It’s not yet two months old, but our AUKUS partnership with the United States and Britain is already showering us with lessons about statecraft, strategy, politics and how to buy submarines. Here is my take on what the past seven weeks have shown us.

First, strategic partnerships are built on common interests and explicitly shared understandings. These links cannot be faked.

France’s ambassador to Australia, Jean-Pierre Thebault, stressed at the National Press Club this week that the failure of the submarine project was the result of ‘the breach of trust caused by the attitude of the Australian government’.

This has a slightly Chinese ‘wolf warrior’ tone to it. Is it solely Australia’s fault? In truth, it takes two to fall out of love.

When it comes to submarines, Australia and France were never on the same page. For Paris, as Thebault says, ‘The Attack-class program was always far more than a contract.’ From the start, the French saw it as an unprecedented act of generosity to build a strategic partnership based on access to their most secret military technology.

Australia never saw it that way. We treated the submarine project like any other defence procurement—a negotiation over price, time frames and specifications.

We ran the project in the bowels of the Department of Defence with officials reluctantly surfacing every few months, hoping to avoid questions at Senate committees. For years, our political leadership had almost nothing to say about submarines other than talking up jobs in South Australia.

By contrast, France saw this as a grand political deal. An Australian military contingent marched at the head of the Bastille Day parade through Paris in July 2016. France saw the Australian connection as the centrepiece of a new strategy to emphasise the Indo-Pacific, which President Emmanuel Macron announced in Sydney in May 2018.

Neither country ever came to grips with this flawed reading of each other’s intentions.

The second lesson is that AUKUS has a better chance of working because it gathers three countries with a far closer connection around interests and shared strategic understandings.

The Anglosphere works—to the annoyance of not just the French but also a generation of Australian public servants brainwashed with the myth that claiming we are part of Asia means we should shun ties of history and kinship.

That’s not to say the AUKUS partners might not disappoint each other. Indeed, the third lesson is that, in international diplomacy, Australia, the US, Britain and even France all have a great deal to be modest and apologetic about.

In the 1980s, France was hardly a model neighbour in the Pacific—think of nuclear testing and sinking the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour. What about Britain’s withdrawal from east of the Suez Canal in the 1950s or joining the EU in the 1960s at a cost to Australian exports? Then we have the US withdrawal from the forever war in Afghanistan a nine-week eternity ago. And don’t forget our chronic underinvestment in defence, enabled by American military might.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is surely right to say that national leaders should ‘move on’. It’s time to stop the recriminations, which unchecked could ricochet for years. We all have more than enough, to use President Joe Biden’s word, ‘clumsy’ foreign policy moments to live down.

Lesson four: we have more insight into Biden. A careful reading of his comments at that meeting with Macron in Rome last Friday shows that Biden did not completely throw Australia under the bus.

Biden said, ‘What we did was clumsy. It was not done with a lot of grace.’ Note the emphasis on ‘we’. The rest of Biden’s comments stressed the importance of America’s relations with France, but there was no backward step on the purpose or priority of AUKUS. Why? Because the Anglosphere works.

On the other hand, it’s remarkable that Biden—‘honest to God’—seemed astounded by the French annoyance at losing a $90 billion deal. While Donald Trump never read his briefing papers, it seems that Biden reads his but can’t remember them. We need a strategy for Biden management.

Lesson five: we need to lock in AUKUS outcomes at warp speed. We shouldn’t take a luxurious 18 months to decide between a maxed-out US or maxed-out UK submarine production line.

Australia should opt to buy in to the US Virginia-class production line; we need to find a way to bring the UK into that, but let’s stick to the US design with no costly Australian modifications.

My sixth lesson is that strategy is at its best when it’s written down. A flaw in the Australian approach on submarines is that both the French design and its nuclear-propelled successor were the results of policy made by press conference.

Governments need to get back to the discipline of thinking through complex policy on paper and using ministerial statements and policy documents to explain them to the Australian public.

Morrison should use the next parliamentary sitting to make a detailed statement about the purpose of and plan for AUKUS. He should articulate an agenda for the 18-month pathway to a design decision and allow the broadest parliamentary debate to get everyone on record as to where they stand. The PM should then regularly report progress to parliament.

Lesson seven: Plan Bs are good. We would never have been given the opportunity to develop nuclear propulsion if Morrison hadn’t forced Defence to ask questions that had previously been undiscussable.

The search for Plan B reflects a type of policy leadership now all too rare at the political level. Up to that moment, the government had surrendered the public management of the submarine program to the worst bovine instincts of the Defence Department. Never again.

It’s desperately important that AUKUS succeeds and that after 18 months—or, hopefully, earlier—we have that defined pathway to nuclear propulsion. But what if the project fails? We need a Plan C, which will be the plan for how we strengthen the deterrent capability and hitting power of our military without nuclear-powered submarines.

Plan C must strengthen our defences as we wait potentially 20 years (hopefully less) for the nuclear boats to arrive. The Australian Defence Force of 2022 is much more important to us than the ADF of 2042.

Finally, lesson eight: if we run AUKUS like we ran the Attack-class project, it too will fail. AUKUS cannot be left to the admirals, fine people though they are. The government must fund and run this project like the security of our nation hangs on the outcome. As indeed it does.

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

For a think tank devoted to strategy, the need to combat climate change leads naturally to the realms of defence and national security.

ASPI’s early work on climate change was driven by Anthony Bergin from the time he joined the institute in 2006.

Bergin had been director of the Australian Defence Studies Centre at the Defence Force Academy (1991–2003), and his writing on climate drew on his study of oceans policy, the South Pacific and Antarctica.

Bergin twinned his research on terrorism with his study of climate change. His responses to the two scourges rhymed: the need for Australia to ‘harden’ and build resilience, for the Australian people to clearly understand the policy challenges, and for all arms of government to think about lines of leadership, responsibilities and coordinated responses.

Bergin hunted for answers that joined up Australia’s governments, police, emergency services, insurers and businesses. A central thought running through his writing was the impact of climate change on the role and structure of Australia’s military.

In 2007, Bergin and Jacob Townsend issued A change in climate for the Australian Defence Force discussing how the ADF must rebalance its mix of missions and create new mission types. The task was to look out two to three decades to examine the implications for strategy, force structure, capability and the way the military uses energy.

ADF missions would blend disaster relief, development assistance and state-building, Bergin and Townsend wrote. The biggest challenge would be changing Defence’s behaviours and systems without reducing the ADF’s operational capability.

Relief missions would demand the capability to move and land large volumes of supplies. The navy might require more shallow-draft ships to land in disaster‑stricken areas and heavy-lift helicopters for ship‑to‑shore transport, or even hovercraft:

For the ADF, the rapid response that disasters demand may require bigger surge capacity, a larger logistics capability and maintaining higher states of readiness. Additional resources would be needed, while extreme weather will add complexity to military missions and maintenance schedules.

In the following decade, Bergin hailed as ‘absolute game-changers’ the navy’s biggest vessels, the Canberra-class landing helicopter docks, which were longer than the previous aircraft carrier. The ships could respond to disasters in Australia as well as in the region:

The LHDs will focus on regional military support, including in disasters (they can be deployed as floating hospitals and command and control centres); evacuation missions (such as a raid from the sea to recover hostages); and peacekeeping. They will also play a key role in extreme natural disasters at home.

At ASPI’s 2007 Global Forces conference, Brahma Chellaney argued that beyond the environment or economics lay a new topic: ‘climate security’, expressing the ominous link between global warming and international security.

Climate change would be a ‘threat multiplier’, Chellaney said, raising the risk of water wars, while different weather patterns would impinge on military operations. The most severe effects of climate change would occur where states were poor or fragile:

Intra-state and inter-state crises over water and food shortages, inundation of low-lying areas, or recurrent droughts, hurricanes or flooding may lead to large displacements of citizens and mass migrations, besides exacerbating ethnic or economic divides in societies. It is thus important to examine the risks of global warming, including potential situations in which climatic variations could be a catalyst for conflict within or between states.

ASPI explored the policy implications of the scientific findings and the expanding demands of national security, and Bergin produced or co-wrote a series of studies.

Australian domestic security—the role of Defence: The primary ADF focus was on warfighting, but a shift or broadening of military culture was needed. Expectations of Defence in domestic security had increased: ‘Government is attracted to using the ADF because it projects strength.’ Potential roles included maritime surveillance, special-event security and mass-gathering protection, communications and community liaison, and critical infrastructure protection.

An Office of National Security: Australia needed a national security strategy, created and run by an independent entity reporting directly to the prime minister, much like the Office of National Assessments.

Taking a punch emphasised resilience, robustness and alternative supply options as answers to terrorism and climate-caused disasters—building the ability to deal with large-scale catastrophic events. Disaster response loomed as ‘a core mission’ for the ADF, influencing equipment decisions and military basing around Australia.

Cops and climate: Australia’s eight police forces would be the ‘thin green line’, facing disasters and environmental refugees, enforcing emissions trading schemes and protecting precious water.

All in a day’s work—business and Australian disaster management: There’d be a dollar in it, but business is happy to help. And they’re already in place.

Rudd’s Army—a deployable civilian capacity for Australia: In 2009, the Labor government considered a deployable civilian capacity for the rapid use of civilian experts in international disaster relief, stabilisation and post-conflict reconstruction. Bergin and Bob Breen recommended an emergency response register (medical teams, engineers, logisticians, sanitation experts and communications technicians) and a register monitoring the quantity and location of commercial stocks for emergency aid.

Hardening Australia argued that the disasters of climate change would ‘become larger, more complex, occur simultaneously and in regions that have either not experienced the natural hazard previously or at the same intensity or frequency’. The nation needed to harden critical infrastructure just as it should harden the preparation and coordination of its emergency response system.

In 2010, Here to help explored the developing Defence role in disaster management. Extreme weather events would increase the vulnerability of the growing populations in coastal developments and in bushfire-prone areas. The ADF would be called because of the continual per capita fall in the number of volunteers and emergency services personnel and ‘growing community and political expectations to use military resources to support whole-of-government counter-disaster efforts’.

Financing Australia’s disaster resilience posed fundamental questions about the roles of private insurance and government in reducing future losses from natural disasters: ‘We need a new approach to financing the costs of natural disasters and encouraging those living in high-risk areas to be better prepared. The reality is that all Australian taxpayers will have to bear a share of this cost.’

In 2013, Heavy weather said that the ADF would inevitably be involved in mitigation and response tasks. Seeking to deflect the politics of scepticism or denial, the report argued that this wasn’t a ‘green’ view, but was about the need to prepare Australia’s military to deal with disruptive forces. An interagency group should examine ‘climate event scenarios for Australia and the Asia–Pacific’ and the implications for national resilience and regional stability. The ADF chief should have a climate adviser and should work with the Five Eyes allies (Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US) to plan military responses to extreme weather events.

In 2014,Working as one: a road map to disaster resilience for Australia reported that natural disasters cost the Australian economy $6.3 billion per year, and that was projected to rise to $23 billion by 2050. Rather than ‘just waiting for the next king hit and paying for it afterwards’, Australia must build the resilience of individuals and local communities as well as state and federal agencies.

As strategy is always about responding to change, the discussion of climate security had become one element of responding to climate change.

Drawn from the book on the institute’s first 20 years: An informed and independent voice: ASPI, 2001–2021.

Australia’s strategic policy leaders have long been acutely aware of the importance of the nation’s north to economic, ecological and tactical security. The vast expanse of country has been continuously cared for by First Nations peoples for over 65,000 years. Through their cultures and languages, they have deep understandings of the land and its inland and marine waters, an immutable connection to country and historical economic and cultural connections to Australia’s northern neighbours. But consideration of the role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their perspectives has been largely absent from the policy agenda until very recently.

To understand the role First Nations people have to play in the north, it’s worth contrasting the historical and present-day experiences of Indigenous Australians living in northern regions with those in southern jurisdictions. While Indigenous citizens across Australia are more likely to experience economic disadvantage and suffer the consequences of institutional (and personal) racism, geographic and demographic differences play a substantial role in shaping the lives of individuals, communities and economies.

Well before European settlement, First Nations people in northern Australia established trade and cultural relationships with what are now Southeast Asian nations, including Macassan Trepang traders of southern Sulawesi and across the Torres Strait to what is now Papua New Guinea and Indonesian New Guinea. These millennia-long relationships present an opportunity to reactivate a new dimension in not only trade, but also regional defence and biosecurity arrangements. Historically, cultural exchanges were also an important part of the trading relationship and it’s worthwhile considering them in the development of free trade agreements.

First Nations people account for 15% of the overall population in the north compared to just 3% in the south. Outside of the major northern settlements, the proportion is even higher—between 15% and 25% across the Northern Territory and northern parts of Queensland and Western Australia. First Nations people make up more than 50% of the population in a third of local government areas. And, according to current demographic trends, Indigenous people will make up around half of the working-age population in the north by 2050.

Historical and more recent political and policy developments have resulted in Indigenous Australians now having ownership or legal interests in over 80% of the northern landmass, including around 85% of the Northern Territory coastline. This makes the Indigenous estate of the north several orders of magnitude larger than its equivalent in the south, and given Australia’s geographic location and geopolitical position, the strategic importance of this land to national security can’t be overstated.

While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in Australian Defence Force tactical units, particularly the North-West Mobile Force, or NORFORCE, is notable, the involvement of First Nations people in the operational security of the north remains substantively underbaked, given their existing potential and resources. In many parts of northern Australia, members of about 80 Indigenous land and sea ranger groups are the only human presence for thousands of kilometres, and their knowledge of these remote areas is unparalleled. From a surveillance perspective, Indigenous land and sea ranger groups are an underutilised security asset.

When considering the capacity of Indigenous ranger groups to support surveillance, it’s important to recognise that the scope of ‘surveillance’ in a national security context must include biosecurity surveillance. Australia’s multibillion-dollar agricultural and tourism sectors, along with our health system, depend on our ability to monitor and effectively control incursions of pathogens and invasive species. Given the sheer length of the northern coastline, and the remoteness and vastness of the northern landmass, providing a level of biosecurity surveillance that delivers adequate protection for Australia’s population and economy through conventional means verges on impossible. As custodians of the land, with knowledge of its form and management stretching from the deep past to the ever-changing present, Indigenous people are an obvious, yet too often overlooked, resource in Australia’s biosecurity arsenal.

Indigenous Australians are increasingly being recognised not only as ‘traditional’ custodians of the land, but as the rightful, legal owners. Third-party settlements and access agreements created by legislation or contracts pertaining to the Indigenous estate have resulted in billions of dollars residing in trusts and other arrangements for which First Nations groups are beneficiaries. Though we are yet to see the large-scale activation of this asset base, Australian jurisprudence, legislation and policy are increasingly following international trajectories in recognising Indigenous rights to land, resources and self-determination.

Optimal activation of the Indigenous asset base (in the north and elsewhere) requires further reform to provide legal rights with respect to the ability to appropriate value from land, water, cultural and intellectual property rights. Currently, the legislated interests of First Nations peoples in their traditional lands, to say nothing of their other assets, is unnecessarily complex and inequitable. These interests range from exclusive possession under fee simple or ‘fee simple–like’ title, to rights that provide a form of shared tenure. In many circumstances, that amounts to little more than a right to interfere in matters pertaining to their lands.

While reform to Commonwealth and jurisdictional legislation will certainly be required in this regard, significant and immediate improvements can be made through less complex measures. For instance, it requires no legislative change for third parties to demonstrate an appreciation of the legal and ethical rights of Indigenous owners as they engage in land-use negotiations, or for those parties to ensure that Indigenous rights are reflected in commercial contracts.

In addition, to be effective counterparties and developers in their own right, traditional owners require the rights and resources, including civil and economic governance arrangements and capacity development, to freely manage their own financial assets on their terms.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that the entire Australian community and economy stands to benefit from the expansion of economic activity in our north. The scale and abundance of natural resources and unique cultural and intellectual property belonging to First Nations communities and organisations, and the proximity of those assets to growing regional minerals, food, energy, carbon and tourism markets, means the region can’t be truly developed without genuine, equitable participation by First Nations people.

Amid the commentary on Australia’s handling of France over the decision to switch to nuclear-powered submarines, Canberra’s treatment of another close partner and the reaction that has caused have received relatively scant attention.

The Australian government’s dealings with Indonesia on the submarines and AUKUS was no less maladroit.

Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi’s carefully crafted communiqué on AUKUS and its headline first act was muted compared to Paris’s understandable fury at being so shamelessly gulled. On the surface, it simply called on Australia to keep to its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and encouraged Canberra to settle differences ‘peacefully’ through dialogue and international law, specifically the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

But Marsudi’s pointed use of adverbs like ‘deeply’ hint at more profound concerns, and the dynamics of Indonesian politics are likely to plunge them even deeper.

One doesn’t have to swallow the line of some observers in Jakarta that Southeast Asians are universally upset by Australia’s ‘arrogant’ actions on the grounds that buying such boats will imperil the region’s aspirations to being a zone of peace.

They aren’t. Some have welcomed AUKUS and what it brings, including Australia’s boats. Their fears about China lie behind this.

Even many Indonesians are unconvinced that signing up to the ASEAN peace treaty guarantees either amity or cooperation when Beijing is busy enforcing its absurd nine-dash-line pretensions to ownership of the ‘North Natuna Sea’.

Some have been quick to urge Indonesia to step up its military responsiveness to China’s latest incursion into its exclusive economic zone, which the government has done, albeit without any accompanying statement from Retno expressing concerns, deep or otherwise, about Beijing’s actions.

One Indonesian parliamentarian, a former major general, has even claimed that an ‘anti-communist’ group within Indonesia’s military was keen for Indonesia to join the US ‘bloc’ and transform AUKUS into ‘AUKUSI’.

That said, it’s true that many Indonesian commentators, like their government, want to put the emphasis on international law and ASEAN-centred diplomacy in dealing with Beijing. For them, AUKUS and Australia’s submarines are an affront to both.

Moreover, President Joko Widodo’s administration doesn’t see the need to pick sides—much as Australian governments used to argue until recently—especially when it sees material advantage in flirting with both.

The Australian government isn’t oblivious to this sentiment, or the need to play to it. Foreign Minister Marise Payne has recited her mantra that Australia wants to help towards the region’s peace and security under the wise helmsmanship of ASEAN.

But the government’s actions have made these words sound more hollow than ever. Sequencing the Jakarta-hosted 2+2 meeting just one week before the AUKUS announcement is a glaring example.

Whatever hints Australia’s ministers might have given their Indonesian counterparts, it’s clear that Jakarta was as blindsided as the French.

This is not to say that Canberra should have let the Widodo administration into the secret. Our comprehensive strategic partnership is way too short of being truly strategic for that.

But this not how to treat partners in a relationship that we sensibly want incrementally to grow more closely aligned, even if anything approaching a truly meaningful and influential strategic relationship is still little more than a pipe dream.

We could and should have done things differently, more respectfully and frankly—and held the talks after the AUKUS announcement.

Canberra could have told its partners in Jakarta some time beforehand that something was going to happen that would affect their interests, begged their understanding that this needed to be held close for the time being, reassured them that we’d taken full account of Indonesia’s position, and explained that we must brief our partners.

Of course, after the announcement the Indonesians may have expressed their discontent by abruptly postponing the talks. The optics would not have been ideal. But all it would have shown is that the two countries held different positions and that Australia at least showed Indonesia the respect of giving it some forewarning and the chance to discuss the matter as equals.

On the other hand, had the talks proceeded, we could have demonstrated plausibly that we’d listened attentively to what Indonesia was telling us and would behave accordingly. We could have allowed Jakarta to highlight how concerned it was that Australia keep to its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its stated adherence to ASEAN regional leadership and its Indo-Pacific vision. We could have politely and respectfully argued that deterring hegemonic behaviour that threatened ASEAN’s principles and the sovereignty of its members necessitated a credible deterrent, but that we of course shared the goal of sustainable peace and prosperity.

Instead, by carrying on blithely with the talks before the announcement, we’ve left the impression of duplicity and arrogance. Too many Indonesians have associated the first characteristic with us since East Timor’s independence, if not before. But arrogance is especially frowned upon in Indonesian culture and often associated with neo-colonial tendencies.

We’ve not only added superficial credence to the argument now raging in Jakarta that Australia has crawled away from ASEAN and back to its ethno-racial brethren and the pretensions of deputy sheriffdom. We’ve given more resonance to the arguments of those insisting that Australia is no less a threat to ASEAN states’ interests in keeping their region peaceful than China, notwithstanding that the AUKUS and Quad states haven’t claimed any disputed atoll as their own and turned it into an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

We’ve flared the preconception that Australia is cavalier about Indonesia’s desire that foreign submarines—especially ‘nuclear’ ones—don’t secretly ply waters it regards as its tanah air (homeland).

The dynamics of Jakarta’s politics and its structures of government risk deepening this impression. Indonesia’s system affords a significant role in international affairs to its legislature. Distinct from the executive in Indonesia’s presidential system, the parliament’s commission responsible for foreign and defence issues not only exercises actual powers but also serves as a bully pulpit to shape public opinion, often in the direction of nationalist populism.

Australia has often been a favourite target of this body’s more jingoistic members, and little could inspire them more than the prospect of their southern neighbour being up to its perceived usual tricks and treating Indonesia with contempt.

The commission’s members have acted true to form, with some urging the administration to confront Australia for threatening the region’s peace and taking measures that have ‘implications for the defence … or the sovereignty of our country’.

The commission’s censure will add to the negative perceptions of AUKUS and Australia’s military ambitions already in the public domain. Australia even seems to have engendered suspicions that it’s secretly planning to arm its submarines with nuclear weapons, regardless of our assurances to the contrary.

Our assurances risk carrying as much weight in such quarters, including in the commission, as our insistence that we have no designs on Papua, even though both are true.

In democratic Indonesia, administrations can ill afford to disregard such political posturing, and the administration’s messaging has subtly adjusted. After appearing before a closed commission hearing, Deputy Foreign Minister Mahendra Siregar reaffirmed that Indonesia was ‘worried’ that Australia’s nuclear submarine plans would destabilise the region by provoking an arms race, pointing the blame for such ‘disturbance’ more openly than Retno.

All this affirms that unless Australia starts investing as much strategy and trust in diplomacy as it does in military preparedness—if not in sheer dollar terms, then at least in skill, integrity and nous—we risk doing little to ‘shape’ our region besides helping a select few deter China from forcefully reshaping it.

It’s hard to be optimistic that the government will do so. Too often the political optics seem to be paramount. And in questions of national security, it has shown little evidence, despite modest boosts to the aid budget for Southeast Asia, that it holds its foreign ministry in the same regard as defence, whether as a source of advice or as a prop for its announcements.

The view seems to be that the domestic case for doing more to pursue our foreign and strategic interests is more marketable standing in front of impressive weapons or next to American presidents than behind culturally astute diplomatic tradecraft.

The government might well claim that with Indonesia, this approach works fine. It may assume that AUKUS will not lead to Jakarta repudiating our strategic partnership agreement, let alone rejecting the Bushmaster vehicles Australia has gifted it or recoil from the other small but welcome enhancements to the defence cooperation agreement both sides committed to during the talks.

By such superficial measures, it might well be right. We’ll manage our way out of any immediate tension, which Jakarta will wish to limit.

But as the past fortnight has underlined in very dark tones (especially in our relations with France), tin-eared diplomacy accrues costs, especially in disaffecting and even offending those we need most to influence.

For the time being, Australia and Indonesia disagree fundamentally over the relative utility of dialogue and alliance-based hard power in deterring a would-be hegemon and preserving sovereignty, and about how much of the latter is necessary if the former can have any power of persuasion.

We should expect this disagreement to persist for the foreseeable future. The Widodo administration’s successor will likely think the same way.

That’s fine. We can disagree.

We should certainly not be dissuaded from taking measures we consider vital to our national security just because Jakarta holds a profoundly different perspective. (Whether the course Canberra has chosen is the right one is an entirely different debate.)

But if one of our strategic objectives is a relationship with Indonesia that has matured beyond the transactional into a genuine partnership built on mutual trust and respect, we will need to relearn how to pursue that more adroitly.

In time, we could help nudge Jakarta at least into shifting closer to those of its ASEAN partners less ambivalent about China’s real threat and how realistically to address it, while lending more credence to our claims in Washington that we are attuned to, and influential in, our region.

This will take more than just scheduling meetings better, though that would help.