Nothing Found

In the first part of this series, I discussed the high rates of ammunition expenditure in the war in Ukraine and emphasised that this is a question not just of expensive missiles but also of explosive ordnance—traditional, ‘dumb’ munitions, like artillery shells, unguided bombs and rockets, and small-arms and medium-calibre ammunition.

I should correct a detail in that first post where I mentioned munitions company NIOA’s Maryborough forge. This facility is now producing 155-milimetre projectiles for export. The firm is also contracted to produce 30-milimetre ammunition for the Boxer vehicle, as well as 155-milimetre components for the Australian Army under Land 17.

In my previous piece I noted that, while the term ‘explosive ordnance’ appears in the name of the Australian Defence Department’s munitions program (the ‘Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise’, or ‘GWEO’), it doesn’t appear to have been part of the program’s original design and the focus remains on guided weapons supplies. In this second part, I identify some questions about our EO supply arrangement and identify some of the policy challenges.

As Defence leaders rightly point out, we can’t manufacture all the components, let alone finished munitions, our weapons platforms need. That means we face a constant task of balancing an assessment of where the greatest need is against the art of the possible. Where are the greatest risks that existing stockpiles and supply chains will fail us, and which of those risks can be addressed quickly?

Conversations with industry unsurprisingly convey a gamut of frustrations. One prominent view is that Defence needs to communicate a clear assessment of what guided weapons and ammunition are a priority. That assessment needs to be genuinely joint, and reflect a blunt appraisal of what response options the government considers non-negotiable. Put differently, the chain of logic needs to ultimately flow from broader preparedness settings. This also relates directly to the much-cited claim that Australia can no longer count on 10 years of warning time for a crisis or conflict in our region: if we have truly dispensed with that assumption, our approach to munitions should match.

The ammunition consumption rates observed in Ukraine cannot genuinely be described as ‘extraordinary’ because every major conflict forces militaries to relearn this lesson. The salient question here is: have the assumptions about expected consumption rates and quantities been interrogated against what is being experienced in Europe?

Even the US, with its enormous domestic small-arms industry, ran low on small-arms ammunition during the Iraq War, which was hardly of the same intensity as the fight in Ukraine. Some reports have suggested that the US is now ‘close to the limit’ of what it can continue supplying to Ukraine. They also say that expenditure has been higher than pre-war US planning assumptions.

In a genuine regional or international crisis, therefore, how valid is any assumption that the US or other key allies could stop-gap our ‘dumb’ munitions shortfalls? It seems highly unlikely that such overseas sources could be relied upon.

Another difficult-to-answer question goes to the realities of the surge capacity at Australian Munitions’ Benalla and Mulwala facilities. These are crucial establishments: among other reasons, they are Commonwealth-owned facilities on Commonwealth land because a strict regulatory framework applies to manufacturers of guided weapons and explosive ordnance. But it means that the commercial custodianship of these facilities (Australian Munitions is a subsidiary of Thales) underwrites a critical national capability.

Is the Commonwealth equipped with the expertise and experience to engage in genuine due diligence about what these facilities are capable of producing should ‘the flag go up’? Our confidence in manufacturing capabilities that may lie dormant and unexercised in the Commonwealth-owned facilities, for example, should be low until proven otherwise.

And does the Commonwealth have a good understanding of what other (if any) facilities could be retooled under extreme circumstances to play a role in EO supply chains?

Conversations with industry also describe other frictions that policymakers are acutely aware of—like workforce. At this stage, the talent pool is shallow across relevant industry, and firms often have little choice but to shuffle staff among competitors, not to mention Defence, which can quickly become self-defeating. This is certainly true for players in the guided weapons industry, but it is also a constraint on those attempting to make progress on other munitions types.

There are no quick fixes for issues like this, but policy needs to be crafted that provides incentives for industry approaches that address some of the workforce challenges. For example, consideration could be given to some kind of preferential treatment for firms that can commit to and demonstrate that they are training and retaining their own workforces.

In sum, there is one open question and one reliable generalisation. First to the former: if ‘dumb’ munitions haven’t been prioritised by Defence to date because it was assessed that existing domestic sources will be reliable under pressure, is that assessment still valid? The answer may well be ‘yes’, and we can’t publicly scrutinise the question well because of the sensitive nature of the data, but it’s a question worth re-asking.

The reliable generalisation is that this costs money—lots of it. A 2016 Australian National Audit Office report on Defence’s management of the Mulwala Propellant Facility found that between 1999 and 2015, Defence ‘paid $526 million for munitions produced by the Mulwala and Benalla Facilities, and has paid $1.874 billion in order to build, operate and maintain the facilities’. That is, Australia paid more than three times as much to maintain the Commonwealth-owned munitions facilities as it did for munitions acquired from them. The overheads are enormous.

In this light, the enterprise approach signalled in the GWEO is indispensable. Economies of scale must be sought to whatever extent they are achievable. Finding a way to join up the investments being made under the GWEO (in its at least superficially expanded form beyond guided weapons) and the traditional way that munitions are funded, through the services’ sustainment budgets, surely makes sense.

These issues go to the heart of the idea that credible defence capability must rest upon a coherent relationship with the national support base, as David Beaumont and others have advocated. Among other things, the accountabilities for munition supply arrangements must be aligned between the different stakeholders inside and outside of the defence organisation.

There are a lot of smart people inside Defence working alongside industry on the GWEO Enterprise as a whole, and Defence’s leaders are anything but naive about the importance of ordnance, munitions and explosives to go into the weapons Australia purchases. Let’s hope the ‘EO’ part of GWEO is getting due attention.

Whether it wins or loses its war on Ukraine, Russia is likely to become more dangerous and unpredictable, and Australia needs to prepare better to deter an increased threat of nuclear conflict.

That grim conclusion is contained in a report by a top Australian analyst of Soviet and Russian affairs, Paul Dibb, emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, who writes that the risk of nuclear conflict is now higher than at any time since the Cold War.

He warns that the Pine Gap intelligence-gathering base near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory could become a priority nuclear target and says Australia should begin serious discussions with the United States about the status, purpose and credibility of extended nuclear deterrence in this much more worrying strategic environment.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is at an extremely dangerous moment for global security because Europe’s security order is being fundamentally challenged, Dibb says in the report, The geopolitical implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, released today by ASPI.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered the worst international crisis in decades and there’s a real risk of escalation into a major war involving Russia and the US, he says. ‘The ugliest days of this war are in front of us, not behind us.’

In both the Cold War and more recently, Russian authorities have made it clear that Pine Gap is a priority target. Australia needs to understand what the implications of that are for Alice Springs, a town of 32,000 people just 18 kilometres from the base. It has long been supposed that major Australian cities—such as Sydney and Melbourne—wouldn’t be targeted, Dibb says.

He says the invasion has brought the spectre of a new cold war but also the prospect of a wider general war in Europe erupting, while an increasingly authoritarian China is working with its strategic partner in Moscow to remake the international order. ‘This deeply disturbing picture is made all the worse by Putin’s now frequent references to the potential use of nuclear weapons,’ he says.

‘We need to plan on the basis that Pine Gap continues to be a nuclear target, and not only for Russia. If China attacks Taiwan, Pine Gap is likely to be heavily involved. We need to remember that Pine Gap is a fundamentally important element in US war fighting and deterrence of conflict.’

The most dangerous scenario for America would be a grand coalition of China and Russia united by complementary grievances. Washington could for the first time face the threat of a two-front contingency of nuclear war.

‘We need to focus on the friendship between the authoritarian leaders of those two countries, their mutual disdain for what they see as a rapidly declining West, and their shared sense of historical grievances,’ Dibb says.

‘The conjoining of the strategic ambitions of Beijing and Moscow highlights the differences in the current global competition for power with the West and increases the potential for miscalculation and conflict.’

Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, Dibb says, ‘Russia will continue to exist as a geopolitical entity unless it’s totally destroyed by an all-out nuclear war.’

Russia’s attack on Ukraine demonstrated that Putin intends to re-establish Russia as a major power at almost any price, says Dibb. He notes that as the Soviet Union disintegrated, Ukraine was effectively the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons power after Russia and the US. Its nuclear weapons were destroyed by agreement in 1994.

Under Russia’s ‘escalate to de-escalate’ strategy, it could use relatively small tactical nuclear weapons if it faced an overwhelming threat from a superior conventional military force that threatened the existence of the state. And Dibb says it’s of more concern that Putin might do so either in Ukraine or against NATO allies supplying Ukraine’s armed forces with conventional weapons. Putin might use a tactical nuclear weapon for its demonstration effect in Ukraine or to show that he’s had enough of NATO’s interference. Much of the munitions NATO supplies to Ukraine pass through Poland.

‘My view is that there’s little doubt that Putin is the sort of person who won’t resile from the use of nuclear weapons, particularly if it looks as though he’s losing this war,’ says Dibb. ‘But he must surely realise that there’s no such thing as the limited use of tactical nuclear weapons in isolation from their escalation to a full-scale strategic nuclear war.’ Washington needs to make that much plainer to Putin and his advisers.

‘Once we enter the slippery slope of even limited nuclear exchanges, the end result will be escalation to mutual annihilation—something about which both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping may need reminding.’ Unlike in the Cold War, Russia and the US no longer enjoy the extensive confidence-building measures such as nuclear arms control agreements, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty.

The habit of talking to each other has largely disappeared, which can only add to the risks of nuclear miscalculation, says Dibb.

A severely weakened, isolated and smaller Russia might then become more—not less—dangerous for the world. If the war in Ukraine extends to a direct conflict with NATO, all nuclear bets will be off, Dibb says.

European members of NATO, such as Poland, might seek additional protection by stationing US nuclear weapons on their territory.

Dibb says Australia should continue to help Ukraine as much as possible with further supplies of military equipment, but he stresses that there’s ‘little compelling reason’ for the Australian Defence Force to structure its forces for ‘high-intensity land warfare operations in Europe against Russia’.

NATO and Australia have recognised China as a major strategic challenge and that’s now combined with the threat from the de facto alliance of Russia and China. So, Dibb says, Australia and NATO should more closely share strategic analysis.

Australia needs to put much more effort into examining Russia’s military intentions in the Indo-Pacific and replace skills that were downgraded at the end of the Cold War, Dibb says. ‘Today, in the Australian intelligence community, there’s little expertise on Russia (for example, the Office of National Intelligence has only one officer dedicated to analysing Russia).’ A review into how Australia can repair this serious policy and intelligence gap should include what roles universities can play in training relevant academic and policy expertise about Russia. Australia also needs to strengthen intelligence and policy engagement with European countries that maintain high-quality analytical assessment capabilities about Russia, he says.

Australia also needs to be much better informed about the scale and depth of the relationship between China and Russia and how they aim to change the balance of power in the region, including their regular joint military exercises in the region and Russia’s supply of advanced weapons to China that may be used against us. Russia’s exports of military equipment to India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, Fiji need closer scrutiny and analysis.

Dibb doesn’t believe that the Ukraine war is likely to be stopped by a coup among Russia’s leaders to topple Putin. Unlike in the former Soviet Union, there’s no politburo in the Kremlin now to organise a challenge among the leadership, he says.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine inherited part of its nuclear arsenal. But in the 1994 Budapest memorandum, Ukraine agreed to return these weapons to Russia in exchange for ‘assurances’ from Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States that its sovereignty and borders would be respected. Russia brazenly violated this promise when it annexed Crimea in 2014 and tore up the memorandum with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. Many observers have concluded that Ukraine made a fateful mistake by agreeing to surrender its nuclear arsenal (once the world’s third largest). Are they right?

In the early 1960s, US President John F. Kennedy predicted that at least 25 states would have nuclear weapons by the following decade. But in 1968, United Nations member states agreed to a non-proliferation treaty that restricted nuclear weapons to the five states that already had them (the US, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China). Today, just nine states have them—the five named in treaty signatories plus Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea—but there are more ‘threshold states’ (countries with the technological ability to build nuclear weapons quickly) considering the option.

Some analysts suggest that proliferation might be a good thing, because a world of nuclear-armed porcupines would be more stable than a world of nuclear wolves and unarmed rabbits. In their view, Russia would not have dared to invade a nuclear-armed Ukraine. They also question why some states should have a right to nuclear weapons while others do not.

Others advocate the abolition of all nuclear weapons, a goal enshrined in the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in 2021. It currently has 86 signatories and 66 parties (though none of the nine states with nuclear weapons have signed up).

Sceptics of this approach argue that while nuclear abolition may be a worthy long-term aspiration, efforts to get there too quickly could increase instability and the likelihood of conflict. The real ethical challenge, they maintain, is not nuclear weapons’ existence but the probability of their use. It might be better if humanity had not learned to harness the power of a split atom in the 1930s; but that knowledge cannot be abolished, so it is better to focus on reducing the risks of its use in warfare.

Suppose that you live in a neighbourhood that suffers continuous devastating break-ins, burglaries and assaults. One day, some of your neighbours decide to equip their houses with massive explosive devices and trip wires, and post warning signs to deter intruders. The problem is that if these devices are used, your house will be damaged, too. Yet there are also considerable dangers in trying to dismantle the system in the short run.

What would you do? You might ask your neighbours to use the system only to defend against intruders and not to threaten others. You could encourage them to install devices to reduce the risk of accidents, and demand compensation for the risk they impose on you by including your house under their warning signs. And you might persuade them to take steps to dismantle the system sometime in the future, when relatively safe means can be found to do so.

By rough analogy, these are the types of conditions enshrined in the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and that is why the Russian invasion of Ukraine is so damaging. Russia has not only violated its explicit security guarantee under the Budapest memorandum; it has also hinted at nuclear escalation to deter others from coming to Ukraine’s aid. It is thus weakening the taboo against treating nuclear weapons as normal war-fighting weapons—a convention that the Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling called the most important global norm since 1945.

But it would be a mistake to exaggerate the harm that the invasion of Ukraine has done to the non-proliferation regime. For one thing, those who think the invasion will teach other states that they would be more secure if they had nuclear weapons are oversimplifying history. One cannot assume that nothing would have happened if Ukraine had kept its Soviet-era nuclear weapons.

After all, such weapons do not come ready to use ‘off the shelf’. The fissile material in the long-range Soviet missiles stationed in Ukraine would have had to be removed, reshaped and repurposed. Not only would that have taken time and expertise, but it might have accelerated Russia’s intervention. When states approach the nuclear threshold, they enter a ‘valley of vulnerability’ that may reduce their security and increase general instability. Even when stable deterrence is imaginable in a region, it may be highly risky to try to get from here to there.

Some theorists argue that just as nuclear weapons encouraged prudence among great powers, by giving them a ‘crystal ball’ with which to foresee the devastation that would follow from nuclear war, the spread of nuclear weapons would similarly produce stability among smaller regional rivals. Nuclear porcupines would act like rabbits, not wolves.

But not all regions are equal in terms of escalation risk, and it cannot be assumed that all leaders would have the wisdom to use their crystal balls. Regions differ in terms of the number of civil wars and overthrown governments, civilian control of the military, security of communications, and weapons-control protocols. If new proliferators have a higher risk of using nuclear weapons—even inadvertently—they and their neighbours will become even more insecure in the ‘valley of vulnerability’.

Ultimately, when nuclear weapons proliferate, the chances of inadvertent or accidental use tend to increase, managing potential nuclear crises becomes more complicated and establishing controls that may someday help to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in world politics becomes more difficult. In short, the greater the spread of supposedly defensive weapons, the higher the risks of blowing up the whole neighbourhood. The real lesson from Russia’s war in Ukraine is that we must reinforce the existing non-proliferation treaty and refrain from actions that erode it.

Russian forces commenced their invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. As plenty of analysts have pointed out, this is more fruitfully seen as an escalation of Russian aggression against Ukraine since 2014, rather than understood in isolation. Nonetheless, from the beginning of this major escalation by way of a ‘conventional’ invasion until the time of writing, 84 days have elapsed.

Major US-led combat operations commenced against Taliban-governed Afghanistan on 7 October 2001. Northern alliance forces entered Kabul on 13 November. Osama bin Laden is thought to have left for Pakistan on horseback on 16 December. If we take 9 December, when the Taliban abandoned Kandahar, as the end of the regime, 70 days elapsed between the commencement of major combat and the fall of the Taliban. Operation Anaconda didn’t occur until March 2002, an early milestone in a sorry 20-year timeline that was yet to unravel.

The US invasion of Iraq commenced on the 20 March 2003. Just three weeks later, coalition soldiers were pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, in a remarkable testament to the failings of the Iraqi army. President George W. Bush declared ‘Mission accomplished’ from the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003. The 84-day mark fell on 14 June 2003. Saddam had not yet been captured, the US was still searching for ‘weapons of mass destruction’, American contractors had not yet been strung up from a bridge in Fallujah, and Iraq had not yet descended into horrific sectarian bloodshed.

On 25 June 1950, North Korean troops streamed across the 38th parallel, marking the start of the Korean War. Seoul fell on the 28th. X Corps landed at Inchon on 15 September—the 82-day mark of the campaign—dislocating the North Korean disposition and initiating a rapid UN advance north. UN forces approached the Yalu River on 25 October and then Chinese troops joined the fight. Seoul was yet to change hands twice more, General Douglas MacArthur was yet to be relieved of command by President Harry Truman, and truce talks were still a long way off.

Eighty-four days into the Afghanistan war, improvised explosive devices were yet to emerge as a threat, and coalition soldiers—in the small numbers they were committed—were still moving at great liberty in soft-skinned vehicles. The evolution of this threat to a much higher level of technical sophistication was even further off, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions seemed to validate the supremacy of American airpower over almost all else. The sense of the politically possible in both countries felt, relatively, expansive.

Fifty years earlier in Korea, a war of movement had not yet given way to trenches and relatively static lines. By the 84-day mark, the apparent defeat of North Korea was more than a month away, and the catastrophe of Chinese intervention for UN forces was yet to play out.

The examples could go on, but I’ll get to the point: things change drastically in war. And the salient lessons from a given campaign change accordingly. There has been an understandable glut of commentary on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the West, including much from this organisation, and a good deal of it is concerned with apparent lessons. We should tread carefully.

There are, briefly, at least three reasons that recommend this caution. The first is the historical record sketched above. We know that much can change. This is true of both the political dimensions and the tactical and technical lessons of any conflict.

The second is the nature of the information we are receiving from Ukrainian sources. Ukraine is winning the propaganda war, at least in the West. For those of us in democracies, wishing for Ukrainian wins on the battlefield, this is a good thing. I am glad that Russian disinformation has not been a wild success. But it means we need to be careful using the available information to form far-reaching conclusions. Even high-quality open-source work, such as the Institute for the Study of War’s ongoing campaign assessments, relies heavily on Ukrainian official sources. There is little focus and little reliable information available on Ukrainian losses and failings, which—even if things are going exceedingly well for the Ukrainian military—must be significant.

Third, very few of the commentators party to this discussion have much value to add. In particular, few have experience on the ground against which to evaluate the flow of information out of the theatre or to contextualise the origins of particular military capabilities or decisions. Jack Watling, of the Royal United Services Institute in London, is one of the few exceptions, which is on show when he’s able to question and nuance hasty explanations of Ukrainian army success. This was also true of the 2014–15 period in this conflict; Phillip Karber’s fieldwork-informed research was an exception at that time.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter commentary has been particularly egregious for half-formed ‘hot takes’. The cottage industry focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin himself is especially fraught. It’s understandable that analysts are trying to grapple with Putin’s thinking. But genuine expertise on Russia, let alone Putin, is rare (especially in Australia), and ongoing speculation about Putin’s health is particularly unhelpful. Historically grounded guidance, such as that suggesting that a coup is rather unlikely, is much more reliable fare for the time being.

We might reach for another comparison point, the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. There was extensive and understandable focus on the air and missile dimensions of that war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But analysis published more recently has painted a more nuanced picture than that present in early coverage of the drone war, suggesting that ‘the hype was exaggerated. The Azeri drones were essential for their victory, but did not win the war alone, severe ground fighting was necessary’.

This war in Ukraine is going very badly for Russia, and the tragic sacrifices being made by the Ukrainian people and military appear to be paying off on the battlefield. Nonetheless, we should be wary. We need to learn the lessons of this latest war, but it might be a little while before we’re able to do so with much rigour.

What is it about some Westerners that makes them so singularly lacking in self-awareness as they assume a position of moral and intellectual superiority to issue condescending pronouncements on non-Westerners? In their chapter in the 1999 book The power of human rights, Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp wrote: ‘Pressure by Western states and international organizations can greatly increase the vulnerability of norm-violating governments to external influences.’

I can still remember being startled, when I first read that sentence, by the unconscious arrogance it betrayed in dividing the world into non-Western governments as errant norm-violators and Western governments as virtuous norm-setters and norm-enforcers. When I worked at the United Nations, I lost count of the number of times African and Asian diplomats complained about the continued hold of the white man’s burden on Westerners’ dealings with the rest of the world.

Edward Luce pointed out in the Financial Times on 24 March that in saying Russia has been ‘globally isolated’ over Ukraine, the West ‘is mistaking its own unity for a global consensus’. True, 141 of the UN’s 193 member states voted to condemn Russia’s invasion in a General Assembly resolution on 2 March. But the 52 non-Western countries that didn’t, including half the African countries, account for more than half the world’s population and include democracies like Bangladesh, Mongolia, Namibia, South Africa and Sri Lanka. Because India is the most prominent and consequential of these, many commentators continue to ask: ‘Why does India get a free pass for supporting Russia?’

By contrast, and echoing Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s earlier careful differentiation of India’s public neutrality on the Ukraine war from China’s (there’s no moral equivalence between India’s and China’s abstentions on UN votes on Ukraine, ‘not even remotely,’ he said), during his recent visit to India, UK PM Boris Johnson noted that Indian PM Narendra Modi had intervened ‘several times’ with Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to ask him what on earth he thinks he is doing’. India, he added, wants peace and not Russians in Ukraine. He was followed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who expressed keen interest in partnering with India in renewable energies as a way of Europe’s ‘diversifying away’ from Russian oil and gas.

These views validate the claim by an Indian official, and broaden it to Western capitals more generally, that there’s been ‘a belated, but grudging, acceptance of India’s position within the US administration’. Such official understanding of India’s careful balancing act and nuanced policies is absent from much public commentary.

Foreign policy is not about virtue-signalling morality but about acting in the best interests of citizens. Every country’s policy is based on a mix of geopolitical and economic calculations (realism) and core values and principles (idealism). Consequently, no country’s policy is consistent and coherent, and none is immune from mistakes, hypocrisy and double standards, even if some are guilty more often and more gravely than others. It cannot be, therefore, that when Western governments downplay values, as in the long-running and brutal Yemen conflict, it’s realpolitik, but silence about atrocities in Ukraine by others is complicity with evil.

India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar pointedly remarked on 11 April in Washington that since sanctions were imposed by NATO on Russia, India’s monthly oil imports from Russia were probably less than European energy imports in one afternoon. At the prestigious annual Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi on the 26th, Jaishankar gave similarly sharp answers to questions from the foreign ministers of Norway and Luxembourg. Last year, he reminded them, the rules-based order came under threat in Asia after the West’s hasty departure from Afghanistan and Asians were left to deal with the aftermath. India’s security interests were heavily impacted by the chaotic withdrawal that was all exit and no strategy. On 22 April, the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that since the EU arms embargo on Russia imposed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, France and Germany had sold €273 million worth of arms to Russia that were likely being used in the war in Ukraine.

On 24 April, Morrison said a Chinese military base in Solomon Islands would be an unacceptable red line. A White House statement after President Joe Biden’s top Pacific adviser Kurt Campbell met with Solomons PM Manasseh Sogavare said that if ‘a de facto permanent military presence, power-projection capabilities, or a military installation’ were to be established there by China, the US would have ‘significant concerns and respond accordingly’. This is not dissimilar to how Russia reacted to its red lines being crossed by Ukraine and NATO, as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa noted. The Solomons are 1,700 kilometres from Australia’s coast, while Russia and Ukraine share a land border and Kyiv is only 755 kilometres from Moscow (directly comparable to Ottawa–Washington).

There’s a more complete understanding among the Australian, British, European and US governments today that India’s dependence on Russian arms is a legacy posture that doesn’t reflect current trajectories. The dependence arose as much from restrictive US arms export policies in the past as from India’s preferences. The visible deficiencies of Russian arms in the Ukraine war will accelerate India’s shift away from them. Russia’s reduced economic weight under the impact of Western sanctions will also make it a less attractive partner.

Indian statements on the Russian invasion and atrocities against civilians have hardened over time, albeit without naming Russia. India offers possibilities for reducing Western dependence on the Chinese market and factories (cue the recent Australia–India trade-liberalising agreement) and also on Russian energy. And India is critical to an array of Western goals in the Indo-Pacific.

After the 2+2 ministerial meeting in Washington on 11 April, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin described the US–India relationship as a ‘cornerstone of security in the Indo-Pacific’. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged that India–Russia relations developed in the decades when the US ‘was not able to be a partner to India’. Today, however, the US is ‘able and willing to be a partner of choice with India across virtually every realm: commerce, technology, education and security’. Most Indians reciprocate that sentiment, but India can better help advance Western goals, including as a source of influence over other countries, as a demonstrably independent actor in world affairs than as a mere US cypher.