In his statement to the Solomon Islands parliament on the draft security agreement between his country and Beijing, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare stridently but disingenuously denied ‘pitching into any geopolitical power struggle’.

Despite the shared fears of Sogavare’s domestic critics—one of whom leaked a copy of the draft—and knowing that virtually all of its Western friends profoundly disagreed, the Solomon Islands government has now inked the agreement.

It’s not clear if the signed version is different in any important aspect from the leaked version, but even a significant sanitising of the language wouldn’t undo the damage this event has done to both signatory countries.

In a three-page letter to Sogavare, the president of the Federated States of Micronesia, David Panuelo, set out very clearly the reasons why Solomons security ties with China would pitch the region into the broader geopolitical power struggle.

The letter is particularly significant because it was written from the perspective of the only one of the three Micronesian entities in a freely associated relationship with the US to recognise the People’s Republic of China. (The other two are Marshall Islands and Palau.)

Panuelo argues that, while the Solomons enjoys agency as an independent state to pursue its national interest, it has an obligation to its people, to the region and even to global security to use its agency with prudence. Sogavare has an obligation to recognise that his decisions have consequences for others in the region.

The language and substance of the draft agreement betray its origins in Beijing and thus serve to identify China’s ambitions in the Solomons and by extension the region more generally.

The implied preferential extraterritoriality in the draft allowing China to use its military ‘to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects’ raises concerns beyond Solomons Islands.

The safety of Chinese personnel and their property has been a legitimate concern at several critical points in the Solomons’ history—most notably during the riots in April 2006 and November 2021. Nevertheless, privileging the protection of major Chinese projects goes beyond such events and has an ominous ring regionally.

The Sogavare government signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2019 within days of switching recognition from Taipei to Beijing. The association of direct protection by the People’s Liberation Army of BRI projects regionally would be an even more damaging trope for China than ‘debt-trap diplomacy’.

This is not an impossible stretch. Observers have noted that a feature of Chinese contributions to UN peacekeeping missions has been a bias towards protecting China’s commercial assets.

On 31 March, the Australian Defence Force’s joint operations chief, Lieutenant General Greg Bilton, spoke publicly of the consequences of a Chinese military presence on ADF operations. While Bilton was careful to use the language of conditionality, the security agreement has already thrown an enormous rock into the Pacific pond and the ripples will affect all members of the free and open Indo-Pacific project.

The references in the draft agreement to military personnel, armed forces and ship visits with stopover and transition arrangements give rise to justifiable concerns that it will legitimise prepositioning of Chinese military stores as a precursor to a secure naval precinct on its way to a full-blown military base under the pretext of protecting Chinese interests.

The immediate-term objective for Beijing, apparently shared and supported by Sogavare, has been to achieve some parity with Canberra’s security treaty with Honiara signed after the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomons Islands ended. A long-term objective in light of last year’s AUKUS announcement may be to focus Australia’s security concerns closer to home and away from the South China Sea.

A belated public declaration that the Solomons would never allow a Chinese military base is scarcely likely to settle concerns.

The Sogavare government’s dissembling and lack of transparency on the switch in recognition to Beijing, the secrecy provisions in the draft agreement and the smuggling of replica military-grade Chinese weapons to the Solomons for police training have intensified the trust issues regarding Chinese ambitions.

Even where local opinion minimises the likelihood of any intended military objectives in or through Solomon Islands, the security agreement is recognised as troubling at the domestic level.

The privileged protection of major Chinese projects is laden with risk, particularly with regard to inflaming interethnic rivalries and possibly leading to outright conflict.

There are serious tensions between the government of the Solomons’ largest province, Malaita, and the Sogavare government. Malaita Premier Daniel Suidani has vowed to never allow Chinese money into Malaita.

The continuing resistance of the province to accepting Chinese aid projects is a source of annoyance to Honiara. The use of Chinese police or military personnel to protect a major development project forced on Malaita would very likely reignite the deadly civil conflict of two decades ago.

Another potential flashpoint is also on the horizon. Opposition leader Matthew Wale has warned that there may be a constitutional crisis looming as Sogavare appears to want to extend the life of his government by postponing national elections due next year until 2024.

Acknowledging the media reports of this proposal, Governor-General David Vunagi warned that it would require constitutional change approved by parliament.

Although some constitutional provisions require a three-quarters vote, it appears that this change might need only two-thirds of the parliament. If that’s true, judging by the no-confidence vote Sogavare survived in December 2021, the numbers could be there for such a change.

A serious constitutional crisis where a third of the population strongly resent an attempt to extend the life of the Sogavare government could reignite interethnic conflict, which is why Australian troops are currently on Guadalcanal.

Just how far would Beijing go to protect a government that has delivered so much to China? Equally, how far would Canberra go to defend the democratic values required under the Biketawa Declaration if a competent authority such as the governor-general made the request?

One thing is certain: the regional security egg has been scrambled. There’s no way back to the sense of manageable balance that existed before the leaking of the draft agreement.

Whatever financial advantage the Sogavare government thinks its leveraging of sovereignty has won for it, the precautionary cost in the security response of states unable to trust the Solomons’ promises is likely to be much higher.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s endgame in Ukraine remains unclear. But his war there does seem to be sending one clear message: if you have nukes, nobody messes with you. The security risks this poses cannot be overestimated.

Just days after launching his invasion of Ukraine, Putin announced that he had placed Russia’s nuclear forces on ‘high alert’—a clear warning to the West not to intervene militarily on Ukraine’s behalf. And it seems to have worked. Despite Russia’s relentless bombardment, including of civilian areas, the United States has flatly refused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated requests for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone.

The reason is simple: The West fears the consequences of all-out war with a nuclear-armed power. While this is not unreasonable, it is likely to erode trust in America’s nuclear umbrella, the effectiveness of which, as a 2020 study showed, was declining long before Russia began its war against Ukraine. The only way a country can credibly protect itself from attack by a nuclear power, it now seems clear, is to maintain nuclear weapons of its own.

For Ukraine, this is particularly frustrating. In 1994, after the end of the Cold War, the country surrendered its nuclear arsenal—then the world’s third largest—in exchange for security assurances that turned out to be meaningless. Not surprisingly, some officials have indicated that they regret disarmament.

Likewise, the Ukraine war has vindicated those countries that were already pursuing nuclear weapons, and they have redoubled their commitment to doing so. In recent weeks, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has conducted several high-profile missile tests, including a failed test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile.

But the nuclear power to watch in Asia is China. Since it tested its first nuclear device in 1964, China has adhered to a doctrine of minimum deterrence—essentially, maintaining just enough nuclear weapons to be able to retaliate against a nuclear attack. That is about 350 warheads today, compared to America’s 5,550 and Russia’s 6,000.

So, while China has long possessed a nuclear deterrent, it has avoided wasting hundreds of billions of dollars building a large arsenal—an effort that probably would have triggered a regional nuclear-arms race. There are of course limits to this approach. In a conflict with another nuclear power, China could be neutralised with a pre-emptive strike and missile defence. But a war between nuclear-armed powers seemed so unlikely that maintaining minimum deterrence seemed like a good bet.

The deepening cold war with the US changed China’s strategic calculations. Last December, the US Department of Defense estimated that China was seeking to double its nuclear stockpile by 2027 and amass 1,000 warheads by 2030.

Following the Ukraine war, China will surely strengthen these efforts. It certainly has the resources for a massive arms buildup. And, with Putin issuing nuclear threats and tensions over Taiwan intensifying, the strategic imperative is stronger than ever.

But the nuclear buildup will not stop with China. Several of Asia’s key players are now set to be dragged into a costly and dangerous arms race that will make the entire region less secure. India, China’s regional rival, will seek to expand its own arsenal, prompting India’s nuclear-armed nemesis, Pakistan, to do the same.

This would place East Asia’s non-nuclear states, such as Japan and South Korea, in a quandary. Already, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has called for Japan to consider hosting American nuclear weapons. Though the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, quickly rejected the idea, the proposal represents a major shift in a country that has abided by the principles of nuclear non-proliferation since World War II.

If an Asian nuclear-arms race takes hold, countries’ willingness to challenge taboos will only increase. In both Japan and South Korea, nuclear weapons will become the most divisive domestic political issue, with national-security hawks advocating their development, even if doing so jeopardises relations with the US, which views nuclear proliferation as an existential threat.

Finally, Taiwan might decide to acquire nuclear weapons as insurance against a Chinese invasion. But this would almost certainly precipitate just such an invasion. The resulting conflict, which could well involve the US, could quickly escalate into a nuclear war.

The world has long depended on the principle of mutual assured destruction to prevent nuclear war. But, even if MAD deters countries from launching premeditated wars, it cannot protect against accidents or miscalculations. The more nuclear weapons the world has, and the more fearful countries are that their adversaries will launch pre-emptive strikes, the more acute the risks become.

By bolstering the case for more nuclear weapons in Asia, Putin’s war in Ukraine could decimate what little is left of the region’s strategic stability. This not only poses an existential threat to Asia; it would also deliver yet another blow to the global non-proliferation regime, making it even harder to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons in other regions.

Beijing’s goals, set out in numerous speeches by Xi Jinping and in decisions and actions, are clear now. Number one remains Xi and the Chinese Communist Party staying in power indefinitely as rulers of China’s 1.4 billion people—Xi’s real ‘China dream’.

Xi and his acolytes want three big things:

• an external environment that continues to enable China to grow its economic, technological and strategic power
• tighter control over China’s domestic economy and all Chinese individuals and entities, as Jack Ma and many other formerly powerful corporate figures now understand
• deeper integration of other economies into China’s market, where China dictates the terms as a means of influencing and controlling actors in its external environment.

These priorities interact with the deep partnership that has developed between Moscow and Beijing, starting with the 2001 Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, accelerating under the growing relationship between Xi and Vladimir Putin since 2013 and culminating in their joint statement less than three weeks before Putin launched his long-foreshadowed invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.

Looked at with these priorities and this context in mind, Putin’s war in Ukraine, like Covid-19 and increased strategic competition with the US and other major powers, has negative and positive consequences for the rulers in Beijing.

On the negative side, Putin’s war exposes the contradictions in Chinese policy and action. Beijing’s long espousal of the principles of non-interference in other states and respect for their sovereignty looks meaningless when placed against Xi’s and the broader Chinese government’s clear diplomatic protection for Putin as he engages in an aggressive war that directly breaches them.

Xi’s vague and conflicting language, repeated by China’s foreign ministry and various state media mouthpieces, attempts to blur and blunt the jarring contradiction at the heart of Beijing’s position on the war. But his words are entirely unconvincing, as many of the Chinese state voices engaged in this effort may well realise.

Here’s the foreign ministry’s readout of Xi talking to Germany’s Olaf Scholz and France’s Emmanuel Macron:

President Xi stressed that the current situation in Ukraine is worrisome, and the Chinese side is deeply grieved by the outbreak of war again on the European continent. China maintains that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected, the purposes and principles of the UN Charter must be fully observed, the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be taken seriously …

So, the ‘current situation’ is ‘worrisome’, as if the war were some naturally occurring phenomenon troubling Europe rather than the result of human decision-making—in this case by someone Xi knows well: Vladimir Putin.

While wrapping himself in a lofty reference to the UN charter, Xi ensures he supports Putin’s stated reason for starting this war and killing so many Ukrainian civilians and Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. Xi tells Macron and Scholz that ‘the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be taken seriously’. He knows this phrasing is an echo of Russia’s language on the conflict, as we’ve heard from figures like Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko. He also knows there’s nothing legitimate about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a state China has recognised since 1992 and a UN member since 1991.

Putin’s war is also forcing Chinese companies and financial institutions to adopt the West’s broad, deep sanctions against Russian entities because, if they fail to comply, they risk losing much larger international markets than Russia.

There’s tension, no doubt, between these corporate decisions and the government’s opposition to the sanctions—characterising those adopted by the EU, the G7, every NATO member and numerous other countries from Switzerland to Australia as ‘unilateral’, despite the word’s mathematically implausibility in these circumstances.

But that tension may not be terribly pronounced or long-lasting: Xi’s reassertion of CCP control over state-owned enterprises and all Chinese companies means they’ll subordinate their commercial interests to state interests and policy directions.

Beijing clearly wants to find ways to continue to trade with and support Russia economically and financially while Putin wages war. Foreign Minister Wang Yi has asserted that because China is ‘not a party to the conflict’, it shouldn’t have to adopt sanctions or comply with them. Chinese officials have gone further, saying China hopes to maintain normal trade with Russia while Putin is in the midst of his war.

This means we should expect the Chinese government’s policy for itself and for China’s corporate and financial actors to be to do the minimum required to be narrowly technically compliant with international sanctions while creatively engineering ways to provide Russia with economic and financial support.

While Chinese companies and institutions with international markets well beyond Russia are complying for now, the sanctions are giving Beijing’s policymakers an opportunity to learn how broad, deep sanctions might be developed as a policy tool for their government. This will inform Beijing’s work on its own sanctions machinery to use against others.

Like its position on state sovereignty and non-interference, we should expect the purity of Beijing’s position against ‘unilateral’ sanctions to not trouble Chinese officials at all when it comes to employing their own sanctions as weapons to complement their informal, truly unilateral economic coercion methods.

And the unified sanctions against Russia are a forceful catalyst to accelerate implementation of Beijing’s own economic and technological strategy of dual circulation, aimed at reducing China’s dependence on US- and EU-led financial markets, supply chains and technology, with a particular focus on digital technologies. This was already a core matter for Xi and his CCP politburo colleagues because of the growing strategic and technological competition between China, the US and, increasingly, the EU.

But the shock of seeing previously divided countries and powers across Europe and the Indo-Pacific act with such speed and unity of purpose against Russia will inject urgency into Chinese action. So, we’ll see an acceleration of the technological ‘decoupling’ of China from the larger democratic world, and a broadening of that decoupling beyond the technology sector, with energy and even renewables being likely new areas.

That decoupling will become turbo-charged should Beijing provide not only economic, financial and diplomatic support to Putin but also material military assistance to his war.

US intelligence has revealed that Moscow has already asked Beijing for such assistance—apparently including supplies like armed drones. And the information was sufficiently reliable for US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to raise the issue directly with CCP politburo member Yang Jiechi in an inconclusive seven-hour meeting in Rome.

Beijing—and Xi himself—are likely to have absolutely no intention of shifting from their partnership with and support for Putin, but they will work covertly and in ways that allow them to claim they’re not in technical breach of sanctions but are ‘seeking peace’. Beijing will continue to bet that the attraction of its large market and the passage of time will reduce other governments’ unity on Russia, and make it easier for Beijing to walk its preferred path.

But Beijing’s decision-making and calculations have proven far less supple and successful, and more strident and inwardly focused, as the Xi era wears on, so it’s unlikely to be able to strike this balance in the sea of contradictions it finds itself in. To paraphrase that seasoned politician of the 1970s and 1980s, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, ‘You can’t sit on the fence and keep your ear to the ground without terrible things happening.’ The prospects of Beijing being exposed for deep, active support to Putin are growing.

The consequences will be a further shattering of what’s left of the ‘global economy’ and the beginning of a world challenged by the manifest strategic partnership between the twin autocracies of Russia and China. This challenge, unexpectedly, is likely to be met with much greater unity and will than we had any right to expect before 24 February.

Let’s hope the Quad and AUKUS get boring. It’s rare in the politics of diplomacy to have no new ‘announceables’ or major initiatives from key meetings like the Quad involving Indian, Japanese, American and Australian foreign ministers in Melbourne on Friday. It’s even rarer for that to be a fine thing.

But Melbourne has hopefully set a pattern for other Quad meetings in 2022—a focus on hard work, implementation and delivery, with a common, positive purpose, and without the need for shiny new talking points.

Reading the joint statement and remarks after the meeting, the agenda is clear and the work is coming together, as is a sense of optimism and energy. That optimism contrasts starkly with the defensive tenor of much of the last five years, when China had seemed to have the momentum and others were mainly just responding.

Last year saw major new strategic developments and groupings, with the big two being the Quad leaders’ group brought together twice by US President Joe Biden with prime ministers Narendra Modi, Scott Morrison, Yoshihide Suga and then Fumio Kishida, and AUKUS—brought into being by Biden, Morrison and UK PM Boris Johnson. This year and the next must see action and effort on the agendas of both these ‘minilaterals’.

The good news is that even on their way to Melbourne the US, Indian and Japanese ministers all knew this. Indian reporting on External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar put it well, saying the Quad would be ‘operationalised in Melbourne’, with the agenda being ‘to translate its discussions and objectives on the ground, be it vaccine delivery [or] critical and emerging technologies’.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on his plane: ‘The Quad is becoming a powerful mechanism for delivering, helping vaccinate a big part of the world and getting a lot of vaccines out there, strengthening maritime security to push back against aggression and coercion in the Indo-Pacific, working together on emerging technologies and making they sure they can be used in positive ways not negative ways’.

Japanese reporting had a similar tone, also noting that Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi would continue on after the Quad meeting to Honolulu to continue work with Blinken on Indo-Pacific security. Blinken and Hayashi were joined there by their South Korean counterpart, Chung Eui-yong.

All this is evidence that our region’s most powerful democracies have moved from thinking and proposing to implementing and acting. That’s enormously positive and energising, and sorely needed not just in the Indo-Pacific but in the wider world.

It’s also more than noteworthy that the US, in particular, is devoting this leadership time and attention to the Quad and our region while also bringing so much bandwidth to bear on deterring Russia in Europe. We need to get less surprised about the ability of this great power to walk and chew gum. And we also need to understand a new phenomenon that is strangely making this easier.

On 4 February, Russian and Chinese leaders Vladmir Putin and Xi Jinping chose to use their lonely time together at the Winter Olympics to tell the world that their coercion of those around them—whether of Ukraine, Taiwan or other neighbouring states—was actually conscious and concerted behaviour, and that we should expect to see more of it as their partnership deepens.

In their lengthy joint statement, among anxious words about ‘colour revolutions’ and fears of external enemies, Xi and Putin tried to convey a picture of themselves to the world as cosy, empowered autocrats, confident enough to pretend that authoritarianism is democracy, aggression is pacifism and political repression is protection of human rights.

The two problems they have are that simply saying all this doesn’t make it true, and the disconcerting fact that the world’s real democracies are graphic demonstrations of what actual freedom looks like: creative and messy, but powerful.

We should thank both Putin and Xi for focusing the efforts of an otherwise diverse set of democratic groupings and powers across NATO, the EU, the Quad and AUKUS in common directions—and for showing us all the connections between what happens in Europe and what happens in the Indo-Pacific.

Funnily enough, another common cause Putin and Xi were less vocal about is also present right now in the febrile climate of an approaching federal election: foreign interference in our political system. Because Australia is not an isolated target of this work, it’s another phenomenon that will drive European and Indo-Pacific partners closer together

While they protest their non-interference commitments, both Russia and China are capable and large-scale perpetrators of covert and corrupting interference inside other nations’ policymaking and political machineries. Russian interference in US politics is formally documented and the activities that led to Australia’s foreign interference laws have been reported extensively—with some prime examples collected in Peter Hartcher’s excellent book Red zone.

Just last week, ASIO chief Mike Burgess said espionage and foreign interference have outpaced terrorism as the greatest threats his agency is dealing with. While other states with ‘sharp elbows’ (as Burgess called them) are also involved, the two big players are Russia and China. There are conflicting accounts about whether one particular plot recently disrupted by ASIO was Russian or Chinese. Sources within intelligence agencies seem to have confirmed it was Beijing, but this or another plot could just as easily have been Russian.

In 2022, AUKUS is showing a similar shift from aspiration to hard, focused delivery work. Five months of the 18-month implementation planning period the AUKUS leaders announced back in September have already sped by.

Among other signs of progress—like a three-nation nuclear information-sharing arrangement—Australia is putting additional diplomats into Vienna to do the heavy lifting around protecting nuclear non-proliferation, while also expanding Canberra-based non-proliferation expertise. That’s no doubt less exciting work than dealing with designing, building and operating nuclear submarines. But it’s essential to get right if Australia is to get the submarines and also implement AUKUS in a way that doesn’t just protect but strengthens the world’s controls around nuclear weapons. Non-proliferation is not a trivial side issue for AUKUS. It’s a core part of how it must be designed and implemented.

With the Quad and the frenetic consultation surrounding deterring and sanctioning Russia over Ukraine, 2022 has started well for those interested in reversing the lazy narrative of declining, divided democracies confronted by confident autocracies.

Australians should take to heart three key facts about this.

It’s remarkably positive that, with the Quad and AUKUS, we are at the table in two of the peak groups that matter to how the regional—and global—order gets rearranged.

That puts a great obligation to do more than just participate in these groupings—we need to invest the resources, talent and simple hard work to make our contributions matter, and to increase the tempo and momentum of delivery of both these groupings.

And aggressive autocrats banding together won’t be deterred by nuanced tones of voice and smiles. Doing so will require clear-eyed cooperation backed by real-world capabilities, measured diplomacy and political will—as well as all the creativity our messy democracy and those of our partners and can bring to bear.