In this episode, Strategist editor Jack Norton covers this year’s Beersheba Dialogue, the annual conference between ASPI and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, named after the World War I battle.

He speaks to former Labor MP and shadow assistant minister for defence and cybersecurity Gai Brodtmann about the state of the Australia–Israel relationship and to arms-control expert Emily Landau about the Iran nuclear deal and the possible threat posed by Tehran.

Jack also interviews veteran journalist Yossi Melman about Israel’s relationship with China, with a focus on Chinese investment in the country.

It is evident from Australia’s increasingly severe droughts and record-breaking heatwaves that time is running out to take action on climate change.

Yet, despite persistent calls from eminent scientists to reduce global dependence on fossil fuels, a call to action has gone unanswered by our political leaders.

And we aren’t facing just an environmental threat in Australia—there are significant implications for our national security and defence capabilities that we haven’t fully reckoned with either.

This point was made abundantly clear in a speech prepared for defence force chief Angus Campbell in June, excerpts of which have been recently published by the media. It noted that Australia is in ‘the most natural disaster-prone region in the world … [and] climate change is predicted to make disasters more extreme and more common. If the predictions are correct, it will have serious ramifications for global security and serious ramifications for the ADF.’

Climate change works as a threat multiplier—it exacerbates the drivers of conflict by deepening fragilities within societies, straining weak institutions, reshaping power balances and undermining post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding.

This year’s IISS armed conflict survey noted that ‘climate-related drivers for armed violence and conflict will increase as climate change progresses’.

The survey points out that the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that escalated into civil war was preceded by the country’s deepest and most prolonged drought on record. One study found that the drought was two to three times more likely to happen due to climate change, and that it helped fuel migration to large cities, which in turn exacerbated the social issues that caused the unrest.

In May 2018, I was among numerous experts who gave evidence to a Senate committee examining the potential impacts of climate change on Australia’s national security. One of the biggest threats I identified was the possibility of mass migration driven by climate change.

There will be nearly 6 billion people in the Asia–Pacific by 2050. And if the region has become increasingly destabilised due to climate change, many people will likely be affected by rising sea levels, water and food shortages, armed conflicts and natural disasters, and desperate to find more secure homes.

This is already happening now. Since 2008, it’s estimated that an average of 22.5 million to 24 million people have been displaced globally each year due to catastrophic weather events and climate-related disasters. And a new World Bank report estimates that 143 million people in three developing regions alone—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America—could become climate migrants by 2050.

Australia, with its very low population density, will likely be an attractive place for climate migrants to attempt to resettle in. The World Bank has called on Australia to allow open migration from climate-affected Pacific islands, but successive governments haven’t exactly been open to refugees and asylum seekers in recent years. If we don’t have a plan in place, our estimated 2050 population of 37.6 million could be overwhelmed by the scale of the national security problem.

Other experts agree. American climate security expert Sherri Goodman has described climate change as a ‘direct threat to the national security of Australia’, saying the region is ‘most likely to see increasing waves of migration from small island states or storm-affected, highly populated areas in Asia that can’t accommodate people when a very strong storm hits’.

Australia would also struggle to respond to worsening natural disasters in our region either caused by or exacerbated by climate change.

As part of the Senate inquiry, the Department of Defence noted an ‘upwards trend’ in both disaster-related events in the Asia–Pacific region and disaster-related defence operations in the past 20 years. As alluded to in the speech prepared for Campbell, we could easily find ourselves overwhelmed by disaster relief missions due to the severity and scale of future weather events, or due to a series of events that occur concurrently in dispersed locations.

This would stretch our available first-responder forces—defence, police, ambulance, firefighters and other emergency services—even in the absence of any other higher priority peacekeeping missions around the world.

The Senate report listed 11 recommendations for action by national security agencies and the government. Among these were calls for:

• the government to develop a climate security white paper to guide a coordinated government response to climate change risks
• the Department of Defence to consider releasing an unclassified version of the work it has undertaken already to identify climate risks to the country
• the government to consider a dedicated climate security leadership position in Home Affairs to coordinate climate resilience issues
• the Department of Defence to create a dedicated senior leadership position to oversee the delivery of domestic and international humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as climate pressures increase over time.

Some of these findings were contested. In their comments, the Coalition senators made a point of saying how well the government has been doing on climate change in the defence and foreign affairs portfolios. Sufficient strategies are in place, they said, ‘to ensure Australia’s response to the implications of climate change on national security is well understood and consistent across the whole of government’. They also considered that a separate recommendation on defence emissions reduction targets fell outside the spirit of the inquiry. They did not support it.

The findings in the report are a cause for concern. The recommendations lack timetables for action and a sense of urgency.

The Senate committee also admitted its own shortcomings. For instance, it couldn’t adequately examine the potential impacts of climate change on Australia’s economy, infrastructure and community health and wellbeing due to a lack of substantial evidence on these issues.

Furthermore, and most worryingly, it seems the government just doesn’t care enough. It has yet to table a response to the report more than a year later.

A welcome development would be if the government announced a climate change security white paper that clearly spells out where ministers stand on the issue and the specific measures we need to take to prepare for the threats ahead. It would also dispel the concerns of many Australians about our future-readiness.

But the Coalition’s response to the Senate report is breathtakingly complacent and smacks of reckless negligence, given that Australia is on the front line when it comes to climate change and our national security faces undeniably serious risks.

Climate change is already presenting significant challenges to governance, our institutions and the fabric of our societies. It’s time we recognise the potential threats to security in our region as well.

US President Donald Trump’s muddled messaging on Chinese tech giant Huawei has had us all confused this year. The tweets, mixed signals and excessive focus on trading away policy positions for a ‘deal’ don’t always paint a picture of an administration with a long-term strategy for national security and technology.

The Australian government, while it certainly can’t always be held up as a strategic public communicator, does have clear messaging on its side when it comes to 5G. In August 2018, the Australian government banned ‘high-risk vendors’—including Huawei—from involvement in the country’s 5G networks. The government’s decision on Huawei was a too-rare example of policy contestability. It was fostered by a strong and in-depth public debate and involved input from multiple departments and agencies that spanned economic, technical, geopolitical and—importantly for Australia given its geographic location—strategic considerations.

Huawei is now unable to participate in Australia’s 5G build. Before that, in 2012, the company was banned from participating in Australia’s national broadband network. But beyond those pieces of critical national infrastructure, the company has free rein and continues to do plenty of business in Australia.

So, what motivated the Australian government’s decision on Huawei? The 5G network is critical national infrastructure, not public Wi-Fi for a local swimming pool. Critical parts of the economy will sit on top of—and rely on—5G. This is about far more than telecommunications; it’s about whole-of-economy security assurance.

While the media narrative has often been that the US applies pressure to its allies to ‘ban Huawei’, that wasn’t Australia’s experience. In fact, Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was ousted in mid-2018, has gone to great lengths this year to carefully and publicly explain why the decision was made. He is also on the record explaining that it was he who encouraged Trump to make 5G a greater priority.

Once the decision was done and dusted, it was clear that Australia’s choice came down to a combination of three overlapping issues: risks, transparency and trust.

There are many risks when it comes to working with a company like Huawei, and the Australian government’s appetite for risk on 5G wasn’t large enough to absorb them all.

When making various decisions related to 5G—and other critical technologies—the potential for ‘back doors’ is only one risk being weighed. Governments also need to make assessments about the integrity and availability of the data on the network, in addition to the confidentiality of information. They also need to worry about public relations and perception. For example, how closely do governments want to work and associate with a company that is complicit in enabling human rights abuses in Xinjiang through its work with the region’s public security apparatus?

A range of risks of working with Huawei are already on the record, from allegations of systematic intellectual property theft and dubious ethics to allegations of sensitive data theft that occurred under the company’s watch. Increasingly, governments also need to ensure they analyse, and fully understand, the laws that govern a company’s home environment. This is particularly critical when such laws mean a foreign government can exert extrajudicial direction, something that would obviously never be publicly acknowledged.

The UK government’s approach—testing Huawei’s equipment via the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre—provided a beacon of hope for governments wanting a middle-of-the-road solution. But, unfortunately, it’s turned out not to be the palatable policy option many governments were hoping to replicate. First, the evaluation centre’s mandate is purely technical, which means it can’t mitigate all the non-technical risks that come with working with a company like Huawei in 5G. Second, the centre’s annual reports have become progressively more negative in their outlook, and earlier this year Ian Levy, the technical director of the UK National Cyber Security Centre, gave a damning assessment of Huawei’s equipment: ‘The chance of a vulnerability with a Huawei piece of kit is much higher than other vendors.’ Third, the approach has the perverse effect of giving the most problematic major vendor an advantage over its competitors by providing it with tailored advice to improve its products.

Getting a straight answer out of Huawei—on a range of important issues—is difficult. This lack of public transparency puts the onus back on governments to conduct their own investigations to inform 5G policymaking. That’s a burden they don’t have to carry with other 5G vendors like Ericsson and Nokia.

For example, Huawei has struggled to explain who exactly owns the company and how its governance structure works. This is no small matter. Huawei has also struggled to prove its independence from the state. On the issue of internal Chinese Communist Party branches, a Huawei overseas executive said that while the company has one such branch, it ‘has no say in our operations. It meets in non-working hours and looks after staff social issues and activities. It has nothing to do with the management of the company and is run by a retired employee of the company.’ But through Chinese-language sources, we know this number and explanation are not correct.

In 2007, Huawei had reportedly established more than 300 CCP branches and counted 12,000 CCP members among its employees. The CCP’s expectations of these party committees—and associated branches—are clear. Article 32 of the CCP’s constitution outlines their responsibilities, which include encouraging everyone in the company to ‘consciously resist unacceptable practices and resolutely fight against all violations of party discipline or state law’.

The company has also struggled to explain what happened in the African Union headquarters  between 2012 and 2017, when there was reportedly a data breach that whisked sensitive information to servers in Shanghai every night. Huawei was the key ICT provider in the African Union headquarters and was responsible for protecting data from security threats. Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei hasn’t denied the hack took place, instead telling the media: ‘For the breach of equipment used by the African Union, it had nothing to do with Huawei.’

That may well be true, but wouldn’t a private company conduct an independent review to figure out how, over a period of five years, it all went so wrong? Meanwhile, Huawei’s work in Xinjiang is increasingly in the spotlight, and for good reason. In July 2019, the company argued that it is providing equipment in Xinjiang ‘via a third-party’. That is not true. In fact, many of Huawei’s business dealings in Xinjiang are done directly with local authorities, police and security agencies.

The announcement of one Huawei public security project in Xinjiang in 2018 even quoted Huawei director Tao Jingwen as saying, ‘Together with the Public Security Bureau, Huawei will unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society.’

Because 5G is critical national infrastructure, most governments must make sure they can trust the companies they partner with. The suite of risks, combined with a lack of transparency, has resulted in a crippling trust deficit. It would have been negligent of the Australian government to allow high-risk vendors, like Huawei, into Australia’s 5G network. In many ways, it wasn’t just the right decision. Given the evidence available, it was the only possible decision.

A version of this piece was published in The Diplomat magazine’s August 2019 issue as a section in the cover article, ‘Asia’s great Huawei debate’; it has been republished with permission.

In a speech in late 2001, Colin Powell stunned humanitarian actors around the world by describing NGOs as a ‘force multiplier’ for the US diplomatic and defence efforts around the globe and ‘an important part of our combat team’.

Although perhaps well intentioned, Powell’s characterisation of the role of NGOs signalled the beginning of a more dangerous era of American foreign policy and pointed to a fundamental lack of understanding among administration officials about the risks humanitarian workers face when they’re perceived to be affiliated with political and military forces.

Humanitarian organisations and their staff operate under a strict set of principles: humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence. With humanitarian action now heavily concentrated in contexts of conflict and violence, independence—the notion that humanitarian action must be autonomous from political, economic and military objectives—has come to be one of the most important principles for humanitarian actors and the people we serve.

These principles play a critical role in ensuring that humanitarian personnel can access civilians on all sides of a front line and can support those in greatest need, wherever they may be found. The principles are also essential in protecting our staff who work in these dangerous settings, who rely on community acceptance as their primary source of security.

In late May, Alex Hawke was appointed Australia’s minister for international development and the Pacific. Scott Morrison’s re-elevation of the role to a ministry is a welcome move and demonstrates the government’s commitment to the Pacific step-up, and hopefully to international development more broadly.

Hawke’s parallel appointment as assistant minister for defence, however, is a worrying indication of how Australia’s humanitarian aid program may be viewed by the new government. In his press conference, the prime minister noted that this dual appointment would hopefully lead to greater integration of Australia’s international development and defence efforts in the Pacific.

For those who experienced the blurred lines of America’s foreign policy during the so-called war on terror, Hawke’s joint appointment and the prime minister’s statement are unwelcome echoes back to Powell’s 2001 remarks. As in 2001, humanitarians in Australia are worried about what this will mean for the preservation of independence, and for perceptions of our neutrality when delivering government-branded assistance in active conflict settings.

Any affiliation between political or military actors and humanitarian organisations, even if only an implied affiliation, can compromise development and humanitarian efforts and jeopardise the safety of humanitarian workers. And the risk is real: humanitarian personnel have been targeted in Afghanistan and other places as a result of affiliations to donor governments with negative reputations.

Even before this announcement, humanitarian and development workers have faced pressure to frame humanitarian outcomes with a defence lens. In Afghanistan, for example, it is no longer enough to report how many children and families have benefited from lifesaving assistance or development support. Now, NGOs are also being encouraged to report how many beneficiaries have chosen not to join armed groups as a result of benefiting from this assistance.

While this line of inquiry might make sense from a foreign policy perspective, the practicalities of how this information is collected present real risks for humanitarian staff on the ground. Asking whether someone was or is likely to join an armed group raises understandable questions in communities about who the interviewer is working for and how the information will be used. Ultimately, asking these types of questions puts humanitarian staff directly in the centre of the conversations they try hardest to avoid.

With Hawke’s appointment to assistant defence minister, many humanitarians fear that this pressure to blend humanitarian and defence outcomes will grow and start to affect our work in other countries. While right now Afghanistan is a fairly isolated case, it’s not difficult to imagine the same pressure being applied to our work in Syria, Iraq or even parts of the Philippines or Indonesia.

Like most other major international donors, Australia has endorsed (and recently co-chaired) the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative. The initiative reinforces the principle that humanitarian assistance must be provided on the basis of need alone, without influence from political or military agendas. This is likewise consistent with the OECD regulations, which clearly state that ‘Military aid and promotion of donor’s security interests’ do not constitute official development assistance.

It’s critical that Australia’s humanitarian decision-making remains independent as Hawke takes up his new role, and that Australia redoubles its commitment to the Good Humanitarian Donorship principles that it has been instrumental in leading.

While it could be argued that Hawke’s two hats will ensure consistent policy across these two portfolios, it’s also possible that defence will undermine the humanitarian imperative if it’s not taken seriously from the outset. Hawke will need to be deliberate in maintaining a distinction between these two portfolios as he navigates these new spheres, and ensure independent humanitarianism is not compromised by military or political agendas.

How times change. Only half a century or so ago, Australians were fighting and dying in Vietnam in an American-led effort to hold back the supposed threat of communist expansion. The whole of Southeast Asia would fall over like so many dominoes, we were assured, unless young Australian men risked their lives to stop them. Now the very same ‘communist’ government, which eventually won the war, is now our newest ‘mate’ in the region.

You don’t have to be a relative of one of the 500 or so Australians who died in Vietnam to wonder what’s going on here. What vital national interest did these young men give their lives for? Even the former head of the Australian Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, has conceded that Australia’s participation in this conflict was ‘a mistake’. It is, of course, not the last one Australian policymakers and planners have made when acting in support of the alliance with the United States.

Nor is it necessary to rehearse the well-known and catastrophic history of the invasion of Iraq to make a simple point: that war was also one in which Australia’s vital strategic interests were arguably not involved and which contributed absolutely nothing to the safety of the nation. And yet our predictable support of American foolishness contributed to a tragedy that has yet to finish playing itself out.

Even if we put to one side the appalling and avoidable loss of human life, strategic hardheads would have to concede that the destabilisation of the entire Middle East has profoundly undermined international security generally. It has also encouraged our ‘great and powerful friend’ to make an all-too-predictable request for participation in yet another ill-judged and potentially calamitous foreign adventure with little immediate relevance to Australia.

Equally predictably, the Morrison government has agreed to cooperate. That this contribution has been dressed up as part of a supposedly international effort—and not slavish devotion to the alliance—doesn’t make it look any less like just another outing of the usual Anglosphere suspects. The phrase lipstick on a pig comes to mind.

If this is a depressingly familiar story and an abrogation of foreign policy independence, there are some signs that all may not be lost for middle-power diplomacy of a sort that’s often invoked but less frequently seen. Vietnam really is a remarkable success story and likely to become one of the region’s most consequential rising powers. If ever a partner was worth cultivating, it would seem to fit the bill.

Welcome as Scott Morrison’s visit was in many ways, though, it’s not too cynical to ask whether it would have happened at all were it not for the government’s all-consuming anxiety about the rise of China. It’s striking that in the calculus of threats and opportunities that has shaped Australia’s foreign policy generally and regional relations in particular, it is the former that have been ascendant.

No doubt Canberra’s strategic elites would argue that’s as it should be. Whatever one thinks of the merits of such claims, it’s difficult to see Australia’s dominant strategic culture and values changing, despite the disasters they have led us into over recent years—to say nothing of the pointless loss of life.

But the somewhat unexpected embrace of Vietnam as our new mate really might offer a chance for a little creative diplomacy. True, Australia’s attitude is arguably self-serving and instrumental—Vietnam’s also got an even more immediate and difficult relationship with China—but even inauspicious beginnings can produce good outcomes.

If Australian policymakers are serious about developing an independent brand of middle-power diplomacy, then Vietnam is precisely the sort of country they should be looking to enlist to the cause. As our blossoming friendship suggests, we have potentially common causes in a number of areas, and not just in our unease about China.

As middle powers with little capacity to influence the behaviour of China or the United States when acting alone, we may have more in common with Vietnam than we do with either of the region’s ‘great powers’. Indeed, it’s not too fanciful to suggest that a coalition of like-minded states such as Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, India and Australia might jointly discourage both China and the US from behaving badly.

Of course, that would require Australia to have the capacity to make decisions about what’s in our national interests, rather than reflexively responding to the actions or demands of others. One might have thought or hoped that Australian policymakers would have drawn some instructive lessons about the value of independent policy from our recent involvement in the Middle East, and from what now seems to have been a pointless conflict in Vietnam.

Even more ambitiously, perhaps, it might be possible to develop a foreign policy that isn’t exclusively framed through the prism of potential security threats, especially from our immediate neighbourhood. Morrison’s trip to Vietnam is a hopeful sign. A closer relationship with Vietnam would be one constructive way of honouring the otherwise needless sacrifice of young Australian lives and an indication of how much at least some aspects of regional relations have progressed.