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In the recent statement from the Quad leaders’ meeting in Tokyo, the Pacific islands feature prominently. Each of the Quad members of Australia, India, Japan and the US have their own unique track records and capabilities to contribute in the region.

From June through to October Japanese naval ships will make port calls to seven Pacific island countries. But perhaps Japan can be persuaded to become even more engaged, especially in the Micronesian zone, where three of the five countries (Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau) have free association agreements with the US, and three (Marshall Islands, Nauru and Palau) recognise Taiwan. It’s no accident that of the five Micronesian countries, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi only landed in one, Kiribati, on his tour of the region.

Japan should cooperate more in surveillance of various island exclusive economic zones. The Palau marine surveillance co-ordination centre that Japan supports could, for example, become one of the fusion centres for the flagship Quad partnership for maritime domain awareness through which risks to undersea cables as well as other maritime crimes could be evaluated.

Similarly, Australia should work more with the US in Micronesia. If the US is able to capitalise on Palau’s offer to Washington to establish a base there, then we should offer some military assets there. Australia is now building 12 offshore patrol vessels. There could be a rotational access of, say, four OPVs through the area. Being in-country, buying provisions from local shops and building people-to-people ties goes a long way. We should also be working more with the US on Guam, the centrepiece of US-led north Pacific security.

More broadly, there’s a wide range of possibilities to work with the US. Australian and US forces could deliver health assistance to the islands with regular rotation of teams of military clinicians through host-nation hospitals for around four weeks at a time, incorporating local training along the way. If requested to assist, we should encourage our engineering firms to work with the islands in land reclamation. Given the importance of maritime transport and safety in the Pacific, we should team with the US and possibly South Korea to design and construct safe ferries to be operated under the islands’ ownership. Taiwan can help with information technology and perhaps EEZ surveillance.

France is a key Pacific player with nearly 3,000 defence personnel in the region. We need to get our relationship back on track for that reason alone. These forces protect French territories and offshore zones, as well as assist in disaster response. France plays an important role in the South Pacific defence ministers’ meeting. We should enhance cooperation with France in fisheries surveillance and patrolling the high seas.

India is well placed to play a bigger role in creating options for the island states. China’s expansion is largely achieved through political warfare. That’s a battlefield on which India has proven skills: India has helped its neighbours weaken China’s grasp on their economies and elites, including in Maldives and Nepal.

In a wide range of key sectors such as education, healthcare, telecommunications, transport, renewable energy, information technology and agriculture India can provide affordable, climate- and culture-appropriate solutions. Maritime security training could be facilitated with India’s new theatre command, and through that with the Quad. Exchanges with Indian MPs and island parliaments would build understanding and contribute to pushing back on China’s attempts to shape and control international rules and norms.

Daniel Suidani, the premier of Malaita, the most populous province in Solomon Islands, recently pointed out that China wants to work with Solomon Islands on policing and ‘centralisation of control’, but that ‘policing won’t bring us development’. Rather, he argued that ‘we have a lot to gain from working more closely with India. It innovates and leads in so many sectors, including affordable healthcare, education, pharmaceuticals, IT, communications satellites and so much more, all the while being vibrant, open and diverse. We feel a natural warmth towards India.’

Australia should be willing to work with a wide range of partners in the region, depending on the needs of the island country involved, without feeling threatened. While there are many partners to work with, in many ways, Australia doesn’t have to lead, do it alone, or even be there if someone else can do it better.

The people of the Pacific want democracy, transparency, accountability and rule of law. From there, they can build their economies and become islands of stability in a free and open Indo-Pacific, benefiting all. We should be working flexibly, with like-minded countries, to use our strengths in an appropriate and co-ordinated manner to reduce each other’s weaknesses. It’s that sort of burden sharing that truly scares Beijing and gives hope to the people of the Pacific and far beyond.

On 3 May last year, Canada and Japan signed a joint vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific. More recently, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly and Defence Minister Anita Anand received mandate letters to develop a Canadian Indo-Pacific Strategy, or IPS.

Notwithstanding these steps towards a Canadian IPS, in closed-door discussions with other Indo-Pacific stakeholders, the common refrain is ‘Where is Canada in the Indo-Pacific?’. So, what will be in its IPS? How will it distinguish itself from the US IPS?

PM Justin Trudeau prioritises a progressive foreign policy approach. Chrystia Freeland, the deputy premier, says Canada has a ‘feminist foreign policy’ approach that’s at the centre of its efforts to eradicate poverty and support inclusive development.

So, what should be the basis for a Canadian foreign policy approach to the Indo-Pacific and is there a place for the Trudeau government’s progressive domestic policy agenda?

In trade, standard-setting and maritime security cooperation, some progressive policy advocacy has been a barrier to securing Canadian interests in the region. The Trudeau government’s emphasis on progressive policies was behind the failure of a bilateral free trade agreement with China. It nearly sank the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and strained Canada–India relations.

Progressive foreign policy advocacy has prompted trade and security partners in the region to ask whether Trudeau wants to talk about trade and security or cultural issues.

In areas such as inclusive development, good governance and climate change, there are ways to wed Canada’s domestic values to an IPS.

Canadian Indo-Pacific priorities resonate with the EU, Japan, Australia and the US They understand that China represents a systemic challenge to the current order that prioritises international law, transparency and international institutions that promote good governance through transparent rules-based systems.

The rules-based order is not calcified. It is open to change according to governance dilemmas that emerge. China has been part of this rules-making process in the past. The current order has developed to include climate-change-related targets, trade regulation and shared taxation approaches. In the future, it will need to further evolve to tackle the issue of artificial intelligence, cyber governance, the digital economy and other issues.

Canada has a national interest in ensuring that the rules that emerge to govern these new technologies and emerging problems reflect Canadian values at home.

Any Canadian IPS will need to pragmatically link Canadian progressive domestic aspirations and the realities of the Indo-Pacific’s complex heterogeneity and commitment to ASEAN centrality.

With these limitations in mind, a Canadian IPS will likely be built upon these pillars: inclusive development, trade and economic resilience, climate change, maritime security, energy and critical mineral security, and middle-power diplomacy.

Through unilateral and multilateral partnerships, the inclusive development pillar of a Canadian IPS will focus on development projects through an intersectional approach with the objective of attempting to address inequality, particularly among minority and underrepresented groups in the region.

Japan, Korea and Australia have similar approaches to their development schemes and would be force multipliers if properly coordinated in this endeavour.

Trade and economic resilience remains central to Canada’s economic prosperity. As a member of the CPTPP, Canada has a vested interest in seeing the agreement expand. Its emphasis on protecting intellectual property, limiting the roles of state-owned enterprises and strengthening labour and environmental laws makes the CPTPP a high-standard agreement. This agreement protects research and development and ensures that rules-based market forces remain the arbitrator of economic competition.

Working with CPTPP members, Canada will need to advocate for its expansion with economies like the UK, South Korea and Taiwan. Expanding the number of CPTPP members also serves to protect Canada and other members from economic coercion by diversifying their trade linkages to like-minded trading partners. It also helps Canada to be a rule-maker rather than a rule-taker.

Canada’s IPS should include investment in resilient infrastructure and connectivity at home and in the region to tackle supply-chain issues and non-traditional security challenges such as transnational diseases, climate-change-related extreme weather and geopolitical friction.

The Indo-Pacific is home to the three most populated countries and regions in the world: India, China and Southeast Asia. Climate change will negatively impact the food and water security of each region. It will foment social, economic and political instability that will not stay in the region. Refugees, food and water shortages, and disruptions in supply chains and trade will destabilise the most economically dynamic part of the world making today’s inflation problems look insignificant.

A climate change pillar will see investment in climate-change mitigation, promote environmentally friendly governance and business systems, and technology transfers. The scale of the problem will require regional and global coordination.

Sea lines of communication require stability to continue to transport energy and goods to the region. By working bilaterally and with and in groupings such as the Quad or the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, a maritime security pillar of a Canadian IPS will continue to enhance maritime domain awareness and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea through naval activities, collective diplomacy and 1.5-track dialogues.

Canada’s IPS will include an energy and critical mineral security component. With natural gas, petroleum and critical minerals in abundance, Canada will wed its commitment to climate change with technological development at home to provide reliable, environmentally friendly energy and critical mineral resources to the Indo-Pacific.

While intimately linked to the US, Canada does not want to be either a bystander or an accidental victim of the intensifying US–China strategic competition. It also does not want its strategy to be seen as subservient to a securitised US IPS. As a result, Canada will invest in problem-solving middle-power groupings that may include the US such as the 2020 Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations.

These six Canadian IPS pillars are likely to be the contours for a sustained, inclusive and meaningful role in the Indo-Pacific. They allow for Canada to plug into existing minilateral partnerships such as the Quad or AUKUS to add value on a case-by-case basis. At the same time, Canada can continue its multilateral engagement with international institutions such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, CPTPP and UN. Critically, these pillars allow Canada to complement the efforts of its allies and friends in the region to contribute to a free and open Indo-Pacific.

With global attention focused on Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s territorial expansionism in Asia—especially its expanding border conflict with India—has largely fallen off the international community’s radar. Yet, in the vast glaciated heights of the Himalayas, the world’s demographic titans have been on a war footing for more than two years, and the chances of violent clashes rise almost by the day.

The confrontation began in May 2020. When thawing ice reopened access routes after a brutal winter, India was shocked to discover that the People’s Liberation Army had stealthily occupied hundreds of square miles of the borderlands in its Ladakh region. This triggered a series of military clashes, which resulted in China’s first combat deaths in over four decades and prompted the fastest-ever rival troop build-up in the Himalayan region.

India’s counterattacks eventually drove the PLA back from some areas, and the two sides agreed to transform two battlegrounds into buffer zones. But, over the past 15 months, little progress has been made to defuse tensions in other areas. With tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian troops standing virtually at attention along the long-disputed border, a military stalemate has emerged.

But stalemate is not stagnation. China has continued to alter the Himalayan landscape rapidly and profoundly in its favour, including by establishing 624 militarised border villages—mirroring its strategy of creating artificial militarised islands in the South China Sea—and constructing new warfare infrastructure near the frontier.

As part of this effort, China recently completed a bridge over Pangong Lake—the site of past military clashes—that promises to strengthen its position in a disputed area of Ladakh. It has also built roads and security installations on territory that belongs to Bhutan, in order to gain access to a particularly vulnerable section of India’s border overlooking a narrow corridor known as the Chicken Neck, which connects its far northeast to the heartland.

All of this, China hopes, will enable it to dictate terms to India: accept the new status quo, with China keeping the territory it has grabbed, or risk a full-scale war in which China has maximised its advantage. China’s expansionism relies on deception, stealth and surprise, and on apparent indifference to the risks of military escalation. The aim of its brinkmanship is to confound the other side’s deterrence strategy and leave it with no real options.

China learned from its strategic folly of invading Vietnam in 1979 and has become adept at waging asymmetric or hybrid warfare, usually below the threshold of overt armed conflict. This enables it to advance its strategic objectives, including land grabs, incrementally. Coercive bargaining and overt intimidation also help to overcome resistance.

This salami-slicing strategy has already enabled Chinese President Xi Jinping to redraw the geopolitical map in the South China Sea. And the terrestrial application of this approach being deployed against India, Bhutan and Nepal is proving just as difficult to counter. As India is learning firsthand, countries have virtually no options other than the use of force.

One thing is certain: simply hoping that China will stop encroaching on Indian territory will do India little good. After all, India got into this situation precisely because its political and military leadership failed to take heed of China’s military activities near the frontier. On the contrary, while China was laying the groundwork for its territorial grabs, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was bending over backwards to befriend Xi. In the five years before the first clashes flared in May 2020, Modi met with his Chinese counterpart 18 times. Even a 2017 standoff on a remote Himalayan plateau didn’t dissuade Modi from pursuing his appeasement policy.

Seeking to protect his image as a strong leader, Modi has not acknowledged the loss of Indian territories. India’s media enables this evasion by amplifying government-coined euphemisms: China’s aggression is a ‘unilateral change of status quo’, and the PLA-seized areas are ‘friction points’. Meanwhile, Modi has allowed China’s trade surplus with India to rise so rapidly—it now exceeds India’s total defence budget (the world’s third largest)—that his government is, in a sense, underwriting China’s aggression.

But none of this should be mistaken for unwillingness to fight. India is committed to restoring the status quo ante and is at its ‘highest level’ of military readiness. This is no empty declaration. If Xi seeks to break the stalemate by waging war, both sides will suffer heavy losses, with no victor emerging.

In other words, Xi has picked a border fight that he can’t win and transformed a conciliatory India into a long-term foe. This amounts to an even bigger miscalculation than Modi’s policy incoherence. The price China will pay for Xi’s mistake will far outweigh the perceived benefits of some stealthy land grabs.

In a sense, China’s territorial expansionism represents a shrewder, broader and slower version of Russia’s conventional war on Ukraine—and could provoke a similar international backlash against Xi’s neo-imperial agenda. Already, China’s aggression has prompted Indo-Pacific powers to strengthen their military capabilities and cooperation, including with the United States. All of this will undercut Xi’s effort to fashion a Sino-centric Asia and, ultimately, achieve China’s goal of global pre-eminence.

Xi might recognize that he has made a strategic blunder in the Himalayas. But, at a time when he’s preparing to secure a precedent-defying third term as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, he has little room to change course, and the costs will continue to mount.

A senior Asian diplomat quips that China’s leadership fears the numbers two, three, four, five and seven.

The superstition is the way the numbers are stacking up.

China agonises over the bilateral alliances represented by the number two (US–Japan, US – South Korea, US–Australia), three represents the members of AUKUS, four is the Quad, five is the Five Eyes intelligence community and seven is the G7.

I’d add to the list the number one, which is too serious for any jest. Beijing wants to be number one. And it wants to enforce the one-China policy on Taiwan. Beijing’s great fear is Taiwan’s growing singularity. China and Taiwan peer intently at Ukraine: the wolf warrior and the porcupine seek invasion lessons.

The way the numbers stack up was the theme last week of an ASPI masterclass, offering an accounting of China’s emerging military and strategic capabilities.

The conference star was former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who noted that China is constantly counting, measuring its ‘comprehensive national power’, judging the power balance with the US. It was a notable ‘twins’ moment having the two ASPIs together for a session—Peter Jennings for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and Rudd as head of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

Characteristically, Rudd is doing two things simultaneously as he zips around the wide brown land. He’s campaigning for Labor in the federal election and promoting his new book, The avoidable war. The book is Rudd at his best: deeply detailed at 400 pages, but vivid and driven in its discussion of the ‘unfolding crisis’ between the US and China and the danger of ‘global carnage on an industrial scale’. The Strategist’s Jack Norton reported on Rudd’s presentation, including his comments on the controversial deal between China and Solomon Islands.

From Washington, ASPI’s Mark Watson offered the masterclass a US perspective, describing the American shift from engagement to competition to deterrence. The engagement decade (2000–2010) was defined by economics as China joined the World Trade Organization. The competition decade (2010–2020) saw economic cooperation bumping against China’s rising military capability and the arrival of Xi Jinping.

Now in the deterrence decade, Watson said, the US ‘no longer sees China as a constructive player but as an outlaw’. China is one of the few things Democrats and Republicans in Washington agree on. Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Watson said, the US remains focused on the Indo-Pacific: ‘Long term, China is still the main game.’

John Lee, former senior national security adviser to foreign minister Julie Bishop, described a reversal of the mindset of the past three decades where cooperation with China was an ‘absolute good’ and Asia was ‘sleepwalking into becoming a Sino-centric region’.

Lee stressed the limited but important ability of other powers to shape China’s understanding of the costs of its actions. ‘One of the tricks China plays on the world is to suggest it can’t be deterred,’ Lee said. ‘We do have the weight to significantly change the cost calculations of the Chinese Communist Party.’

The University of Sydney’s Gorana Grgic offered a range of conceptual frames for the future that’s coming into view:

• Charters—a resuscitated United Nations and rebuilt multilateralism.
• Clubs and coalitions—the democracies join together; the autocracies line up; like-minded coalitions form around issues.
• Concerts—a 21st-century version of the 19th-century recipe, built around spheres of influence.

Grgic’s bet discounts both the charter and concert outcomes. The charter future asks too much of a deeply troubled multilateral system. And attempts at concert will suffer because of domestic politics and the difficulty getting agreement between different regime types.

The Biden administration is using both club and coalition approaches, Grgic judged, with a high-minded appeal to democratic renewal as the principled lodestar, linked to a pragmatic effort to gather teammates.

Amid the domestic hand-to-hand of an election, Australia is giving some attention to the way the international system is shifting (or cracking). ASPI’s agenda paper for the federal election comes at this future from several directions.

ASPI’s Michael Shoebridge judges that globalisation is ‘dead, not resting’, a victim of a divided and dangerous world. He sees a great decoupling of economies and supply chains, notably in the digital world and in key inputs (critical minerals, semiconductors, rare earths, software and, increasingly, the big tech actors and their platforms):

This fracturing of globalisation isn’t just about grievance and increased state-based competition. It’s a response to its inherent flaws, exposed by Covid’s shattering of brittle supply chains and by the ruthless intervention of state power into markets and longstanding business relationships (whether the more egregious, aggressive type we’ve seen from Beijing using trade as a weapon, or the ‘America first’ and ‘EU first’ behaviours seen with vaccine supply early in the pandemic).

Jennings sees politicians increasingly frustrated with a defence organisation that must move beyond the language of crisis and turbulence, to act with urgency and purpose:

Whoever is in government after the next election will face immense policy challenges. How best to strengthen Australia’s position against an angry, nationalist China? How best to shape and support American engagement? How to strengthen our regional friends and how to rapidly boost the capabilities of the ADF, and plan for nuclear submarines.

Time for an independent review of Australia’s defence capabilities, Jennings says, ‘the like of which we haven’t seen since Paul Dibb’s review in 1986’.

Fergus Hanson, of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, says Australia must look outward to a regional battle that will be about democratic values as well as interests. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade must be given the cash and mandate for a contest that’s not a clash of arms, Hanson writes, but a regional contest that ‘will require diplomatic expertise and scale to win’.

DFAT, I’ve argued, is a great department with an anaemia problem, its budget squeezed for decades. Nobody wants to pay for good foreign policy, but everybody pays for poor foreign policy. See James Wise’s ASPI report on how Australia underappreciates and underinvests in diplomacy.

As with Defence, Hanson says DFAT’s role needs a big rethink:

A lingering problem has been an inability to identify clear objectives that DFAT can pursue and achieve, thereby justifying its funding to government. The failure to do this has seen national security agencies increasingly ascendant in the Canberra policy ecosystem. As dismal as DFAT has been in justifying its own existence, the dynamics of competition in the region demand a well-resourced and high-functioning Australian foreign service. If DFAT can’t demonstrate the ability to evolve, a high-level review should look at a complete overhaul of the organisation to make it fit for purpose.

On 21 May, voters will pencil the numbers on their ballot papers, giving their score on our politics, but also on how the numbers are adding up beyond our shores.

China’s treaty on security cooperation with Solomon Islands has two key purposes. First, it helps to extend the military reach of the People’s Liberation Army, complicating America’s task of moving its own forces through the Pacific. Second, Beijing gets the joy of damaging Australia’s security interests, because now we must plan on a threat from the east that can watch and potentially target our military bases.

Nothing could amuse Xi Jinping more than to see Labor blame Prime Minister Scott Morrison for failing to stop China from undermining the sovereignty of the Solomons by co-opting its prime minister.

It turns out the members of our ‘Pacific family’ have minds and agendas of their own.

The real test for the Australian government is to develop a strategy to ensure that a Chinese military base isn’t built and that Honiara decides by itself to embrace a closer security relationship with us. Securing that outcome will be difficult because Beijing will move quickly to create ‘facts on the ground’. Probably before our 21 May federal election is over, PLA cargo aircraft and ships will arrive in Honiara with material to provide the ‘logistical replenishment’, ‘stopover and transition in Solomon Islands’ and to carry out the ‘major projects’ described in the leaked draft agreement.

Australia’s policy failure is not that we failed to disrupt a Chinese covert operation. It’s much broader than that. For decades, we have overestimated our influence in the Pacific, underinvested in promoting our security and failed to appreciate China’s strategic intent.

Australia’s defence policy, released in 2020, sets three fundamental goals: to shape Australia’s strategic environment; to deter actions against our interests; and to respond with credible military force, when required.

We have failed in all three aims. We are not shaping the views of our neighbours and we have failed to deter Chinese adventurism in any practical sense. Our ‘credible military force’ is as busy as a defence force could be doing disaster relief and helping with the Covid-19 response, but when it comes to operating in the region, Defence is slow, hesitant, late and limited.

After the election, the Solomons’ lesson should force an immediate and urgent rethink about how to add grunt to the ‘shape, deter, respond’ mantra. The starting point should be to act with focused intensity to shore up our threatened strategic interests in the Pacific. We need to stop wringing our hands about China’s money politics in the region and accept that the leadership we claim will cost money.

This week Morrison announced that an extra two patrol boats will be built for the navy. Defence Minister Peter Dutton should go to Honiara and offer to base them there in a shared Australia–Solomons facility.

Diplomatically, we should be working with other Pacific island governments to develop a shared view of the risks China presents to the region. This means dropping the usual niceties behind closed doors to set out in stark terms how a micro-state can be subverted with Beijing’s money, lose its sovereignty and find itself beholden to the bosses of the Chinese Communist Party.

Morrison’s extra patrol boat announcement is a great example of what can be done if the focus is building more defence capability for the short term rather than the 2030s. The government should reverse its ill-considered decision to scrap the SkyGuardian plan for armed Reaper drones operating by 2025.

That would make it possible for the Australian Border Force to buy the maritime version of the same drone—a plan it has been forced to shelve because of the Reaper decision. Putting aside the Australian Greens—who are also happy to blame Beijing’s perfidy on our own government—does anyone doubt the need for stronger maritime surveillance to our east?

Solomon Islands can be persuaded to shelve the China deal. It will take focused effort on our part and more money than we would like to spend, but we have been short-changing defence for decades—another achievement of the great Australian bipartisan project to be asleep at the wheel of our own security.