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traditional rhetoric of Chinese government communiqués, asserting, ‘We hope that the relevant parties could discard the outdated mindsets of Cold War mentality and zero-sum game [and] objectively view China’s relations with Pacific island countries.’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.

The increasing strategic competition between the US and China means one thing for most of the countries in the Asia–Pacific region: it’s going to be harder to respond to a more assertive China that challenges the international order and to a US that alternates between isolationist tendencies and confronting China.

The South China Sea continues to be one of the main theatres in which the great-power contest plays out, as the recent USS Decatur incident showed. In the face of rising tensions, Canberra and other key regional players may need to show more willingness to protect their economic interests in the sea lanes of communication. An emerging wave of pushback against Chinese investments in critical infrastructure in the region also hints that key US allies might be expected to collectively resist China’s overt economic expansion.

But in light of the tectonic shifts in the region, it’s important for Canberra to develop an Asia strategy of its own that reflects Australia’s national interests and sets a far-sighted policy for its interactions in the neighbourhood.

Here are five Cs or ‘constants’ for Australia to bear in mind in formulating its Asia policy in the wake of escalating great-power competition.

The first one is careful. It’s easy to get carried away by the confrontational narrative in an atmosphere that’s been heated up by speeches from Washington and Beijing on the possibilities of confrontation and preparedness for war. Aggression is contagious.

Australia is a responsible middle power and should keep a cool head. China’s political influence operations in Australia have already led to a ‘reset’ in Canberra’s thinking about relations and a diplomatic ‘freeze’ that only started thawing when Foreign Minister Marise Payne met her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi last week. Beijing will likely be involved in more incidents, such as further attempts to take advantage of Australia’s democratic and open society that could make Canberra pursue more retaliatory policies. Instead, Australia needs to strengthen domestic regulation to prevent further penetration; last year’s foreign interference law is a good example of that.

But beyond protecting its own political integrity, Australia has a larger, parallel, challenge of managing its alliance with the US. Canberra is facing both the fear of abandonment and the fear of entanglement—where the more powerful ally drags its partners into conflicts. Dealing with that challenge requires strategic planning rather than ad hoc responses.

Being careful also means having a thorough understanding of regional affairs and sentiments. To achieve that, Australia needs to show the second C—committed.

Canberra’s commitment to its direct neighbourhood has fluctuated in the past. Many have identified an ‘Australian ambivalence’—a tendency to be preoccupied with big and powerful, but often distant, partners, sometimes at the expense of those that are smaller but closer.

The Special Summit with ASEAN in March was a welcome initiative, but a long-term commitment needs more than sporadic gatherings. Australia needs to commit to a continued invested presence in the region. That will require a level of constant attention to, and engagement with, the region, regardless the political mood of the government of the day—which brings us to the third C: consistent.

Consistency is a rare quality these days in global politics. It should be an indispensable element in Australia’s policy. Inconsistency can have catastrophic effects—just look at the Philippines’ flip-flop under Rodrigo Duterte and how that has affected developments in the South China Sea.

Canberra’s stance should be consistent with what it believes and has announced through government policy statements over the years: a rules-based order and rejection of force or the threat of the use of force, in accordance with international law and UN conventions.

Notwithstanding the recent lively debate on a Plan B, the Australia–US alliance remains a cornerstone for Australia’s security posture. Australia is bound to work with Washington despite Canberra’s reservations about the Trump’s administration politics. Hence, there is an even a stronger need for the fourth constant: coordinated.

Alliance coordination is vital. Poor coordination among the allies can not only weaken the alliance but also erode trust between alliance members. Canberra still shares many of the fundamental goals that guide Washington’s engagement with the region. Australia and the US need to coordinate their efforts to avoid sending misleading signals that weaken confidence in the alliance, as well as undercut or raise the cost of efforts while decreasing the effect.

For example, if Australia wants to join forces with the US and Japan, and other like-minded partners, in offering ‘quality infrastructure’ as an alternative to the China’s debt-trap belt-and-road projects, it needs to refrain from making individual announcements in favour of a well-coordinated cooperative response. All participants need a detailed, research-based understanding of the areas in which they can multiply the outputs and areas in which individual efforts can be complementary.

Finally, as the region grows increasingly anxious about the machinations of the great powers, Australia should double down on the fifth C and be constructive. An example of playing a constructive role is further conceptualising the Indo-Pacific strategy so that it includes as many players in the region as possible and puts collective interests at the core of regional politics.

Such a strategy would seek to promote an equal playing field, economic and trade liberalisation, and respect for international law. Support for international institutions and their continued role in a free and open Indo-Pacific region that rejects both domination and isolationism would be the most welcome constructive input.

In late August, Indonesia and Australia signed a new comprehensive strategic partnership agreement during Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s visit to Jakarta. The document provides a new long-term framework for the bilateral relationship as part of a broader Indo-Pacific vision. Defence cooperation is a central component of that vision.

The relationship between the Indonesian defence force (TNI) and the Australian defence force (ADF) has been on the upswing. In early September, the Indonesian navy participated in Exercise Kakadu, Australia’s largest maritime exercise involving 27 countries. And in 2016, the Indonesian army held a joint training exercise in Darwin as part of Exercise Wirra Jaya, which is now an annual event. It was the first time an Indonesian unit had trained on Australian soil since 1995.

Back in July, senior leaders of the armed forces agreed to hold more joint TNI–ADF exercises and training in 2019 and 2020.

Such developments reinforce the common refrain in the Australian strategic community that Indonesia is the country’s ‘most important’ regional security partner.

This notion goes back to the 1995 Agreement to Maintain Security, the first defence agreement between the two countries. Although the pact was scrapped after the 1999 Australian-led UN intervention in East Timor, the 2006 Lombok Treaty revived the narrative.

The 2009 defence white paper noted that ‘Australia’s relationship with Indonesia remains our most important defence relationship in the immediate region’. Despite the bilateral crises and hiccups over the past decade, that view has persisted among Australian officials and analysts. The 2016 white paper stated that a ‘strong and productive relationship with Indonesia is critical to Australia’s national security’. Most recently, one former senior Department of Defence official argued that Indonesia remains ‘the country of most importance to Australia and our long-term security’.

But this story of Indonesia’s importance is inaccurate.

First, Indonesia has never been the largest recipient of funding from Australia’s defence cooperation program (DCP). That position has been held by Papua New Guinea since the 1970s. Indonesia wasn’t even always the highest DCP recipient among Southeast Asian nations.

After the Lombok Treaty, DCP funding to Indonesia averaged around A$4.4 million per year. But compared to other DCP recipients over the past two decades, Indonesia ranked second-highest only twice (2006–07 and 2016–17). Most often, Indonesia ranked third (12 years), fourth (two years), fifth (three years) or sixth (once, in 2000–01).

The DCP may not be the only form of defence engagement, but historically it constitutes the bulk of it, and the available DCP data provides a powerful measure that is difficult to ignore.

Second, Indonesia has never been Australia’s most important training partner. That title belongs to the United States.

Bilateral exercises with Indonesia amount to only around 8% (37 out of 449) of all ADF bilateral exercises between 1997 and 2015. The United States, New Zealand, Thailand, Papua New Guinea and Malaysia have had more exercises with Australia than Indonesia has in that period.

Third, Indonesia and Australia don’t have a well-developed and institutionalised arrangement for defence technological cooperation or defence industrial collaboration.

Policymakers only recently explored the possibility of industrial collaboration. In late 2016, Australia and Indonesia agreed to work together on developing an armoured vehicle based on the design of Thales Australia’s Bushmaster.

But such efforts pale in comparison to the low level of Indonesia–Australia technological cooperation. From 1969 to 2016, for example, Australia sent patrol boats, fighter aircraft, and light transport and maritime patrol aircraft to Indonesia. Most of the vessels, however, were provided during the Cold War and are by now around 40 years old.

Indeed, according to a survey of Indonesian recipients of Australian education and training programs, the lack of technological cooperation remains one of the big stumbling blocks in defence collaboration.

Taken together, these indicators suggest that Australia has more important security partners than Indonesia. Instead, Indonesia’s significance to Australia’s strategic geography and the historical volatility of bilateral ties seem to have driven the narrative.

In any case, to ensure that the broad vision outlined in the new partnership agreement can materialise, both Jakarta and Canberra need to stabilise and institutionalise bilateral defence ties. One of the first steps needs to be to stop saying that Indonesia is Australia’s most important security partner. After all, that label is not only inaccurate, but also raises unnecessary and unrealistic expectations of what defence cooperation can accomplish.

Over the past year, there’s been a frenzy of public interest—in Australia and beyond—in the Pacific region. The concern has, of course, been focused on China’s growing activities in the Pacific islands. All of the sudden, it has become a hotly contested geopolitical space. Conventional partners are reacting. Australia is ‘stepping up’. New Zealand is ‘resetting’. The UK is opening new diplomatic posts in the region. France wants to ‘pivot’ back to the region. The US is taking a more active interest.

Close watchers of the Pacific are scratching their heads asking, why now? The growing presence of China in the Pacific has been well documented for some time, and indeed the roots of Chinese engagement in many parts of the region date back generations. Michael Powles was writing about it in 2007. Graeme Smith was talking about China in the Pacific in 2011. Books have been written and a number of PhDs have been completed on the subject. In 2015, the Lowy Institute released its map of Chinese aid in the Pacific, which received significant attention for being the first to quantify the size and reach of China’s aid program in the region.

For whatever reason, the pin has clearly dropped in the past year.

Before China’s engagement in the Pacific, geopolitics in the region had been relatively benign—a point the 2013 PNG defence white paper acknowledged, and Greg Colton examines in his recent Lowy Institute paper. Thanks to China, the Pacific has been empowered with options beyond its traditional partners of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the United States. In response to this, along with upping their own games, Australia and New Zealand are actively recruiting ‘traditional’ partners to get back into the game. But what would a ‘Pacific pivot’ from more ‘like-minded’ or ‘traditional’ partners look like?

Since China has used its aid program as a vehicle to spread into the region, we’ll focus on the role of development assistance. This is only one part, and in many cases a minor one, of broader diplomatic and geostrategic relations. But, for many donors, the aid relationship remains a critical component of interaction with Pacific island nations.

Over the past 18 months, we have also been developing a tool—the Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map, launched today—that will make analysis of foreign assistance in the Pacific far more comprehensive. The map is an interactive, multi-faceted platform that contains data on close to 13,000 projects in 14 Pacific countries from 62 donors (new and old) from 2011 onwards. With the primary objective of enhancing aid effectiveness in the Pacific by improving coordination, alignment and accountability of foreign aid, it is the most comprehensive data-collection effort of aid in the Pacific that has ever been undertaken.

The Pacific Aid Map also illustrates how far these partners will have to go to increase their presence on the ground.

Top donors to the Pacific islands region, 2011–2016

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Source: Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map

Let’s start with the United States. The US has a long and turbulent history with the North Pacific. The Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau all maintain a compact of free association with the US. Between 2011 and 2016, more than 85% of US aid to the region has gone to these three countries. The compact is up for renegotiation in 2023, and Palau (already under pressure from China) hasn’t received compact funding for seven years.

There are also problems brewing in US territories in the region, notably Saipan. The US should look to reaffirm its role in the north Pacific and engage in more targeted action further south, such as enhancing its diplomatic footprint, supporting regional organisations, providing more scholarship support, and involving Pacific partners in more joint military operations.

France has a very strong presence in the region, but only in its territories of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna. More than 500,000 French citizens call the Pacific home. The territories benefit from annual domestic transfers from Paris to the tune of US$3–3.5 billion, almost double the total aid budget for the rest of the region. Close to 2,000 troops are permanently stationed in New Caledonia, and they actively police their vast exclusive economic zones in the East Pacific.

In the ‘Anglo-Pacific’ (or sovereign Pacific), however, the footprint of France is hardly noticed. France didn’t participate in the Bougainville or Solomon Islands interventions. While France has the third largest diplomatic network in the world, it maintains only three posts in the Pacific. France has taken steps in recent years to engage more in the region, most notably working with French Polynesia and New Caledonia on their accession to full membership of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2016. Despite this, the Pacific Aid Map shows that aid from both France and the EU has been in decline since 2011. France should focus on reversing this trend and continuing to crack out of its territorial shell in the Pacific.

The UK has perhaps the longest way to go, with marginal development and diplomatic footprints. Leaving the EU (now far from certain) does present an opportunity as the UK looks to reassert itself bilaterally and reassign aid resources. Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson saw the Commonwealth, a dated community of 53 current and former UK colonies, as a vehicle for reengagement. While 20% of Commonwealth countries are in the Pacific, it remains to be seen whether this ambition will be realised without Johnson at the helm. New diplomatic posts are welcome, but they will be a sideshow if concerted aid dollars don’t come in behind them.

None of this is to say that these countries shouldn’t look to take a more active role in the Pacific, or that Australia and New Zealand shouldn’t be actively courting them. The Pacific faces critical development challenges. Overall aid is on the decline. France, the UK and the US may also bring new ideas and relationships along with their money that could be of benefit of the Pacific. Just don’t expect a Pacific pivot to drastically shift the dial on our new and competitive status quo.

Donald Trump sows a great deal of uncertainty, but there’s every indication that he’ll see less of the Australian prime minister than did his two immediate predecessors, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Consider each president’s first year in office. John Howard met Bush in the Oval Office in September 2001 during a four-day visit when he also commemorated the 50th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, hosted the president and a third of his cabinet at the Australian ambassador’s residence, and was coincidentally in Washington when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. Kevin Rudd made two trips to the White House in 2009, in what Obama called a ‘great meeting of the minds’, and saw the new president at several multilateral summits that year.

The length and quality of leader-to-leader engagement between the US and Australia in the first year of the Trump administration has been lower, and not just because of that phone call. While Trump and Malcolm Turnbull seemingly soothed any lingering tensions in a 45-minute meeting prior to the Coral Sea commemoration event in New York in May, and are expected to hold a second in Asia next week, Trump won’t have spent much time with his Australian counterpart by the end of his first year in the presidency.

Looking ahead, that’s not likely to change. Trump’s aversion to travel, the delicately poised Australian parliament, and an upcoming federal election don’t foreshadow a high level of engagement between the 45th president and Australia’s prime minister.

A new database compiled by the United States Studies Centre enables direct comparisons between Trump and his two predecessors. The database chronicles every in-person interaction between Bush, Obama and Trump (so far) with Australian prime ministers, and shows that over the past 16 years the US president has interacted with his Australian counterpart in either a formal or informal capacity an average of 3.4 times per year.

The US president has hosted the Australian prime minister in the Oval Office on 12 occasions since Bush was inaugurated in January 2001—more than the comparable figure for both the Japanese (10) and Canadian (11) prime ministers. Bush and Obama each visited Australia twice during their presidencies—they logged one international summit and one bilateral visit apiece, including presidential addresses to the Australian parliament in 2003 and 2011. During their two-term presidencies, Bush held more official working visits with his Australian counterpart (10) than Obama (6), but Obama attended a regional or global summit with the Australian prime minister on no fewer than 28 occasions.

The upward trend in the frequency of personal contact—if not necessarily the length or depth of direct leader-to-leader engagement—under President Obama was primarily due to his prolific attendance at multilateral meetings. In addition to long-standing presidential and prime ministerial attendance at summits such as the UN General Assembly, APEC and NATO, the US has attended the G20 since Bush first hosted the grouping in 2008. Obama first attended the East Asia Summit in 2011 and only missed one thereafter (in 2013, but only because he was dealing with a US government shutdown at the time).

By contrast, Trump has shown himself to be less willing to travel interstate, let alone overseas, than presidents before him: one New York Times journalist labelled Trump a ‘homebody president’. Trump’s first foreign trip was on 20 May—the latest first foreign trip in more than 50 years by a US president.

The White House’s initial suggestion that the president would not attend next week’s East Asia Summit (a decision that has now been reversed), despite being in the Philippines the day before, was the latest indicator that the Trump administration holds a dim view of multilateral engagement. The US has either left or is threatening to leave the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Agreement, UNESCO, NAFTA and the Iran nuclear deal. This ‘withdrawal doctrine’, in combination with the president’s aversion to foreign travel, portends a lower level of US–Australia leader-to-leader contact throughout Trump’s presidency.

Whether or not Trump manages a visit to Australia—and follows his predecessors by addressing the Australian parliament—it’s time for Australian stewards of the alliance to grapple with the implications of limited ‘Trump time’.