Tag Archive for: Southeast Asia

Myanmar: a gourd between the cacti

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Today is a momentous day for Myanmar, as Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) takes its place in the country’s parliament, ending decades of authoritarian rule. Following its massive win in last November’s election, the NLD will control both upper and lower houses. The parliament will select a new president when the current incumbent Thein Sein steps down at the end of March.

Although the constitution was drafted deliberately to prevent Suu Kyi from taking that position she has said she will rule ‘above’ a proxy NLD president. This January’s amnesty for over 100 prisoners, including a number jailed for political activities, suggests that the military-backed regime is continuing down a path to accept democratic government—but even with the NLD taking the political reins reform will be slow.

Myanmar’s geography makes the country a critical player in the strategic calculations of China, India and Southeast Asia and of deep interest to Australia, Japan and the US. Following the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 and the appalling repression under martial law declared in September that year by Myanmar’s State Law and Order Restoration Council, China and Myanmar developed a close strategic relationship. It was a partnership of convenience, reinforced by the international community applying sanctions to Myanmar.

Beijing suffered an unexpected reverse in September 2011 when the Myanmar government, bowing it said to the ‘will of the people’, suspended a major hydropower project with China. While China’s economic links dominate, Myanmar is seeking to broaden ties with other countries and put some measured distance between itself and Beijing.

People wanting to understand Myanmar’s rapidly changing place in regional security should read Rajiv Bhatia’s recently published and excellent book India-Myanmar Relations: Changing contours. Bhatia was New Delhi’s ambassador to Myanmar from 2002–05 and has had a career-long interest not only in that key bilateral relationship but more broadly in Myanmar’s strategic position. He sets out a convincing case that India is likely to establish deeper ties with Myanmar, based on cultural and historical connections. Those links are typified by Suu Kyi’s personal associations with India: her mother was ambassador in New Delhi from 1960 to 1967. When Suu Kyi visited India in 2012, she expressed her debt to Jawaharlal Nehru as providing one of the intellectual ‘maps’ that helped her through her long years of house arrest. Ghandi and Nehru, she said, ‘became my most precious friends because they helped me find my way through uncharted terrain’.

It seems inevitable that Myanmar’s strategic future will be defined by increasing competition between China and India. Bhatia quotes former Burmese Prime Minister, U Nu, describing his country as ‘hemmed in like a tender gourd among the cacti’. Myanmar’s land border with India is 1,600km long and its border with China is 2,000km long. Lengthy and unresolved insurgencies have been fought across both borders. For India, Myanmar offers a necessary path to development for its land-locked north eastern region. A number of key maritime and road transport projects are seeking to knit the regions closer together. New Delhi sees closer ties with Myanmar as offering a bridge to deeper relations with Southeast Asia and a way of mitigating China’s influence.

Visiting Tokyo in September 2014, Prime Minister Modi referred with evident exasperation to what was interpreted as China’s growing influence: ‘Everywhere around us, we see an 18th century expansionist mind-set: encroaching in other countries, intruding in others’ waters, invading other countries and capturing territory’. It matters deeply to India that Myanmar chooses to balance rather than to bandwagon with China. Bhatia points to ‘the wall of scepticism that exists in India in view of its past experiences and present day monitoring of China’s actions in parts of South Asia and East Asia’.

For China’s part, Myanmar offers access to the Bay of Bengal. A decade in construction, an oil and gas pipeline linking Myanmar’s deep-water port of Kyaukphyu in the Bay of Bengal with Kunming in Yunnan province of China shows Beijing’s interest in energy supplies that don’t transit the Straits of Malacca. But while completed in early 2015, the pipeline is yet to operate at full capacity because of disputes over agreements relating to transportation, investment and tax terms.

Although Beijing regards the emerging NLD government in Naypyidaw as less helpful to its interests than military rule, it will keep investing in Myanmar to support the roll out of President Xi’s One Belt One Road strategy and a deeper commercial and, ultimately, military presence in the Indian Ocean. China’s trade and investment relationship with Myanmar dwarfs India’s. It needs to warm chilly political ties, which won’t be an easy task.

Australia’s interests in Myanmar should encourage developing closer economic relations which are currently miniscule after years of sanctions. Canberra should look to remove the one remaining area of sanctions around military equipment and rapidly boost defence engagement. Canberra stands to benefit strategically from India’s deeper engagement with Myanmar and there may be some opportunities for trilateral cooperation with India and Myanmar on maritime security. Those should be encouraged as part of Defence’s foreshadowed policy to substantially grow regional engagement efforts.

Indonesia’s haze crisis: more trouble ahead

President Joko Widodo of Indonesia, inspecting the work in building retention basin to restore peatland moisture and to stop the forest fire in Rimbo Panjang, Riau.

The haze from land-clearing fires blanketing Sumatra, Kalimantan and peninsular Southeast Asia for the past two months has now extended to Papua, with the blame falling on an agriculture development project aimed at turning the easternmost district of Merauke into an unlikely food bowl.

President Joko Widodo has ordered a nation-wide moratorium on peatland cultivation as the burning season drags on, exacerbated by what may be strongest drought-inducing El Nino weather phenomena in 18 years that threatens failed crops and higher food prices.

According to Dutch earth scientist Guido van der Werf, the 115,000 fires detected across Indonesia this year until 25 October have churned out more than 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. On many days, that exceeds the 15 million tons of fossil fuel emissions recorded daily across the whole of the US.

The fires have so far razed 1.7 million hectares, but those in peatland are notoriously difficult to extinguish, giving off the most smoke and burning at a depth of five and 10 metres which makes them impervious to aerial water bombing.

While the effects of the so-called El Nino Southern Oscillation have been moderate so far, Indonesia’s National Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) predicts it will strengthen over the next two months and last well into next year.

Similar estimates come from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), leading the World Bank to forecast the possibility of lower GDP growth and higher inflation next year.

The Bank’s latest quarterly report says a severe El Nino could damage up to 400,000 hectares of paddy land and cut rice output by more than one million tons. An Indonesian Agriculture Ministry study estimates that, in turn, may halve farmers’ household income.

While the southern slopes of Papua’s central highlands are routinely socked in by low-hanging afternoon cloud, the smoke from forest fires is a new hazard, shutting the airport in the southeast coastal mining town of Timika for days on end.

Much of the smoke is now drifting westwards from the controversial Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate. The estate is part of the Indonesian Government’s drive for food self-sufficiency—a policy many economists think is misplaced.

Ever since President Suharto achieved rice self-sufficiency nearly four decades ago, Indonesians have come to regard importing rice as a sign of failure—and a source of political instability if the price isn’t properly managed.

That’s what lay behind Suharto’s failed million-hectare rice project in Central Kalimantan’s peatlands in the mid-1990s, which was launched to meet increased consumption but caused an environmental disaster instead.

Merauke is a similarly massive and environmentally-fraught undertaking, involving at least 36 companies and designed to produce 2 million tons each of rice, corn and sugar, 167,000 tons of soybeans and 937,000 tons of palm oil from 1.3 million hectares of newly-cleared forest land.

Conceived by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s government—and now supported by the Widodo administration—it has been described by Land Deal Politics Initiative as a ‘textbook land-grab’ of ancestral lands and a ‘strategic location for national development fantasies’.

Global Forest Watch currently counts more than 700 hotspots around Merauke, spreading across the nearby border into Papua New Guinea where the Ok Tedi copper mine has already been closed because of a water shortage.

Climatologists attribute a much drier October to the progressive strengthening of a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, which cools surface waters in the east and reduces rainfall across Australia and Indonesia.

Longer-term climate predictions aren’t encouraging either.

A 10-year-long study released last year showed that the sea current, pushing warm waters from the western Pacific into the Indian Ocean through Indonesia’s network of straits, is acting differently and could transform the climate in both ocean basins as a result.

Indonesia is the only tropical location in the world where two oceans interact in this manner, with the so-called Indonesia-Through-Flow (IFT) playing a role in everything from Indian monsoons to the region’s increasingly frequent El Nino’s.

The main in-flow passage through the archipelago is the Makassar Strait which separates Borneo from Sulawesi. Some water then enters the Indian Ocean through the Lombok Strait, between Lombok and Bali, while the bulk flows east into the Banda Sea and out through the Ombai Strait and Timor Passage.

According to American and Australian scientists, the IFT has become shallower and more intense in the same way water passes through a kinked hose. That suggests that climate change may worsen the effects of the El Nino and its wet sister, La Nina.

The 1990s in Indonesia were largely characterized by sustained El Nino conditions—particularly towards the end of the decade—which then changed to large swings between El Nino and La Nina conditions in the 2000s.

Indonesians remember El Nina from 2010-2011 when the cooling of the Pacific meant they didn’t have a dry season at all. So do hapless Queenslanders, who were deluged with rain for eight straight months and suffered the worst flooding in their history.

Now comes yet another severe El Nino, which began in late August when the trade winds weakened and the surface water being driven across the central and eastern Pacific became progressively warmer because of its longer exposure to solar heating.

The worst of these such events occurred in 1997-98. With rainfall well below the average for March and April, a year-long drought set in, triggering calamitous bush-fires across Kalimantan and Sumatra as farmers sought to replace depleted food crops.

Lead researcher Janet Sprintall, of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, believes changes in the IFT could shift rainfall patterns across the whole Asian region. In other words, the seasons could be turned completely on their heads, with all that means for agriculture and fisheries in Indonesia and many of its Southeast Asian neighbours.

If the climatologists are right, the future may already be here. As the situation continued to deteriorate this week—and the haze spread for the first time across western Java—President Widodo cut short his visit to the US and flew home to take charge of the mass evacuation of mothers and children from the worst-hit areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan.

It has never been this bad, not even in 1997-98. Like his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s experience with the devastating 2004 Aceh tsunami, Widodo now has a national disaster on his hands—this time, manmade. The haze crisis could have even bigger consequences for Indonesia and its neighbours than the tsunami.

Indonesia: going nowhere fast

Losari Beach, Makassar

It took 24 hours—and apparently an angry call from a blindsided President Joko Widodo—for Home Affairs Minister Tjahjo Kumolo to revoke a raft of new restrictions on visiting foreign journalists, which were similar to those in force during President Suharto’s 32-year rule.

Why they were introduced in the first place is difficult to understand in the current democratic climate, but it showed once again the mixed signals emanating from the Widodo government when it comes to Indonesia’s dealings with the rest of the world.

Cabinet reshuffles or not, the president will have to work harder at ensuring there’s a lot more policy coordination and a lot less economic nationalism if he is to achieve his goal of attracting foreign investment and bringing a better balance to the economy.

New manufacturing industries are vital for sopping up unemployment and steering the country away from its past dependence on natural resources and onto a growth path that will propel it above the current 5%.

Right now, Indonesia is going nowhere fast, offering a welcoming hand in one instance and an arresting hand the next. It’s left the overriding impression that because of the size of its domestic market—and the profits to be gained from it—everything has to be on its terms.

It wasn’t always like this. In the years following the 1997 financial crisis, Indonesians were in despair, wondering where they had gone wrong and why it was taking so long for the country to recover. The arrival of the 2004–2012 commodity boom changed all that.

Officials trot out figures which appear to show productive foreign investment pouring in. But ask any foreign business group or investment bank analyst and they leave no doubt that investors have Indonesia firmly on the back burner.

There are different reasons for this. Admittedly, many centre on the general economic slowdown, with commodity prices still in the doldrums, domestic consumption sinking and a sluggish China weighing down hopes of an imminent world-wide recovery.

But that’s not all. In private forums, businessmen complain about regulatory uncertainty and cloying red tape; they talk of ministries working at cross-purposes and the economic coordinating minister seemingly incapable of getting them on the same page.

In places like Malaysia and China, start-up ventures are lavished with new buildings, modern technology and attractive incentives. In Indonesia, there’s nothing but bureaucratic obstacles, poor infrastructure and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude among senior officials.

One large global company, for example, still can’t secure approval to import a common agriculture commodity for its processing plant—a necessary contingency plan in the event that Indonesia is unable to produce enough to keep it running at full capacity in the future.

Two Korean companies hoping to set up garment and shoe factories in Central Java to take advantage of cheaper labour costs found they had acquired land that was either in the middle of nowhere or not zoned for industrial use.

The list of gripes go on, topped by the Manpower Ministry’s policy of slashing work permits and its recent decision to force all non-resident directors and commissioners to obtain temporary permits, whether they attend meetings in Indonesia or not.

Like the media restrictions, you would think it would take only a phone call to resolve. Instead, Widodo demonstrated his ignorance of procedures by saying he wanted to scrap temporary stay visas. That would leave the related work permit issue untouched.

Foremost among the mixed signals is the Government’s fixation on adding to the so-called Negative List—sectors where foreigners aren’t permitted. Yet even in areas where foreign investors are encouraged, such as the creative economy, they’re only allowed minority ownership.

Another complaint is the Government’s requirement for foreign-owned projects to use local content. It’s not that it can’t be done, but the way officials beat investors over the head with it. Similarly with a new requirement for all companies engaged in public service to build data centres, even if there is no need for them.

In this climate, the targeted incentives on offer in neighbouring countries are almost unheard of. Instead, by far the most common complaint is the whimsical introduction of regulations, which are both unclear and lacking in the certainty necessary for business plans to work.

A classic template is the 2009 Mining Law, the broad provisions of which were initially greeted with cautious enthusiasm. Then three years later, the Government came up with implementing regulations that changed everything, giving miners an impossible year-long deadline to build smelters.

Instead of facing up to reality, Indonesia plays its now-familiar game of smoke and mirrors. Beef prices are at record levels because the Government continues to restrict meat and live cattle imports in an effort to show it has attained self-sufficiency. It hasn’t and it probably never will.

Indonesians are assured that the looming El Nino weather phenomenon, which meteorologists are warning could be even worse than the devastating 1997–98 event, will have little impact on agriculture. But the impacts are already being felt, and no-one knows how much more is to come.

Then there was the recent spectacle of President Widodo attending the ground-breaking ceremony for a 2,000-megawatt Japanese-funded power station, hailing it as an example of the Government removing bottlenecks to infrastructure development.

Yet buried in the stories appearing in local newspapers was the revelation, well-known to most people who follow the power industry, that developers still have to win a years-long battle to acquire a crucial 10% of the land.

On that front, little has changed. Despite having the state-owned Pertamina oil company as a partner, land issues meant it took ExxonMobil more than a decade to finally get East Java’s Cepu oilfield on stream. The reason, according to one senior energy official: ‘too much democracy.’

For all the bluster aimed at a gullible domestic audience, Indonesia is losing the perception game where it counts: out in the world. But before new chief economic minister Darmin Nasution can come up with ways to turn that around, he must first convince ministers and bureaucrats alike that carrots work better than sticks.

Thailand’s border timber war

Kallai Timber Yard

The illegal harvesting and smuggling of the rare and valuable Siamese Rosewood (Dalbergia cochinchinensis) across the Thai-Cambodian border is an issue that’s landed on ASEAN member states’ desks yet again. On 7 May, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) outlined the complexities involved in allowing the illegal timber trade to thrive to the 11th Meeting of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Wildlife Enforcement Network (WEN) in Brunei. To put things in perspective, the operation of the Siamese Rosewood supply chain involves a range of national criminal offences including corruption, fraud, money laundering, and murder. On top of these criminal offences, it’s the strategic implications of this highly profitable (illegal timber trade in ASEAN is estimated to be worth USD 17 billion per year), illicit and vertically integrated supply chain that presents a regional security challenge.

Found in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, Siamese Rosewood is highly valued by Chinese furniture makers, with small coffee tables being sold for tens of thousands of US dollars each. During the last twelve months alone the price of Siamese Rosewood has tripled.

While the EIA stressed the importance of Siamese Rosewood preservation for the region and Australia, the report presents two worrying trends for the greater Mekong subregion. First, the illegal harvesting of rosewood is symptomatic of the environmental sustainability challenges faced by the region’s developing economies. Second, organised crime value chains focused on the illegal timber trade are both integrating and globalising. And so from a regional security perspective, the reporting also underscores the continued evolution of non-political or religiously motivated transnational organised crime in the greater Mekong subregion.

Illegal logging now threatens Siamese Rosewood with extinction, despite the fact that the species is protected by national laws in all range states. In 2013, Siamese Rosewood was listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The current exploitation of dwindling supplies of Siamese Rosewood is indicative of the new era of natural resource scarcity in ASEAN. For almost twenty years Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia enjoyed the benefits of a highly profitable timber resource boom. During this period, many public officials viewed the region as ‘the land of plenty’.

With the turn of the century, there has been a growing realisation in some ASEAN states that the region is now entering a period of increased scarcity. While the opening up of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Myanmar economies has eased the short-term regional resource shortage, scarcity still looms large.

In the approaching era of natural resource scarcity, ASEAN states must be able to exercise sovereignty over their natural resources to ensure both their sustainable exploitation and access to appropriate royalties. There are additional challenges with the impending achievement of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC); coordination between ASEAN economic spheres will be hard, particularly ensuring that the environmental ministries are included in the drafting of policies set to drive economic growth.

The criminal exploitation of natural resources such as timber is contributing to regional instability. Despite the existence of national and international laws, the trade in Siamese Rosewood continues. Siamese Rosewood is illegally harvested in all range countries (Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand), often by cross border loggers, and shipped to China via either Laos or Vietnam. In China, Siamese Rosewood products are openly traded.

With the illicit timber trade now integrated across multiple borders, the challenge for ASEAN is where and how to disrupt this multinational supply chain. In many cases, the Siamese Rosewood supply chain is operated by well-established transnational organised crime groups. While Thai enforcement and border security officials rigorously pursue illegal loggers, those involved in later stages of the supply chain continue to operate with impunity.

For ASEAN states in the greater Mekong region, the illicit trade in Siamese Rosewood underscores border security failures. Non-state actors and transitional organised crime syndicates, are directly challenging state sovereignty over their natural resources. While there’s a history of religious and political motivated insurgencies in Southeast Asia, the ongoing conflict between illegal loggers and forest rangers, police and soldiers amounts to criminal insurgency.

So far the coordination of national responses across the Mekong subregion has been limited. The targeting of the illicit timber trade, remains for the most part the responsibility of forestry and agricultural departments who have limited capacity to deal with such a complex, capable and often violent threat. Given the globalised dimension of this activity and the challenges in rooting it out, a far more coordinated approach to disruption operations is needed.

Australia has an important role to play in highlighting the regional security implications of Thailand’s border timber war for ASEAN states. A regional response to the impacts of the growing primary resource scarcity in the region needs to be encouraged, especially with regards to the rapid exploitation of Laos and Myanmar.

Vietnam fifty years on

A young Vietnamese woman uses a couple of baskets to carry a baby and her shopping as she passes a line of Australian troops resting in an armored personnel carrier

Last weekend’s commemorations of the centenary of the Gallipoli landings was the ultimate expression of our habit of reflecting on the causes, conduct and consequences of war at the time of major anniversaries. Unfortunately, Australia’s major wars of the twentieth century occurred, with remarkable precision, at quarter-century intervals. Thus the centenary commemorations of 1914–18 will overshadow the 75th anniversaries of major turning points in the Second World War and the 50th of those of the Vietnam War.

Fifty years ago this week, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced the commitment of the first battalion of Australian combat troops to Vietnam on 29 April 1965. Ten years later, on 30 April 1975, the war ended as North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. In a particularly cruel irony, the Australian ambassador closed our Saigon embassy and headed for the airport five days earlier—the 60th anniversary of the Anzac landing.

If Gallipoli had occurred, say, a year earlier or a year later, those anniversaries might now prompt a substantial discussion of the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War and its implications for many areas of Australian political and social life: grand strategy, military operations, conscription, and the physical and mental health of veterans. Instead, we have only a few references in public discussion.

That gap matters. While the scale of our 1965–72 commitment does not compare with that of 1914–18—to use one crude but telling index, 521 service personnel dead from a population of about 12 million compared with 60,000 from a population of less than 5 million—the impact of Vietnam is more immediate. Any new commitment, especially as part of a coalition led by the United States, is still likely to meet the challenge: ‘Is this another Vietnam?’ And the current Minister for Veterans’ Affairs takes every opportunity to say that our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans must be treated better than those from Vietnam.

So how should we look at the Vietnam War, half a century on? First, it was not a case of Australian involvement in ‘other people’s wars’. As far as Robert Menzies was concerned, it was more a matter of getting the US to fight Australia’s wars. Australian strategy was based on the need to keep Britain and the United States committed to the security of Southeast Asia, which clearly mattered more to Australia than to northern hemisphere allies.

Menzies, it seems, feared American isolationism more than American overreach. He, and those from whom he chose to take advice, found it difficult to believe that the United States, if fully committed to a conflict, could be defeated. It was a huge miscalculation, but understandable given Menzies’ personal experience as a young man during WWI, which the US did not enter until 1917, and as Prime Minister in 1939–41, before Pearl Harbor. To him, and others of his generation, what really mattered was Washington’s commitment: if the Americans were involved, it seemed, success was certain.

Australia had a very specific reason to be concerned about American policy. In the early 1960s Australians were deeply concerned about another, much closer, Southeast Asian conflict. Australian forces were supporting the new federation of Malaysia against Indonesia’s ‘confrontation’. It was a low-level conflict, but Australian policymakers constantly feared that Indonesia might raise the stakes, not only on the Malayan peninsula but also across Australia’s only land border—between Indonesia’s West New Guinea and the Australian territories on the eastern half of the island (today’s Papua New Guinea). When Australian ministers asked American officials at what stage Indonesian aggression might prompt support under ANZUS, the Americans clearly hinted that much would depend on Australian support for the American position in Indochina.

The Vietnam War was not about regime change, but about regime defence. There was never any intention to overthrow the communist government in Hanoi: the aim was only to prevent the fall of an anti-communist government in the south. In that sense, Vietnam was more akin to the first Gulf war of 1991 than to the Iraq invasion of 2003.

Above all, we should remember what else was happening in Southeast Asia in 1965. The Indonesian Communist Party was the third largest in the world. President Sukarno said 1965 would be a ‘year of living dangerously’ with the support of a ‘Beijing-Jakarta’ axis. Tensions between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore would soon lead to the ejection of Singapore from Malaysia. Thailand faced a substantial communist insurgency in its northeast. It is hardly surprising that many of the region’s ‘dominoes’—most publicly Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew—fervently urged the Americans not to withdraw. We learn from Jeremy Hearder’s new biography of Sir James Plimsoll that Indian generals were expressing a similar view in early 1965.

By 1968–69, much had changed in the region. Indonesia was now securely under the anti-communist President Suharto. Malaysia and Singapore were functioning better apart than together. Thailand had its internal insurgency under control. The formation of ASEAN in 1967 indicated that these non-communist nations were willing to collaborate better. In short, the only dominoes likely to fall with South Vietnam would be Laos and Cambodia.

For Australia and many other countries in the region, the 1965 commitment by the United States and its allies served a purpose, but the strategic gains were achieved by the end of the 1960s. The real tragedy of the Vietnam War was that it continued well into the 1970s, at huge cost to all external participants, and most of all, to the Vietnamese people.

 

Gamechangers in Asia

Gamechangers in Asia?

In late February, I attended the Ditchley Park conference on power rivalries in Asia. A sub-theme of the conference was to explore whether the region was being drawn into an arms race. Like all good conferences, it didn’t end in a series of pre-packaged answers, though I think my broad impression from listening to the conversation around the table was that we’re looking now at a region that has become strategically more competitive over the last year or two. Still, I can’t see Asia as a region characterised by arms racing—at least, not in the narrow technical sense that the region as a whole is locked into an action–reaction dynamic producing weapons arsenals excess to requirements. True, some of the harder-wired strategic relationships—in south Asia or northeast Asia, for example—have a little more of the action–reaction dynamic than others. But broadly speaking, defence spending in most Asian countries isn’t especially high as a percentage of GDP. And strategies tend to be asymmetric rather than symmetric.

Look at our own defence spending. Does it constitute the Southeast Asian leg of an arms race? No, and there’s not much prospect of its quickening abruptly. Indeed, there’s something approaching bipartisan agreement that defence isn’t a priority compared to domestic spending. That’s a position common to many of the countries that took part in the wave of military operations that followed 9/11, and the duration, cost and uncertain outcomes of those ventures have induced a weariness about the effectiveness of military force to achieve desired objectives among publics at large. But it’s also testimony to the rising social welfare demands upon many Western budgets. Most Asian countries are facing similar pressures to spend more in other budget sectors. And even if we were spending more on defence, would the net effect be stabilising or destabilising? A broad view of US allies and partners in Asia is that the US ought to be spending rather more here, precisely because it’s a stabilising presence in the region. Read more

‘Public enemy number one’ died this year – largely unnoticed

Chin Peng wanted by MalayaAmid the attention given to the installation of a new government in Canberra, the Australian media didn’t, as far as I’m aware, notice the death in September of Chin Peng. That name probably means little or nothing to most Australians today but in the 1950s, as the leader of the communist insurgents during the Malayan Emergency of 1948-60, he was regarded as ‘Public Enemy Number One’ by British countries, which in those days very much included Australia. His story is important for Australians, and not just because Australians fought and died during the Emergency. And there are reasons why his death was noted in the major American media, even though the United States wasn’t engaged in the Emergency.

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Why a stronger Indonesian military is good for Australia (but is still a long way off)

Indonesian Air Force Sukhoi aircraft with RAAF F/A-18s on Exercise Pitch Black 2012ASPI today released my report Moving beyond ambitions? Indonesia’s military modernisation which examines Jakarta’s plans to build a modern defence force over the next decade. It’s an important topic, because the military balance between the ADF and its Indonesian counterpart, the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), has always factored large in Australia’s defence planning.

TNI’s current modernisation efforts take place in the context of a broader debate about Indonesia’s possible emergence as a major regional or even global power. Australia’s 2013 Defence White Paper, for example, expects nothing less. If that happens, Indonesia will not only become more powerful relative to Australia, but a more capable TNI would also be a major geostrategic asset for us. Hugh White, for example, has argued that it’s quite likely that our larger neighbour to the north will become a major regional maritime power, able to protect not only its own maritime approaches but also Australia’s.

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Defence White Paper 2013: the strategic setting

A quick first read of the principal ‘strategic environment’ chapters of the new White Papers (Chapters 2, 3 and 6) gives a broad feel for the document as a whole. The overall tone of the document is consistent with the National Security Strategy, depicting a regional environment that’s simultaneously cooperative and competitive, and an Australian strategic approach that attempts to both shape and hedge.

There’s an occasional jerkiness to the document’s flow, as if more than one hand has been attempting to insert messages—not surprising in any government document that underpins future funding. That jerkiness is most evident at the start of Chapter 3. Para 3.3 contains, oddly, a long and detailed equipment list at the opening of an argument about Australian strategic interests. Paragraph 3.4 abruptly changes tack and argues that Australian strategic policy is really about shaping rather than hedging. It’s followed by two paragraphs on hedging before para 3.7 returns to the theme of shaping.

Along the way some important and astute observations emerge. Para 3.19, for example, identifies one of our key strategic goals—a non-coercive regional order. But those observations sit alongside other paragraphs which seem overly restrictive in how we might pursue that goal: para 3.47, for example, seems an ADF-centric view of how Australia might attempt to influence the unfolding regional transformation. Read more

Pivot 2.0

Prime Minister Gillard listening to President Obama addressing troops in Darwin.

As we enter US President Barack Obama’s second term, one of the key strategic questions for Australia is what happens to America’s ‘pivot’ towards the Asia–Pacific. Announced in late 2011, it signalled a renewed US commitment to the region by strengthening and diversifying US military presence in the region. Later rebranded ‘rebalancing’, it was largely a reaction to allies and partners worrying about a more assertive China and about the possibility of Washington becoming more isolationist in the face its looming economic crisis.

Over the course of 2012, the US moved from rhetoric to incremental implementation. Apart from the announcement of plans to rotate US Marines through Darwin, Washington initiated similar discussions about greater rotational access with the Philippines. The Obama administration agreed to increase the number of forward deployed US Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) by basing four in Singapore. It called for a US–Vietnamese strategic partnership and conducted joint naval training with its former enemy. It even strengthened defence cooperation with Cambodia, which was thought to be in the ‘China camp’. Moreover, the US strengthened its posture in Japan and South Korea. Finally, the Pentagon pushed a new ‘AirSea Battle’ doctrine designed to counter a growing ‘anti-access/area-denial challenge’ in the Western Pacific, for which read: Chinese military systems. Read more