Peter’s sprightly post leaves no room for doubt: he doesn’t buy the argument that he thinks I’m making about how we should respond to China’s rise. I’m glad to hear that because I don’t buy the argument he thinks I’m making either. Like him, I don’t believe that Australia must make a choice between America and China—or at least not the kind of once-and-for-all, all-or-nothing choice he has in mind. On the contrary, like Peter, I think the key aim of Australian policy should be to avoid having to make that kind of choice.

Where we differ, I think, is over what we should do to avoid being forced to make that ‘big choice’ between America and China. Peter would, I expect, agree that whether we can avoid making the big choice depends mainly on the trajectory of the US–China relationship. If they get on okay with one another, we can get on okay with both of them. But the worse they get on, the starker the choice we’ll face between them. And in the event of a conflict we would face a big choice indeed. Read more

A journey even more remarkable than the Chinese Ming Dynasty fleets’ discovery of Australia in the 1420s (at least according to Hu Jintao in 2003) is Hugh White’s journey of discovery on the China Choice road. Readers will be familiar with the bleak landscape of this voyage: confronted with a growing China determined to dominate its region, Australia must choose between its biggest market or its American ally. The choice is either to give China breathing space to manifest its destiny or ultimately go to war to stifle Beijing’s ambition. The prospect of war is so terrible that Australia’s only sensible option is not to cooperate with Japan or, most likely, any other partner in the region, because to engage with others is to encroach on Chinese breathing space. And that will take us to war.

The latest staging post on the China Choice road, is an article in the Fairfax broadsheets lamenting Tony Abbott’s commitment to closer defence and economic cooperation with Japan. This is a bad thing, Hugh argues, because Japan’s interest is to gather around it countries that will fight alongside it against China. In the White world of international security, where countries behave like the planets set on their immutable orbits, there’s no other outcome than that China and Japan will go to war over rocks in the sea while the US, Australia and any other country silly enough to limit China’s breathing space will be drawn into the conflict. So obvious is this desolate outcome, Hugh concludes, that either Tony Abbott just doesn’t understand the celestial movements of countries in White’s world, or:

A second possibility is that Mr Abbott is just pretending not to understand. He does understand what is going on in Asia, and has decided that, as regional strategic rivalries escalate, Australia’s best move is to spur them on—not just by strengthening our alliance with America, but by becoming Japan’s ally against China.

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Japan has quickly risen to become a defence partner for Australia that ranks beside New Zealand and Britain. Thus, Japan sits on the second tier, with the traditional Anglo allies, below the peak where the US presides as the prime, principal and paramount ally.

To see Japan as one of Australia’s closest security partners is to describe a set of changes that have arrived with great speed in only two decades.

When Shinzo Abe told Australia’s Parliament on Tuesday that he wanted to ‘make a truly new basis for our relations’, he was stating a future ambition for Japan, but building on a structure already in place.

The key fact of that structure was in this sentence: ‘There are many things Japan and Australia can do together by each of us joining hands with the United States, an ally for both our nations’. As my previous post noted, Australia and Japan are becoming allies, without a formal when-the-shooting-starts-bilateral-alliance, because of the trilateral that expresses their alliances with the US. Read more

Rod Lyon and Malcolm Davis superbly articulate the inherent risk of declaratory policy—just because you limit yourself with regard to nuclear weapons doesn’t mean that your adversaries will benevolently respond in-kind. I agree that it may be unsound categorically to rule out nuclear first use in absolutely all circumstances. One of the benefits of a multilateral treaty prohibiting low-yield nuclear weapons over sole purpose is that it raises the nuclear threshold without setting an inflexible condition on nuclear use.

I’ll try to address the specific questions posed by Rod with regard to Baltic and China. First, how does making it clear to Putin that the United States would not contemplate initiating a nuclear conflict to defend the Baltic states enhance Lithuania’s security, even if an unlikely prospect?

The answer turns on a philosophical point. There are some who believe (and I’m not suggesting Rod or Malcolm are in this category) that questioning nuclear deterrence weakens it. I don’t. Nuclear deterrence must stand or fall on credibility and nothing else. If questioning the credibility of nuclear use in certain cases makes actual use less likely, chances are that any security benefit was illusory to begin with. That doesn’t mean the United States should declare redlines (or make sole-purpose declarations), but clarity about when nuclear use is more or less credible helps avoid catastrophic miscalculations and focuses attention on what provides a real security dividend. Read more

The Government of the Republic of the Philippines is presently engaged in a concerted effort to modernise its military into a force capable of projecting a posture of credible external deterrence. The overarching goal of that transformation is to equip the Armed Forces of the Philippines with the necessary capabilities to protect the territorial integrity of the state, offset evolving foreign defence challenges, and ensure the attainment of Manila’s strategic maritime interests—particularly as they relate to claims in the South China Sea (SCS). To that end, three central innovations have been emphasised in the short-to-medium term.

First is the establishment of ‘appropriate strategic response forces’, developed in all branches of the military, to undertake integrated defensive missions and deter potential external threats that could harm the country’s core national security interests.

Second is the creation of an enhanced C4ISR system to support the joint command and control of strategic defence operations and improve situational awareness through the faster collection, structural fusion, analysis and dissemination of shared information. Read more