For better or worse Australia is tightly bound with the US economically and strategically. But Shoebridge’s arguments posit an excessively flattering picture of the US and an incomplete view of its history – at a time when it is crucial that Australian foreign and strategic policy-makers have a realistic and unvarnished understanding of how the US might approach the post-pandemic world.
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It’s problematic to present arguments for a submarine capability that lean heavily on a fuzzy concept: the ‘capability gap’. In the current strategic environment, the idea of a capability gap may have become redundant. And doesn’t it seem odd to expect submarines now being designed to fill a ‘capability gap’ in 30+ years time?
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COVID-19 presents a moral crisis – a choice between ethically unpalatable options. Choosing a strategy of mitigation over suppression strikes a particular balance between expected loss of life and maintaining economic activity. Accepting the real possibility of a greater loss of lives than otherwise might occur has a ‘dirty hands’ feel about it. Leaders and institutions will need to prepare themselves for the opprobrium that will come from confronting such moral dilemmas.
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Some confusion has emerged in Australian strategic thinking over ‘strategic strike’, where a threat to an adversary’s key war-making assets produces a deterrent effect, and ‘tactical strike’, where an effect is sought on the battlefield. The result is the inability to see that strategic deterrence is a game for the nation with the preponderance of power and broad options.
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Writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot sees some common threads in the approaches to COVID-19 of the UK, US and Australian governments. The worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. In the UK, the US and Australia, the politics of the governing parties have been built on the dismissal and denial of risk. Just as these politics have delayed the necessary responses to climate breakdown, ecological collapse, air and water pollution,
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