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.

As a historian, I hold the now rather quaint view that the classics can help us make sense of the world. So to understand the recent efflorescence of debate in Australian strategic policy circles prompted by Hugh White’s How to defend Australia, it may be useful to start with one of the most famous artworks in Western civilisation, namely Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican.

The fresco depicts the great Greek philosophers arguing in the agora of ideas. In the middle stand Plato and Aristotle, the two towering figures of Western philosophy. Plato gestures upwards, signifying a higher reality of pure form beyond the physical world. Aristotle extends his hand downwards, indicating that what is important is down here in the world around us, in all of its variety.

Plato and Aristotle had different views on how one accessed the truth. For Plato, reason sufficed; in Socrates’ accounts, Plato could help people determine the good simply by tapping into the eternal truths that they knew already. In contrast, Aristotle collected, classified and compared individual things, whether plants, animals or forms of government. They also differed in their views on whether true knowledge was possible; in contrast to Plato’s certainty, Aristotle held that except in sciences such as mathematics, knowledge was probabilistic.

Their different ways of understanding the world created the fundamental dualism that underpins all subsequent Western thought: the world of pure form versus the messiness of this world of people and things; pure reason versus empiricism; deduction versus induction.

While we shouldn’t force the analogy too far, I’ve been struck by how much Australia’s strategic policy debates are characterised by elements of this dualism.

One the one hand there are those who believe that there are virtually unchanging ‘laws’ that determine our strategic circumstances, whether they’re derived from geography, demography, the nature of power, or history itself. If you can discern those laws, you can identify the greatest threats and design a force optimised to meet them. In this risk calculus, consequence generally trumps likelihood. The ‘defence of Australia’ school is Platonist, and White sits in this genealogy.

In contrast, an Aristotelian approach argues that there are many contingencies in this world, most of which can’t be precisely predicted due to the nature of changing human relationships. Ultimately, the best force structure is one that provides options for a broad range of contingences, rather a very small number of worst-case futures. To the Platonist, this is ill-disciplined dilution of scarce resources.

And while this may be an unfair characterisation, the Platonist approach seems to seek an impossibly ‘clean’ approach to war, suggesting that if we take advantage of our geography, we can avoid conflict on land and among the people, which is messy, unpredictable, and politically and morally complex. Rather, we can confine war to the geometric space of the vast skies and seas around us. In contrast, the other school sees war and conflict as inherently about people; the battlespace is ultimately not geographic but mental.

Just as it’s simplistic to categorise all Western philosophers as Platonists or Aristotelians, so it’s reductionist to assign our strategic thinkers to one or another immutable school. Individuals sit on a spectrum. And the centre of gravity of the community can move, like a pendulum prodded erratically by events.

It seems to me that the pendulum has swung away from White. That’s not just because the majority of the strategic policy community disagrees with his uncompromisingly bleak assessment of the future of US power and what it means for Australia.

It’s also because the Platonist approach focuses on the worst case, which is generally defined as military invasion of Australia, and that the defence force should be designed for that. However, over the past two decades, there has been growing acknowledgement that the ADF is not just a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ fire extinguisher, or an insurance policy, but a tool of national power that can and should be used every day to help shape the world in ways that support our national strategy.

This has been amplified by the view expressed by many that we have entered into a world characterised not by Platonic binaries (such as war versus peace) but by constant competition and even conflict at a threshold below war. This view has perhaps been put most compellingly here in Australia by ADF chief Angus Campbell in his analysis of political warfare.

It’s possible that the current concern with grey-zone conflict and political warfare could prove to be a fad (perhaps as US–China competition hardens into a cold war and the worst-case scenario of a hot one) and the pendulum will swing back to a binary, Platonist worldview. But at the moment White’s view is a contrarian position, at odds with the dominant paradigm shaping the actions of practitioners and policymakers.

While I’m more influenced by the contingencies (a nice word for messiness) of human history, there is much that a Platonist approach offers to the debate. For example, it insists on discipline in the alignment of strategy and capability to avoid trying to do and be everything. White’s point that the mere fact that a military capability could be useful is not sufficient reason to acquire it should be emblazoned over the entrance to Russell Offices.

Andrew Davies recently argued that ‘balanced’ force structures are lazy. I agree, if they seek balance for its own sake, or to avoid difficult decisions about prioritisation, or to keep all the services happy. But I don’t think a force optimised for one low-probability, worst-case scenario is the answer.

A Platonist approach can also paint potential futures that may seem unlikely or unimaginable, as White has done. But if those futures are undesirable, we can work to avoid them. As Campbell argued at ASPI recently, we can as part of a community of nations write our own history.

The strategic importance of northern Australia to our national security has long been recognised by successive governments, but policymakers have struggled to develop a coherent long-term plan for the defence of the north.

Until recently, there hasn’t been any real urgency to getting our defence thinking about northern Australia right. During the Cold War, Australia was a half a world away from superpower competition. And ever since the release of Paul Dibb’s 1986 review of defence capabilities, defence strategists have largely assumed that, should the defence of northern Australia ever become a national priority, we would have a decade or more to address the problem.

Unfortunately, as Australia’s strategic outlook becomes more uncertain in a new era of great-power competition, we now have to think about the defence of the north in a more deliberate and urgent fashion.

Over the last decade, the gap between the strategic policy vision outlined in successive defence white papers and the Australian Defence Force’s actual presence in the north has widened.

If our industry and logistics base across northern Australia can’t easily be scaled up in a crisis, the ADF may not be able to defend our northern approaches or conduct joint expeditionary operations in our neighbourhood at short notice.

Piecemeal Defence investments in the north may have their benefits but they don’t provide a sufficient foundation for rapid military escalation should changing circumstances dictate.

Because of the significantly reduced warning times for future conflict, it’s likely that northern Australia will increasingly become either the ADF’s forward operating base (FOB) or its springboard to another location in the Indo-Pacific.

In my report Strong and free? The future security of Australia’s north, released today, I argue that there’s a need to rethink the importance of northern Australia, defined as those areas north of the 26th parallel south, as a single, scalable defence and national security ecosystem.

Titled ‘FOB North’, this network could be developed to deliver integrated support to current and future ADF and national security operations. Traditionally, an FOB is a small, usually temporary, base that provides tactical support in an operational theatre. In the context of this report, FOB North conceives of the north of Australia and its defence infrastructure as being in a state of readiness to support a range of defence contingencies of which we may have little advance warning.

Northern Australia’s industrial and logistical base will need to be enhanced to be able to provide a permanent civilianised replenishment and depot-repair capacity for defence assets deployed across the various physical nodes of FOB North.

For Australia’s future defence force, much of the thinking to date has been concerned with capability choices, manufacturing and deep maintenance.

The next step must set in place the facilities and resources needed to sustain those capabilities in the north during their deployments. Darwin and Royal Australian Air Force Base Tindal would need to become critical nodes in global defence supply chains for such capabilities as the RAAF’s F-35 jets. These preparations will also require federal, state and territory government investment in ‘Industry 4.0’ capacity in northern Australia.

To succeed, the FOB North concept must be a key element of Australia’s broader national security strategy.

ADF and other national security activities must be closely linked and mutually supporting within an FOB North strategy, and Home Affairs and intelligence agencies should also be integrated within it.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks in achieving FOB North is money. The creation of FOB North would require investment, though that shouldn’t be viewed simplistically through a defence lens. Rather, the entire strategy should be based on a cost-sharing arrangement within a national investment plan across both the public and private sectors.

The FOB North concept would provide policymakers with a foundation for thinking of the north as a facilitator of engagement with the region. FOB North will make the north of Australia a vehicle for regional defence and security, rather than defence from the region.

The development of FOB North needs to be part of, and supported by, Australia’s sovereign nation-building efforts. As both a sovereign defence and a national security concept, FOB North would play an integral part in building national resilience in northern Australia. It shouldn’t be simply planned and delivered through a future defence white paper.

This kind of ambitious national approach will involve Defence working with a diverse array of stakeholders and partners. It will also allow Defence to make a significant and lasting contribution to its most basic strategic interest: a secure, resilient Australia.

Between December 2015 and February 2019, 12 Australian dual citizens were stripped of their citizenship under the Australian Citizenship Act 2007 because of their involvement with terror groups. As the provisions of the act are automatically applied, many more Australian dual citizens may be affected. At a recent hearing conducted by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security as part of its review of the legislation, a Home Affairs spokesperson said flatly, ‘All we know is the ones that we know about. We don’t know the ones that we don’t know about.’

The core argument for citizenship revocation is that the person is deemed to have breached their social contract; they have rejected the values, rules and norms of Australia, and therefore shouldn’t benefit from membership of its citizenry. The revocation is meant to act as a punishment to the individual, a deterrent to those thinking of engaging in similar behaviour, and a means of mitigating terrorism risks.

Understandably, citizenship revocation, and the accompanying ‘getting tough’ on national security and ‘citizenship is a privilege’ narratives, resonate with many Australians.

However, there are some fundamental flaws in the thinking that underpins Australia’s citizenship revocation legislation.

Following the emergence of Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in June 2014, several countries introduced administrative measures stripping those who had travelled to Iraq and Syria of their citizenship. But there’s little empirical evidence to support the idea that citizenship revocation played a role in dissuading people from not travelling to Iraq and Syria to join the various jihadist groups. Intuitively, those who are interested in joining violent extremist groups are unlikely to be deterred by the threat of having their citizenship revoked.

Rather than acting as a punishment, losing citizenship may serve to highlight an individual’s commitment to ‘the cause’. In certain circumstances, revocation may give individuals a special status among their cadre of extremists for having made an extra sacrifice.

Citizenship revocation under the Australian Citizenship Act affects only individuals who have, or are entitled to, another citizenship. Australians who have Australian citizenship can’t be stripped of their citizenship because that would make them stateless, which would be a breach of international law.

Having two categories of citizenship feeds the jihadist narrative that Western government are institutionally racist and Islamophobic. In practice, these measures may disproportionately affect people of Muslim faith, as it’s thought that most dual-citizen Australian foreign fighters either come from Muslim-majority countries or have parents who emigrated to Australia from those countries.

Over almost two decades, Australian local authorities, police and community activists have worked to address concerns about discrimination in minority communities. Their efforts have helped foster an environment in which people feel comfortable discussing issues and individuals of concern with the authorities.

Despite these successes, policymakers should still be worried about the growing mistrust of the authorities among certain minority communities, primarily the Muslim community, and their sense of structural discrimination and Islamophobia. Citizenship revocation has most likely fuelled those communities’ concerns.

One unintended consequence of citizenship revocation is that it may discourage people from cooperating with the authorities. Arguably, if there’s a fear someone may lose their citizenship and get deported, individuals are less likely to cooperate.

Since 9/11, Australia has developed a robust counterterrorism regime. A central component of the regime is a suite of programs and initiatives at the federal, state and territory levels that are aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism. Australians working in that field have become global leaders. This strategy has provided local, state and federal authorities with the necessary legislative, operational and practical tools to work with individuals to help them disengage from violent extremism and ensure they don’t pose a threat to Australians and Australian interests.

The threat of citizenship revocation undermines the counterterrorism regime, specifically the disengagement and deradicalisation programs.

Knowing where violent extremists are enables Australia’s security and intelligence services to mitigate the risk that they pose. Over the past 18 years, successive Australian governments have adopted a range of measures to deal with violent extremists. These measures continue to result in the disruption of terrorist plots. Not allowing these individuals to return would place an added burden on our security services to keep track of the movements of radicalised ex-Australians outside of Australia.

If Australians who have travelled to Iraq and Syria aren’t allowed to return to Australia, they will likely seek new places from which they can continue to propagate their violent extremist ideas. History has shown that terrorists tend to establish a presence in fragile and weak states where they can exploit local conditions, including lax controls and corruption. Given that terrorist groups like IS have franchises and affiliates around the world, there are many places where fighters fleeing Iraq and Syria can find sanctuary and continue to propagate their ideas and incite others to commit violence.

As the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security continues its review of the operation, effectiveness and implications of the citizenship-stripping provisions of the Citizenship Act, it needs to set aside overly simplistic, transactional views of citizenship revocation. It needs to consider promoting public confidence in the effectiveness of Australia’s counterterrorism arrangements. It also ought to consider the second-order effects that this legislation is having on Australia’s counterterrorism efforts. Finally, it needs to consider the harmful impacts that ‘citizenship is not a right’ arguments have on social cohesion in Australia.

Hugh White sees the US–Australia military alliance weakening, possibly disappearing, as China’s rise undermines US hegemony in East Asia and as US relative power wanes. ‘We will really be on our own’, he observes in How to defend Australia.

On this foundation, White builds a provocative case for greatly expanded acquisitions of submarines, fighter aircraft and, somewhat equivocally, nuclear weapons. His objective: to deter or to defeat a future Chinese attack on Australia without active US support.

How to defend Australia is an elegant, readable and confronting book in which White is asserting, once again, his prominent position among Australian defence intellectuals. He’s something of a gadfly, asking awkward questions, offering scathing criticisms, posing radical answers and urging quick decisions. ‘We don’t have much time’, he writes in the opening chapter. ‘Time is not on our side’, he reaffirms near the end of the book.

It’s obvious that historic strategic shifts are reshaping power relations in East Asia and that Australia now faces increasingly complex and uncertain security challenges. But is White’s pessimism entirely justified? Is the US really on a downward historical spiral while the rise and rise of China is now inevitable? If it’s not, White’s case for radical changes in Australia’s defence policy might seem at least unduly gloomy.

In fact, Australia’s alliance with the US has never guaranteed it US support in the event of an attack.  The ANZUS Treaty is an agreement to consult in the event of a threat; it commits the parties to act only in accordance with their constitutional processes. Likewise, there has always been uncertainty about the wisdom of Australia’s reliance on US extended nuclear deterrence. White rightly notes Australia will face a difficult choice on nuclear weapons acquisition if it can’t rely on Washington’s nuclear umbrella. But that has always been the case: military alliances between great and lesser powers rarely if ever guarantee certainty to the minor party seeking protection.

China is quickly catching up with the US as an economic and military power, but US military budgets still outstrip Chinese defence spending and US armaments are superior to most Chinese equivalents. Chinese military doctrine, organisation, training and leadership generally lag behind the US and other advanced powers. The Chinese military also lacks real war experience and global logistic support. Bureaucracy, graft and corruption remain serious issues for the Chinese military.

China faces other constraints. A recent report from China’s Academy of Social Services says the country faces a long period of ‘unstoppable’ population decline after 2029. It says growth in the working population has stagnated and the ageing population is ‘bound to cause very unfavourable social and economic consequences’. The US, by contrast, has a large, growing and diverse young population which will be available to develop the nation’s civilian and military power. China has abundant people, but they are increasingly aged and dependent and will grow old before they grow rich.

If economic and military power and demography aren’t sufficient to ensure the US remains a worthwhile and willing alliance partner for Australia, then it doesn’t seem unduly optimistic to expect that America’s national pride and its democratic political system will help to keep the US engaged.

It’s true, as White argues, that the US is suffering political malaise under President Donald Trump. But despite his isolationism Trump is conducting a domestically popular escalating trade war with Beijing with scant regard for its effects on allies and others. That is not the action of an administration preparing to make way for China.

Democracies, unlike despotic regimes, ultimately and often painfully survive idiosyncratic leaders who rise periodically to challenge and even debauch their values. The US especially has large, excellent and powerful diplomatic and security elites with the political clout to restrain wayward leaders.

White undervalues these formidable US assets in concluding that US power and influence in the region will shrink and possibly disappear. He may have conceded too much too soon in reading the funeral rites for the US–Australia alliance. He also ignores the recent Lowy Institute poll which found that 73% of Australians believe the US would come to our defence if we were attacked and that only 32% of Australians trust China.

There’s another important reason why Australia should preserve the alliance rather than move to offset its demise. Most of our most advanced military equipment—including F-35 fighter jets, and submarine and surface-ship combat systems—can only be maintained, updated and kept operational by their US makers. Somewhat cavalierly White seems to accept this prospect and argue that we could manage with poorer weapons from Europe and perhaps even from Russia. It’s hard to see military leaders or the government acquiescing willingly in this conclusion while accepting White’s proposal to double the defence budget to $80 billion a year.

Nevertheless, White has confronted the country with some tough questions about the alliance and defence policy. But the alliance never has been an absolute security guarantee. We need it because it complicates the decisions of potential aggressors and because it assures us of access to the world’s best military equipment. In an uncertain world we can hope for little more. White’s proposals would be an expensive leap into even greater uncertainty to the strategic advantage of China.