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Here’s the ‘darkening’ security outlook for the Indo-Pacific for 2023.

The US worries, ‘Will China let us have peace?’

Japan finds itself at the security crossroads due to ‘the resurgence of great power competition’.

Canada frets that the Washington consensus on ‘the existential threat’ from China means that ‘Canada’s options to engage with China are limited’.

India seeks a new global balance because ‘the Sino-American partnership that allowed [Asia] to develop and progress in peace for almost five decades has collapsed’.

‘Dubious of America’s long term strategic commitment’ to Southeast Asia, Thailand ‘is leaning closer and closer toward China’.

Singapore sees the US girding for ‘a concerted effort with its major allies to degrade China’s capabilities to challenge America’s global pre-eminence’.

For Vietnam, the fraught regional order will be marked by ‘competition instead of cooperation’, ‘polarisation instead of globalisation’, and ‘decoupling instead of integration’.

A voice from Myanmar that can’t be named speaks of two years of ‘turmoil and conflict’ following the military coup, the junta’s ‘escalating oppression’ and the ‘spontaneous courage’ of the people.

Mongolia has ‘giants on every horizon’.

The line from New Zealand is, ‘It’s grim out there.’

The national perspectives are from the Regional security outlook 2023, published by the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific. CSCAP is the unofficial ‘track two’ counterpart to the official ‘track one’ work of the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers—Plus Forum.

The outlook’s editor, Ron Huisken, heads his introduction, ‘Open season on the rules-based order’, noting that for nearly two decades ‘the international community had sensed the gradual but relentless erosion of confidence in the principles, conventions, and processes designed to foster stability and peace’. CSCAP’s annual survey has tracked that trend, along with ‘the spectacular surge in China’s strategic weight toward parity with the US’.

A notable gap in this year’s edition: for the first time in 15 years, there’s no chapter offering a view from China. The absence suggests that China’s second track is waiting for the first track to draw conclusions and decide the fresh line from Xi Jinping’s summitry at the G20 and APEC. Perhaps Xi will want warmer words and less warrior wolfing.

The chance for new thoughts underlines Huisken’s call to ‘simply lower the barriers to easier communication. All parties must project a willingness to learn and to understand.’

A similar point came from last week’s Australia–US ministerial meeting in Washington, which emphasised ‘the importance of all countries managing strategic competition responsibly’. The US and Australia pledged to ‘work together to ensure competition does not escalate into conflict’ and said they ‘look to the People’s Republic of China to do the same and plan to engage Beijing on risk reduction and transparency measures’.

Washington wants to ‘build a floor’ with China and define some ‘red lines’. Canberra has cracked the diplomatic freeze and wants Beijing to keep talking to ‘stabilise’ relations.

AUSMIN offers the communiqué-language version of apprehension, as the US and Australia pledge defence and security cooperation ‘to deter aggression, counter coercion, and make space for sovereign decision making’.

The Labor government’s response to ‘uncertain and more precarious’ times is a stronger alignment with the US. Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles says the strategic landscape ‘is as complex and precarious as it’s been at any point really since the end of the Second World War’. The alliance, he says, has ‘never been more important’ and has ‘never been in better shape, and that’s a big thing to say because the alliance has always been in very good shape’.

It’ll be difficult to get a Laborite as enthusiastic and as knowledgeable about the alliance as Kim Beazley, but Marles may be that man, as he avers:  ‘Australia’s most important relationship is its alliance with the United States. It is essential to our worldview, it is completely central to our national security.’

Foreign Minister Penny Wong pointed to three areas where Australia collaboration with the US ‘has a different approach and an enhanced emphasis’: action on climate change; a focus on Southeast Asia and the importance of ASEAN; and the South Pacific.

No recent AUSMIN communiqué has devoted as much wordage to the South Pacific, as the US starts to build the sinews to do more lifting in the region.

Joe Biden’s administration has sent a big ‘We’re back!’ message to the islands, holding its first summit with South Pacific leaders in Washington in September. AUSMIN offers detail. The communiqué promised a ‘redoubled’ commitment to working with the islands, guided by Pacific priorities of climate change, resilient infrastructure, maritime security, dealing with disasters and supporting the Pacific Islands Forum.

The US offers more diplomatic missions, the return of Peace Corps volunteers and extra maritime surveillance, and the US Coast Guard promises training for maritime security to ‘enhance the benefits the Pacific Islands derive from the Australian-gifted Guardian-class Patrol Boat fleet’. The statement said the US and Australia would ‘do more to dispose of unexploded ordnance’ from World War II that still threatens nine island nations.

The US can no longer leave Melanesia and Polynesia to Australia and New Zealand, a division of responsibilities that worked well for 50 years.

Australia wants the US back in the game in the South Pacific, because China has changed the game. The outlook for great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific flows through to more contest in the South Pacific.

Since the modern South Pacific arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States has handed significant regional responsibility to Australia and New Zealand.

America would do the duties of the big external power in Micronesia. Australia and New Zealand would ‘shoulder the main burden’ in Melanesia and Polynesia.

A buffed, burly ex–US Navy officer wily in the ways of Washington expressed the US stance with typical clipped directness: ‘Don’t understand the South Pacific. Happy to leave it to you. Always willing to help.’

The Washington insider was Richard Armitage, who served as an assistant secretary of defence (1981–1989) and deputy secretary of state (2001–2005). My memory of Armitage’s description of the division of responsibilities is anecdotage from the late 1990s. For the formal expression of that division as it was being created, turn to Australian cabinet documents.

In a March 1977 cabinet submission on Australian diplomatic representation in the South Pacific, Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock stressed the ‘urgent need for Australia to extend its official presence in the South Pacific’, because of efforts by the Soviet Union and China to increase their roles in the islands.

Peacock wrote that Washington expected Canberra and Wellington to carry the South Pacific load:

In discussions on Soviet and Chinese motives in the region, the United States Government has made it clear that, while it stands ready to play a supporting role, it looks to Australia and New Zealand to shoulder the main burden of ensuring the stability of the region and of developing close relations with the Island countries. The United States also looks to Australia and New Zealand to provide most of the basic reporting and intelligence on the countries of the region.

By 1977, the two decades of decolonisation in Melanesia and Polynesia was nearly complete. Here’s the independence time lime: Western Samoa, 1962; Tonga, 1970; Fiji, 1970; Papua New Guinea, 1975; Solomon Islands, 1978; Kiribati, 1979; and Vanuatu, 1980.

The new South Pacific was born.

Gough Whitlam’s Labor government (1972–1975) and Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government (1975–1983) responded in the ways that still drive much of what Australia does in the islands.

Whitlam and Fraser worked to remake Australia’s role while holding to a fundamental tenet of the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia: we must be the chief power in the South Pacific, a foreign policy and strategic imperative specified by the constitution in 1901.

Earlier prime ministers—Alfred Deakin, Billy Hughes, John Curtin—talked of empire and later of trust territories. Whitlam and Fraser had to find ways for Australia to be the key partner for newly independent neighbours.

In creating that role in the 1970s, Canberra was also rethinking the Australia–US alliance following Vietnam, in the ‘aftermath of America’s greatest defeat in war in 160 years’ (a line from another wily Washington player, Robert Gates).

America expected allies to do more of the strategic and diplomatic lifting.

Peacock repeated the message of South Pacific responsibility—and the complications involved—in a cabinet submission on US relations in December 1978:

The Americans have looked to Australia and New Zealand to take the lead in the South Pacific, but have accepted Australian encouragement to take a more active role in the region. In view of Island sensitivities, Australia will need to exercise care in interposing itself between South Pacific countries and the US.

Under Fraser, Australia doubled its aid to the South Pacific and set up new diplomatic missions. Leaving aside aid pledged to Papua New Guinea, 1978 was the year that Australia gave more aid to the islands than New Zealand did. And so it has continued. Australia wants to be the top aid giver in the islands.

As for Peacock’s line about encouraging the US ‘to take a more active role in the region’, that’s been an occasional effort that never really shifted the fundamental settings. Until now.

The effect of the division of responsibilities over the five decades was most evident in the diplomatic, political and intelligence realms. A negative read would be that Washington went absent in Melanesia and Polynesia. A kinder version is that Washington had more important tasks everywhere else in the world, and had confidence in Australia and New Zealand to serve their own interests and their own region.

On defence and strategy, the South Pacific gets plenty of attention from Hawaii, from the US Pacific Command, which in 2018 was renamed Indo-Pacific Command.

The jest used to be that in the old title of the US Commander in Chief Pacific—CINCPAC—the first ‘C’ stood for Caesar. This Caesar was a military tribune with more power than many of the prime ministers and presidents he treated with. Thus, Washington was relying on its tribune as well as its allies.

Yet even the tribune in Hawaii shares some of the Washington problem when it comes to Polynesia and Melanesia. With responsibility for more than half of the earth’s surface, Indo-Pacific Command has a lot of forces in a lot of places, but not many in the South Pacific.

The strategic division established in the 1970s has run its course. Both Canberra and Washington agree: the US has to get back in the game in the South Pacific, because China has changed the game. What holds for the broader Indo-Pacific is now true for the South Pacific.

Australia expends much money and might to prevent a Chinese ‘strategic surprise’ in the islands. That’s the phrase used by the US Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell, speaking in January at the launch of an Australia chair at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Campbell said the US had to lift its game in the South Pacific, to match what’s done by Australia and New Zealand: ‘But that’s an area that we need much stronger commitment. And I’m, frankly, looking to Australia as the lead here. And we, as the United States, have to be a better deputy sheriff to them in this overall effort.’

The US as Australia’s ‘deputy sheriff’ shows Campbell’s dry humour, his understanding of the way roles have long been allocated, and his memory of the trouble former prime minister John Howard had with the ‘deputy sheriff’ badge.

The US understanding of what Australia can deliver in the South Pacific has changed and that means the US role must change.

Activities in space matter for national security, not least because of the significance of remote-sensing technologies in gathering intelligence and data. Any weaponisation of space presents obvious national security challenges. Continued safe access to space, and also to launch sites, will be key in securing essential information, such as that used to monitor military activity and climate events, and in delivering humanitarian aid.

The use of space also poses unique legal challenges, including when and how domestic laws might apply to space activities—for example, the application of criminal law in space and the challenges posed by the use and misuse of extraterritorial jurisdiction in space generally.

The demography of space actors has changed rapidly since the end of the Cold War. There’s now an expanding kaleidoscope of space activity in the Indo-Pacific region. For example, Indonesia has plans to build a (non-military) spaceport in Biak, an island in the northern part of Papua. Notably, Indonesia’s geographical position on the equator makes it an attractive space launch location because the way the earth spins on its axis means equatorial launches can produce additional velocity compared with higher latitude launches.

Biak is home to indigenous West Papuans who are concerned about land acquisition and environmental management. This illustrates the interconnectedness between space and human rights, including where both commercial interests and human rights obligations are actively present and may be conflicting. Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, has reportedly personally pitched Indonesia as a launch site to SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk. In November, Indonesia is scheduled to host the Business 20 summit in Bali, which Musk is rumoured to be planning to attend.

Australia and the rest of the world should not underestimate Indonesia’s strategic significance. It is the largest economy in Southeast Asia and the world’s fourth most populous nation and 10th largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity. It is the fulcrum connecting the Philippines and the north and western Pacific in the northeast; the South China Sea directly to its north; and to the west, the Indian Ocean. It lies at the heart of the Indo-Pacific. As such a strategically located emerging power, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Indonesia is looking to extend its reach to space.

Australia itself has a rapidly growing commercial space sector that includes launch capabilities. In June, Equatorial Launch Australia successfully completed its first commercial space launch for NASA from Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory. It was also NASA’s first launch from a fully commercial spaceport. That was followed last week by a second successful launch for NASA from Nhulunbuy.

Other potential Australian launch sites that could be of strategic interest are being developed at Whalers Way near Port Lincoln in South Australia and at Bowen in north Queensland. Australia’s Gilmour Space Technologies is reportedly close to the first orbital launch of its Eris I launcher, suitable for deploying small satellites into orbit. All of these projects are increasing Australia’s global competitiveness as a potential key player in Indo–Pacific space relations.

Elsewhere in the region, Thai start-up mu Space opened Thailand’s first spaceship factory in late 2020. Last month, South Korea launched satellites into orbit using its own rocket for the first time. Japan, already a major space-faring nation, launched the world’s first mission to return samples from an asteroid in December 2020. Last year, the Japanese government signed an agreement with NASA on the Lunar Gateway, an orbiting outpost with both commercial and government partners.  Launched in 2008, India’s Chandrayaan-1 helped confirm the presence of ice water on the moon, and India plans to land Chandrayaan-2 on the moon in 2022 or 2023.

China released a white paper in 2021 on its space program, describing its mission to ‘explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power’ as an ‘eternal dream’ to be pursued ‘for the benefit of all humanity; to meet the demands of economic, scientific and technological development, national security and social progress; and to raise the scientific and cultural levels of the Chinese people, protect China’s national rights and interests, and build up its overall strength’.

In the same year, China signed a memorandum of understanding with Russia to establish a research station on the moon within the next two decades. Beijing is also the headquarters of the Asia–Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, whose member states are Bangladesh, China, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand and Turkey. The theme of the organisation’s development strategy forum in 2015 was ‘The belt and road initiative for facilitating space capabilities building on the Asia Pacific countries’. It has since built a satellite data-sharing platform.

For Australia, the rapid expansion of the space activities in the Indo-Pacific region means ensuring respectful working relationships in the region, continued investment in our own space industry, and deepening engagement in space diplomacy. It also means ensuring our legal regimes both protect and enable our potential to play a leadership role in regional space relations.

Australia’s support of the US-led Artemis Accords is significant. Among other matters, the accords recognise ‘the necessity of greater coordination and cooperation between and among established and emerging actors in space’, ‘the global benefits of space exploration and commerce’, and the ‘collective interest in preserving outer space heritage’. They also affirm the principles of space law set out in the core international treaties governing space.

Australia has also strengthened its space relationship with the United Kingdom. In February 2021, the two countries signed the Space Bridge Framework Arrangement, which aims to grow jobs across the industry.

Notwithstanding these broader international partnerships, it would serve Australia well to continue develop itself as a regional, as well as international, space player—not least in remaining cognisant of the geographical and political significance of our neighbour Indonesia and other regional players with an increasing interest in the space sector.

The central balance of international power this century will be set in the Indo-Pacific.

So ends a 500-year stretch of history when the central balance was made in Europe and decided by the West. The United States played the decisive role in the last century as an Atlantic power; this century it’ll be as a Pacific power.

Systemic changes don’t come any bigger.

The shift to the Indo-Pacific is an international strategy version of the way the world is turning to new sources of power to deal with climate change. This is to be a century of decarbonisation and lots of de-Westernisation.

Even a world stepping back from peak globalisation won’t slow an Indo-Pacific reality that’s turned from long-term trend to today’s fact. The power balance will be set in the place where most of the world’s people live and where most of the world’s wealth will be created.

The West will matter greatly in determining the central balance that’ll be defined in the Indo-Pacific. But as in much else, no longer will the West dominate.

The message of last month’s NATO summit was that the security of Europe and the security of Asia are joined; that’s why the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea attended. As the first Japanese prime minister to attend a NATO summit, Fumio Kishida, observed:

[T]he security of Europe and of the Indo-Pacific is inseparable. Russian aggression against Ukraine is not a problem for Europe alone, but instead an outrageous act that undermines the very foundation of the international order …

Russian aggression against Ukraine clearly announced the end of the post–Cold War period. Attempts to unilaterally change the status quo with force in the background are ongoing in the East China Sea and South China Sea. I feel a strong sense of crisis that Ukraine may be East Asia tomorrow.

The invasion of Ukraine is the galvanising event dramatising the strategic version of tectonic change. Well before Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered war, the end of the old order had shaken everyone’s grand strategy, including Australia’s.

The international rules-based order is under attack by Russia, backed by China. And China is the state that shifts the system. When the rules are broken, the response turns to power. And in the system of states, that’s all about seeking a balance of power. Europe must join the Indo-Pacific in achieving that central balance.

NATO’s Madrid communiqué picked up the description of China as a systemic challenge that has been adopted by key European powers along with the US:

We are confronted by cyber, space, and hybrid and other asymmetric threats, and by the malicious use of emerging and disruptive technologies. We face systemic competition from those, including the People’s Republic of China, who challenge our interests, security, and values and seek to undermine the rules-based international order.

The heads of Britain’s MI5 and the US’s FBI chime in predicting ‘a strategic contest across decades’ with China.

The reality of global power shifting to Asia has been an economic megatrend for many decades, as Japan lifted off in the 1960s and ’70s and Deng Xiaoping lit China’s rocket in 1978.

Offering more precision than history usually grants for megatrends, here’s the moment when the central balance started to shift from the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific (or, as it was called at the time, the Asia–Pacific).

Date that transfer moment to midnight on 30 June 1997. On that night of monsoonal storms and choreographed drama, colonial rule came to an end in Hong Kong. Chinese troops standing like statues in the lashing rain rode across the border in the backs of open trucks as Hong Kong’s last governor sailed out of the harbour on the final voyage of Britain’s royal yacht.

Use June 1997 as a final-curtain moment for the European/Western ascendancy in Asia that lasted precisely 500 years. The half a millennium started in July 1497, when Vasco da Gama left Portugal to become the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and reach India.

The Western power that da Gama presaged was part of the geopolitical zeitgeist on that stormy night in Hong Kong as China proclaimed the end of a humiliation. I used that thought in a book on Australian foreign policy a few years later: ‘Asia was at the end of the Vasco da Gama era. The symbolism was exquisitely encapsulated—Asia had suffered five centuries of Western intrusion and command, and Hong Kong’s handover marked the final page.’

A far deeper and still relevant discussion of the end of the da Gama era was offered by one of Australia’s great strategists, Coral Bell, in 2007.

Bell described ‘a landscape with giants: six obvious great powers (the United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia and Japan), but also several formidable emerging powers that are important enough, strategically or economically, to affect the relationships among the great powers’.

Noting the end of ‘the moment of unchallenged US paramountcy’—the unipolar moment she dated from 1991 to September 2001—Bell considered ‘the historically more familiar shape of a multipolar world, a world moreover in which power is more widely distributed than it has been for the past two centuries’. The most important change was ‘the end of Western ascendancy over the non-Western world’.

If the world got lucky, Bell mused, it might achieve a new concert of power for the 21st century based on the basic building blocks of rules (‘deals must be kept’) and sovereignty (‘the ruler gets to make the rules in their own domain’).

If luck soured, Bell wrote, the world faced ‘an inescapable clash of norms, which may for the foreseeable future always limit the level of consensus among governments’.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is a monumental trashing of norms. And China’s support for Russia kills the chances of concert or consensus, even though Beijing’s ‘no limits’ pact with Putin is shifting towards a ‘limited liability’ partnership because Russia becomes such a liability.

Instead of norms, we must seek power balance. And the central balance must be in the Indo-Pacific because that is the centre of the system.

In a vivid Washingtonian turn of phrase, Russia is ‘the hurricane’ coming fast and hard, while China is ‘climate change: long, slow, pervasive’.

In the Indo-Pacific, the great game is in full swing and NATO must come to play.

During the recent visit by Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles to Japan, the nations vowed to strengthen the interoperability of their armed forces amid shared concerns over Chinese assertiveness. The minister’s visit came shortly after the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged US$2 billion ($2.9 billion) to help Indo-Pacific nations boost maritime security. ‘We will make use of technical cooperation, training and other means conducive to strengthening the maritime law enforcement capabilities of at least 20 countries to promote efforts to train at least 800 maritime security personnel and strengthen their human resources networks,’ he said.

This is a timely and important initiative by Japan at a time when law enforcement at sea is becoming more challenging. Strengthening civil maritime law enforcement is necessary to assist the region with managing common problems such as illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing; drug trafficking; people smuggling; marine pollution; and search and rescue. These challenges were set out for Australia in April this year with the release of the first Australian government civil maritime security strategy.

Over the past decade or so, there’s been significant growth in both the size and use of coastguards and other civil maritime law enforcement forces in the region. But many regional states have limited capacity to respond to national and regional civil maritime security challenges, especially in maritime domain awareness.

The Japanese Coast Guard Academy hosts some regional students, and the Japan Coast Guard sponsors ASEAN coastguard personnel for training in Japan. The US Coast Guard has engaged in hands-on exercises to help train Southeast Asian coastguards on boarding procedures and vessel inspections. It has also supported the technical experts workshop run by the Southeast Asia Maritime Law Enforcement Initiative, a regional forum to increase maritime law enforcement cooperation and information-sharing among Southeast Asian nations.

Interpol has run courses in Southeast Asia on strengthening border controls and preventing and combating various forms of maritime crime. Under the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s global maritime crime program, the Indian Ocean Forum on Maritime Crime conducts capacity-building through training sessions on visit, board, search and seizure procedures; maritime domain awareness; and criminal investigation skills. Based in Bangkok, the program’s Pacific Ocean team assists states in Southeast Asia and the Pacific region in building their capability to tackle maritime crimes.

But there’s no dedicated institution in the Indo-Pacific focused specifically on providing professional training and education for officers from regional coastguards and maritime law enforcement agencies.

An Indo-Pacific maritime law enforcement professional development centre would fill the gap to build partner capacity, promote professionalism in maritime agencies and strengthen regional cooperation to better meet maritime security challenges. The centre could also cover maritime safety and marine environmental protection, given that these activities are often subsumed in roles performed by regional maritime law enforcement agencies.

The proposed centre would encourage the emergence of long-term relationships between Indo-Pacific maritime law enforcement agencies and their counterparts in the region.

It would facilitate contributions to training in maritime law enforcement by partners such as the United States, France, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. It would work with existing structures and regional institutions and would operate in a way that builds lasting, trust-based relationships to ensure that Indo-Pacific maritime law enforcement agencies see clear benefit in learning from and engaging with it. Early in its operations, the centre would engage with senior representatives from Indo-Pacific agencies in order to best tailor its programs.

One interesting model to look at is the US International Law Enforcement Academy in Botswana, which hosts and facilitates international law enforcement training, including maritime law enforcement events, particularly in Africa. Another interesting model would be the NATO concept of centres of excellence, and in particular the NATO centre of excellence for maritime security in Turkey.

The Indo-Pacific maritime law enforcement professional development centre should be located in Darwin given the city’s status as the gateway to Southeast Asia. Its establishment there would underline Australia’s strong links to the region. Darwin is a rapidly growing centre of maritime activity supporting the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Border Force, the offshore oil and gas industry, commercial fishing, ship repair and maintenance, and marine tourism.

For Australian Border Force staff there’s the possibility that some of the training that’s now conducted at the ABF College in Neutral Bay in Sydney might be undertaken in Darwin. The best place to conduct realistic, practical training is always in the environment that you intend to operate in: the wider Darwin Harbour and its maritime approaches are some of the best maritime training areas that the ADF, the ABF, maritime police units and regional allies already utilise. A centre of excellence in Darwin would also be ideal for the Heads of Asian Coast Guard Agencies Meeting collaborative framework, of which Australia through the Maritime Border Command is a member, to regularly conduct practical collective training and skills exchange.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met Prime Minister Kishida at the Quad summit in Tokyo last month. The two leaders will meet again at the NATO summit in Madrid this week. In the sidelines of that meeting, Albanese might raise the idea that a maritime law enforcement professional development centre in Darwin be a joint venture between the Australian and Japanese governments. It could be managed by the Australian Border Force and the Japan Coast Guard. It would soon become the Indo-Pacific’s maritime law enforcement training facilitator of choice and promote a multinational approach to the conduct of regional law enforcement operations at sea at a time of increasing maritime insecurity.