The rise of ISIS allied with the seemingly inevitable mass migration caused by climate change is confronting Australia’s military and intelligence leaders with a devilish conundrum. No one yet has a plan to meet the approaching tumult but one thing is certain: in solving the dilemma the role of our Special Forces will be increasingly central to our future defence and security.

These conclusions were borne upon me during the two years of research and writing that produced my Warrior Elite, the history of our Special Forces incorporating our intelligence agencies just published by Hachette. It involved scores of interviews with the planners behind the political scenes who develop our defence policy.

In the last two decades the military and the intelligence agencies have coalesced into a Special Forces cohort unlike anything that preceded it. And it incorporates an ever increasing proportion of our defence preparedness. The planners know that the technological genie is out of the bottle. Today, an SAS squadron, for example, has at its command a firepower exceeding a WWII battalion. An extraordinary research effort in 47 military and civilian facilities in the US and others in Europe, Japan and China is producing an astonishing array of protective battle suits, advanced weaponry, communications, telemetry and real time HQ support and direction. These are either in use now or on the verge of deployment to the Special Forces of most advanced countries, Australia included. They are the instruments of a radical transformation of military strategy and tactics.

As our Commando regiment increases its battlefield capacity, the SAS in close cooperation with ASIS is expanding its capabilities in potential trouble spots in the region, the Middle East and even the African continent. But here the planners run up against a strategic quandary. Both units are closely affiliated with the US. And while this brings substantial technical advantages, in the bigger picture these are offset by strategic liabilities which defence leaders realise they must overcome.

America’s imperial superpower assertions have created serious complications in Australia’s relations with China and arguably affected the development of open-hearted, neighbourly relations with the largely Muslim nations of Indonesia and Malaysia. Both Indonesia and China are themselves deeply vulnerable to ISIS—Indonesia through its 95% Muslim population and corrupt governance; China because of its 160 million Muslims and their alienation from an unyielding single-party government. Both countries are facing much bigger problems than Australia in controlling their internal threat.

Indeed, were it not for Australia’s enthusiastic embrace of the Five-Eyes alliance which has traditionally been directed against China and Indonesia, among others, it would be perfectly possible to envisage a regional arrangement encompassing Australia and its two most populous neighbours in a cooperative Special Operations counterforce to the jihadists.

Then comes the second strand of the conundrum: climate change. Heavy Weather, an ASPI Special Report published in March 2013, warned that global warming:

 ‘has generated little interest in either the ADF or the Defence Department, [yet] climate change is transforming the conventional roles of security forces. As a threat multiplier, it has the potential to generate and exacerbate destabilising conditions that could reshape the regional security environment.’

That now seems inevitable. And the planners are aware that our response must involve international alliances with the great forces who would underwrite—with force if necessary—the right of nations like Australia to decide (in John Howard’s immortal phrase) ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

When climate change produces uncontrolled mass migration—the forerunner of which we now see in the Mediterranean—the support and cooperation of regional governments, particularly Indonesia and China, will be essential to any Australian effort to retain its territorial integrity. Yet once again our ‘Five-Eyes’ alliance with the Anglosphere which targets Indonesia and China as potential threats stands as an impediment to the development of the cooperation  and support required.

While the American alliance will no doubt remain in place, it may well be that Australia needs to loosen the ties to its Anglophile past before a genuine regional integration can be secured. An innovative 2014 ASPI/ADF study might well point the way to the future. It proposes the posting of Special Forces liaison officers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines ‘of which Indonesia is the most important’. It recommends increased Special Forces engagement with Southeast Asian nations leading to the establishment of a Special Forces Regional Training Centre in Australia. And in a ground-breaking proposal, it advocates an ‘intensification’ of cooperation with Chinese Special Forces. ‘This would be a confidence-building exercise,’ it says, and would develop through joint humanitarian and military exercises.

In this rearrangement of forces, as our Special Forces add a diplomatic cutting edge to their arsenal, we might well find that our future security—in Paul Keating’s words—is ‘in Asia’ and not ‘from Asia.’

The recent ANU–CSIS paper The ANZUS Alliance in an Ascending Asia is a welcome addition to contemporary thinking on the Australia–US alliance and its prospects over the next couple of decades as China looms ever larger. The even more recent release of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Long-term Macroeconomic Forecasts: Key Trends to 2050 offers a challenging counterpoint to the comfortable policy prescriptions of the ANU–CSIS study.

While it might suit some to dismiss China’s capacity to realise its leadership ambitions, as did the Secretary of PM&C at the Crawford School’s Australian Leadership Forum at the end of June, its growing economic dominance is already affecting the regional strategic balance. And when the relative economic strength of the major global economies is viewed through the lens of demographic change, workforce participation rates, greater capital use efficiency in R&D and adjustments in immigration policies, the mid years of this century look even murkier.

Then there’s the fashionably ignored problem of global warming, which may bring with it significant and adverse security effects, particularly in the riverine deltas and archipelagoes of Asia, with entire communities moving to higher and drier ground. And as the large emerging economies of China and India move away from carbon-intensive energy production, Australia’s relative economic position and associated political throw-weight will decline.

Those combined forces could well stress the alliances that the US already has in place with Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, and may well impact on its alliance with Australia. The ANU–CSIS paper ignores these factors.

The ANU–CSIS paper does, however, provide a useful overview of the ANZUS Treaty, identifying the key political and military developments that have served to support the continuing relevance of the alliance. Curiously, it overlooks what was probably the most profound change to the operation of the alliance— the re-engineering of the operating arrangements at Pine Gap and Nurrungar—which happened on Kim Beazley’s watch as Minister for Defence. Although that was three decades ago, it inaugurated the integrated cooperation paradigm that continues to define the alliance to this day.

The paper correctly acknowledges that the ANZUS alliance, like most defence treaties, was initially threat-based: Australia and New Zealand needed US military assurances if Japan were to rebuild an independent self-defence capability. It doesn’t, however, come to grips with the significance of how the ANZUS alliance has changed since 1951, as shared strategic aims and values have replaced threat as the driving force of the treaty. AUSMIN communiqués since the mid-90s have reflected this fact.

Sadly, what might have worked in the past is no guide to what might work in the future. The paper’s curious language of hubs, spokes, pivots and rebalances suggests a mindset that remains entrenched in the linear strategic concepts of the past. While the US, Australia and New Zealand will continue to coalesce around human, social and political values as the foundation of their long-term strategic relationship, these values are not readily transferable to strategic associations that might be established elsewhere in Asia.

This seems to have escaped the authors of the ANU–CSIS study, especially as they considered the prospective place of both Indonesia and Japan in the evolution of Australian and US strategic interests in Asia. The idea that Indonesia and/or Japan might in some way replace Australia as the US’s preferred strategic partner is ludicrous. What isn’t ludicrous is the interest that the US (and Australia if it can replace a transaction-based Indonesian relationship with an outcomes-based diplomacy) should have in engaging Indonesia and Japan more constructively in the strategic affairs of Asia.

Australia, Indonesia and Japan each bring quite different strengths and benefits to the US as it seeks to secure and manage its global strategic interests. These strengths and benefits are complementary rather than competitive.

The joint US–Australia approach to the emergence of China as a global strategic power cannot rest on some kind of latter-day containment doctrine, or even a policy of constraining China. Nor are the US and Australia in a position to ‘shape’ China’s expectations or ‘permit’ it to take a larger leadership role.

Our joint ability to condescend extends only so far!

Rather, the US and Australia are well positioned to construct a network of intersecting and differentiated relationships that capitalise on the opportunities now on offer in Asia to strengthen and extend a rules-based strategic architecture that engages China, not corrals it. Our collective aim should be to exploit and leverage complexity and ambiguity rather than engage in a form of linear reductionism that misrepresents multi-dimensional strategic opportunities as competitive binary options.

The ANU–CSIS paper questions whether US–China and Australia–China relations might be diverging, but without recognising that difference isn’t necessarily divergence. While the paper implicitly resolves this artificial dichotomy by proposing a return to first principles—what is the regional and global order we seek, and what are the ways and means we have to achieve and sustain that order—it doesn’t answer those questions.

In Australia’s case, the suggestion that some kind of ‘strategic choice’ between Washington and Beijing is inevitable is just another form of the prisoner’s dilemma. Because the nature and dynamics of Australia’s relationships with the US and China are so different, the management of those relationships is much more a question of ‘both/and’ than of ‘either/or’.

The effect of the ANZUS alliance on the strategic evolution of the Asia–Pacific region will ultimately depend on the skill shown by Washington and Canberra in fostering a rules-based regional security architecture supported by economic and trading arrangements that generate prosperity, build resilience and enhance political and social stability. The ANU–CSIS paper has made a start by identifying some of the problems that need to be addressed. But it also reminds us just how much further our joint policy development needs to go.

Getting China right is a key challenge for Australian foreign policy. It’s not easy to do given  our tendency to scare ourselves witless with overblown assessments of Chinese power.

Foreign observers who know China well puzzle about Australian views of the country. Every foreign policy move is assessed for the apparent distress it might cause in Beijing. An Aussie military exercise with America. Won’t the Chinese see that as a provocation? Our Navy needs submarines. Surely that will enrage the People’s Liberation Army? Academics seriously warn us not to get close to Japan and to reduce US alliance ties because these might not play well in Beijing.

In The Australian on Monday Bob Carr warned that we should only ’emphasise the positive’ about China so as not to rouse the dragon.  That was certainly how Carr played his brief time as Foreign Minister.  His diary recounts how he sought to underplay growing defence cooperation with the US at the 2011 AUSMIN meeting in Perth, precisely out of concern that China might object to Marines in Darwin.

The Chinese are astute enough not to regard a few hundred visiting Marines as a dagger pointed at the heart of the Middle Kingdom. But China isn’t beyond toying with our mistaken view that the world hangs on Australian policy decisions.  So it is that every utterance by ambitious PLA senior colonels or reference in People’s Daily editorials is combed by Australian commentators looking for signs that we may have transgressed some Chinese boundary.

The concern to not poke the dragon produces a form of inverse critique of Australian policy moves. For example, at a time of significantly raised tension between China and Japan in 2014, Beijing unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea. Julie Bishop sensibly said this hurt Australian and regional interests in freedom of air transit. But it’s the Australian reaction rather than the Chinese action that is said by Carr and others to be the miscalculation.

Similarly Tony Abbott is chided for saying that Australia has no better friend in Asia than Japan. He talks of Japan as an ally, an often used description of close partners rather than implying a formal treaty relationship.  In both cases this is criticised by Australian rather than Chinese observers, not because Abbott’s statements are incorrect—he’s right on both counts—but because they might generate negative reaction in Beijing.

After some years of participating in and leading senior Defence talks with PLA counterparts my observation of dealing with Chinese leaders is that they understand very well Australia has a strong alliance relationship with the US and that it won’t be broken by Beijing’s preference that such ‘Cold War alliances’ wither away.

The Chinese understand that the US strategic presence in Asia has been the basis of post-war stability and therefore of Chinese economic growth.  To the extent China has any interest in defence cooperation with Australia it’s because they think our substantially US-sourced technology and intelligence engagement makes the Australian Defence Force a more valuable partner.

Beijing pragmatically acknowledges the value the US alliance delivers to Australia’s role in the  Asia–Pacific.  But as an opportunistic actor, China won’t hesitate to play up to the instincts of Australian commentators always looking for ways to make Canberra rather than Beijing the problem in regional security.

To be clear on this latter point, it’s Beijing (not Canberra) that is constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea. It’s Beijing (not Canberra) that has built a 3000 metre, military-grade runway on one of these islands, located artillery and sensors there and persists in playing risky games of chicken with the ships and aircraft of other countries transiting the region.

Australia’s foreign policy approach to China should articulate and then hold to our view of Australian strategic interests. That will be respected more by Beijing than emphasising only the positive or turning a blind eye to Chinese actions—like declaring the ADIZ or building artificial islands—which raise regional tensions.

An Australian approach based on arguing for our strategic interests has not yet, and is unlikely to damage bilateral ties with Beijing. On the contrary, it makes us look like a country which is predictable, open and knows its own mind.

Contrast this with New Zealand’s approach. Although John Key has done a lot to return New Zealand closer to the US and Australia as defence partners, Wellington’s public diplomacy studiously tries to balance between Chinese and American interests as though there is no meaningful difference between the two countries. New Zealand’s uncomfortable silence when China declared its ADIZ bought it no extra credit in Beijing, beyond a rather contemptuous view that ‘small countries’ should keep their mouths shut on big strategic matters.

It’s pointless to pretend that Chinese interests in the  Asia–Pacific align to the interests of other countries in the region or indeed globally; that’s what makes the ‘disputes’ in the South China Sea so intractable. ASEAN and other countries including Australia failed to identify that Chinese island construction was rapidly moving the problem from one of international legal positions to a far grittier fight over expanding strategic control.

To have any hope of limiting further Chinese opportunistic attempts to create reality on the ground in the South China Sea and elsewhere, we need to take a hard-eyed assessment of our strategic interests. Preemptive capitulation or false attempts to emphasise the positive won’t help in the tough minded contest for power in the region.

A decade ago, there were some critics ready to predict a downturn in international peace operations. The start of the 21st century had seen a return of peacekeeping from East Timor to Liberia, but critics saw this as a temporary phenomenon. The first Annual Review of Global Peace Operations published in 2006 wasn’t the product of one of the skeptics. ‘There is every reason to believe that the demand for effective peacekeeping will rise, not shrink, in the years ahead,’ it predicted. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the latest findings show peace operations continue to surge even as NATO and its allies—including Australia—withdraw from Afghanistan. In a world of intractable conflicts and limited good options, peacekeeping is still a valuable strategic tool.

The report of the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on peace operations—Uniting Our Strengths for Peace, released on 17 June argues for the primacy of politics, more responsive operations, stronger partnerships, and missions that are field-focused and people-centered. While not as revolutionary as August 2000 Brahimi Report, this ‘insiders’ document’ does propose some new ideas for old problems as well as contain a long list of technocratic fixes.

As the Annual Review migrates online to become the Global Peace Operations Review, the latest data shows that UN deployments have grown by 8% in 2013 and 2014 to involve more than 100,000 soldiers and police. The number of personnel deployed by other regional organisations, especially in Africa, leapt by 60%.

The new website data on global peace operations isn’t just limited to uniformed personnel. In the same period, the UN and regional groupings have appointed more than 20 new envoys to head special political missions mediating crises from Burkina Faso to Ukraine.

The first edition of the Review of Political Missions in 2010 was recognition of the value of ‘blue suits’ in resolving conflicts, which are always political problems before they turn violent. Civilian crisis management operations, it said, ‘are a diverse tool, and demand for them is likely to increase’.

The reviews published over the last decade weren’t crystal-ball gazing. They gathered data from the statistics visible in the rear view mirror of history. They didn’t foresee the turmoil resulting from end of the Gaddafi regime, state fragility in West Africa, or civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

But looking backwards, the pattern of special political missions has been clear: where there’s war, there will be peacemakers—even if those are battlegrounds where armed peacekeepers fear to tread. By this metric, more peacemakers demonstrate that conflict is on the rise and are more numerous now than those of 2005. NATO’s drawdown has also restored the UN as the leader in peace operations. Compared to most regional groupings, the UN is more capable of mobilising and managing the deployment of multinational forces.

A decade on from when Australian troops packed up from the Timor–Indonesia border, peacekeeping has also evolved. In Liberia, peacekeepers were recently deployed to help combat Ebola. There are new doctrines; such as one covering the protection of civilians, and old debates; such as the limits of the use of force, especially surrounding the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) in the DRC.

Such innovations court controversy. To many, the new tasks look like mission creep. In DRC, unarmed drones have been deployed to conduct surveillance, raising issues of invasion of privacy. In the Mali mission, Netherlands signalers have eavesdropped on the phone calls of armed groups, special forces have conducted long range patrols, and Apache attack helicopters have prowled the skies. Interventions like this come close to a red line for some member states. The last thing they want is to empower overly aggressive UN missions or ones that might spy on them.

Robust UN missions are seen as effective but are hard to sustain. Key troop contributors, especially the South Asian countries that form the backbone of UN peace operations, are reluctant to sign up for such duties.

New Asian contributors are increasingly filling the blue helmets’ ranks, but they share similar reservations. China started slowly, but has now deployed its first combat battalion in South Sudan. Indonesia has pledged to become a top-ten contributing country by more than doubling its current contribution to 4,000 personnel by 2019, but worries the FIB might be ‘seen as a party to the conflict and perceived partial’. It is a delicate line to walk and probably can only really be avoided by UN peacekeeping operations avoiding robust mandates. Panel chairman Jose Ramos Horta said that enforcement tasks, like those given to the UN in Somalia in 1993 and in DRC in 2003, must be ‘exceptional’ and ‘implemented with extreme caution’.

But despite such additions, there’s still a deployment gap. UN missions mostly struggle to reach mandated strength. Where this isn’t so much a problem, such as in UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), it’s because there’s a diversity of contributors, especially from Europe, but also from peacekeeping aspirants like Indonesia.

Some small European countries, such as Ireland, are proud of their tradition of UN peacekeeping. In 1997, two-thirds of Irish soldiers had served on UN peacekeeping operations—70% of these more than once. But US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power has argued that all European nations must do more. It’s a message that should be heard in Australia too.

UN deployments aren’t a distraction from NATO’s core mandate, Power says. On the contrary, they add to collective security. Perhaps, inadvertently, she also explained why they endure and the UN Security Council turns to them when ‘something must be done’.

‘Blue helmets carry the unique legitimacy of having 193 Member States behind them – from the global North and South alike,’ she said. This mattered when Australian forces went to Timor in 1999: it meant InterFET wasn’t an invasion and UNTAET not an occupation. They were missions to enforce and support peace of behalf of all nations. In some fights, it pays to have the world on your side.