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‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ This line from Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘Mending Wall’ is often misunderstood. Some take it to mean that having hard barriers in place will keep neighbours apart and therefore prevent problems. However, in the poem the very action of rebuilding the fence together every year is what brings the neighbours closer. By spending time together, talking and repairing the fence, they become better neighbours.

Australia’s future is deeply intertwined with that of its Indo-Pacific neighbours and we have an enduring interest in the sovereignty, stability, security and prosperity of the region. This benefits all who live in it. Building national resilience in Australia shouldn’t be seen only through the lens of strengthening domestic systems, economic settings, critical infrastructure and other programs. It is also about ensuring we have a resilient neighbourhood.

The Australian government has a long history of supporting capacity-building initiatives across the region with this objective in mind. The initiatives are delivered through aid programs, defence cooperation programs, medical and health projects, academic and professional exchange programs, and so on. They seek to help build stronger communities and more stable governments so that Australia can improve its own economic and security interests, and therefore become more resilient.

However, this policy approach, while well intentioned, is not always matched with well-designed, practical initiatives and engagement. Sometimes that’s due to a lack of country-specific literacy, which leads to programs being designed and delivered in an Australian-centric manner. We need to build a deeper understanding of the region among our policymakers, business leaders and academic institutions (secondary and tertiary). Anyone who understands the region will know that success is underpinned by personal connections and networks. These take time to develop, along with patience and a strong understanding of local drivers and conditions.

To explore how simple, well-designed programs can succeed, let’s look to one of our largest, most important, diverse and dynamic neighbours, the Republic of Indonesia.

Australian politicians of both persuasions regularly state that Indonesia is one of Australia’s most important strategic partners. What this actually means in terms of Australia’s foreign-policy priorities and practices is, however, often contested. While there have been some excellent achievements—most recently with the finalisation of the Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, for which the two governments should be applauded—misperceptions and misunderstandings remain on both sides.

Looking back a decade, in his historic 2010 speech to the Australian parliament, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono highlighted the dangers posed by the perceptions that Indonesians and Australians have of one another. He said, ‘I was taken aback when I learned that in a recent Lowy Institute survey … there are Australians who still see Indonesia as an authoritarian country, as a military dictatorship, as a hotbed of Islamic extremism or even as an expansionist power.’ The president highlighted that a key to overcoming these barriers is better people-to-people linkages.

Progress has been made, but we need to continue to strengthen these people-to-people linkages. Below are two small, but important, practical models that could be followed.

In 2011, the Australian Department of Defence launched the Indonesia–Australia Defence Alumni Association, or IKAHAN. The purpose of IKAHAN is to foster relationships across the large, diverse, and sometimes misunderstood, bilateral defence relationship. It provides a platform to exchange ideas, interact in new ways, build relationships among future leaders on both sides, dispel myths and encourage dialogue between the senior leadership.

Notable Australian members include former and current governors-general of Australia, former senior Australian Defence Force leaders, leading academics and thought leaders. There’s a similarly impressive membership on the Indonesian side. Senior leadership is important, but so is future leadership, and IKAHAN boasts a large cohort of junior members. The simple act of establishing a vehicle to better promote understanding and engagement that resonates for both sides has added a depth to the bilateral relationship not imagined before.

Coincidentally, in 2011 the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association established an exchange program to bring Indonesian animal husbandry students to northern Australia to learn about Australian cattle-production systems and foster greater cross-industry understanding of the unique challenges faced by producers in both countries. The Indonesian students typically spend eight weeks in Australia gaining practical hands-on training working alongside Australian stockmen and -women on northern cattle properties. Several of the Australian host families then visit Indonesia to reunite with the students they hosted in Australia and to learn more about Indonesian agriculture and its requirements as a market.

Many of these Indonesian students go on to become leaders in their field. These relationships can’t be valued in dollar terms but hold an immeasurable value in one of Australia’s most important live-export markets.

Both programs continue today and both are in important sectors that have been tested in the past and will likely be tested in the future. The philosophy and approach taken to weatherproof these sectors can be applied across the Indo-Pacific region. By adding ballast to our bilateral relationships through people-to-people linkages, we can better manage future shocks and therefore add resilience to Australia and our neighbourhood.

Practical first steps that we can take to help build this ballast include increasing the capacity and depth of Asian studies programs in our schools and universities, designing genuine collaborative government programs and projects (which will often require doing things differently to the Canberra norm and mindset), and building Asia-capable business leaders who better understand our northern neighbourhood—which equates to almost 60% of the global population.

As we move out of the pandemic, Australia has the opportunity as a middle power to match our rhetoric with practical action. We have the opportunity to become a good neighbour. Let’s not let it pass us by.

In his inaugural address, US President Joe Biden declared that Americans ‘will be judged’ for how they ‘resolve the cascading crises of our era’. He expressed confidence that the country would ‘rise to the occasion’, and pledged that the United States would lead ‘not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example’.

The contrast with President Donald Trump’s divisive, isolationist rhetoric couldn’t be sharper. But adopting a different tone is easier than reversing America’s relative decline. To do that, Biden will need to provide wise, forward-looking leadership. And that doesn’t necessarily mean breaking with everything that Trump did.

America’s debilitating political polarisation has undermined its international standing. Partisan considerations have hampered—even precluded—the pursuit of long-term foreign policy objectives. US policy towards a declining Russia, for example, has become hostage to US domestic politics.

Biden’s calls for unity reflect his awareness of this. But the truth is that healing the deep rupture in US society may be beyond any president’s ability, not least because so many Republican voters seem to have abandoned all faith in evidence and expertise. So, rather than becoming consumed by domestic political divisions, Biden must rise above them.

And yet, there is one area where there’s broad bipartisan consensus: the need to stand up to China. Trump understood this. Indeed, his tough China policy is his most consequential—and constructive—foreign policy legacy. Unless Biden pursues a similar approach, the erosion of US global leadership will become inexorable.

The Indo-Pacific region—a global economic hub and geopolitical hotspot—is central to an effective China strategy. Recognising the region’s immense importance to the world order, Beijing has been steadily reshaping it to serve Chinese interests, using heavy-handed economic coercion, political repression and aggressive expansionism to have its way from the Himalayas and Hong Kong to the South and East China Seas.

The only way to preserve a stable regional balance of power is with a rules-based, democracy-led order—or, as the Trump administration put it, a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’. Over the past year, this vision has spurred the region’s democracies to deepen their strategic bonds and inspired even the faraway democracies of Europe to implement supportive policies. Under the Biden administration’s leadership, countries must now build on this progress, creating a true concert of democracies capable of providing stability and balance in the Indo-Pacific.

Biden seems to understand this. He has made clear his intention to build a united democratic front to counter China. But he is also at risk of undermining his own vision.

For starters, Biden didn’t embrace the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ until after his electoral victory, and when he did, he replaced ‘free and open’ with ‘secure and prosperous’. But, whereas ‘free and open’ automatically implies a rules-based, democracy-led order, ‘secure and prosperous’ leaves room for the inclusion of—and even leadership by—autocratic regimes. This ignores the crux of the Indo-Pacific challenge: a revisionist China is actively seeking to supplant the US as the region’s dominant power.

Making matters worse, Biden has signalled a possible reset of ties with China. This would play right into China’s hands.

Trump’s China policy was not just about trade or human rights. It sent the (right) message that China is a predatory communist state without political legitimacy or the rule of law. This helped to tip the scales in America’s favour. Over the past year, unfavourable perceptions of China reached historic highs in many countries. While this was largely because of the made-in-China Covid-19 pandemic, Trump’s ideological onslaught and China’s own aggression—such as on its Himalayan border with India—also played a role.

If the Biden administration abandons economic decoupling and treats China as a major competitor, rather than an implacable adversary, it will tip the scales in the opposite direction, relieving pressure on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime and undermining faith in US leadership. This could embolden Beijing to destabilise the Indo-Pacific further, with Taiwan possibly its next direct target.

Moreover, US conciliation would give India second thoughts about aligning itself too closely with the US, and would likely lead to Japan’s militarisation—a potential game-changer in the Indo-Pacific. It would also facilitate China’s efforts to leverage its vast market to draw in America’s democratic allies—a risk underscored by its recent investment deal with the European Union. All of this would undermine efforts to forge the united democratic front Biden envisions, compounding the threat of China’s aggressive authoritarianism.

The worst choice Biden could make would be to seek shared leadership with China in the Indo-Pacific, as some are advocating. Worryingly, Biden’s team doesn’t seem clear on this. In a 2019 essay, Jake Sullivan (Biden’s national security adviser) and Kurt Campbell (Biden’s ‘Indo-Pacific czar’ at the National Security Council) championed ‘coexistence with China’, describing the country as ‘an essential US partner’.

To be sure, Sullivan and Campbell didn’t call for Sino-American joint hegemony, in the Indo-Pacific or beyond. But they also didn’t take the clear and necessary position that the US must forge a concert of democracies to bring sustained multilateral pressure to bear on China.

After four years of Trump, Biden is right to tout the importance of domestic unity. But a tough line on China is one of the few policy areas behind which Americans can unite. More important, it is the only way to ensure a stable Indo-Pacific and world order.

Australia’s strategic outlook in 2021 holds both an unhappy certainty and a deep anxiety. The unhappy certainty is that China’s intent to punish us for failing to bow to its domination will continue and probably get worse.

The good news is that we now understand what needs to be done about Beijing’s bullying. The government has a tight-lipped determination to push back, as was shown this week by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s rejection of a $300 million takeover of the Probuild construction company by a Chinese state-owned entity.

Getting to this moment of policy clarity hasn’t been easy. It required the overturning of decades of Canberra consensus that closer engagement with China was Australia’s only path to prosperity.

With the help of Beijing’s offensive rhetoric and aggressive diplomacy, we have passed this inflection point. No federal government could reverse course and seek now to deepen our economic dependence on China.

So much for certainties. The anxiety is about how the Biden administration will approach its security interests in the Indo-Pacific. Canberra decision-makers are relieved that the unpredictable chaos of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is almost over, but Trump presided (perhaps without realising it) over a US policy establishment that shaped a bipartisan consensus on China which will last into Joe Biden’s presidency.

Yesterday a 2018 National Security Council secret document, the US strategy framework for the Indo-Pacific, was released in Washington. It advocates pushing back against China, working more closely with India, and bolstering alliances with Australia, Japan and South Korea. It also discusses doing more in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands to help democracies. All of this can easily be adopted by Biden.

Trump pushed back more effectively than his predecessor Barack Obama against Beijing’s annexation of the South China Sea and put more priority on supporting Taipei. Trump had a positive relationship with prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison that kept Australia prominent and appreciated in Washington and kept defence cooperation growing.

But Trump’s approach was flawed by a capricious unpredictability—for example, his ill-considered attempt to get Kim Jong-un to give up nuclear weapons on the promise of property developments and tourism in North Korea.

Canberra’s relief is that we dodged the worst of Trump’s criticism of America’s allies. We could easily have been targeted, as European allies were, for failing to pull our weight on regional security. Instead, Australia made the right call to keep Chinese companies out of our 5G network, pushed back against foreign interference in domestic politics and, belatedly, promoted a Pacific ‘step-up’.

These policy moves, along with just barely managing to get defence spending above the ‘acceptable’ NATO benchmark of 2% of GDP, buy interest and credibility in Washington.

Canberra’s anxiety about Biden reflects a concern about how he might drive American strategic policy. What if Biden reverts to an ‘Obama-lite’ strategy? Internally distracted by Covid-19 and a poisonous election year, might Biden look to placate Xi by not pressing Beijing on cyber spying, human rights abuses, Taiwan and the South China Sea and instead shape an agenda around climate, arms control and multilateral diplomacy?

Some of these approaches were features of an article Biden wrote for the authoritative Foreign Affairs journal in mid-2020. He said a priority for his first year would be to ‘organize and host a global Summit for Democracy to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world’.

Summits are an occasionally useful tool of foreign policy but no real substitute for practical action, a capable military, active alliances and a well-defined national agenda.

Biden’s second stated goal was to ‘equip Americans to succeed in the global economy—with a foreign policy for the middle class’. This seems to be a nod to the domestic ‘America first’ mood. Biden said that he wouldn’t enter into trade agreements ‘until we have invested in Americans’, that the ‘vast majority’ of troops must come home from the Middle East, and that military force ‘should be used only to defend US vital interests’.

Remarkably, Biden’s Foreign Affairs essay doesn’t mention Taiwan, perhaps the most immediate strategic problem he will face after the inauguration because of growing Chinese pressure threatening the island democracy.

The risk for Australia is that Biden will deliver a more elegantly expressed version of American disengagement of a type we have seen in the last four years. An ‘America first’ approach runs the risk of turning into an ‘America only’ strategy that cedes too much initiative to an angry and activist Beijing.

Australia will gain more from a United States that is encouraged to double down on its presence in the Indo-Pacific. The price for an active and engaged Washington is that we’ll have to step up our own involvement in the region and do our best to shape American policy thinking.

Biden has, for example, said that he wants to ‘jump-start a sustained, coordinated campaign with our allies’ to denuclearise North Korea. As a leading ally, Australia will need to develop some thinking about how to achieve that goal and the role we can play.

Whatever Biden’s reticence about America’s role, no global leader is better placed than Morrison to shape a more activist US engagement in the Indo-Pacific. Our management of Covid-19 and widely respected pushback against Xi’s bullying has bought Australia a privileged place at the alliance table.

Morrison should visit Washington soon after the inauguration to help shape Biden’s thinking about America’s role in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. If Biden is to develop a strategic approach that also serves Australia’s interests, we need to craft our place in that coalition effort. There is no more urgent Australian policy development task.

Key elements of this strategy should be a common response against Chinese economic coercion; a formalising of ‘Quad’ defence cooperation that also involves Japan and India; a shared condemnation of China’s dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy; an agreement to develop supply chains that shun Chinese forced labour; and combined planning to strengthen the defence of Taiwan.

The bedrock of our strategic credibility is our military and intelligence cooperation, more of which will be needed to make the alliance, now in its 70th year, fit for the purposes it must serve today. We must ask what more can be done to strengthen America’s military presence and cooperation in the region and what the Australian Defence Force can do to deter authoritarian military adventurism.

This will require more regional leadership from Australia than we have been comfortable delivering up until now, but the price of an engaged Washington is an activist Canberra. Biden’s strategic ambition is ours to sway.

Stable Seas recently released its third annual Maritime Security Index with one very important addition. This year, the geographic scope was expanded to include Australia for the first time. The index tells us about the current state of Australian maritime security, and, perhaps more importantly, raises questions about the future of Australian efforts to combat non-traditional maritime security challenges in its own waters and the larger region.

Maritime security is complex and multi-faceted. The Maritime Security Index brings data to bear on many aspects of these issues for the first time, providing a tool to explore trends within and the relationship between nine diverse components of maritime security across 71 states and territories in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It focuses on some of the non-traditional security issues facing the maritime domain that often affect the daily lives of coastal communities, challenge maritime governance, and contribute to transnational crime and organised political violence.

The index can assist in visualising, quantifying and analysing the challenges and opportunities policymakers face in their maritime domains. However, we also hope that it can serve as a tool for deeper inquiry. Quantifying these complex maritime security issues is no simple task, and in attempting to do so we hope that we have given policymakers ways to engage with the analysis that open up new lines of inquiry into the current state of affairs and future policy priorities in the maritime domain.

Australia, as one might anticipate, ranks very highly across many measures of maritime security. It ranks at or very near the top of several index categories, including international cooperation, fisheries, rule of law, maritime mixed migration, and coastal welfare. These are all indications of Australia’s capacity to effectively govern its maritime domain but come as little surprise.

What may be much less intuitive are Australia’s lower scores on other aspects of maritime security, including illicit trades, piracy and armed robbery, and maritime enforcement capacity. Examining the broad factors that give rise to these results may generate productive discussions about the nature of the challenges and opportunities facing Australia.

On illicit trades, Australia sits just above the middle of the pack in the Maritime Security Index. This is primarily due to the persistent challenge of maritime drug trafficking. Australia, like many wealthy economies, is a destination market for drugs of various kinds, and some, particularly cocaine and opioids, appear to be trafficked into the country via the maritime domain at significant levels. Beyond the impacts this illicit trade may have in Australia itself, it also affects the maritime security of the states it transits through and plays a significant role in funding transnational criminal networks and armed groups in Latin America, South Asia and Southeast Asia. While attempts have been made to use Australia’s efficient, well-managed ports as entry points and vigilance against that method should be maintained, it appears that much of this trafficking tries to use isolated portions of the coast and Australian waters for drop-offs and ship-to-ship transfers.

In the area of piracy and armed robbery, Australia ranks in the bottom half of the index. Because maritime threats are inherently transnational, the index measures piracy and armed robbery not only by the presence of incidents in a country’s waters, but also by proximity to attacks in adjacent marine regions. While Australia’s own waters are free from such activity, the challenge posed by these issues in Indonesia is significant, and, as has been seen with Singapore, even states with extremely high maritime enforcement capacity can have difficulty keeping such challenges from spilling into their own waters.

What’s more, Australia’s economic prosperity is directly linked to the safety and security of maritime trade through Southeast Asia, making piracy and armed robbery in these waters an issue of core national interest. As Australia reorients its security priorities to an increasing focus on areas closer to home, maritime law enforcement capacity building with Indonesia and other regional states struggling with piracy and armed robbery could be useful in mitigating the challenge before it has the opportunity to pose a more direct threat to Australia’s economic and security interests.

Finally, and perhaps most unexpectedly, in the maritime enforcement section of the index Australia ranks 18th out of 71 countries and territories. This was a surprise, even for the Stable Seas team that developed the methodology. The Royal Australian Navy is a robust, modern force with capabilities that would be the envy of nearly any other navy within the geographic scope of the index.

However, the index weights the level of maritime enforcement capacity necessary against the size of each state’s respective maritime domain. Australia’s massive coastline and outlying islands generate an exclusive economic zone measuring roughly 8.5 million square kilometres, the largest in the Maritime Security Index’s area of study. The index takes this immense maritime domain into account as a significant challenge for projecting maritime security and governance.

The other factor that impacts Australia’s maritime enforcement score is the relatively small number of coastal patrol vessels available to the RAN and maritime law enforcement. While the RAN’s diverse assets are critical for ‘high-end’ national defence missions, they have more limited utility in combating the non-traditional maritime security challenges that are the focus of the index. These missions are likely to fall to the more limited number of the RAN’s Armidale-class patrol boats, along with the Cape-class patrol vessels operated by the Maritime Unit of the Australian Border Force. These are highly capable vessels for addressing the kind of non-traditional challenges in question, but their comparatively limited numbers still negatively affect the overall score.

There are certainly a variety of other capabilities that should be considered in a more detailed analysis of Australian maritime enforcement capacity, but the impact of limited patrol vessels on the maritime enforcement score is not detached from reality. In fact, it reflects policy conversations which are already being had in the Australian maritime security community, and the need to fill this gap has already been acknowledged by plans for procuring additional Cape-class and offshore patrol vessels.

These are exactly the kinds of conversations that Stable Seas seeks to help catalyse via the index project. With the inclusion of Australia in the scope of the project for the first time, we hope the index will be a valuable tool for members of the Australian maritime security community in identifying these nuances, advocating for resources and policy prioritisation, and building an evidence base for future efforts to ensure continued security in Australia’s maritime domain.

The tiny island state of Seychelles is rethinking its future in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the first democratic change in its ruling party in 43 years.

Charting a new way forward for the country, increasing food security and building new industries based on the blue economy and knowledge are priorities for the new government of Wavel Ramkalawan, former opposition leader and now president. It will involve assistance from partners such as India, China and Japan, and it won’t be an easy task.

Although Seychelles has long experience in balancing competing external interests, increased geostrategic competition in the Indian Ocean may make it harder to secure the foreign investment it urgently needs to rebuild after the severe economic impacts of the pandemic.

When it achieved independence from Britain in 1976, the new country was quickly drawn into wider global networks. Its position as an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ in the western Indian Ocean made it attractive to the big powers.

A socialist coup soon after independence propelled it towards the Soviet bloc, but, even then, Seychelles trod a fine line between opposing factions, and the US continued to operate a satellite tracking station on the main island of Mahé.

A long runway built in 1971 helped establish international tourism, which soon became the main pillar of the economy.

With half of its forests protected from development and its sandy beaches and the surrounding ocean teeming with fish, the country was promoted as a tropical paradise.

Other mainstays included fish processing and an offshore finance facility, which led to an unwanted reputation for money laundering and illegal transactions.

Over the past decade, the economy has been reasonably sound. The World Bank designated Seychelles as a high-income country. Until recently, the nation had credible reserves of foreign exchange, and it scores well on measures of health, education and social welfare.

From the start of this century, there has been a construction boom. Even 10 years ago, the roads were relatively empty; now, daily rush hours are commonplace.

But the Covid-19 epidemic caused international flights to be cancelled and prompted a domestic lockdown. Seychelles has recorded very few cases of coronavirus, but that has come at the cost of a booming tourist industry. Inflows of foreign exchange were drastically reduced, the exchange rate fell, prices rose and there were shortages of some goods. Many businesses were caught in debt traps.

Elections in October 2020 led to the comprehensive defeat of the party that had held power for more than four decades. The priority for Ramkalawan and his government is to work towards a new future. To revive the economy there must be more tourists, although that will risk a rise in the number of infections.

In the longer term, the economy must diversify, make smarter use of people’s skills and include more knowledge-based occupations. This will require a revolution in broadband capacity and an upgraded program of ICT training and education.

Digital capability upgrades can only be achieved with the support of international partners. But, as the past has shown, there’s invariably a price to be paid for such assistance, whether through security concessions or votes in the United Nations.

Developing the blue economy may also help. Seychelles made an early start in promoting the concept of sustainable seafood production and blue energy, but there have been few tangible results.

Tapping the energy reserves of tides and currents is still far from being realised, and little has been done to see what can be grown in the sea itself. Considerable investment is needed for research and development, which is beyond the reach of a small nation. Partners with access to more resources are essential if oceanic opportunities are to be realised.

Comparable challenges in neighbouring island states in the western Indian Ocean (Mauritius, Réunion, Comoros) should encourage a regional approach that produces economies of scale in investment and governance. Making the blue economy work is also of interest to other small island states in the Pacific and Caribbean. Ideas and experience can be shared to the benefit of all.

Another vulnerability highlighted in recent months is Seychelles’ heavy dependence on food imports. It’s self-sufficient in fish and eggs but imports up to 90% of other foods. Supply lines can’t be guaranteed, and increasing locally sourced supplies is imperative.

The previous government identified pork, poultry and a range of vegetables as candidates for greater production, ideally leading to self-sufficiency. More also needs to be done to ensure that food grown locally is organic.

Securing external assistance to aid economic recovery will require careful diplomacy. Seychelles has always attracted the interest of big powers—first France and Britain as colonial powers, then the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and more recently India and China.

There are close relations with the United Arab Emirates, and Japan has recently opened a new embassy. Meanwhile, the US, from its strongholds in Diego Garcia and Djibouti, maintains a watching brief.

The country has long benefited from loans, grants and infrastructure investment. Recovery won’t be possible without further support, but it will be a challenge to accept funding from one source without upsetting another. If, for example, India revives its interest in a naval base on the outer island of Assumption, the strategic concerns of China will need to be addressed.

It’s no coincidence that, in 2018, just a few months after the former president, Danny Faure, went on a state visit to India, he was then invited to meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing. No details were released about what was discussed, but some kind of balancing concession will surely have been on the agenda.

‘A friend of all and an enemy of none’ is a term often used to sum up the nation’s diplomacy. This has been tested before, but perhaps not at any time more than now.

This post is part of an ASPI research project on the vulnerability of Indo-Pacific island states in the age of Covid-19 being undertaken with the support of the Embassy of Japan in Australia.