‘The only way to deal with these people is to bring them to justice. You can’t talk to them, you can’t negotiate with them.’ —US President George H.W. Bush, 2003

Negotiations between the US and the Taliban are set to continue later this month with a new round of talks planned. This marks a significant shift from a longstanding policy of never negotiating with terrorists. The talks demonstrate that political solutions are needed to end political conflicts.

Democratic governments have historically de-escalated a number of conflicts through negotiations with terrorist actors, including the Irish Republican Army, the Basque ETA and the FARC in Colombia. A RAND study has found that 43% of terrorist campaigns ended through some kind of negotiation.

As terrorism in the Asia–Pacific increases, the time is right to consider such an approach.

The region has a long history of terrorist activity, mainly by groups seeking independence from post-colonial centralised governments.

While global deaths from terrorism fell by 27% in the past year, they rose by 30% in the Asia–Pacific. The increase has been centred in three countries: the Philippines, Myanmar and Thailand have together experienced nearly 4,000 attacks over the past five years (see figure below).

This rise has broadly corresponded with the expansion of transnational terrorist franchises, such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State, into the region. Those organisations have provided local groups with funding and material support while integrating their conflicts into the struggle for a global pan-Islamic caliphate.

IS, in particular, has demonstrated an exceptional capacity to mobilise disparate local movements under its banner of jihad. In 2016, a video featured militants from Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines pledging allegiance to the group. A year later, IS-affiliated and -trained militants captured the city of Marawi in the Philippines. In the ensuing battle, 603 Filipino soldiers were killed.

The involvement of absolutist religious elements makes these groups difficult to eliminate. Because religious combatants see their cause as having transcendental significance, they’re unlikely to negotiate a political solution. Tactics employed by these groups, such as using women and children as suicide bombers and beheading prisoners, can further entrench conflict.

As IS faces territorial decline in the Middle East, it is deploying more resources and fighters to what it considers its East Asia province. That shift poses a significant risk for countries that are dealing with ongoing regional conflicts. It also reinforces the regional influence of an actor that has shown the will and capacity to harm Australians.

Separatist terrorist groups use violence to push for autonomous control over their regions. State violence to counter terrorism can also lead to greater support for the terrorist groups, furthering conflict.

Terrorist groups generally look to abandon violence if they’re in military retreat, they perceive themselves to be in a good negotiating position, or they are given enough incentives to negotiate.

Increasing internationalisation of conflicts changes the incentives to negotiate for both parties.

Local groups risk their separatist and nationalist goals being subsumed into or competing with the agenda of international terrorist franchises. Affiliation with IS or al-Qaeda may also hamper open dialogue with government. Groups may be more willing to compromise so that their political objectives are at least partially met.

There are also changed incentives for governments, which may be more willing to compromise to prevent international groups from gaining footholds.

This has already happened. A recent peace deal in Bangsamoro in the southern Philippines brokered by Malaysia came about in part because of a fear of local groups aligning with IS.

Australia has an active and ongoing interest in the stability of the Asia–Pacific. It is currently promoting peacebuilding in Myanmar and peace and security initiatives in the Philippines. Examples include expenditure of $52.6 million on Operation Augury in the Philippines and $24 million on conflict resolution efforts in Marawi. Further expenditure is planned to promote stability in the Philippines, including $90 million on childhood education in conflict-affected areas.

Australia could expand on this contribution by adopting the role of a good-faith mediator between states and local terrorist groups.

In the short term, Australia can support the conditions needed to bring all parties to the negotiating table. This includes promoting confidence-building measures, such as weapons hand-ins or releases of political prisoners.

Australia can also share its domestic experiences and expertise to reduce the risk of internationalisation of terrorist groups. Greater resources and cooperation will help to reduce access to terrorist propaganda and prevent fighters from travelling to conflict zones in the Asia–Pacific.

Among the many reasons I’m an optimist is the decades I’ve spent inside two strange but wonderful Australian institutions.

One magnificent institution is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, where I toiled as a journalist for 33 happy years. Most of my time as an ABC hack was in Canberra—in the old parliament, then up the hill to the giant flag and the unique building that has the House of Representatives and Senate on its wings and the executive in the rear.

Only in Oz would the prime minister and all other ministers get to their offices through the back door.

For years I’ve struggled feebly for a punchline about the PM and cabinet residing out the back: rear-mounted engine … the ultimate backseat drivers … how do you see the way ahead from the arse-end of the building?

There must be a metaphor to fit. Please advise.

The ABC and Parliament House are marvellous while also being maddening and mysterious. Maybe that’s how it is with all major institutions, which brings me to my jest about how these two great entities have shaped my optimism.

A while ago, when I wrote a cynical piece on the three unholy rules that govern Canberra, I was tackled on my sunny self-characterisation: ‘If you’re such a congenital optimist, how can you write this dark stuff?’

The answer is simple: I’m an optimist because of decades in the ABC and covering the Oz parliament. And, of course, I’m a dark realist because of decades in the ABC and covering the Oz parliament.

When they’re at the best, both institutions make you rejoice. At their worst, when they mangle their purpose and mislay their principles, the proper response is rage.

For the last couple of years I’ve raged at the ABC and Canberra for the disastrous dismantling of Oz international broadcasting.

Gutting international TV, ending shortwave and exiting the news and journalism contest in the Asia–Pacific is lousy policy and appalling judgement, hugely damaging to Australian foreign policy. I’ve inflicted many columns on The Strategist, testified to one Senate hearing and made submissions to three inquiries. For an overview of the recent dumbness and optimistic prescriptions for a better broadcasting future, see ASPI’s paper Hard news and free media as the sharp edge of Australian soft power.

In the way of Canberra, bad policy is slowly being confronted. The ABC is dimly grasping how much it has abandoned its charter responsibility, enacted by parliament, ‘to transmit to countries outside Australia broadcasting programs of news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural enrichment’.

The ABC is putting its leadership back together after last year losing both its chair and managing director in the same week. The chairman fired the managing director because she wouldn’t bend to his will; then the chair had to go because he was too eager to bend to the government’s will. Sad, bad days for Aunty.

The ABC rebuild has taken a significant step with the appointment of Ita Buttrose as the new chair. At last, the ABC board has a chair who actually knows journalism and media! How novel. And promising.

The main cause for optimism is that both sides of Oz politics have grasped that the destruction of Australia’s international broadcasting voice in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia hurts our foreign policy interests.

The government’s announcement of $17.1 million, over three years, to supply Australian commercial television programs to broadcasters in the South Pacific is a facile and clumsy initiative that doesn’t amount to strategy.

The positive point is that it’s a sign of a government that understands Australia needs to get back into the media game in its region. A strange first step is at least a step. The opposition also embraces an international broadcasting rethink and rebuild.

A new political consensus is forming on international broadcasting, as one element of Canberra’s darkening view of international prospects.

Australia proclaims its first strategic priority now is to manage great-power competition. The Oz step-up in the South Pacific—the Pacific pivot—is the response of a nation that sees its strategic interests in Papua New Guinea and the islands directly challenged by China.

Australia proclaims its enduring fidelity to the alliance as it grapples with the arrival of the post-American world, a multipolar era of shifting power where US military dominance doesn’t translate to other dimensions.

Tough times demand hard thinking and good policy.

Australia is awaking to the costs of absent-mindedly discarding an 80-year tradition of broadcasting to the Asia–Pacific.

My preferred label for this new era is hot peace, not the new cold war. But the cold war elements remind Canberra of a time when international broadcasting was a vital instrument of state policy. Look around today and note China’s arrival as a major international media player, the big Russian effort, and how Britain is boosting the BBC World Service.

In an era of power completion and contest over the nature of the international system, Australia must again power up its voice to serve its interests, influence and values.

The most recent meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Singapore last November suggests that the US, India, Japan and Australia regard the initiative as a geostrategic multiplier in the Indo-Pacific. Despite the evident convergence, there have been few signs of a genuine renewal of the Quad’s purpose since it was resuscitated in 2017 after a decade-long hiatus.

This is underscored by the absence of a unified declaration following the Quad’s meetings in 2017 and 2018. Although individual statements released by the four members after the meetings agreed on the importance of a free and open Indo-Pacific, they overlapped on few points of detail. And although Quad boosters assert that its foundations are stronger today than they were a decade ago, the absence of a single joint statement betrays the inherent limits of the initiative.

The recent revival of the Quad was triggered by the return of Shinzo Abe as Japanese prime minister in 2012. Shortly after returning to office, Abe wrote an essay promoting a ‘democratic Asian security diamond’ to forestall Chinese ‘coercion’.  The proposal endorsed the view that the US, Japan, Australia and India should cooperate to ‘safeguard the maritime commons stretching from the Indian Ocean region to the western Pacific’.

India’s threat perception vis-à-vis China has increased in the decade since the Quad was first initiated, pushing it closer to Washington and US allies in Asia like Australia and Japan. The increase in Chinese naval deployments in the Indian Ocean and the rapid modernisation of China’s nuclear weapons program, including its sea-launched ballistic-missile capabilities, have exercised Indian planners and provoked a greater emphasis on the link between national strategy and maritime force projection. These concerns have been overlaid by India’s apprehension about the growing reach of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Australia’s concerns over China’s strategic posture in the Indo-Pacific and its overt militarisation activities in the South China Sea have been reinforced by revelations of interference by Beijing in Australian domestic affairs. Disclosures of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Australia have included attempts to bribe high-level officials, pressure for Chinese-language media outlets to toe the line on key issues, monitoring of Chinese students in Australian universities, and recruitment of sympathetic advocates to articulate the CCP’s position in the media.

These factors have coalesced to create a more permissive environment for Australia’s participation in the Quad and other minilateral security initiatives. The Quad has the support of the opposition Labor Party as well as the Coalition government.

For the US, returning to the Quad after a 10-year hiatus dovetails with the Trump administration’s preference for a more explicit acknowledgement of competition with Beijing, not just in the strategic arena but also in the economic domain. Washington’s continuation of freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea—notwithstanding the clear risks of military escalation—and the Trump administration’s appetite for zero-sum confrontation with Beijing over trade, signal a renewed determination by the US to contain Chinese great-power ambitions.

While Trump is less focused than his predecessors on promoting the idea of a concert of democracies in the Indo-Pacific, the Quad aligns with his disdain for large-scale multilateralism and his fixation on burden-sharing with allies and security partners. Perhaps more importantly, the Quad maps closely to the Pentagon’s vision of developing America’s Indo-Pacific alliances and partnerships ‘into a networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains’.

However, given the Quad’s history, there are serious doubts about whether it can be sustained. As La Trobe University’s Nick Bisley has argued, ‘there is not a single vital national interest that all four share’. Perhaps tellingly, in contrast to 2007, the resurrection of the Quad in 2017 elicited very little apparent concern on the part of Beijing. This reflects China’s broader reaction to US-led minilateral initiatives, as distinct from specific initiatives taken as part of US bilateral security alliances, which tend to attract vociferous condemnation from China.

Beijing probably feels reasonably confident that underlying divisions between US allies will prevent an Asian NATO from emerging and that most, if not all, American allies in the region (and those not allied to the US, such as India and Indonesia) will avoid formal multilateral security commitments because of their acute dependence on Chinese trade and investment. Ultimately, Beijing’s reading of minilateralism’s (and, by extension, the Quad’s) prospects may be close to the mark.

All four parties have clear incentives to constrain, and in some cases push back against, Beijing’s growing assertiveness, but that won’t necessarily sustain the Quad beyond its recent resurrection. There’s little indication that members are serious about mapping the Quad’s future in detail, and while perspectives within ASEAN are mixed, Singaporeans (perhaps surprisingly) remain the most sceptical about Quad.

One school of thought may be that the Quad parties will discover a renewed purpose only if Beijing uses force in a regional contingency. That may be credible, but it’s more likely that the US, Japan and Australia will focus all their efforts on leveraging existing bilateral security alliances in response to a major uptick in Chinese military activity. And it is difficult to envisage India seriously buying into a conflict in the South China Sea when even Japan and Australia place caveats on how much their alliances with the US formally commit them to do in certain scenarios.

In the final analysis, we’re likely to look back on the Quad’s resurrection in 2017 as another false dawn for the development of meaningful security arrangements outside formal alliances in the Indo-Pacific.

The network of US alliances built in the early years of the Cold War has proven remarkably resilient. Nowadays, it’s easy—and wrong—to take that resilience for granted. Back in 1997, Stephen Walt, analysing alliance durability, penned one of the classic articles in international relations, ‘Why alliances endure or collapse’. He argued that durable alliances turned upon hegemonic leadership; the alliance’s importance as a symbol of credibility or resolve; the disproportionate influence of particular interest groups in a country’s domestic politics; the level of alliance institutionalisation; and shared strategic identities.

Not all of those factors apply with equal weight to the ANZUS alliance. I don’t see much evidence, for example, that its durability turns upon the disproportionate influence of particular interest groups—indeed, popular support for ANZUS is almost always broad and strong. Nor is the alliance held together by institutionalisation: if anything, ANZUS is under-institutionalised. But the remaining factors—hegemonic leadership, the importance of the alliance to both the US and Australia as a symbol of resolve, and shared strategic identities—do look highly relevant.

Walt was writing when the alliances were 40 or 50 years old. Today, we’re another 20-odd years down the track. So we’re talking now about alliances that are 60 or 70 years old—and have weathered the Cold War, the ‘lost’ decade of the 1990s, and the ‘war on terror’.

Moreover, one might fondly imagine that in recent years US alliances have been given a new lease of life by the return of major-power competition to the international order. Alliances of states typically find greater purpose—because of greater threat—in an era of interstate rivalry than they do in an era of violent non-state actors, or in an era of comfortable unipolarity. So, rationally, we should be entering a period of reinvigorated Western alliances.

But we aren’t. While the evidence is anecdotal and impressionistic, US alliances seem to have become weaker in recent years. Certainly, the 45th US president’s disdain for alliance commitments—a sentiment that runs deeper than the longstanding burden-sharing issue—hasn’t helped. It’s undercut the contribution that hegemonic leadership usually makes to alliance durability. And, by reducing alliances to self-interest and transactionalism, it’s blurred the idea of shared strategic identities.

European members of NATO have begun to talk openly of security options beyond the alliance. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has recently canvassed the possibility of an ‘independent’ army to reduce Europe’s reliance on the US. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken of the need for EU leaders ‘to look at the vision of one day creating a real, true European army’.

If the US chooses to play a smaller role in NATO, there would still be 28 other members of the alliance available to take up some of the slack. True, they’d find life harder, given how much Washington currently brings to NATO. But the same can’t be said of US allies in Asia, each bound to Washington in a tight, bilateral relationship. If the US decides to reduce its involvement in Asia, its bilateral allies (Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand) do not share residual alliance obligations towards each other.

Here in Canberra, the future of ANZUS has emerged as a critical, if largely unspoken, question for the future of Australian strategic policy. That’s because ANZUS has long been a one-stop shop for all of our security needs—it backstops Australian security, allows us to make a meaningful contribution to the global and regional order, grants us access to substantial quantities of finished and raw intelligence, and underpins a defence force that’s well armed and well trained. A weakened ANZUS, let alone no ANZUS at all, would leave big holes to fill in our strategic policy.

But the current problems in US alliances aren’t solely created by the occupant of the Oval Office. It’s still far from clear what we’re witnessing in the US. Is it a short-term deviation from the strategic mainstream, or a longer-term shifting of the mainstream itself? We may not know the answer to that question until sometime in the 2020s.

And regardless of the answer, a broader structural shift in the international order—towards greater multipolarity—is continuing to eat away at alliance cohesion. As Walt observes:

Alliances will tend to be less robust in a multipolar world, because the major powers will possess more options as their numbers increase, and because shifts in the distribution of capabilities will be more frequent when there are more great powers in the system. It will also be more difficult for each state to determine where the greatest threat lies, and international alliances are likely to be more flexible and fluid.

The emergence of a world in which international alliances are ‘more flexible and fluid’ would be discomfiting to Australian policymakers. ‘Flexible’ alliances carry connotations of voluntary—and optional—fulfilment of obligations; ‘fluid’ ones suggest relationships bereft of solidity.

Australia is certainly redoubling its efforts to build new strategic relationships with a range of countries in Asia. And our alliance experience hasn’t prepared us well for that venture—ANZUS’s closeness and intimacy don’t translate well to the awkward political and cultural domain that is Southeast Asia, for example. In a shifting regional security environment, Asian countries are all trying to cross the river by feeling the stones. Everyone’s treading lightly and keeping their options open.

If alliances are on the wane, and new, less onerous forms of strategic partnership on the rise, we have a major challenge ahead. Critics of ANZUS allege that it has made Australia too subservient to the US. But Australian security would be poorer without it.

In an interesting, and highly significant, recent statement, China’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Lu Kang, challenged Australia’s traditional perception that the South Pacific is within its sphere of influence. He stated that, ‘The Pacific islands are no “sphere of influence” for any country’, and employed the traditional rhetoric of Chinese government communiqués, asserting, ‘We hope that the relevant parties could discard the outdated mindsets of Cold War mentality and zero-sum game [and] objectively view China’s relations with Pacific island countries.’

The reality, of course, is that China is determined to challenge the US’s strategic primacy across the Indo-Pacific, and seeks to replace the established rules-based order with a Chinese-led system that would diminish, and then ultimately eliminate, America’s influence in Asia. China’s increasing involvement in the South Pacific through the Belt and Road Initiative is an important component of the emerging strategic contest and a challenge to Australian security.

Those signing up to the BRI (the Victorian government should take note) must understand that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Small states in the South Pacific, burdened with Chinese debt they can’t pay back, risk watching as China’s presence grows in their countries through its investment in infrastructure projects that, ultimately, it will control, once the debt trap is sprung.

Most worryingly for Australia, the BRI opens up the potential for a Chinese military presence in territories close to our eastern seaboard. Such a development would give Beijing greater opportunity for military coercion against Australia in a crisis.

Given the risk a forward Chinese military presence would pose, Australia needs to consider updating its military strategy to one of ‘forward defence in depth’ throughout Indo-Pacific Asia, including into the South Pacific. Australia should not maintain a reactive military strategy that continues to rest on foundations established in the mid-1980s when our strategic outlook was far more benign.

Forward defence in depth builds on the strategy outlined in the 2016 defence white paper that was centred on three strategic defence objectives:

• deter, deny and defeat attacks on or threats to Australia and its national interests, including incursions into its air, sea and northern approaches
• make effective military contributions to support the security of maritime Southeast Asia and support the governments of Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Pacific island countries to build and strengthen their security
• contribute military capabilities to global operations that support Australia’s interests in a rules-based international order.

Forward defence in depth would integrate the first objective—essentially the ‘defence of Australia’ mission—with the second objective by giving the ADF a far more visible and regular role throughout maritime Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. In doing so, we’d extend our defence in depth far forward, rather than basing the defence of Australia task on being able to defend a comparatively narrow strategic moat that is the ‘sea–air gap’. The third objective—more far-flung operations in support of a global rules-based order—should be prioritised to contingencies across the Indo-Pacific region. The objective of forward defence in depth is to expand our regular military presence and meet any threats that emerge much further from Australia’s shores.

This is not meant to discount the requirement or significance of Australia’s vast inland areas as a natural defensive advantage. One of the main reasons Australia has never been invaded is because of the vast and hostile terrain between our northern coasts and our southern population centres. But defence infrastructure in our north is too sparsely deployed and too limited. It’s a very thin front line with very long internal lines of supply to southern defence infrastructure and force concentrations. That posture is increasingly in need of review.

In an age of new types of weapons and new types of warfare, it’s not at all clear that the sea–air gap gives Australia the same advantage as it did in the days of the Paul Dibb’s 1986 review of defence capabilities or the 1987 defence white paper when the threat environment was drastically different.

A forward Chinese military presence would fundamentally change our strategic calculus for the worse. It could come both from forward military bases of the sort seen now on disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea, and dual-use facilities like Hambantota in Sri Lanka. That would enable China to concentrate its military power in a way that puts our northern bases at risk in a crisis—particularly if their defence rests on responding only if an opponent enters our northern air and maritime approaches, as suggested in the 2016 defence white paper.

That approach rests on assumptions about the strategic geography of a ‘land girt by sea’ offering us a decisive defensive advantage. Yet the growth of long-range cruise- and ballistic-missile capabilities and the emerging threat of hypersonic weapons, cyberattacks and anti-satellite weapons make new types of coercion possible that simply bypasses the strategic moat to our north. It also fails as a credible response to the ability of the Chinese navy to interdict our vital offshore fuel and energy lifelines, which all traverse chokepoints and narrows in maritime Southeast Asia. A policy based on defending the sea–air gap could potentially become the Maginot Line of the 21st century.

Forward defence in depth develops and extends an ADF anti-access and area denial (A2AD) perimeter outwards. It denies a peer adversary a cost-free ability to manoeuvre close to Australia and exploit long-range strike weapons effectively or threaten our energy security. It shifts our strategy to be more in line with 21st-century multi-domain operations and emphasises a requirement for the ADF to become a power-projection force in every sense.

It also allows us to strengthen cooperation with the US and do more to share the burden with our essential strategic partner, while opening up new opportunities for greater defence cooperation with key partners across the Indo-Pacific and into the South Pacific. The recent agreement by the US, Australia and Papua New Guinea to develop the Lombrum naval base at Manus Island is an excellent start, but that defence diplomacy needs to go much further.

In the second part of this series, I’ll consider the importance of strengthening defence diplomacy and economic relationships with our key regional partners, and then conclude in the third part with suggested enhancements to ADF force structure.