To either over-emphasise or understate the challenge presented by China is perilous. So Is Paul Dibb right to suggest that the West is failing to see China’s weakness, much as it failed to understand the weakness of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s?
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The prospect of nuclear powered submarines has generated a lot of magical thinking in defence and strategic policy circles. But the incontrovertible fact is that submarines that don’t exist cannot either defend or deter.
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Is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute advocating that Defence policy should be outsourced to weapon system manufacturers? Commercial organisations responsible to shareholders, often foreign interests, should not be responsible for identifying and pursuing Australia’s national interest.
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The key judgement Australian decision-makers need to confront concerns the sustainability of the United States’ great power status. Is America reaching a tipping point; an inflexion point where the upward great power trajectory it has been on for over a century is reversed?
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Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison might have gone to Europe with the Indo-Pacific region “is the epicentre of renewed strategic competition” mantra on his lips, but the NATO communique reflects the reality that it is Russia, not China, that fills Europe’s strategic horizon.
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What are the ‘drums of war’ that senior Australian public servant, Michael Pezzullo, can hear? His words have been understood as echoing anti-China warmongering found among some commentators and hinting strongly at the current hysteria around Taiwan. So how did the Australian government deal with a senior public servant stepping into the political limelight in this way?
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Iran and China have signed a 25-year wide-ranging cooperation agreement referred to as the ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’. The agreement has long been under development, but the signing comes as both countries remain under US sanctions.
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The UK’s much anticipated new security, defence and foreign policy paper, Global Britain in a Competitive Age, sets out the government’s overarching national security and international policy objectives. Reviews have been mixed.
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If President Biden produces a National Security Strategy in 2021, Australia should hope for a major shift away from that of President Trump. But not an uncritical return to the 2015 version of President Obama. If stability and a workable international system are the outcomes the Biden Administration seeks, then three deeply interwoven issues need to be given serious attention: leadership, democracy, and sovereignty.
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The Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index 2020 is a substantial undertaking that purports to map “out the existing distribution of power as it stands today, and tracks shifts in the balance of power over time” by ranking “26 countries and territories in terms of their capacity to shape their external environment”. However, a misunderstanding of the concept of power, and some underlying subjectivity and biases, undermines its usefulness.
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With Russia, China and the United States leading the development of operational hypersonic weapons, other Indo-Pacific states, including Australia, have indicated that they intend to do so in the intermediate future. This comprehensive Atlantic Council primer seeks to marry technological characteristics, geostrategic and military imperatives, and regional dynamics in order to provide a basis for further analysis about hypersonic development and application trajectories in the Indo-Pacific.
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That the pandemic will have an impact on defence ministries is beyond doubt. One way or another, national governments and defence ministries will have to grapple with the immediate and extended effects of the pandemic on their countries’ military spending and resource allocation.
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Is a great power war in prospect? The study of war provides insights into the preconditions for conflict and an awareness of the unpredictable nature of war. It shows that great power wars can be as unpredictable as they are transformational. The winners are hidden from sight at the inception, and the losers risk everything. If Australian leaders assume they could come out unscathed on the winning side of an East Asian war they are taking a huge gamble on behalf of Australian citizens.
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Only a select group of voices is heard most often and most loudly on the subject of Australia’s strategic policy. This creates a false sense of certainty around what is a speculative and inexact policy area. The policy choices, and the connection between strategic policy and force structure, deserve to be intensively examined and validated through public debate – not least of all because the opportunity cost of defence investment is huge.
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Australians should not take comfort from recent government statements around the Australia-US Ministerial Consultations – claims that Australia makes its own decisions, its own judgments, in the Australian national interest, in order to uphold Australia’s security, prosperity and values. Reassuring words are the slippery province of diplomacy. Strategic policy is founded in force structure and force posture.
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Retired Royal Australian Navy Admiral James Goldrick provides an initial assessment of the Strategic Update, suggesting that the strategic assessment is sound, but that “the planned measures” may not be enough, and may not “be in place in time to achieve the deterrent effects now deemed so necessary”.
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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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Secondary sanctions are a potent form of economic coercion that allows the US to extend its jurisdiction well beyond its borders, enabling interference in other nations’ foreign policy independence and infringing other nations’ sovereignty. Knudsen argues that economic autonomy depends on displacing the US from the central role in international finance.
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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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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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