From the bookshelf: ‘Great Game On’

Over the past decade, a major power shift has been taking place as China has advanced in displacing Russia as the dominant power in Central Asia, according to Geoff Raby in his new book, Great Game On: The contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy. And this power shift has only accelerated since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as Russia has been depleted militarily and lost prestige and influence.

Raby is a well-known former Australian ambassador to China. His previous book, China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order, focused on another power shift, involving China’s rise, the emergence of a multipolar world order and the passing of America’s post-Cold War ‘unipolar moment’.

According to Raby, it used to be said that China and Russia had a division of labour among the five stans of Central Asia, namely Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Russia provided military assistance and security, while China’s role was economic. But the rise in China’s power has brought it much closer to these countries.

It is significant that China’s Belt and Road Initiative was launched in Astana, Kazakhstan in 2013. The initiative has played an important role in elevating China’s power and influence in Central Asia. China has become the region’s biggest source of infrastructure construction and is the biggest creditor of the region. In 2023 Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted the inaugural China-Central Asia Summit in Xi’an, a historic Chinese city. The heads of state of the five stans attended, but Russia was not invited.

Raby sees in China’s emergence as the preeminent power in Central Asia an uncanny historical analogy with the US. By the end of the 19th century, the US had consolidated its territory and secured its borders, and by the early years of the 20th century had established hegemony over the Western hemisphere. It was then free to project power globally, which it did. China’s historic security concern has been its western, inland frontiers. By becoming the dominant power in Central Asia, it is similarly freer to project power globally.

Raby has severe doubts about the ‘friendship without limits’ announced by Xi and President Vladimir Putin on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022. Cooperation between China and Russia may have expanded greatly in response to Western sanctions. They are also drawn together by their shared sour attitude towards the US-led world order, which they see as an existential threat to their authoritarian rule. And the two leaders appear to have a genuine affection for each other, having met 43 times since 2012.

But there is no evidence that Putin warned Xi of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the Chinese government found it had to evacuate 6000 Chinese students in Ukraine. And the timing of the invasion made China look complicit in the violation of one of the most fundamental principles of international law and the cornerstone of China’s foreign policy, namely the sanctity of international borders.

Raby argues that China and Russia’s newly minted friendship without limits has feet of clay. The expression ‘friendship without limits’ disappeared from Chinese official media or propaganda almost as soon as it was uttered. Raby believes that the relationship will likely be judged by history as a ‘concert of convenience’, though for the moment it is one of the most consequential of our times.

Fundamentally, the relationship between China and Russia is riddled with mistrust and grievances, according to Raby. For example, during a period of weakness in the 19th century, China was forced to cede vast territories to Russia in unequal treaties, something that is not forgotten. Moscow supported Delhi in its 1962 war with Beijing. Today, Russia’s elite feels uncomfortable at their country being China’s junior partner and would certainly be displeased with China’s moves in Central Asia. And Putin is now strengthening relations with India, North Korea and Vietnam to remind China that Russia has other options.

Raby is dismissive of concerns among the commentariat that an axis of authoritarians or an alliance of autocrats is challenging the West (‘Chussia Anxiety’). Rather, he sees the world bifurcating into two ‘bounded orders’, one led by the US-led West and the other by China. He proposes a ‘reverse Kissinger’ whereby the West would join forces with Russia to balance China, despite Russia’s horrific behaviour in Ukraine—though this may have to await the passing of Xi and Putin and will require Europe playing a strong role in ‘Europeanising’ Russia.

Raby’s new book is of particular interest as he challenges much conventional wisdom and offers realistic perspectives on very complex issues—even if there are questions about some of his speculative analysis and prognostications.

War and appeasement: why a deal with Putin will backfire

US president-elect Donald Trump’s boast that he will quickly negotiate a deal with Vladimir Putin about Russia’s war with Ukraine is likely to fail. This will be the case even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed last month that the war ‘will end sooner’ under Trump.

The question is: in whose favour will it end?

My central concern here is that all this is occurring as the military outlook for Ukraine is grim. How long Ukraine can keep going militarily is uncertain and Kyiv may be unable to resist a demand for a Trump deal. This uncertainty is made worse by nobody knowing what Trump will actually do.

Trump grievously underrates Putin’s determination to win his war at all costs. And Putin will not allow peace talks to get in the way of eliminating Ukraine as a nation-state. He continues to assert that there is no such country as Ukraine. He also makes it brutally clear that Ukraine can never be allowed to be a member of NATO.

Last month, in reaction to the United States allowing Ukraine to use longer-range missiles (such as the 300km-range Army Tactical Missile System) to strike deeper into Russia, Putin has promised ‘an appropriate and palpable response’. But this is not the first time Putin has promised, in effect, a nuclear response.

As NATO’s former secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg has noted, if Putin wants to escalate with the use of weapons of mass destruction, he can create all the excuses he needs but ‘so far, we have called his bluff’. And the Pentagon has just announced there are no increased signs of a higher level of Russian nuclear alert.

There are, however, different opinions on this contingency. Kim Darroch, Britain’s former national security adviser, warned that allowing Britain’s long-range Storm Shadow missiles to be fired by Ukraine into Russia ‘risks a major escalation of the conflict’.

So, after almost three years of war, Putin’s views are in fact even more—not less—expansive. According to Anne Applebaum, a leading Russia expert, Putin is fighting not only to destroy Ukraine as a nation but he also wants to show that America, NATO and the West are weak and indecisive, regardless of who is the US president.

Putin believes he and his ‘closest friend’, Chinese President Xi Jinping, are the world’s leading authoritarian powers, increasingly powerful militarily and attractive not only to North Korea and Iran but also to many of the so-called global south countries.

More than 70 percent of Russians now are apparently of the view that the West, led by NATO and the US, is seeking to fundamentally destroy Russia. A large majority of Russians allegedly now see the West as an existential threat to the Russian motherland. So, Putin is about winning much more than a war with Ukraine.

Then there is the question of Putin’s personality. Unlike Trump, Putin has been Russia’s dominant authoritarian leader for practically a quarter of a century now. And there is no sign—at least foreseeable—of any credible opposition to him. He recently has implied that China and Russia have created a new geopolitical concept for world order that is stronger than a confused and inward-looking US.

As a former KGB officer, Putin was trained to believe the ‘correlation of world forces’ is logically moving towards Russia’s national interests because of the collective weakness of the West.

According to Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, ‘The sad truth is that the fight against the West has become the organising principle of Putin’s regime and has created too many beneficiaries to be abandoned any time soon. Trump or no Trump, Russia’s foreign policy will be guided by anti-Americanism for at least as long as Putin is in the Kremlin.’

Gabuev goes on to argue that mistrust between Russia and the West will outlast the Trump era. He also argues that while the Kremlin remains guarded in its official expectations of the new US administration, the hope in Moscow is that Trump’s presidency will be ‘a gift that keeps on giving’.

This is because Trump has pledged to end the war in Ukraine quickly and the main fear in Western capitals is that he will drastically reduce military support for an embattled Ukraine—greatly to Russia’s advantage.

But Trump’s anxiety to reach some form of a deal on Ukraine next year will not eliminate the root causes of the Kremlin’s confrontation with the West.

Rather, it will only confirm in Putin’s mind the lurch of the US to be inward-looking with Trump’s preoccupation to ‘make America great again’.

This brings us to what form such a Trump deal might involve. Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, appears to be toying with the idea of an exchange of Ukrainian territory for a ceasefire. This might involve acknowledging Russia’s current occupation of 18 percent of the territory of Ukraine—which includes not only Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk but also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—in exchange for a ceasefire that will be internationally supervised. By whom? Presumably, Putin will categorically reject the presence of any NATO troops on Russia’s border with Ukraine.

In my view, such a ceasefire and territorial settlement would leave Putin with the freedom to rearm the Russian military with a view to a massive attack when he is ready, which might be aimed at occupying the entire eastern half of Ukraine along the Dnipro River from Kyiv to Odesa.

But as Gabuev’s colleague Tatiana Stanovaya observes, no Western leader—including Trump—has a plan for ending the war that would be remotely acceptable to Putin. She says none of the mooted solutions comes close to meeting Russian demands for a pro-Russian government in Kyiv and a NATO that will never admit Ukraine to its membership. There are also many in Moscow who argue that Russia should not squander its current battlefield advantage for the empty promise of talks with Washington.

There are other options being toyed with in Europe. For example, there is the model of West and East Germany after World War II. The latter was a Soviet-occupied puppet regime called the German Democratic Republic, which few countries in Western Europe recognised. It existed cheek by jowl with an independent Federal Republic of Germany, which—unlike the GDR—was internationally recognised and was a key member of NATO. That model existed for more than 40 years until the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The problem with extrapolating that model to today’s Europe is that at that time the US continued to support NATO through its large Cold War military presence in West Germany for more than a half-century and the US was also undoubtedly the strongest military power in the world. Arguably, neither of these facts exist right now.

Now we face a situation with an America that is decidedly turning inwards in focus. As Charles Kupchan (who was special assistant to the US president on the National Security Council from 2014 to 2017) argues in his book Isolationism: A history of America’s efforts to shield itself from the world, the central question is not whether the US retrenches but whether it does so by design or by default. He considers that the likelier outcome is retrenchment by default—an unplanned and perilous American retreat from global affairs.

In other words, a disruptive inward turn is now a real possibility for today’s America—more so than when Kupchan’s book was written four years ago. Trump’s clarion call of making America great again may mark ‘an unplanned and perilous American retreat from global affairs’. And there can be little doubt that Putin is about to test Trump’s mettle in this regard over Ukraine.

After congratulating Trump on his election, Putin implied he would have discussions only if the US initiated talks (he will not talk directly with Zelensky), dropped its economic sanctions and refused to offer any further support for Ukraine. In other words, Putin demands a Russian victory and the complete and utter destruction of Ukraine as a separate country.

And let’s not pretend that Putin’s ambition to restore Russia’s past empire in the ‘near abroad’—especially the Baltic countries and Poland—would be satiated if he wins in Ukraine. Far from it: this war in Ukraine is not just some distant territorial dispute, as some members of Trump’s inner circle assert. If things go horribly wrong in Ukraine, we could see a wider war in Europe.

Trump’s idea of negotiating a swift end to the war is unrealistic while Ukraine is fighting an outright invasion for its existence, not just a territorial dispute. Stopping the war now on Moscow’s terms will only further encourage Putin’s highly dangerous adventurism.

Australia’s lack of defence primes isn’t a problem; it’s an opportunity

Australia is uniquely suited to help solve the greatest defence acquisition challenge of our time. While the world is innovating at an unmatched pace, the old scions of the defence industry are not.

Western armed forces need equipment that is developed and built not just more cheaply and quickly but with evolution built in. They cannot keep waiting for superb systems that take many years, even decades, to get into service and cost so much that few units can be bought—and are then improved only on achingly slow schedules, if at all.

General Jim Rainey, the commander of the US Army Futures Command, had sharp comments when he visited ASPI this spring: ‘We need to change and adapt how we acquire. We are either going to do it now or we are going to do it when we go to war.’

Australia’s chief of army, Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, was equally sanguine: ‘As one of my predecessors, Sir Henry Wells, adroitly put it in 1957, we must “avoid the situation where soldiers have to be killed to learn”.’

And at ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue in September, Abraham M Denmark, a senior associate from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, had a blunt call to action: ‘Adapt or die.’

By all appearances, US and British primes contractors have chosen ‘die’. Despite increasing calls to change the way they develop defence technologies, they keep podding along with their old processes. At Land Forces 2024, while discussing how the Australian Army relied on space, Northrop Grumman offered to lend its ‘experience and primacy in space’ to help up-and-coming firms—but seemed to have no direct answer to Starlink, a cost-effective commercial service that militaries across Europe and the Indo-Pacific are looking to.

Pillar 2, the part of AUKUS that is not about nuclear submarines, has not enjoyed the detailed attention of Pillar 1, which is. It has been dismissed occasionally as a grab bag of disparate technologies, but a common thread runs through them. Not only will they be critical in a future fight; they are all innovations that primes have failed to deliver over the past decade. China is investing heavily in these technologies and, according to ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker, is now outpacing the AUKUS partners.

At Land Forces, the US and British prime contractors at least acknowledged the problem, conceding they needed to reduce historical seven- to 10-year production timelines down to 18 to 24 months. It’s unclear how the prime contractors, widely known for cost overruns and delayed delivery, can cut their development times by 80 percent. Regardless, the processes need to be not just faster but fundamentally different.

The US and British defence industries are accustomed to a waterfall process, in which development progresses slowly ‘from requirements definition through to testing, deployment, and field use.’ The process is linear and often irreversible. ‘Information flows in one direction only, regardless of the downstream consequences for the system …’. What is needed, instead, is ‘an iterative fashion where requirements and design solutions can evolve as the technology is developed.’

Take drone technology, for example. In recent research, the Royal United Services Institute’s Justin Bronk and Jack Watling outline findings that Ukraine’s drone industry is constantly tweaking designs, adapting to a fiercely competitive battlefield. Everything from sensors, radios, software and weapons are getting updated every six to 12 weeks, they find.

At Land Forces, Anduril, a disrupting entrant to the US defence industry, demonstrated an understanding of current defence technology challenges: ‘It’s not about getting the tech faster to the warfighter. It’s about getting tech that can evolve,’ stated a spokesman, retired Lieutenant General Neil Thurgood.

Each Pillar 2 technology will require integrating systems of systems. Countering drones can require seamless integration of well over a dozen technologies, which react faster than a human can. The primes, however, continue to try and capture sole source vendor contracts.

While Australia doesn’t have the established defence primes the US and Britain have, it also doesn’t have their bad habits. And Pillar 2 technologies aren’t solely for the benefit of defence, with plenty of opportunity for dual use. Dean Rosenfield, the chief executive of defence-focused engineering company Nova, cites the example of Australia’s mining and farming industries. ‘Australia should be an autonomous systems superpower,’ he says.

Sixty years ago in The Lucky Country, Donald Horne was pessimistic about his compatriots. ‘Australia has not been a country of great innovation or originality,’ he wrote. ‘It has exploited the innovations and originality of others and much of its boasting is that of a parasite’. Half a century later, it is the US and British defence industries that have shown a persistent lack of cleverness. Pillar 2 represents an unmatched opportunity for Australia’s firms, if they wish to take it.

Culture matters in the Independent Intelligence Review 2024

Workplace culture is important. It’s time to examine it in the National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Research shows that people surrounded by behaviour contrary to organisational values are 47 per cent more likely to engage in unethical behaviour. Another finding is that average teams outperform those dominated by unpleasant superstars. We also know that high-level executive thinking is impaired under stress—not exactly ideal for human brains that rely on snap judgements, bias and decision-making shortcuts, and much less so in high-stakes intelligence analysis and reporting.

In contrast, a consciously designed high-performing team environment can set the right conditions. This may be a culture that challenges cognitive biases, fosters candour, increases accountability and drives diversity of thought. The right team culture can also help retain and grow personnel and drive shared purpose and understanding of workers’ roles, cultivating agency reputations as employers of choice.

But, working environments in the NIC can lack transparency. They are often hidden away in agency basements and secure zones. Notwithstanding formal oversight from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, some NIC workplaces can be isolated from public view, and therefore be more susceptible to developing internal cultural practices that would not be accepted elsewhere. The 2024 Independent Intelligence Review, whose report has not yet been published, presents the perfect opportunity to evaluate the NIC’s cultural positioning in the evolving security environment, paying due attention to employees, their working conditions and psychological well-being.

It comes as no surprise that NIC agency internal cultures have been hidden from scrutiny for decades. The NIC is a black box, where culture has been understood in the context of legislative compliance, workforce attraction, and the post-9/11 mantra of ‘interagency cooperation’. The 2017 Independent Intelligence Review implied that recruitment and retention were a key focus area for the NIC, but it failed to fully consider how culturally astute leaders and supportive team cultures support this outcome.

First and foremost, intelligence analysts and other NIC workers are people, humans under sustained pressure. Intelligence work is demanding, unglamorous and at times emotionally draining. The work routinely exposes analysts to the worst humanity has to offer. This sets the conditions for highly capable, but increasingly desensitised teams. We can’t change our high expectations of the NIC workforce, but we can embed supportive cultures that enable our people to perform at their best. In short, culture should be considered a fundamental input to capability for supporting the NIC in their missions.

The report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide released this year highlighted the tension between ‘as-designed’ and ‘in-practice’ cultures. As a complex and fluid human system, culture requires deliberate nurturing. NIC agencies must be held to account by meaningful workforce culture reporting obligations, and teams should be empowered to develop mentoring, recognition of performance, and practical examples of good behaviour.

To be fair, the NIC and Defence are getting better at this, and their maturity around diagnosing issues related to culture has been improving. Also, from the outside we can see some culture-improving initiatives, including the NIC careers website addressing myths among potential recruits and the Office of National Intelligence’s initiative to bring therapy dogs into the office. But we hope more has been done in the 2024 review to recognise productive working cultures as an enabler of performance. The importance of culture in the NIC should be expressed at the top, through the 2024 review.

We cannot afford not to get NIC cultures right. Their workers need to be empowered in psychologically comfortable, high-performing teams to drive informed, defensible, resilient and scalable intelligence outcomes.

Has Angela Merkel no shame?

When Angela Merkel left the German chancellorship in December 2021, after 16 years in power, she had a credible claim to being one of the greatest politicians of the 21st century (so far). Now, after three years of deafening silence, and with her legacy in shambles, she is promoting her forthcoming political memoir. Her silence was more persuasive.

She gave her first interview to the German weekly Der Spiegel, defending major policies that helped to shape Germany and Europe as we know them today. Among these were her appeasement of Russia, which adhered to the Cold War principle of ‘change through trade’ (Wandel durch Handel); her welcoming of more than one million refugees (mostly from Syria and the Middle East) in 2015; and the phaseout of Germany’s nuclear power plants.

A fourth issue concerns not a policy but the lack of one. Owing to Merkel’s failure to do anything noticeable to adapt the German economy to this century’s technological challenges, the country remains under-digitalised, with embarrassingly poor internet access, an absurdly overgrown bureaucracy, governing institutions that still use fax machines and once-dominant companies that can no longer compete with their American and Asian counterparts. German highways and bridges are crumbling, trains regularly run late and major infrastructure projects (like Berlin’s rail station and airport) take two or three times longer than they would in Poland or even Romania.

Where once Germans heaped scorn on Poles for supposedly being foolish and incompetent, now the tables have turned. Visit Germany nowadays and you may find that you cannot even pay for breakfast with your credit card. You will have to run to an ATM, but you may find that it is broken or does not accept Visa or Mastercard (as is the case two-thirds of the time). And don’t even think about connecting to wi-fi. You will find better access (and a more dynamic information-technology sector) in Belarus—a Russian vassal state.

Moreover, Merkel did nothing during her 16 years in power to prod the industries that Germany prides itself on—chemicals, pharmaceuticals, internal-combustion vehicles—to adapt to the 21st century, and now it shows. The German army, meanwhile, is regularly an object of ridicule in the European press.

If Germans prefer to use fax machines and avoid the internet, that is their business. Unfortunately, though, their government’s decisions affect all of Europe. Merkel’s moral argument for providing aid and shelter to refugees in 2015 is uncontroversial. But surely she should have known that immigration on such a massive scale would produce a populist backlash, not only in Germany but throughout Europe. Merkel made a show of standing up for liberal democratic values, but her policy yielded an assault on them. The result was weaker liberal democracy and less immigration.

Similarly, by stubbornly insisting on the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipeline projects, Merkel and other German leaders empowered a dangerous dictator who had revisionist designs on eastern Europe. And by blocking NATO from offering a ‘membership action plan’ to Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 Bucharest summit, Germany effectively invited Russia to invade. Anyone with an elementary knowledge of Russia’s foreign policy knew that the Kremlin would exploit the resulting uncertainty.

In her Spiegel interview, Merkel blames others for this litany of failures. She says she was not the only one against a NATO accession process for Ukraine and Georgia; but is that supposed to excuse her? Europeans took their cues from Germany in those days, and Merkel’s voice mattered more than others—as she well knows.

Similarly, Merkel is still repeating the canard that Nord Stream was a purely economic project, even though it obviously was not. In defending appeasement of Russia, she argues that Poland and Ukraine did not mind having gas transit through their territories as long as they profited from it. But the controversy around Nord Stream was that by circumventing Poland and Ukraine, it diminished whatever influence they had vis-a-vis Moscow. Merkel decided that cheaper gas was more important than Polish or Ukrainian security. In the end, her approach brought an energy crisis and was one of the causes of a new land war on the European continent. The result was no cheap energy and no security.

Merkel’s decision, following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, to phase out Germany’s nuclear power plants also empowered Russia by making the German economy even more dependent on Russian hydrocarbons. Again, such choices could still be defensible if we lived in blissful ignorance of Vladimir Putin’s true character. But after 2008, and especially after 2014, there was no longer any question about who he was and what he intended to do.

Merkel herself was repeatedly warned. As early as 2006, Radek Sikorski, then Poland’s defence minister, was comparing the Nord Stream project to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the secret 1939 agreement between Hitler and Stalin not to attack each other). Five years later, he was still beating the same drum, warning that Poland and Europe had more to fear from German passivity than from German power.

Merkel ignored these arguments. During her long tenure, Germany tried to trade Eastern European security for cheap energy, abandoned an existing renewable-energy source, and gave nativist populists a potent campaign issue. She made Europe less safe from threats both foreign and domestic. Today, with Germany mired in a leadership crisis and buffeted by new global headwinds, Merkel continues to tell herself that she did everything right.

To pre-empt extremist violence, we need real-time social media data sharing

Law enforcement and social media platforms must implement real-time data sharing to stop online extremism before it leads to violence. Using appropriate safeguards, we can achieve this without raising concerns about creating a surveillance state.

Social media companies have vast behavioural data, but their reluctance to share it with authorities means we’re left scrambling after an attack occurs. The resulting delay facilitates radicalisation and puts lives at risk. Rather than reacting to attacks, we should aim to prevent harm through a coordinated, data-driven approach. The current system is failing. Speed matters. Privacy concerns are valid, but when the stakes are this high, we need to ask: how many more lives are we willing to risk?

Extremist groups exploit unregulated online spaces to recruit, radicalise and incite violence. By the time we detect it, it’s often too late. We’ve seen the deadly consequences: shootings, terrorism and violence facilitated through social media. Social media companies like to claim they are neutral platforms, but they control the algorithms that amplify content, creating an environment where radical ideas can thrive.

Take the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019 for example. The shooter posted his manifesto on Facebook and 8chan (an online message-board) before killing 51 people. Although Facebook moved quickly to remove his manifesto, the content spread to thousands. But his interactions with extremist groups and violent posts could have been flagged long before the attack. If they had then been shared immediately with law enforcement, authorities could have detected his extremist behaviour early and intervened.

Social media platforms must be more proactive in identifying extremist content and sharing it with authorities immediately. Delayed intervention leaves room for radicalisation. This is compounded by algorithms that prioritise content likely to generate engagement—likes, shares and comments. Extreme content, which often elicits strong emotional reactions, is amplified. Conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, spread widely on online platforms, drawing users deeper into radical echo chambers.

This isn’t about mass surveillance—it’s about content moderation. This approach should build on existing moderation systems. Authorities should only be alerted when certain thresholds of suspicious activity are crossed, much as financial institutions report suspicious transactions. For example, if activity suggests a user is being recruited by a terrorist group, or if the user shares plans for violence, social media companies should have the ability—and in fact the responsibility—to flag this behaviour to authorities.

Of course, automated content detection can result in misjudgements. This is where human content moderators within social media companies could play a role: once an automated system flags potentially harmful activity, it could trigger a review by an employee who would assess whether the flagged behaviour meets a threshold for real-time sharing with law enforcement. If the content is likely to incite violence or indicate a credible threat, the moderator could initiate real-time data sharing with authorities for possible intervention.

This verification process could be among the safeguards in place to ensure that only high-risk, potentially harmful activities are flagged, protecting the privacy of those who don’t present a threat and preventing concerns arising about the government creating a surveillance state. Shared data would follow appropriate legal channels, ensuring transparency and accountability.

The costs of implementing real-time data-sharing systems are manageable. Social media platforms already use automated systems for content moderation, which could be adapted to flag extremist behaviour without imposing significant human resource costs. Shared financial responsibility between social media companies and law enforcement could also help. Law enforcement agencies could receive funding to process flagged data, while tech companies would have to pay for technology needed to detect extremist activity. We can manage implementation costs and focus resources where they’re most needed by prioritising high-risk platforms and upscaling the system over time.

A limitation is that Australia could not impose this mechanism on platform operators that had no presence in the country. But the larger platforms’ operators, such as Meta, X and Snap, do.

Our current reactive approach isn’t working. We need real-time data sharing between tech companies and law enforcement to intercept threats before they escalate. Lives are at stake, and we can’t afford to wait for the next tragedy.

6.5 million on the move: across the world, migration is surging

Global migration flows have risen to record levels since the pandemic, driven by economic opportunity and conflict, and are facing a widespread policy backlash.

A record 6.5 million people made new homes in advanced nations last year, according to the newly released Migration Outlook of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Migration flows into advanced countries last year were 28 percent higher than in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic.

This does not include the exodus from Ukraine, which about 300,000 people left last year, taking the number of Ukrainians who have fled the war to 5 million.

A further 2.5 million people moved to advanced nations temporarily last year, including students, working holiday-makers and contract labour.

Rising migration is a defining feature of globalisation. The number of people living in a different nation from where they were born has risen from 153 million in 1990, representing 2.9 percent of the global population, to 281 million in 2020, or 3.6 percent of the global population.

In advanced nations, the population share of immigrants has risen from 9 percent to 11 percent over the past decade. Among OECD members, Australia has one of the highest rates of foreign-born residents, at 29 percent. It is surpassed by only Switzerland and Luxembourg.

The incoming Trump administration’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented migrants is part of a global rethink of migration policy, particularly affecting those seeking asylum.

Countries toughening their asylum policies include Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Italy and Britain, while the United States has already strengthened border controls under the Biden presidency.

Official humanitarian migration rose 20 percent to 650,000 last year, however this was only a fraction of demand. Applications from asylum seekers already in a host country rose 30 percent to 2.7 million in 2023, having jumped by more than 90 percent in 2022.

The surge in demand for asylum was greatest in the US, where there were 1.2 million new applications. The biggest source countries were Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba, while applications from Haiti and Nicaragua also soared.

Germany is the second largest destination for asylum seekers. Its 329,000 new applications last year represented a 51 percent jump. Asylum applications in Australia leapt 69 percent last year to 32,550. Iran, Vietnam and India were the biggest source countries.

Several nations have also sought to cap temporary labour migration. Canada is aiming to reduce the population share of temporary migrants from 6.25 percent to 5 percent by 2027. Britain is limiting the ability of temporary workers to bring dependents and has raised the required minimum salary by almost 50 percent. New Zealand has tightened its rules on low-income temporary workers, including by imposing a new English language test.

Australia, Canada and Britain are all implementing policies to slow the flow of international students, aiming to ease the pressure on infrastructure, particularly housing. The number of tertiary students receiving residency permits in Australia last year, 235,000, was 50 percent higher than in 2019, before the pandemic.

Globally, new international student numbers reached 2.1 million last year, which was a third higher than in 2019.

India is the biggest source of migrants globally: 560,000 Indians moved to an OECD country in 2022, an annual increase of more than 30 percent. There were 300,000 Chinese migrants to OECD countries, while migration from Russia more than doubled in 2022, rising to 270,000. Turkey, Israel and Germany were the favoured destinations for Russian migrants.

While governments in the major migration destination countries are responding to the pressure on infrastructure and public services, the OECD says migrants generally have good employment outcomes. It suggests that cutting the number of migrants to relieve the pressure on housing would also reduce the number of skilled construction workers to add to housing supply.

There is very little difference in overall rates of employment across the OECD: 71.2 percent of working-age migrants are employed, compared with 72.0 percent of the native born. In both Australia and the US, the unemployment rate among migrants is lower than for the native born. The ability to tap global labour markets to cover areas of skill shortage is the central economic argument for higher migration flows.

The UN-affiliated International Organisation for Migration reports that advanced nations are home to 80 percent of the world’s 281 million migrants. While that is consistent with the idea of migrants seeking a better life, its annual migration report shows that advanced countries (including Germany, Italy and Britain) and the more affluent emerging nations (such as China, Mexico and Philippines) are 16 of the top 20 origin countries for the world’s migrants. None of the poorest nations is in the top 20.

The vast majority of people displaced by war and poverty do not have a chance to migrate. The International Organisation for Migration estimates there were 35 million refugees in 2022 from conflicts including Syria, Yemen, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and Myanmar. A further 71 million are displaced internally as a result of conflict and violence.

To combat disinformation, Japan could draw lessons from Australia and Europe

Japan is moving to strengthen its resilience to disinformation, though so far it’s only in the preparatory stage.

The EU and some countries have introduced requirements in content moderation for digital platforms. By contrast, Japan has proceeded with only expert discussion on countermeasures against disinformation. While that progress is welcome, Tokyo needs to consider establishing its own standards and join a growing global consensus on countering disinformation, including foreign information manipulation linked to malign state actors.

2024 was a tough year for Japan in countering disinformation campaigns. Immediately after the Noto earthquake in January, false rescue requests were widely spread on social media, diverting scarce resources of emergency services away from people who genuinely needed help. After record-breaking rainfall hit the Tohoku region in July, more than 100,000 spam posts disguised as disaster information appeared on social media. And ahead of the September election for the Liberal Democratic Party’s president and Japan’s October general elections, Japan Fact-check Center identified the spread of false and misleading information about political parties and candidates.

Japan is in a delicate situation. It’s one of the countries at the forefront of Chinese hybrid threats due to its proximity to Taiwan and principled stance upholding the rules-based order. But Japanese society, accustomed to little political division and to passively receiving information, may lack the resilience to disinformation of countries such as the United States or Korea.

Now, about 67 million Japanese are active users of X, more than half the population. X has become an important news and information source for a segment of Japanese society that is less inclined to confirm the accuracy of news items via more mainstream sources.

In response, the government has taken steps to combat disinformation and misinformation. In April 2023, a specialised unit was established within the Cabinet Secretariat to collect and analyse disinformation spread by foreign actors. As president of the G7, Japan introduced the Hiroshima AI Process in 2023 to address AI-enabled disinformation. Furthermore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs produced solid evidence to effectively counter disinformation campaigns relating to the release of treated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This disinformation may have come from China. The ministry’s effort should be applauded and serve as a model for future responses.

But simply responding to every incident may not be sustainable. Countering the proliferation of disinformation also requires content moderation, which must be balanced to protect freedom of expression and avoid placing an undue burden on digital platforms. Thankfully, international partners provide some good examples for reference.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (in full effect since 2024) forces digital platforms to disclose the reasoning behind content moderation decisions and introduces measures to report illicit content. In Australia, the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill (2024) was intended to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority with powers to force digital platforms to take proactive steps to manage the risk of disinformation. While it was abandoned in late November, Japan could use this as a lesson to avoid similar outcomes.

Japan’s government has commissioned various study groups but so far has taken no legislative action to combat misinformation and disinformation. The present reliance on voluntary efforts by digital platforms is insufficient, especially given the growing likelihood and sophistication of disinformation threats. Concrete measures are needed.

The Japanese government should engage multiple stakeholder communities, including digital platforms, such as X, and fact checking organisations, to collectively set minimum standards of necessary content moderation by digital platforms. While the specifics of moderation can be left to the discretion of the digital platform, minimum standards could include, for example, labelling trusted media and government agencies and assigning them a higher algorithmic priority for display. If minimum standards are not met, the digital platform would be subjected to guidance or advice by a government authority. But the authority would not have the power to remove or reorder individual content.

Setting standards in this way would respect existing limits of freedom of expression while reducing exposure of users to disinformation that could cause serious harm. It would require, however, verifiable criteria used to determine trusted accounts and the establishment of a contact point for complaints within digital platforms or trusted private fact-checkers.

Regulating digital platforms will not be enough. It’s also important to call out malicious actors and strengthen public awareness and media literacy. Proliferation of disinformation with political intent by foreign actors is a global problem. So Japan should cooperate with partners with similar democratic values, such as Australia. As such, Tokyo should be prepared to be more proactive in joining public attributions of malicious state-sponsored campaigns. It was, for example, with the advisory, initially prepared by Australia, on the cyber threat actor APT40.

Japan’s resilience to disinformation is still developing. Given its prevalent role in the regional and global order and its proven commitment to a rules-based international order, a higher level of urgency is required.

A new chance for the Middle East

The word ‘opportunity’ rarely appears in the same sentence as the Middle East, and for good reason, but there is a case for suggesting we are approaching an exception. An opportunity—if not for lasting peace, then at least for an end to the ongoing conflicts and the prevention of new ones—is in fact knocking. The question is whether political leaders will open the door.

Israel has decimated the military capability of both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But continuing military action on its part is running up against the law of diminishing returns, as fewer high-value targets are left.

Moreover, continued military efforts threaten the country’s regional and global standing. The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant is the latest indication of the political isolation and economic sanctions that could become Israel’s fate unless it changes course.

The case for a ceasefire on both fronts is strong. The recent agreement between Israel and Hezbollah requires Hezbollah (which is so weakened that it dropped its insistence that a ceasefire in southern Lebanon be linked to one in Gaza) to move its heavy weaponry north of the Litani River, away from the border with Israel. Lebanese troops will patrol southern Lebanon, and the Israel Defense Forces will withdraw from the area and agree not to maintain a presence. Israel has obtained assurances that under certain conditions it would still be able to take military action against Hezbollah to frustrate the group’s attempts to reconstitute itself along the border or if it were preparing to attack.

This accord, if it holds, permits some 60,000 Israelis to return to their homes after more than a year of displacement. In addition, the ceasefire will allow Israel’s exhausted and overextended military to recover and focus on other challenges, including Iran, which is inching ever closer to developing a nuclear-weapons capability that would pose an existential threat to Israel. And the ceasefire should spare Lebanon and its people further devastation.

Yes, the ceasefire will also allow Hezbollah a degree of time and space to regroup, which is why some in Israel oppose it. That said, open-ended military operations will accomplish little, as Hezbollah can be weakened but not eliminated. Israel’s past failed occupation of southern Lebanon demonstrates as much. Israel’s goal, which this agreement puts within reach, should be to restore deterrence.

Gaza poses a more difficult challenge. It is not clear that Hamas would agree to a ceasefire, although it is much weakened militarily and might have difficulty resisting one if Israel agrees to terms that are widely deemed reasonable.

But will Israel agree? It should, because a ceasefire would allow the return of the more than one hundred remaining hostages in Gaza, half of whom Israeli intelligence services believe are still alive. Moreover, as with Lebanon, it is far from clear that Israel stands to gain from continuing military operations in Gaza. Hamas is certainly unable to launch another attack like the one it carried out on 7 October 2023. But Israel’s refusal to start a diplomatic process that would give Palestinians a chance to secure elements of their nationalist aspirations has made it possible for Hamas—with its insistence on endless struggle—to remain relevant.

The big question, then, is whether Israel would agree to a political process that holds out the possibility (however distant, conditional, and vague in terms of territorial reach) of creating a Palestinian state. In the near term, such a process would pave the way for the entry into Gaza of a regional stabilisation force and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Over time, a Palestinian state properly constituted would enable Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic as well as prosperous and secure.

Some in Israel much prefer a future that allows for Israeli settlement of parts of Gaza and annexation of large swaths of the West Bank. And if they do not get their way, they have vocally threatened to bring down Netanyahu’s government. That is a risk Netanyahu has been loath to take, given that, once out of office, he faces pending legal action and official investigations into Israel’s failure to anticipate and respond to Hamas’s 7 October attack.

Donald Trump, whose return to the Oval Office on 20 January 2025 is already looming over these dynamics, could prove to be the critical variable. While the Israeli right sees his return as an opportunity to achieve maximalist aims, even calling 2025 the year of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and an opportunity to begin reducing Gaza’s Palestinian population through ‘voluntary emigration’, Trump has expressed a desire to calm the region.

Trump is in a position to achieve this goal. Owing to events in Lebanon, Netanyahu may be sufficiently strong to stare down his right-wing coalition partners, form a new government without them, or even get a fresh mandate from the voters. And even if not, Trump, whom the Israeli right see as a friend, could lean on Netanyahu and his government in a way that President Joe Biden never could. It would be more difficult for Netanyahu to resist Trump’s pressure, and much easier for Trump to apply and sustain such pressure, given his support among American evangelicals and certain American Jewish communities.

Richard Nixon comes to mind. Nixon, it is said, was able to reach out to Mao’s China because he alone didn’t have to worry about Nixon.

Much the same now applies to Trump. He could build on the ceasefire in Lebanon and press for one in Gaza, launching what would be a promising diplomatic process. Pulling this off would constitute quite a coup for the 47th president. The opportunity is there for the taking.

Beijing’s online influence operations along the India–China border

The Chinese government is likely conducting influence operations on social media to covertly dispute territorial claims and denigrate authorities in India’s northeastern states.

As part of a joint investigation with Taiwanese think tank Doublethink Lab for its 2024 Foreign Influence on India’s Election Observation Project, we identified coordinated social media campaigns seeking to amplify social tensions in Manipur and criticise the Indian government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party and its policies. This occurred in the lead-up to and during the Indian general elections, when social divisions were especially heightened.

Despite Beijing publicly seeking stability with India the Chinese Communist Party will likely use other covert methods, mainly targeting Chinese-speaking diasporas, to destabilise the India-China border and pursue its territorial ambitions.

The CCP has a history of trying to exploit ethnic and political conflicts in India’s northeastern states, such as in Manipur, where Beijing has allegedly fostered instability using Myanmar-based and local terror groups. On 3 May 2023, Manipur’s latest ethnic conflict in erupted between the Meitei and the Kuki indigenous ethnic groups over a disputed affirmative action measure related to benefits for the Meitei people. According to reports, the violence resulted in 221 deaths and displaced approximately 60,000 individuals.

Our findings shows that most of the narrative had first appeared on Chinese social media platforms which then entered the Indian social media landscape through translation or AI enabled translations. This way it reached to the targeted audience, the Meitei people. Anthropologists say the Meitei people may be ethnically related to Tibetans, whose land is now part of China, but the Meitei do not speak Chinese.

Violence in Manipur became a hot topic on Chinese social media platforms and websites in early 2024, amplified by pro-CCP writers and likely inauthentic social media accounts seeking to push CCP narratives in the region. These accounts spread misleading narratives, such as ‘There is a little China in India that holds the six-star red flag, does not speak Hindi and refuses to marry Indians’ (印度有个“小中国”，举六星红旗，不说印语，拒绝和印度人通婚). Others are ‘conflict in India’s Manipur is a result of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s crackdown on religious and ethnic minorities’, ‘India is running concentration camps for minorities’, and ‘Manipur has never been a part of India and the demand for independence in the state is justified.’

We also identified coordinated inauthentic accounts likely originating from China disseminating the ‘Little China in India’ narrative on Western social media platforms, such as X and YouTube. For example, one Chinese-language speaking account named jostom, created in November 2023, posted the phrase ‘Little China’ 小中国, and shared a YouTube video with the nonsensical title ‘Manipur India known as “small China” once the impact of independence on India?’

The video (which had had only around ​​2500 views at the time of writing) was uploaded on 18 March 2024 by the YouTube account Earth story, which claims to be a Chinese-language ‘popular science number [sic] on international relations that everyone can understand’. It is unclear whether the videos uploaded by the account are original content or reuploads from an account of the same name on Douyin, a short-form video app popular in China. However, some video titles are also in English, indicating that the channel’s target audience goes beyond Chinese-speaking diasporas. In addition, there are always auto-generated captions in Hindi or English when the narrator speaks in Mandarin.

The jostom X account was one of many likely inauthentic accounts spreading the Little China narrative. The latest post by jostom was on 20 April 2024. The account has only 22 followers and follows 31 accounts, and mostly shares content with Chinese landscape pictures, a common feature of Chinese propaganda. Out of 71 posts on the account, the Little China video is the only political content.

Among its 22 followers, at least six accounts appear to be inauthentic: they were created around the same date, and their profiles and posts share many similarities. For example, they are all following a similar number of accounts, and the only posts these six accounts made were on 22 or 23 July 2023.

These accounts display similar characteristics to a sophisticated subset of Spamouflage disinformation networks, which ASPI identified last year as having interfered in an Australian referendum. This network goes beyond spreading typically pro-China propaganda and is known for amplifying domestic issues in democracies. Like the accounts that targeted Australia, accounts following jostom use images of Western women to develop their personas. Their first posts are aphorisms or quotes, many of which are incomplete.

The small sample of accounts discussed above is likely part of a broader network of inauthentic accounts originating from China that has increasingly sought to interfere in India’s domestic affairs. Since 2023, social media conglomerate Meta has publicly disclosed at least two coordinated inauthentic networks targeting India and originating from China in its quarterly Adversarial Threat Reports. The first disclosure in 2023 revealed that fake accounts originating from China were criticising the Indian government and military by focusing on issues on the India-China border. The second campaign, disclosed in early 2024, was linked to the original 2023 campaign but instead targeted the global Sikh community, creating a fictitious activist movement called Operation K that called for pro-Sikh protests.

On X, many of the accounts identified by Meta in its Adversarial Threat Reports continued to operate and disseminate disinformation in the lead-up to the 2024 Indian elections. Common topics and narratives spread by these included accusing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of not being concerned about the welfare of people in Manipur, amplifying protests in nearby Nagaland and fomenting dissent against the Indian government in another northeastern state, Arunachal Pradesh (see screenshot below). In some cases, accounts called for Indians to boycott the BJP over its activities in the Manipur region.

ASPI has identified some of the same accounts used for interfering in the 2024 Taiwanese elections.

The accounts appear to be copying tweets from other prominent Indian commentators rather than creating original posts. Sometimes this resulted in errors, such as the Nawal Sharma account appearing to have copied a tweet from India Daily Lives but failing to correctly copy the Hindi text while posting the same hashtags and link (see screenshot below).

The CCP’s influence operations targeting India in 2024 were mostly ineffective. However, they are part of a broader strategy to destabilise countries in their neighbourhoods. It has used similar methods to influence electoral outcomes and political narratives in Canada, Taiwan and Britain, where it has employed a combination of disinformation and covert support to influence public opinion and political results. These actions often reveal Beijing’s true intentions, such as its territorial ambitions in India’s northeastern states, and contradict its charm offensive with neighbouring states.

As the CCP resorts to more covert methods to pursue its interests, democratic countries should publicly expose these influence operations and share information on observed tactics, techniques and procedures with allies and partners. Indo-Pacific countries should consider financial sanctions against private companies or state-affiliated media conducting intelligence activities and disinformation campaigns, similar to sanctions applied to Russian disinformation actors. While it may be difficult to deter the CCP through these policy actions, it will at least impose costs on Beijing and make it more difficult to conduct these operations with impunity.