In wrapping up the Strategist debate on Australia as a ‘top 20’ defence power, I’d like to thank the other contributors for a fascinating exchange. Peter Jennings’ initial contribution drew a thoughtful response from Andrew Carr, and the series unfolded from there. Contributions from John Blaxland, Nic Stuart, Peter Dean, and Andrew Smith subsequently helped to illuminate the shape of the battlefield. Looking back over the contributions, the core difference that emerges is the one between regionalists and globalists. Carr, Blaxland and Dean are regionalists. Jennings and I are globalists. I think Smith’s a globalist by virtue of alliance. And Stuart’s got a foot in both camps.

I want to use this final post to talk about three things that seem to me to underpin the debate: the notion of ‘balance’ in our global and regional imperatives; Australia’s strategic interests; and the concept of international responsibility. Rolled together those factors become something like an exploration of Australian strategic identity.

Several contributors mentioned the need for Australia to strike a balance between its global and regional roles. I think that’s an important point. But I don’t think past Defence White Papers have been good at setting the balance between the near and the far in Australian strategic thinking. The layered concentric-circles model is structurally biased, because the circles lead ever downhill, emphasising a supposed declining interest in the more distant ‘issues of strategic concern’—to use Peter Dean’s phrase—and a strategic prioritisation on ‘fundamental issues’ close to home. The concentric-circles model doesn’t help us strike a balance; indeed, it doesn’t even pretend to be interested in the concept of balance. If we want to do some balancing between near and far, then we need a different way to think about Australian strategy.

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Last year the government released a range of documents relating to Australia’s approach to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The documents, dating between 1945 and 1974, were edited by Wayne Reynolds and David Lee and published as part of DFAT’s Historical Series—a series that has previously done good work in relation to Timor-Leste, ANZUS and other topics. An electronic version of the latest text is available here.

I’ve been reading the manuscript off and on over the last couple of weeks, and the work certainly deserves greater public attention than it has so far attracted. Yes, the documents are heavily redacted—the phrase ‘matter omitted’ appears with depressing frequency. Still, what’s included is comparatively frank—and revealing. Moreover, given the scarcity of material released from Defence files across this period, some glimmers of policy thinking are better than none. Read more

I’m grateful to Andrew Carr, Rod Lyon and John Blaxland for taking up the debate about Australia’s role as a ‘top 20’ global power. It’s obvious we disagree on some fundamental points about designing the best strategy to keep Australia secure in a more risky and competitive world. There are echoes of this discussion around Julia Gillard’s optimistic Asian Century White Paper; Kevin Rudd’s apparently increasingly pessimistic view of regional security; the ‘China choice’ confection; and Tony Abbott’s instinctive globalism—notwithstanding his pre-election ‘more Jakarta and less Geneva’ slogan. Discomforting and novel as it may be, Australia urgently needs to have a grown-up discussion about strategy.

As my first blog post made clear, I take the view that Australia should reshape its defence and foreign policy around promoting a set of broadly-defined global interests. This would force a break with a regional policy priority that has shaped strategic thinking since the end of the Vietnam War. That focus started quite narrowly—in the 1980s defining Australian interests around the ‘inner arc’ of the Indonesian archipelago. Driven outward by crises, our definition of what constitutes our essential region has progressively widened to include Timor and the Pacific, a wider swathe of Southeast Asia and now—for some at least—the Indian Ocean and North Asia. Read more

Australia, South Korea and Indonesia used their status to play coy on joining China’s new development bank. Canberra, Seoul and Jakarta felt they could stand back and await further blandishment while 20 Asian nations joined China to sign up for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on October 24. But all the usual summitry scripts suggest the movement from coy ‘perhaps’ to ‘oh, yes’ starts today at Beijing’s APEC summit.

Indonesia is hinting it’ll be the first of the reluctant three to agree. It’d be quite a snub not to, given that President Xi Jinping announced the AIIB’s creation at Indonesia’s APEC talkfest last year. Getting to yes is a great way for Jokowi to start off with Xi.

The summit script says that Xi can then start to conjure personal chemistry to woo Australia’s PM and Korea’s President. Working together, Canberra and Seoul have demanded clarity and concessions from Beijing on governance, spending decisions, board structure and voting rights. Read more

With ANZUS in the news (PDF) at the moment, this book is a good way to understand where it all started. In early 1942, America needed Australia’s location linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans as a base from which to project power into Southeast Asia. Australia, seriously unprepared for war, needed American combat power. The relationship later formalised as ANZUS was forged then.

I argued recently that our geography makes us a critical partner when American seapower is under challenge in the western Pacific. The degree to which that was true in WWII becomes abundantly clear in Ian Toll’s excellent book. Even before the fall of the Philippines, Singapore, Burma and what was then the Dutch East Indies—most or all were expected to be unable to withstand the Japanese assault—Admiral Ernest King, the newly appointed Commander in Chief United States Fleet, identified two critical elements of allied strategy: Read more