Strategist Article Archives - Page 1137 of 1186

Beware Australians bearing praise: a caution for New Zealand

27 May 2013

It can be rather disconcerting for a New Zealand audience when they are faced with an Australian who wants to praise our defence policy. We don’t quite know whether to celebrate or to question the speaker’s rationality. But there was nothing silly in the talk Andrew Davies gave to our After the Missions symposium in Wellington last week. And there was more to come. In praising New Zealand’s decision to have a hard look at what it needed to do in defence terms, and what it could reasonably afford, Andrew laid the foundation for a stinging attack on the gap between ends and means in Australia’s policy. An Aussie defence specialist bagging Canberra’s approach? Why that was even better.

Dr Davies is not the only Australian analyst to have become enamoured of New Zealand’s greater willingness to live within its means. These days very few of his countryfolk bring their Greg Sheridan impersonation kits with them when they travel across the Tasman. Even Paul Dibb, who once teased that a “broken-backed” New Zealand was potentially part of Australia’s arc of instability, came round some years ago to admiring the willingness of New Zealand’s politicians to make hard but often necessary choices about what defence capabilities could afford. The appeal of this logic and the exquisite pinot noir from the same South Island where Phar Lap was born, have made New Zealand a recent place of pilgrimage for Australian analysts concerned that their country continues to live in a defence fantasyland. Read more

Australia and Fiji’s New Order

26 May 2013

Australia’s long experience of dealing with a New Order regime in Indonesia provides only limited insights for engaging with Fiji’s New Order.

The previous two columns (one and two) explored Canberra’s current headaches in trying to improve diplomatic relations with Suva and the nature of Fiji’s New Order. With that as prelude, the question to consider is what the previous New Order experience can offer to the future Suva game plan?

Let’s start with some of the differences. Indonesia will always be Australia’s most important relationship in Southeast Asia; Fiji will never be the number one country for Australia in the South Pacific.

Another difference—a problem as much for Fiji as for Australia—is that Suharto was smarter than Bainimarama. Suharto was far more corrupt, violent and cunning, and carried just as many cronies and carpetbaggers, but his regime was also served by some highly intelligent and competent experts (especially on the economic side). Read more

Maintaining a steady path on Iran

24 May 2013

On 22 May, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a new report on Iran’s nuclear activities. Nothing in it was particularly shocking, but like the many similar reports that preceded this one, it’s a stark reminder of the international community’s failure to halt Iran’s nuclear progress, despite over 10 years of diplomatic and covert efforts. According to technical experts, despite a series of UN Security Council sanctions and other autonomous sanctions imposed by individual states, Iran has made progress across the board in its nuclear program. It has stepped up the pace of uranium enrichment, increased the volume of material that it is enriching to a higher level (not quite weapons grade, but most of the way there), and is pushing ahead with a program to produce plutonium. At the same time, satellite photos indicate that Iran is trying to conceal evidence that it conducted nuclear weapon-relevant experiments at a site in Parchin. Amid these revelations, diplomats working at IAEA headquarters in Vienna have been quietly sharing their concerns, warning that Iran has significantly reduced the time it would need to produce a crude nuclear device.

These are worrying developments, and yet the Gillard government’s response to the Iran nuclear threat receives very little coverage in the national media. This may be due to an assumption that, because Australia is strategically remote from the Gulf region, and is not among the six states that have taken the lead on diplomatic negotiations (the so-called P5+1: China, France, Russia, the UK, the US plus Germany), Canberra doesn’t have a significant role to play. But this isn’t the case. Despite a history of strong trade relations and political engagement with Iran, which were hardly disrupted by the Iranian Revolution and US hostage crisis, Australia has taken a strong and consistent stand against Iran’s nuclear defiance. Read more

Walking among giants: Australia and Indonesia between the US and China

24 May 2013

As mentioned on The Strategist, last week ASPI convened its first ‘Australia–Indonesia Next Generation Defence & Security Forum’ to discuss the state and future of the relationship. I talked about the strategic implications of the US-Sino relationship for the two countries, both individually and in a bilateral context.

How the US and China manage their relations is of key importance for Australia and Indonesia. Greater strategic competition could lead to serious conflict, even war, with devastating consequences. But accommodating any Chinese hegemonic ambitions could easily come at the cost of smaller powers and is therefore neither in Australia’s, nor Indonesia’s interests.

Luckily, US-China strategic relations are characterised by both cooperation and competition. As the new Australian Defence White Paper (DWP) stresses, this situation allows Australia (and I’d add, Indonesia) to avoid binary choices between Washington and Beijing. Our strategic interactions with the two major powers are not mechanistic ‘zero sum games’ in which cooperation with one country automatically comes at the expense of the other. We don’t (yet) live in a Cold War-type Asia and it’s far from inevitable that we’ll enter into such a period any time soon. Read more

The end of Suharto

23 May 2013

This week marks 15 years since Indonesian cities erupted in violence in early May 1998. Burdened with economic hardship from the East Asian Financial Crisis and fatigued with political corruption, Indonesians took to the street and, amid clashes with armed forces, demanded an end to Suharto’s 31-year rule. On 21 May, Suharto resigned as president (video) and the New Order was over.

Over the past 15 years, Indonesia has developed in various ways since Suharto left centre stage.

For one, after Suharto’s departure, under a series of reforms during the period known as reformasi, democracy took the place of autocracy. According to Freedom House, Indonesia is currently rated ‘free’ and an ‘electoral democracy’. The country has made substantial gains both in its own right and when compared to other democracies in East Asia like Thailand and the Philippines. As Ed Aspinall sees it, Indonesia is judged as being the most democratic system in Southeast Asia. Read more

A view from across the ditch

23 May 2013

I’m in New Zealand at the moment, attending a public symposium on future security issues. It’s an interesting model for this sort of discussion. We have a room full—and I mean full as the forum has been heavily oversubscribed—of military, government officials, academics, students, journalists (who let them in?) and interested laypeople from a wide range of backgrounds. It’s a mix I haven’t seen in Australia, and I think it reflects the benefit of having a small community of national security practitioners.

Some of the discussion topics are very familiar, including the pros and cons of manoeuvring for a UN Security Council position. (I wonder if there is such a thing as Kiwi candy to help out?) But the discussion had a different tone to the one we went through in Australia. The pro position in Australia was about us realising our influence as a middle power. Here in Wellington, it’s more about New Zealand being a good global citizen and doing its bit to make the world a better place. And there’s a lot more discussion about the responsibilities or expectations that would come with a UN seat. For example, whether New Zealand will be pressed to take part in UN peacekeeping and stabilisation operations in far flung places, especially as its commitments in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands wind down. Read more

Mao now

22 May 2013

Mao Zedong is the only 20th dictator to have a resurgence of life-after-death that is largely benign. A heavy influence on the 20th century, Mao was a major force in the history of Communist ideas and rule, and will be a great name in Chinese history. As a man of supreme power also possessing a doctrine, he is arguably unmatched in Chinese history. After successfully uniting China under his CCP in 1949, and following the Soviet model, he later pushed utopian policies culminating in the appalling Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Then he surprised the world again by welcoming anti-Communist Nixon to Beijing in 1972, transforming a bipolar world into a triangle, greatly to the disadvantage of Moscow.

Chinese compare Mao with the hardline emperor Qin Shihuang (think terracotta soldiers) of two millennia ago. Westerners compare him with 20th century authoritarians Stalin and Hitler. But in the four decades since he was laid in a crystal box—displayed still at Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing—Mao’s ‘life after death’ has nothing in common with the posthumous fate of Stalin and Hitler. Read more

What’s an Australian defence industry for? Part II

22 May 2013

At the state and company level the objectives a defence industry strategy might seek to achieve look different to those at the federal level that were discussed earlier (here and here). They’re broader in scope, worry more about resources and are sharper in bite.

For the states their defence industry objectives are generally fairly pragmatic: bringing in money and/or jobs. This is often somewhat undiscerning in that any kind of money and any kind of jobs are sought—although a premium may be paid (literally) for sustainability as will be discussed later. The net result is that at the state level the defence industry sector is conceptually broader then at the federal level, in encompassing acquisition projects, long-term sustainment and ADF basing.

At one end of the continuum between jobs and money, Victoria perhaps focuses mainly on money, wanting simply a robust defence industry that contributes to Victorian economic growth and prosperity. High-value, innovative manufacturing is favoured, being considered to give the best return on investment. Queensland is at the other end of the spectrum in mainly seeking jobs, as its submission to the White Paper that stressed expanding the ADF presence in South East Queensland, Cairns and Townsville reveals. Read more

Putting the CAP into capability

21 May 2013

Since the Defence White Paper 2013 emphasises the Defence of Australia, it’s useful to look at where we would be able to project force under the cover of our own airbases by having a standing fighter patrol, or ‘Combat Air Patrol’ (CAP) overhead. The picture that emerges is perhaps surprisingly limited.

The map below shows approximate ranges for that air cover. The concentric lines are our best guess at the distances at which an air-to-air configured F-35 JSF aircraft can remain on station for an hour. The inner line is the unrefuelled range, while the outer one assumes that a tanker aircraft can refuel the F-35 at 500 nm range from base. (This in turn assumes that the tanker itself—which would represent a high-value target for an adversary—can be safely operated at that distance.)

Figure 2. Approximate ranges from Australian bases at which an F-35 JSF aircraft could remain on station for an hour. The inner line is for unrefueled aircraft. The outer line assumes an air-to-air refuelling at 500nm from base. (Source: ranges estimated from December 2009 Selected Acquisition report data.) Range rings for the Super Hornet with a weapons payload would be smaller.

Business or plunder: international corruption robbing Africa’s poor

21 May 2013

Africa is a resource-rich continent, but most of its people live in extreme poverty. Amid the world’s resources boom and high global demand, Africa’s vast oil, gas and mineral resources have the potential to drastically improve and transform the lives of African populations.

So why do some of the world’s poorest people live in one of the world’s most resource-abundant regions? And, as Australian business, investment and trade with African countries increase, how can this economic injustice simply be ignored?

Global momentum to address the current dismal state of affairs is mounting, and Australia needs to take an active part in efforts to ensure greater transparency and accountability in Africa’s resources sector and international transactions. Read more