From the bookshelf: ‘Who Will Defend Europe?’

Despite frequent US calls for NATO to lift defence spending, most of its European members kept pocketing a peace dividend in recent years by running down their armed forces and defence industries. They imagined that war would never return to Europe and that in any event they could rely on the US to defend them.

Both assumptions were illusory, as Keir Giles argues in a new book, Who Will Defend Europe? Giles is a senior fellow at Chatham House and director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre. He has been an active and prescient analyst of Russia, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, notably in his books Moscow Rules and Russia’s War on Everybody.

As Giles notes, many commentators argue that Russia can no longer be considered a major security threat. It has not been able to achieve its ambitious goal of conquering Ukraine despite its size advantage and has lost enormous numbers of troops and military equipment.

But this viewpoint is shortsighted, writes Giles. Russia has built back its land forces, offsetting losses. The rest of Russia’s military—its air force, navy and nuclear forces—is relatively unscathed. When hostilities come to a halt, Russia will be able to quickly rebuild its military for more adventurism. Indeed, according to off-the-record interviews with European defence and intelligence chiefs that Giles conducted, Russia will be preparing for its next attack on a European NATO member country in the coming few years.

The enormous challenge of countering Russia beyond the traditional battlefield was also highlighted by British MI5 Director General Ken McCallum in a recent speech, when he said: ‘While the Russian military grinds away on the battlefield, at horrendous human cost, we’re also seeing Putin’s henchmen seeking to strike elsewhere, in the misguided hope of weakening Western resolve.’ He said Russia ‘is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more.’

Writing before the 5 November presidential election, Giles says that, regardless of the results, the US will likely be less committed to defending NATO’s European members. Through the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, it is apparent that the US is more committed to defending Israel than Ukraine, with fewer restrictions being placed on Israel’s use of American military equipment. US military leaders in the Indo-Pacific are also competing with NATO for resources as they consider the possibility of a conflict with China in 2027, widely deemed to be a greater priority than Europe.

Ukraine is a shield holding back Russian aggression from Europe, writes Giles, but European reactions are quite diverse. Frontline states such as Poland and Finland are taking the Russian challenge seriously and ramping up defence expenditure. Germany has announced a major increase in defence spending, but it will take a long time for this to translate into improved capabilities. Moreover, while most European NATO countries are now aiming to achieve the organisation’s defence spending target of 2 percent of GDP, it seems that much higher contributions will be necessary.

Giles is rather despondent about the state of the military in Britain, his home country, where it seems to be in a shambles. While the new Labour government’s strategic defence review is welcome, conducting it postpones the timing of reform of the military by one year, and the government has announced that it will not be increasing defence spending.

Another area of concern is Giles’ perception that, because of their soft and comfortable lifestyle, Britons may not come together to defend its nation and values, as it did during World War II. While the same concern would apply to some other European countries, the need to defend your country and values is a relatively easy sell in Sweden, Finland and Poland.

Giles also laments the reluctance of some leaders to speak openly about the gravity of Europe’s security situation. Most European economic and political systems have not woken up to the threat, or if they have, they are not doing anything about it. European populations are mostly unaware of threats to their countries’ security.

Overall, Who Will Defend Europe? is a well-written book, offering detailed insights and perspectives on the gravity of Europe’s security situation, which will have spillover effects worldwide.

A task for Trump: stop China in the South China Sea

For more than a decade, China has been using an increasingly aggressive hybrid-warfare strategy to increase its power and influence in the strategically important South China Sea. Countering it will be one of the defining challenges for US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Chinese dream of global preeminence depends significantly on achieving dominance in the South China Sea and ending America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region, an emerging global economic and geopolitical hub. And China has not hesitated to use coercive tactics in service of these objectives.

In recent years, boats belonging to countries whose territorial claims China disregards, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, have faced blockades, ramming, water-cannon attacks, and even bladed-weapon assaults by Chinese vessels. Offshore energy operations endure frequent harassment. Simply fishing in waters that China calls its own can expose a person to a Chinese attack with iron pipes. Such violent confrontations have heightened regional tensions and undermined stability in a crucial corridor linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

One might have expected the United States to take action to rein in China’s behavior, especially given its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. And yet, three successive presidents—Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden—have failed to offer anything beyond statements of support and symbolic action. In 2012, Obama allowed China’s brazen seizure of the disputed Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines to go unpunished.

This was hardly the first time the US had failed to live up to its defense commitments to the Philippines. In 1995, the Philippines requested US help to block Chinese forces from capturing Mischief Reef, just 129 nautical miles from the Philippine island of Palawan. US President Bill Clinton, smarting over the termination three years earlier of America’s right to maintain military bases in the Philippines, refused. Mischief Reef is now an important Chinese military base.

The more China has got away with, the bolder it has become. Following the capture of the Scarborough Shoal, Xi embarked on a land-reclamation frenzy, creating 1300 hectares of land in the South China Sea, including seven artificial islands that now serve as forward operating bases. China has built 27 military outposts on disputed islands, which now bristle with short-range missiles, reconnaissance gear, radar systems and laser and jamming equipment. Its larger islands also feature aircraft hangars, runways and deep-water harbors. By unilaterally redrawing South China Sea’s geopolitical map, China is ensuring that it is uniquely positioned to project power in the region.

Even as China has gradually eroded the Philippines’ security, including Philippine control of areas within its exclusive economic zone, the US has continued to underscore its ‘ironclad’ defense commitment to its ally. Late last year, the Biden administration affirmed that any armed third-party attack against the Philippine military, coast guard, aircraft or public vessels ‘anywhere in the South China Sea’ is covered by the US–Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. Yet China remains unpunished—and undeterred.

What explains this yawning gap between rhetoric and action? First and foremost, the US fears escalation, especially when its resources and attention are being consumed by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Moreover, the US prefers not to weigh in on sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, where it has no territorial claims of its own. It has not even taken a position on the sovereignty of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, which China also claims.

The US has, however, made clear that its security treaty with Japan covers those islands and cautioned against ‘any unilateral action that seeks to undermine Japan’s administration.’ It should do the same for the Philippines, stating unequivocally that its treaty commitment to the country covers any efforts to compel a change in areas currently under Philippine administrative control, including Second Thomas Shoal, which China has been attempting to besiege.

In support of this stance, the US could cite the 2016 ruling by an international arbitration tribunal that China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea have no legal basis and that Chinese actions within the Philippine exclusive economic zone violated the Philippines’ sovereignty. But China’s open contempt for that ruling should dispel any hope that the South China Sea’s future will be decided by international law, which is why the US must be prepared to back up such a statement with action.

If the US does stand up for its treaty ally, it can take advantage of the nine Philippine naval and air bases to which it has gained access within the last decade, two of which are located just across from Taiwan and southern China. If it does not, China will continue to solidify its dominance over the South China Sea, thereby cornering the region’s rich energy and fishery resources and gaining the ability to disrupt supply chains and punish countries for acts it deems unfriendly.

China will not stop at the South China Sea. Under Xi’s leadership, China has used a similar combination of deception, bullying, coercion and surprise to expand its territorial control elsewhere, from the East China Sea to the Himalayas, sparing not even the tiny country of Bhutan. As with any bully, the only way to stop China is to confront it with a credible challenger. The US must be that challenger, and it should start by defending the Philippines.

Northern Australia doesn’t get enough political attention. We can fix that

Northern Australia comprises half of the nation’s landmass, is rich in natural resources and offers a gateway to the Indo-Pacific—yet it is grossly underappreciated in federal decision-making, with the result that its potential is largely untapped.

To help correct this, northern Australia’s federal politicians should establish a cross-parliamentary group committed to finding a bipartisan approach that prioritises the region’s interests.

Northern Australia is an asset for defence, trade and energy security. Its proximity to Asia and the Pacific makes it a key link in Australia’s relationship with its neighbours. If Australia is serious about strengthening its role in the Indo-Pacific, it must invest more heavily in the infrastructure, services and political representation of its northern regions.

Only 1.35 million people, 5.2 percent of Australia’s population, live in northern Australia, so it is represented by just 12 members of the House of Representatives and 26 senators. The southern states, with concentrated populations and urban centres, dominate federal politics. While some northern Australian politicians hold important committee positions, such as those on the Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia or the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, the concerns of other, far more numerous members of parliament (MPs) limit their influence.

Northern Australia’s geographic and economic significance remains a peripheral concern for too many southern-focused policymakers. But it deserves far more attention in Canberra’s corridors of power. This imbalance in political attention is a critical issue. It’s a matter of national strategy.

Northern Australia needs its political voice heard loudly and clearly in parliament.

An answer would be to establish a Parliamentary Friends of Northern Australia group. Such a cross-party parliamentary group should be dedicated to advancing the interests of northern Australia across all sectors, including infrastructure, regional development, indigenous affairs, agriculture, resources and national security. It could provide a platform for MPs and senators, regardless of party affiliation, to collaborate on policy initiatives that directly benefit northern Australia, raise the profile of its challenges and push for greater regional investment. Importantly, it would offer a dedicated space for northern Australian representatives to amplify the specific needs of their electorates and push for more significant funding and legislative action.

The absence of such a parliamentary group, has contributed to northern Australia often being treated as an afterthought in the national political debate. Too often, policies developed in Canberra overlook the unique challenges northern communities face: lack of essential infrastructure, a need for more sustainable economic development or underinvestment in services and education. A parliamentary friends group would enable northern Australia’s politicians to push for urgent reforms. This would include securing more funding for essential infrastructure projects, such as transport corridors, renewable energy initiatives and regional healthcare services, which are all key to the region’s growth and prosperity.

Beyond this, the federal government must take action to realise northern Australia’s economic potential. The region is a powerhouse of natural resources—minerals, energy and agriculture—contributing significantly to Australia’s GDP. However, its infrastructure is underdeveloped and the lack of connectivity across the vast region hampers its economic output.

Investment in critical infrastructure is essential, particularly in remote areas where the need for improved roads, ports and communications infrastructure is urgent. Fostering a more diversified economy in northern Australia—one less reliant on mining and more focused on renewable energy, technology and tourism—would help the region become more resilient to global economic shifts.

These measures would also enhance national security and provide economic opportunities for the region, particularly in terms of jobs and business development.

Creating a Parliamentary Friends of Northern Australia group would enable MPs and senators from the region to advocate for its needs, ensuring that it was no longer sidelined in the national political discourse. The federal government must correct the imbalance between northern Australia’s importance and the political attention it receives. It must invest in essential infrastructure and work with local communities to unlock northern Australia’s full economic, social and strategic potential.

Public opinion and PLA loyalty: objects of the Information Support Force

The court of public opinion is now a critical battleground in modern warfare, according to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

China’s newly established Information Support Force is not just responsible for the PLA’s vast information network but also for spreading offensive disinformation, countering perceived foreign disinformation and ensuring loyalty across the military. 

The US and its allies need to take this seriously. China’s intentions and capabilities in the information domain are a military issue, not just a matter of public diplomacy.

The PLA now views the media as a ‘combat weapon’. It believes hostile disinformation is damaging command capabilities and could affect political and military outcomes

In April, China’s senior body of military decision makers, the Central Military Commission (CMC), disbanded the PLA’s Strategic Support Force and announced establishment of a new Information Support Force (ISF). This new force is tasked with engaging China in an information war with the United States and US allies.

But the ISF isn’t just about modernising information warfare. Its major mission is ensuring the PLA never turns against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In establishing the ISF on 19 April 2024, President Xi Jinping called on the new service to ‘adhere to information dominance’, ‘strengthen information protection’, ‘consolidate the foundation of the troops’ and ‘ensure that the troops are absolutely loyal’.

With recent corruption scandals threatening the integrity of PLA leadership, Xi has doubled down on suppressing internal dissent in the PLA.

It is clear he sees the ISF as not only a tool for modernising warfare capabilities but also as a mechanism for reinforcing the CCPs ideological control within the military. Since 2021, the PLA has an expressed intent to defend ‘against the enemy’s [psychological warfare] and incitement to defection’. This emphasis reflects a broader strategy to preserve power within the CCP by ensuring that its military remains a loyal pillar of the party’s authority and by countering foreign attempts at swaying Chinese public opinion.

The PLA claims the United States and its allies have deliberately used media and other communications tactics to fabricate discrediting information about their adversaries’ leaders, politicians and senior military officials. It calls this leadership-debilitating tactic ‘beheading with public opinion’ (舆论斩首) and says it can damage the prestige of China’s leaders and military officials, undermine their resolve and damage their decision-making capabilities.

With the creation of the ISF, the PLA is now determined to neutralise these supposed Western tactics. To do so, PLA strategy authors Sun Jian and Mei Zhifeng are calling on the PLA to ‘attack and defend at the same time’ on the information battlefield.

To defend against the foreign tactics, the PLA plans to dispel what it calls ‘rumours’ and the US’s ‘sinister intentions’ by cutting off their dissemination chain and strengthening Chinese public opinion countermeasures. The PLA also wants to counterattack by exposing ‘the false veil of democracy and freedom [the United States] has constructed’, and to sway Chinese public opinion against the US by creating a situation in which China has the moral upper hand. They say this can be done by highlighting contradictions in US foreign policy and domestic issues, such as political divisions and social inequality, to create an image of moral superiority for China.

China has even said it intends to sow public discord and ‘incite separatist and confrontational activities’ in its adversaries. It may be thinking of acting much as Russia does. There is compelling evidence that bots backed by Russia are disseminating disinformation in the United States.

Creating a separate information support force within the PLA shows China’s seriousness in operating within the information domain. In CCP documents, the PLA views the information domain as equal in importance to the physical domains of air, land, sea and space. It even talks about conducting operations in these physical domains to enable operations in the information domain.

This way of thinking about information warfare as a battlefield itself is at odds with the way the United States and their allies view the concept. They instead see it as mainly a means to support conventional operations. In US doctrine, information operations—such as cyber warfare, psychological operations and propaganda efforts—are often used to enhance the effectiveness of traditional military strategies.

In a speech on 8 October 2024, Xi expressed a desire to ‘improve the ability to guide public opinion’. By manipulating the information domain to manage the public’s perceptions, Xi can better influence public opinion and prevent any challenge to the monopoly power the CCP has over China.

The ISF will likely play a significant role in PLA information warfare in the future, and the US and its allies should watch intently to see how the organisation shapes up.

Seven things for Britain’s AUKUS review to fix

The AUKUS review that Sir Stephen Lovegrove will deliver to the British government this month represents a vital opportunity to consolidate the project’s successes and turn a clean page on the areas of dysfunction and inertia that have dogged the project’s first three years.

Sir Stephen has been tasked with assessing British progress with AUKUS, identifying obstacles and advising on further opportunities for the Australian-UK-US defence technology partnership.

Since AUKUS was announced in September 2021, Britain has succeeded in assembling a community of highly motivated officials to work at an impressive pace on this long-term and deeply complex project. This task has been even more commendable in the shadow of the urgent demands made of Britain as the leading European power supporting Ukraine. But the lack of centralised Cabinet Office oversight, the absence of dedicated political leadership for the project, and the failure to connect AUKUS to an integrated economic and national security mission have impeded progress and threatened government’s capacity to deliver on its high ambitions.

Sir Stephen played an instrumental role in the initial conception of AUKUS in his then position as Britain’s national security adviser until he left the government in late 2022 ahead of the announcement of the Optimal Pathway agreement in March 2023. The review will confront not only the highly debated project design for developing and building the SSN-AUKUS submarines but much less visible but equally important questions of process, ownership and leadership. Seven of these issues requiring urgent attention are set out below.

Governance reform

The current machinery-of-government in Britain facilitating AUKUS must be rethought. A decision in 2023 to move the project’s leadership from the Cabinet Office to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) embedded an institutional perception that AUKUS is a limited to a narrow defence-capabilities delivery project. It also put AUKUS at risk of falling on the chopping block when ‘hard choices’ between MoD budget lines have to be made.

The MoD must remain the major stakeholder in AUKUS, but both the prize at stake in AUKUS and the path to achieve it go well beyond defence. Both Pillars 1 and 2 require system galvanisation from the very top and whole-of-government visibility, coordination and leadership to deliver the vision. The oversight and accountability for its success must therefore sit in the Cabinet Office.

Political leadership

Delivering on a project of this scale and complexity will require a specific minister with a dedicated focus to harness all levers available to the government. In the important effort to the foster bipartisan support required to sustain momentum, we have tended to underemphasise the political nature of AUKUS. It is and always has been a deeply geopolitical project that will succeed only if its contemporary custodians can find a political language and rationale to justify its considerable resources.

To date, Britain has sought to lead a fundamentally disruptive project largely through efforts to optimise governmental processes. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that anything less than full-throated support will see AUKUS wither on the vine.

AUKUS as an economic growth project

AUKUS needs to be recognised for its centrality to the British government’s economic ambitions. One of the most important institutional decisions of the past decade has been the choice to prioritise Britain’s knowledge economy—specifically, research and development, higher education and technological innovation—as the foundation of the national prosperity agenda. This means that a project such as AUKUS Pillar 2 (which seeks to accelerate our technological readiness pipeline in cooperation with our closest allies) gives Britain not only the capacity to engage meaningfully in strategic competition but also a leg-up on its core economic mission.

So, AUKUS must be integrated into the British government’s growth agenda and understood as deeply relevant to the nation’s domestic outcomes. The argument must be won with the Treasury to reframe AUKUS as a long-term investment in the nation’s future. As a growth mission, AUKUS can be run with a more ruthless focus on delivery—prioritising fewer projects than now, with proper resourcing, so its deterrence function can be achieved.

Strengthen the stakeholder ecosystem

The government must understand that it has an interest in keeping a broad group of stakeholders informed about AUKUS and in listening to what they have to say: industry, academia, Parliament, the media, think tanks and the general public.

It will benefit greatly, first, from an external policy environment that can help provide meaningful insights and advice to unlock the complex maze of challenges it faces in delivering AUKUS. Second, even though it may not always feel disposed to fostering greater scrutiny, the government will also benefit from an active public debate around all aspects of AUKUS.

Both of these require British institutions forging meaningful engagement settings with different stakeholders and directly supporting initiatives that enable these groups to make a substantive contribution to the project’s success.

The enabling environment

The government must understand that it will need to have a very active hand in fostering the conditions by which industry and academia can get on with it and deliver AUKUS projects.

Reforms to the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations mean the three nations can freely share about 80 percent of advanced technologies with each other. This is game-changing, but the reforms must be seen as simply the beginning and not the pinnacle of Pillar 2 achievement. There remains plenty of low-hanging fruit for the government to address—for example, the harmonising and expediting security clearances between the three partners. The government will also need to be the driving force behind industry-academic collaboration, mitigating the security and funding issues that have led to the privatisation of research labs.

Even the process of driving non-government funding into the AUKUS ecosystem, cajoling venture capitalists and pension funds to invest in defence innovation, will require government facilitation. Resources are tight, but achieving success in these endeavours for AUKUS will also provide wider benefits for Britain’s highly productive defence and technology industries.

Create compelling narratives

The need to design impactful and evolving narratives around AUKUS has been consistently undervalued. This is partly a legacy of the pact’s origins as a highly sensitive security project, but it also reflects miscalculations about the willingness of citizens to engage with the realities of Britain’s security environment. There has been an inclination to present AUKUS in the simple terms of retail politics, promising micro-level job creation opportunities in specific communities already deeply integrated with defence industrial production.

We know from opinion polling that Britons are sold on the bigger picture, supporting initiatives that facilitate allied cooperation, promote deterrence and lift national competitiveness.

There has also been an unwillingness to engage directly with misleading narratives, some promoted by well-meaning critics and others by our international adversaries. This lack of engagement has created a vacuum that risks putting the government on the back foot. It’s time for a grown-up conversation with the public about AUKUS, properly explaining what is being worked towards and confronting misinformation head-on.

AUKUS is the vanguard project of our allied future

AUKUS needs to be understood as a prototype for a new era of co-creation and co-development with our closest friends, particularly those from the G7+3 (the three being Australia, South Korea and India). Within this grouping of 10 nations, we should be hoping to achieve self-sufficiency in access to vital technologies and capabilities that can compete with the ferocious pace of innovation in China.

For this reason, we must stare down the notion that AUKUS is a zero-sum game of prioritising two allies at the expense of others. The benefits of AUKUS will be shared in part through the principle of NATO interoperability and in part due to the project’s experimental nature as the closest possible expression of allied cooperation outside wartime. AUKUS can and must be the blueprint of a future status quo.

Britain has taken some important actions to improve its performance in AUKUS in the past year, but there is much to be done for us to position our institutions to deliver on the considerable opportunities at stake. The Lovegrove review represents the best chance we have to inject new vigour, political ownership and structural reorganisation into AUKUS, so that Britain can best access the project’s full potential and its role in our future resilience.

Australia’s guided weapons program needs to get moving

The Albanese government’s new strategy for the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) enterprise adopts a crawl-walk-run approach to building a skilled industrial ecosystem able to co-design and produce advanced guided weapons with allies and partners within 10 years.

This approach, revealed in a speech on 30 October, is sensible, since Australian capability is beginning from low base. But it also risks moving too slowly in a deteriorating strategic environment to produce the right type of weapons in large enough volumes to meet likely scenarios this decade. GWEO must succeed against the odds to deliver capability at the time it is needed most. This will be a tall order if events do not wait for the GWEO ecosystem to fully mature.

The record of GWEO development hasn’t been great. The initial steps for GWEO date back to the 2020 Force Structure Plan of the government of prime minister Scott Morrison. Because four years passed before we got to the specific GWEO plan announced last month, getting guided-weapon rounds out of factory doors and into the hands of the Australian Defence Force is increasingly urgent.

Nonetheless, the GWEO plan’s objectives are sound. It aims to increase readiness by expanding priority war stocks while enhancing preparedness and national resilience through domestic manufacture of key components and weapons, initially supplemented by foreign components. Australian manufactured components will eventually replace those sourced overseas, allowing greater participation of sovereign small to medium enterprises.

In the interim, GWEO will see Australia assemble foreign components of weapons such as Lockheed Martin GMLRS surface-to-surface missiles for use with HIMARS launcher trucks; Kongsberg JSM air-to-ship missiles to be carried on F-35As and F/A-18Fs; and Kongsberg NSM ship-launched or ground-launched anti-ship missiles, which will replace elderly Harpoons.

The timelines are important. On JSM and NSM, the GWEO plan notes that the Australian government has partnered with Kongsberg Defence Australia to establish a new purpose-built factory beside Newcastle Airport in New South Wales. The factory is due to be completed in 2026 and start production in 2027. Combined NSM and JSM full-rate production of 100 rounds a year will be achieved in 2028.

Separately, planned establishment of an Australian Weapons Manufacturing Complex, pending a decision in 2025, will support manufacture of GMLRS components from 2029. At around 4000 rounds a year, the facility’s capacity will be more than a quarter of the current global production rate and more than 10 times current ADF demand.

Focusing on shorter-range weapons such as GMLRS will enable Australia to build for the United States. This may lead to consideration of more sophisticated and longer-range weapons, including the PrSM, a surface-to-surface weapon with a range of more than 400km. Once PrSM has been developed to a design called Increment 4, it will have a range of 1000km and also be an anti-ship weapon. This leap from the 70km GMLRS would make a much more valuable contribution to ADF requirements for what Defence Minister Richard Marles called ‘impactful projection’.

Beyond that, the GWEO plan signals local production of hypersonic missiles, such as the under-development Raytheon and Northrop Grumman HACM, that will be integrated on the F/A-18F. Such production is set to begin in the 2030s. The GWEO plan also emphasises that in addition to assembling components of missiles, maintaining such weapons is vital and will allow Australia to grow expertise to sustain missile capability for the ADF and for allies.

Aside from missiles, the plan calls for local manufacture of 155mm artillery rounds—including the M795 HE All Up Round—with a desired production capacity of 15,000 per year and the capacity to scale up by 2029 to 100,000 per year to meet ADF and global requirements.

Finally, the plan seeks to establish a domestic rocket motor manufacturing capacity by 2030, responding to the inadequacy of global supply. This would allow Australia to meet the needs of the ADF in making missiles here and contribute to allied requirements.

Though it will be some time before Australia begins to see results, the GWEO plan is welcome guidance and much needed by the Australian defence industry. Government and industry now need to work together to meet the objectives of the strategy and ensure progress remains on track.

Success depends on the ability of Australian primes to demonstrate industrial competence in assembling NSM, JSM and GMLRS missiles. The outcomes of this first tranche of effort will shape Australia’s access to global demand with industry partners and the United States government across the spectrum of GWEO-relevant technologies (including seekers, guidance sections, warheads and rocket motors). The outcomes of these efforts will directly inform Australian decisions about research and development into the technologies that are less likely to be shared with us.

The GWEO plan makes it clear that a credible domestic missile and munitions production base is vital for national defence. In future, it is likely the effectiveness of Australia’s strategy of deterrence by denial will be judged on how well the GWEO enterprise performs, what capabilities it delivers, and when.

The push and pull of the India–Australia relationship

Australia’s new relationship with India has push-pull poles—the pull of the Indian diaspora in Australia and the push that China applies to the Indo-Pacific.

The diaspora is the personal dimension that pulls India and Australia together. China is the geopolitical push that shapes the four-year old India-Australia comprehensive strategic relationship.

Between the push-pull poles stretches the great pool of shared prosperity in trade and investment, education, science and technology, and clean energy.

This push, pull and prosperity defined much in Canberra’s India talkfest in Parliament House last week: the back-to-back meetings of the Australia-India Foreign Ministers’ Framework Dialogue and the second Raisina Down Under dialogue, a multilateral conference that aims to address geostrategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific. Here was first track and second track dialogue running so close as to overlap.

At the press conference after the foreign ministers’ dialogue, Australia’s Penny Wong said it was the 19th time she’d met her Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. When they came together on the Raisina stage the next day, Wong counted meeting number 20. She observed that among the world’s foreign ministers, ‘Jai is the person with whom I have met most and that says something about our friendship, it says something about my regard for him, and the wisdom and insight he always brings to our discussions.’

Personal chemistry always helps diplomacy, but interests drive. Interests have driven Australia and India to converge in this renewed relationship, far removed from their distant and often negative dealings in the 20th century and the early years of this century.

Wong said her constant contact with Jaishankar reflected the importance of what is being created: ‘We share a region and we share a future. We see India as just so important in terms of securing the region we both want and the world we both want.’

Wong said the diaspora of 1 million Australians with Indian heritage is ‘the beating heart of the relationship’. Jaishankar agreed that the diaspora is a key to the India-Australia bond, just as it is in India’s dealings with the United States: ‘The model is the manner in which our US relationship transformed. I do think it’s a change that can be corelated with the growth of the diaspora in the US.’

Jaishankar said the rapport with Australia showed ‘a relationship whose potential was waiting to be realised’. Among the four Quad members (Australia, India, Japan and the United States), he said, the bilateral dynamic that has changed the most for India is with Australia. ‘The relationship is on a roll,’ Jaishankar said, and ‘the more we do, the more the possibilities open up.’

India’s upbeat language on Australia contrasted the discussion about what China’s push is doing to the region.

The sharpest account offered to the Raisina dialogue was from Andrew Shearer, director-general of Australia’s Office of National Intelligence. Shearer said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese refers to him as the ‘bad news guy’, and he delivered such news. Geostrategic competition, Shearer said, would drive a ‘generational, structural contest in the Indo-Pacific’. Rivalry over critical technologies would be the ‘centre of gravity’ or ‘commanding heights’. Looking at China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Shearer offered a ‘very strong view that we have underestimated the strategic impact of this emerging axis’.

Jaishankar’s language on China was that of a minister looking to ‘find ways to discuss how to normalise the relationship’. Since the deadly clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the Himalayan border in 2020, he said, the relationship had been ‘cut back’ and ‘very profoundly affected.’

On 21 October, India announced an agreement with China on ‘disengagement and resolution’ of border issues. A few days later, China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi sealed the deal with a handshake on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia, the first formal bilateral between the two leaders in five years.

In Canberra, Jaishankar observed that the deal with China is a ‘positive development’. The next challenge, he said, was de-escalation of forces, with more negotiation by foreign ministers and national security advisors. At the Raisina dialogue, Jaishankar put the border issue into its broadest context: ‘It’s really in a way quite a challenge, because you have the two most populous countries, both of whom are rising in a broadly parallel time frame.’

With an eye on Donald Trump resuming the presidency in January, the Canberra talks emphasised what Wong called ‘the great importance in the Quad’.

Jaishankar said India had seen steady progress in its relationship with the US over the last five presidencies, including the previous Trump presidency. The second version of the Quad had been under Trump in 2017, Jaishankar said, and that should help its prospects with the new administration. India is confident, and Jaishankar said that its ‘relationship with the United States will only grow’.

In dealing with the Indo-Pacific impacts of the first Trump presidency, Australia did much in tandem with Japan. Canberra will again work with Tokyo, but this time New Delhi will add a new dimension to the Trump wrangling and whispering.

As Trump returns, European countries’ first priority must be backing Ukraine

As European leaders wake up to the reality of Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House, they must take care to avoid two big traps: panic and denial. It won’t be easy, but the stakes are too high to fail.

The reasons for panic are obvious. Trump may be unpredictable and mercurial, but there is little doubt that his political instincts and stated plans will shake the pillars of Europe’s security, economic and political order.

On security, Europeans have every reason to fear that Trump’s proposed ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine will deprive that country of its territorial integrity and leave it demilitarised and permanently excluded from NATO. And NATO itself may well go dormant, with the United States radically reducing its participation and handing responsibility for the alliance’s military command and resources over to the Europeans.

In the Middle East, Europeans rightly worry that Trump’s plan to secure peace will mean supporting the expansionist plans of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition, perhaps even including the Palestinians’ expulsion from Gaza and the West Bank and their resettlement in Egypt and Jordan.

The economic scenarios are even scarier. Trump has talked about imposing a universal import tariff of 10 percent to 20 percent and a 60 percent tariff on goods from China. Such a policy risks triggering a global trade war, with governments introducing retaliatory measures against the US. If China is shut out of the US market, Europeans will be even more vulnerable to the supply effects of its manufacturing overcapacity.

Making matters worse, Europe’s response to another Trump presidency may well be hampered by the illiberal international, which includes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

For all these reasons, European leaders are on the verge of panic and feel tempted to rush to Washington to cut bilateral deals, as many did during Trump’s first term. Doing so would come directly at the expense of European unity.

But the second trap is just as dangerous. If European leaders fall into denial about the scale of the threat Trump poses, they will not take steps needed to build resilience. Europeans have known for the past four years that Trump could return, and they have made some progress toward addressing their new geopolitical vulnerability with higher defense spending (collectively, Europeans now spend more than 2 percent of their GDP on defence) and diversification away from Russian gas. But overall, they have been far too slow.

Some are buoyed by false confidence, telling themselves that if they survived one Trump term, they can survive another. But the Trump of 2017 to 2020 was an outsider who had been surprised by his own election and craved establishment recognition. This time, he is dead set on revenge against the establishment that thwarted him before, and he has had plenty of time to prepare for office. European leaders must take him at his word and brace themselves.

Confronted with these scenarios, the most urgent task for European leaders is to use the 70-odd days between now and his inauguration on 20 January 2025 to agree on their common interests and work out how to defend them—with the US if possible but alone if necessary. That means drafting a concrete plan to protect Europe from both security and economic pressures.

The most immediate concern is Ukraine. To prevent a deal that leaves Ukraine demilitarised and shut out of NATO, Europe needs to ensure a steady flow of ammunition and air defence equipment in the short term while providing Ukraine with credible long-term security guarantees. It also must figure out how to spend more efficiently on defence, increase the volume of combat-ready forces available to NATO and the European Union, and, if necessary, strengthen its own nuclear deterrence.

The second most challenging issue will be trade. If Trump keeps his promise of levying across-the-board import tariffs, a trade war between the EU and its biggest export market is inevitable. In a world where geopolitics and geoeconomics are increasingly intertwined, the bloc should prepare countermeasures against the US and seek to expand trade with the rest of the world.

Trump’s victory also completely changes the context for the EU’s relationship with Britain. Since the Labour Party took office in July, cross-channel contacts have increased significantly. But now there should be an accelerated push to make a big, bold offer to Britain to create a new partnership.

For his part, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer should commit to working toward a stronger and more united Europe. He should put everything on the table, including exploring how Britain’s nuclear deterrent can contribute to collective European security. And he should show how Britain can help extend European power and security through cooperation on sanctions, technology controls, supply chains, critical raw materials, energy security, migration and joint action against gangs and human traffickers, among other issues.

To make that happen, the biggest EU member states—France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain —will need to transcend their respective domestic politics to establish a pan-European consensus. German leadership—whether it comes from the current government or from a new Christian Democratic-led coalition after the spring elections—is more important than ever, but the smaller, more exposed northern and eastern European countries will also have an important role to play. Accordingly, they should form a caucus within the EU to work with officials in Brussels to make geopolitical Europe into a reality.

Europe’s response to Trump’s return will require creativity, resilience and an unshakable commitment to defending its own interests. Every crisis offers an opportunity, and Europeans have a chance to craft a stronger, more self-sufficient bloc that can stand up for itself in an age of global disorder.

Trump’s likely foreign policy: selective engagement, and helping those who help themselves

In his second term, Donald Trump will be determined to pursue a foreign policy that more closely resembles how the US engaged with the world for the first 170 years of the republic: pursuing abundance at home and selective engagement abroad.

He will do so not because the US is weak and in decline but because it is powerful. Its power is a function of its economic size, military superiority, cultural influence, energy security, business innovation and productivity, labour flexibility, growing population, deep capital markets and immense private wealth, and the omnipresence of the US dollar and US Treasury bonds. US power will give Trump greater freedom to act, including by asking more of allies and partners who seek to benefit from the application or deterrent effect of that power.

True, US power faces several structural challenges. Compared with the Cold War era, America’s industrial base is weaker, as evidenced by its current inability to build nuclear-powered attack submarines at a fast enough replacement rate, which will likely compromise Australia’s ability to acquire Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s.

There will be a reckoning in relation to US public debt, which will rise to 122 percent of GDP by 2034 and already requires more to be spent on public debt interest than defence. Trump will need to better balance America’s commitments and its power if his foreign policy is to command domestic support.

However, these and other structural problems are reversible. They do not qualify as the great power killers that have led to the decline and fall of more conventional powers throughout history.

By virtue of its power, the US is able to shape world order to an extent no other actor is able to, China included. Trump is a power politician. He understands that foreign relationships and transactions are an unsentimental function of power relativities and not abstract global rules that seek to fetter the exercise of sovereign power by nation-states. (On this, his speeches to the UN General Assembly are worth re-reading.)

Trump will be prepared to continue to extend US security to those who are prepared to do more to defend themselves, so long as doing so is also in the interest of the US. Those who spend less on defence than the US (at least 3 percent of GDP) will have to lift their spending or make commensurate in-kind contributions to their own security.

Australia is well placed to make or extend mutually beneficial deals with the second Trump administration, especially in relation to critical minerals, the production of nuclear-powered attack submarines at a faster rate, advanced military technology and further access to our geographically crucial facilities and infrastructure.

However, our weak levels of defence spending will become a point of contention if it is judged that we are not doing more to ensure the self-reliant defence of Australia.

We should not assume, however, that a return to this older style of US foreign policy will result in a withdrawn and isolated US. The world is today too interconnected and closer than was the case in the early 1940s, when isolationists held significant sway in US politics. On the contrary, the US is likely to remain very active in the world, but under different terms and in pursuit of more focused objectives. When it is in the US national interest, Trump will take resolute action—as he did in his first term against Iran, including by way of imposing oppressive sanctions, withdrawing from the Obama-era nuclear deal and ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani.

As a disrupter, Trump may strike a grand bargain between the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others, whereby Israel would be secure, Palestinians would be able to live in peace and Iran would be contained. That deal would be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The US will be a powerful actor under and after Trump. For it to be great again, there is one challenge it will have to meet. Trump will have to intensify efforts to ensure that China does not establish itself as the hegemon of Eurasia.

Were it to do so, across time it would gain dominance over the resources, markets and economic power of the world’s strategic heartland. This would undercut the strategic and commercial interests of the US.

A hegemonic China would grow in strength and eventually threaten the US in its hemispheric citadel. It will be in the interests of the US to prevail in this struggle for mastery in Eurasia.

Trump will prefer to do this by way of aggressive trade, investment, technology decoupling and strategic deterrence, avoiding a military clash if possible. Intrinsic to this approach will be the maintenance of forward-deployed US forces in the western Pacific and the strengthening of the latticework of US-centred regional security partnerships that has emerged across the past decade.

Still, he will need to be convinced to defend Taiwan. The arguments for doing so would have to be framed within this counter-hegemonic strategy. Taiwan will need to show it is willing to do much more to defend itself, including by way of an extensive rearmament program.

There is a prospect of a golden age of American power, where a self-interested US, working with equally self-interested allies and partners, and not embarrassed to wield that power, accomplishes a world-changing quadrella: to thwart China, flip Russia, contain Iran and isolate North Korea. If it can accomplish this sweep of the grand chessboard of Eurasia, the US will be not just powerful but great again. Motivated by America-first instincts that are deeply rooted in US strategic culture, Trump has the opportunity to bring about a transformation of the world order that would rival the earlier achievements of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan at the bookends of the Cold War.

International trade is dividing between blocs. Australia could be in the middle

Australia risks being caught in no man’s land as the world divides into rival economic blocs in what the International Monetary Fund describes as a new cold war.

Trade has been falling everywhere since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it has been falling twice as fast between the blocs of nations centred on the United States and China as it has between nations within those blocs.

The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook shows that trade between the rival blocs of nations is falling faster than was the case between the US and Soviet blocs in the late 1940s.

The US presidential election victory of Donald Trump, who has vowed to impose steep increases in tariffs on China and its proxies, will deepen the cleavage in both global trade and foreign direct investment.

IMF Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath has warned, ‘Policymakers need to get ready to navigate a more volatile world whose key features are increasingly being shaped by fragmentation and conflict.’

Australia’s political leaders, like most of their regional counterparts, reject the notion that they face a choice between the two superpowers and instead emphasise opportunities that await in commerce with counterparts across the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

However, Australia’s dependence on China as its principal market and supplier is both an economic and geopolitical fact.

The tension in Australia’s position is shown by the different attitudes towards trade, where the government has sought to rebuild Chinese exports, and foreign investment, where national security concerns are now paramount.

Where Australia sits in a division of the world between rival blocs is not clear. An IMF analysis of the impact of global fragmentation on commodity markets earlier this year assigned Australia to the ‘China-Russia’ bloc, rather than the ‘US-Europe’ bloc.

The IMF estimates that trade between blocs aligned with either the United States and China has fallen 5 percent since 2022, or twice the 2.5 percent decline of trade among nations within those blocs.  A similar dynamic is evident in foreign direct investment.

US and Chinese companies have been shifting supply chains away from each other.  One result has been a surge in the trade of what the IMF terms ‘connector countries’ such as Vietnam and Mexico. Trump has said he will impose punitive tariffs on imports that attempt to evade his restrictions on China by being routed through third countries.

A study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, exploring the impact of a hypothetical 10 percent fall in trade between advanced and emerging nations, found that Australia and South Korea would be the most severely affected, facing falls in GDP as much as 1.4 percent.

It is not simply a matter of geopolitical forces upsetting otherwise mutually profitable trading arrangements. Depending on other nations for traded goods and services can carry intrinsic geopolitical implications. The OECD comments:

Up until recently, interdependence was generally seen in a positive light, principally involving mutually beneficial commercial exchanges, allowing better specialisation and bringing higher productivity and access to a wider pool of capabilities and ideas. However, recent global events disrupting international markets and supply chains have increased concerns about the supply chain resilience and the risks that might be transmitted through international trade linkages.

Global production of products has become increasingly concentrated, and it tends to be increasingly clustered around some countries and regions, notably China and Asia. This is not only due to natural or organic economic factors, such as natural endowments, comparative advantage, economies of scale, or global value chain fragmentation, but also policies.

There is a growing interest in identifying commercial links that could cause high economic or societal damage in case of unexpected disruptions, or those that could be used as a tool of coercion or might create national security risks or weigh on countries’ sovereignty.

Countries are dependent on a trading partner when it accounts for a large share of exports or imports of a particular product or service and there are few alternative suppliers or markets.

When China blocked Australian coal imports, mining companies could divert their exports to other markets. But there was no such remedy for lobster producers, because China accounted for 90 percent of Australia’s exports and a large share of global imports.

The OECD says that many products that appear on lists of ‘critical’ or ‘strategic’ goods are not particularly concentrated. Strategic sectors where OECD countries do have high dependence on China include manufacturing refractory and ceramic products, tools for cutting stone (essential for quarries), pharmaceuticals, lifting and handling equipment and electronic components.

An important conclusion from the OECD study is that China is much more dependent on advanced countries than vice versa. ‘Trade dependencies of OECD economies on China also need to be put in the context of China’s dependencies on OECD economies, which appear even larger.’

While the tensions may become more acute, both US and Chinese blocs retain strong vested interests in each other.