The relative decline of US influence in the Indo-Pacific has upset the regional status quo and leaves a clear power vacuum. With little sign of the US presence being quickly restored to what it once was, there is a pressing need for Australia and Japan to assert themselves as regional powers.

Australia and Japan have been two of the most active advocates promoting the Indo-Pacific as a uniting concept for regional cooperation and recent threats to their shared security interests have seen enhanced momentum towards deepener security cooperation. The recently signed landmark reciprocal access agreement takes bilateral defence and security cooperation to an advanced level, however, more must be done to truly meet today’s challenging security dynamics.

US President Joe Biden flew to Japan to meet Prime Minister Fumio Kishida before today’s Quad leaders’ meeting in Tokyo. It’s Biden’s first visit to Japan as president after more than 12 months in office and is an important attention counter-point to the war in Ukraine. Both the Biden–Kishida and Quad summits provide opportunities for Japan and Australia to remind the US of its critical role as a regional stabiliser and to workshop complementary regional approaches. That reminder can’t come soon enough.

Indo-Pacific regional dynamics have evolved dramatically in recent years. The US is more stretched and distracted, China’s approach is increasingly coercive, non-traditional security issues affect the region and now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has uprooted decades of European stability. As these challenges become increasingly pressing, Australia and Japan need to develop a collective balance of power to uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific. Key to doing this will be engaging with the US in new and meaningful ways as it seeks to redefine its regional presence.

The future of US engagement in the region will look different to what we have seen previously. Under its new strategy of ‘integrated deterrence’, the US will not rely on its strength alone but implement a framework for operating with allies in both conventional and non-conventional areas of conflict. This will be a long-term effort requiring shared political will, capabilities and interoperability among countries: an agenda both Australia and Japan support and other US partners should embrace.

As regional leaders, Australia and Japan can utilise their established relationships with ASEAN, South Korea and European countries to help the US redefine its role in the Indo-Pacific against a backdrop of collective deterrence. With more regional countries involved, China’s decision-making will be more complicated and smaller countries could feel empowered to push back against Beijing’s coercive practices.

With greatly reduced strategic warning time, integrated deterrence—facilitated by capability-sharing agreements, will be key to meeting growing threats to regional stability. This preparation can be bolstered by more access agreements, joint exercises, capability development and information sharing. The reciprocal access agreement is a step in the right direction and both Australia and Japan should continue to extend their defence agreements to other like-minded regional partners to contribute towards this end. By shifting towards integrated deterrence, Australia and Japan can open discussions with the US on how the three countries can work together with partners in new ways and provide greater regional leadership.

Australia’s strategic mindset has shifted in recent years to one that is complementary with integrated deterrence. While historically Australia has engaged with the region through a bilateral perspective, more recently it has prioritised multilateral groupings like the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Quad and AUKUS. In future, Australia’s influence will be measured by what it offers multilaterally, rather than bilaterally. Adopting an approach of integrated deterrence will be an effective means to this end.

Meanwhile, Japan has outwardly expressed its intent to accelerate integrated deterrence with the US. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party commenced a review of Japan’s national security strategy in late 2021 and at the recent virtual US–Japan security consultative committee meeting Japan’s foreign and defence ministers committed to aligning Japan’s strategic defence documents with those of the US. As integrated deterrence appears increasingly necessary, Japan has also increased its defence spending and discussion around amending Article 9 of the country’s constitution is gaining traction.

While Australia and Japan have a special strategic partnership, it is not a combined strategy to respond specifically to US decline. The next step for these two countries is to formalise their thinking to articulate a common Indo-Pacific strategy—one that includes the US doctrine of integrated deterrence and builds regional networks towards a collective balance of power. As Quad countries come away from the leaders’ meeting in Tokyo, the success of the summit will be measured by demonstrated movement towards a more comprehensive security agenda.

In terms of scale, the recently announced Pacific support vessel, ADV Reliant, is chicken feed compared to the Royal Australian Navy’s submarine and frigate projects, but these capability decisions have more in common than is immediately apparent. The recurring issue is an inverse relationship between strategy, concepts and platform acquisitions. Strategy should drive concepts, and concepts should drive what we buy.

When the government announced the Pacific step-up in 2017, it was a strategically sensible policy, if a little late. Then in 2018 it announced a commitment to a ‘large-hulled humanitarian and disaster relief vessel’ that would operate semi-permanently in the southwest Pacific. Why a single ‘large-hulled vessel’ was the best solution for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief was obscure at best. The only large vessels operating commercially in the region are those transiting through. The reason for that is simple: large vessels can only get into deep ports. The vessels that service the needs of most of the population are relatively shallow draft ferries and landing vessels.

In the kerfuffle about the broken commitment to build in Australia, a more important point has been missed. The Reliant is likely to be of limited use for disaster relief. In many disasters, ports and airfields are initially rendered inoperable. The coastal hydrography is often altered, drastically increasing the risk of running aground. Re-establishing ports and airfields and surveying the coast can take days or sometimes weeks. It is in this window that a disaster-relief ship really matters. When no port or airport is operable, you need a ship that can operate and support a useful number of helicopters and landing craft, or one that can itself get on and off a beach. The Reliant can’t do any of that.

The ship has a helipad but is not designed to carry or support a helicopter. There’s no access from the helipad to the cargo deck, so it will be limited to flying underslung loads from the deck, which will be prevented if the crane is in use, and maybe even if it isn’t. In any case, a team of suitably qualified personnel would be needed to prepare the loads for flying and to guide the helicopters.

The Reliant has enough space on its cargo deck for a landing craft or maybe two and has a large stabilised crane, so it might be possible to adapt it to operate a landing craft in due course, but it can’t do that now. It is, however, supposed to be ‘semi-permanently operating in the southwest Pacific’, so will it ‘semi-permanently’ embark landing-craft crews and maintainers? If so, where will they come from? Has the army committed to supplying them?

Without landing craft, no heavy items, like bulldozers or water trucks, will be going ashore. Will the landing craft about to be acquired under the Land 8710 project be designed to be craned, or stored on deck? If not, what happens when the venerable LCM-8 retires in a few years?

Even if all these issues are solved, cargo will still have to be craned over the side into the landing craft—a method long abandoned by anyone who is serious about this, for a host of reasons.

Defence paid $95 million for the Reliant, previously called Horizon Star. For comparison, it paid $100 million (in 2011) for the dock landing ship HMAS Choules. The Choules and the far more expensive Canberra-class landing helicopter dock can stand off from the shore and use their landing craft and helicopters to deliver what is needed to where it is needed. They can also make vast quantities of potable water, so essential in disasters. The Reliant can’t.

One type of commercial vessel that proliferates in our region is the large landing craft, because of where they can get to. With a little alteration, such as water-making capacity, they could be useful in a disaster. A fleet of three such vessels would have cost less to acquire and operate and could have been built in several yards around Australia. Three vessels provide a degree of redundancy for maintenance and refits. Most navies subscribe to the rule you need three to be assured of having one available. Murphy’s Law says the next big natural disaster will occur when the Reliant is being refitted.

A suitable Australian-designed and -owned ocean-going landing craft is currently nearing completion in an Indonesian yard and could have been bought, as the first of a small fleet, for about 20% of what was paid for the Reliant. As it is, that vessel is now being eyed up by both the US Department of Defense and a multinational petrochemical company, which will likely elevate its price.

We’ll probably never know who decided on a single large-hulled vessel, why, or what advice was provided by whom. Given the weaknesses of the platform selected, we must question whether there was any strategy linking the Pacific step-up policy to the Pacific support vessel requirement.

If this syndrome was confined to the Pacific support vessel it would be bad enough, but it’s not.  Much of what Australia’s three services are buying is suboptimal for operations in the near region, which policy declares to be the priority area. Just one of the endless indications of this is the recent selection of the non-marinised Apache attack helicopter to support an allegedly maritime strategy. The cost in corrosion rectification every time these things go to sea will be eye watering, as has been well documented in the US and UK.

Perhaps the first thing an incoming defence minister should do after the election is demand a thorough audit of the links between Australia’s policy, strategy, operational concepts and force design.

When the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue was first conceived as a strategic coalition of the Indo-Pacific’s four leading democracies, many doubted that it would amount to much. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi mocked it as a ‘headline-grabbing idea’ that would dissipate ‘like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean’. But continued Chinese expansionism, combined with former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s determination to build broad resistance to it, has produced an increasingly consolidated group with real potential to bolster regional security. The question is whether it will deliver.

One thing is certain: all four Quad members—Australia, India, Japan and the United States—are essential to realise the vision of a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ introduced by Japan in 2016 and affirmed by the US in 2017. While the Quad took some time to get off the ground—it was resurrected by the US during Donald Trump’s administration but leaders’ summits began only after Joe Biden took office—it has gained considerable momentum. Its members have held three summits since last year (two of them virtual) and are set to meet in person in Tokyo on 24 May.

But the Quad still has a long way to go, not least because its members’ own actions are undercutting its strategic rationale—the need to prevent China from upending security in the Indo-Pacific. A key problem is that all four countries have allowed themselves to be seduced by the Chinese narrative that economic relations can be separated from geopolitics.

China’s trade surplus, which reached a record US$676.4 billion last year, is now the main engine of its economy. Without it, Chinese growth would likely stall, especially as President Xi Jinping strengthens state control over private companies. This would also hinder China’s ability to invest in its military and finance its aggressive manoeuvres in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

And yet the US and India are major contributors to China’s trade surplus. The US leads the way: its trade deficit with China swelled by more than 25% in 2021, to US$396.6 billion, and now comprises more than 58% of China’s total surplus. India’s trade deficit with China—which hit US$77 billion in the 12 months through this March—exceeds its defence budget, even as the two countries are locked in a dangerous military confrontation on their long Himalayan frontier.

China’s stealth encroachments on some Indian border areas in 2020 triggered deadly clashes, setting in motion a build-up of forces and border infrastructure that continues to this day. This should have been a wake-up call for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had been so committed to appeasing China that he was blindsided by its aggression. But India’s large and growing trade deficit with China suggests that he is still asleep.

Australia and Japan have similarly built up significant dependencies on Chinese trade. China accounts for nearly a third of Australia’s international trade and is Japan’s largest export market. Moreover, both countries are members of the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. For them, enabling China to shape trade rules in the Indo-Pacific is apparently a small price to pay for the economic benefits of increased regional commerce.

Rather than continuing to underwrite China’s economic and geopolitical power, the Quad should be making economic cooperation—including increased trade among its members—a central feature of its agenda. Unfortunately, though Biden has pledged to unveil an Indo-Pacific economic framework covering everything from infrastructure to the digital economy, his administration’s unwillingness to commit more resources to the region or offer regional partners better access to US markets severely limits the initiative’s potential. Moreover, Biden has pushed an expansive Quad agenda covering topics that have nothing to do with the group’s core objectives—ranging from climate change to Covid-19 vaccine delivery and supply-chain resilience.

America’s deepening proxy conflict with Russia further muddies the strategic picture. Biden is the third successive US president to commit to shifting America’s primary strategic focus to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific. But the Ukraine war—which he believes ‘could continue for a long time’—may well cause him, like his predecessors, not to complete that pivot.

The war might also spur Biden to take a more conciliatory approach to China. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden had begun to ease pressure on China. He effectively let Beijing off the hook for both obscuring Covid-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 ‘phase one’ trade deal with the US. He also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei. US sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag remain essentially symbolic.

Now, as Biden attempts to ensure that Xi doesn’t offer Russian President Vladimir Putin an economic lifeline, thereby neutralising the impact of Western sanctions, he is likely to adopt an even more conciliatory approach. Already, the Office of the US Trade Representative has reinstated exemptions from Trump-era tariffs on 352 products imported from China. And now the White House is considering a broader reduction of tariffs on non-strategic goods from China.

The Quad can hold as many leaders’ summits as it wants, but without a clear strategic vision—and an agenda to match—it will have little impact. The group’s purpose is to act as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensure a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. At next month’s summit, all other issues should take a backseat to this objective.

In January, the US Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the Pacific was the place most likely to see ‘strategic surprise’. He said the US needed to do more in the region quickly and work with partners like Australia, Japan, France and New Zealand.

Last week we saw an example of this surprise with a leaked draft agreement between China and Solomon Islands that lays down a framework that could, among other things, permit Beijing to deploy forces to ‘protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands’. There’s debate around how mature the agreement is, but the fact that is exists should be a wake-up call for Australia strategic planners.

The draft document states that the Solomon Islands may ‘request China to send police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces’ to the country. It also states that China may ‘make ship visits, to carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands’.

According to media reports, ‘Australian officials are already uneasy about growing security cooperation between China and Solomon Islands.’

However, if we had been paying more attention to what was going on in our backyard rather than seeking to find savings by cutting aid and human presence on the ground over the past decade or two, this might never have happened—or at least it wouldn’t have come as a shock.

For several years, regional observers have been raising concerns about China’s increasing encroachment and infrastructure development in Solomon Islands. Reports on the ground suggest that Australia is being played by Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and there’s a view that any discussion on this isn’t welcomed by Australian officials because it’s seen as upsetting the status quo.

According to a senior Solomon Islands politician, ‘This is a time when the Australian government needs to support our democracy.’ Celsus Talifilu, a local political adviser to Malaita Province Premier Daniel Suidani, expressed concern about the draft security agreement and reports that fake Chinese weapons are being used to train local police. He said that it presents a ‘genuine threat’ to his province and its people.

It’s not Australia’s place to get involved in the internal politics of another nation, but in the rapidly changing and highly contested environment of the Indo-Pacific, the last thing Australia and its allies need is a fractured state or unwanted military base on their doorstep.

One could argue, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison has, that this is exactly what the government’s Pacific step-up program has been doing. But while there have been some excellent initiatives, sometimes the local reality doesn’t match the Canberra rhetoric. We can’t ignore or dismiss this and perhaps it is time to rethink how we get this right.

The immediate issue of unwanted military posturing on Australia’s doorstep needs to be addressed; however, there’s a broader issue here about how we build genuine partnerships in our neighbourhood.

It’s not a matter of just acting reflexively to increase Australian aid. We need to rethink our security and defence cooperation programs. We should be placing much more focus on professional development, training and capacity-building for security forces. This would include enhanced personnel exchanges and programs that are tailored to meet genuine needs and infrastructure investment that fosters local skills and partnerships (rather than debt diplomacy).

Getting this right requires building long-term trust through people-to-people linkages that enable better management of future shocks, and therefore add resilience to Australia and our neighbours.

Practical first steps that we can take to help build this ballast in our regional relationships include increasing the capacity and depth of Pacific and Asian studies programs in our schools and universities; building Asia-capable business leaders who better understand our northern neighbourhood—which equates to almost 60% of the global population; and designing truly collaborative government programs and projects. This may require doing things differently.

Australia has an opportunity to match our rhetoric with practical action and to become a better neighbour. We must not let it pass us by.

This is the fourth in a series of edited extracts from a new ASPI publication, The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific. The first article presented a 2035 climate security scenario, which is the reference point for subsequent articles, including this one.

The Indo-Pacific region is home to almost half of the world’s chronically hungry people and some of the food systems at most risk from the impacts of climate change. In ASPI’s 2035 climate scenario, the climate-related impacts on food production are severe. We’ve learned that the relationship between climate change and political, economic and social unrest throughout the region often runs through food systems.

Today, the world produces more than enough food to go around. Notwithstanding downward revisions due to extreme weather in major ‘breadbaskets’ in 2021, global wheat, rice and maize production is still expected to reach record levels. Globally, the most commonly traded foods, including maize, wheat and rice, are grown in an increasingly small number of highly productive monoculture breadbaskets. In the decade leading up to 2035, global agricultural production continues on this trajectory, leaving the global food system vulnerable to disruptions in those major production centres and heavily reliant on trade to distribute calories.

Rain-fed systems dominate food production in the Indo-Pacific, and these systems are highly sensitive to changes in rainfall patterns, temperature and climate-related extreme events. Climate and crop modelling, in just one example, suggest that a 1°C rise in mean temperatures in the South Asian region will result in the loss of 4–5 million tonnes of wheat.

By 2035, the South Asian subtropical monsoon is triggering extreme flooding due to a powerful La Niña. In Bangladesh, meanwhile, almost a quarter of the country’s territory is inundated each year from rainfall, cyclones and sea-level rise. In extreme years, more than half of the country is affected, destroying crops and agricultural land. According to research by the UN World Food Programme, monsoon rice production in the country could have fallen by as much as 20% by the 2030s, increasing food insecurity by nearly 88%.

There are also lingering questions about food availability in the face of climate change due to the impacts of rising sea levels on major food-exporting and -importing countries’ port infrastructure. Most food in 2035 is still moved by boat and is therefore vulnerable to maritime trade disruptions. By 2035, the increase in climate-related extreme weather events and sea-level rise produce supply-chain disruptions in global food trade, closing flooded and damaged ports for extended periods and affecting food access through price increases and empty shelves in local markets.

But food can be out of reach to people because of cost, even while markets and store shelves are full. Our global food system is complex and interdependent—even more so by 2035. International trade in food commodities continues to grow year on year. By 2021, enough food was traded annually to feed approximately 2.8 billion people. Food trade is especially important in countries that rely heavily on imports to feed their populations, including the Pacific islands. In this setting, production shocks in one part of the world can dramatically affect food prices in another.

We’ve seen evidence of this in recent years. In the 2007–08 global food-price crisis, for example, the price of staple commodities rose dramatically over a short period as a result of climate-related production shocks and trade protectionism. That resulted in civil unrest in nearly 40 nations and the toppling of at least one government. Just three years later, production shocks in major wheat-growing regions in China, Russia and Argentina were linked by some researchers to instability across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring in 2011.

The 2032 global food security crisis sees food prices for major staple crops, especially rice, skyrocket, and multiple countries in the Indo-Pacific experience the vicious feedback loop between food insecurity and conflict.

Achieving food security also requires people to consume the right mix of micro- and macronutrients. By 2020, one in three people were unable to afford a healthy diet, and more than 2 billion people suffered from so-called hidden hunger, lacking key micronutrients in their diets. Nearly two-thirds of people who lacked access to a healthy diet lived in Asia and the Pacific.

The global food system had produced a world facing the double burden of undernourishment and obesity, often side by side in the same countries. The Pacific island region, for example, was already facing some of the highest rates of obesity in the world, with rates of over 50% for adults in Samoa and Tonga. This same region relies on fisheries for protein needs and indeed subsistence food supply, but by 2035 cyclone activity risks destroying fishing infrastructure, and a warming ocean results in critical habitat loss and coral bleaching, threatening livelihoods and food security in the region.

There’s also considerable risk that climate change will reduce the nutritional density of commonly consumed foods. General food insecurity among children has also been connected to powerful El Niño events. For example, researchers have demonstrated that the 2015 El Niño probably led to an additional 6 million children globally suffering from chronic undernourishment.

Climate change presents major challenges to achieving food security in the Indo-Pacific, with run-on effects across the region. Projections hold that 77 million more people will be food insecure globally by 2050 without necessary investment in climate-change mitigation and adaptation. Such impacts require transformational, systems-level change to address those challenges.

Climate-smart agricultural practices and investments in social protection systems that provide a safety net for vulnerable populations are important no-regret interventions in the face of climate change. The demand for humanitarian food assistance will continue to rise by 2035 in the Indo-Pacific without necessary investments in food-system transformation. And there are innovative ways to deliver assistance; the UN World Food Programme’s forecast-based financing, for example, uses sophisticated weather forecasts to enable food and other assistance to be distributed before a disaster strikes.

Adapting our global food system to the impacts of climate change will require transformative solutions, not mere tinkering at the margins.