The recent ASPI report by Marcus Hellyer and Andrew Nicolls is a welcome addition to the B-21 debate in Australia. In the report, Hellyer and Nicolls cite Michael Mazarr, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and define the concept of deterrence by denial as ‘having sufficiently robust capabilities to convince an adversary that the cost of acting militarily against Australia isn’t worth any gains that might be made’.

However, that’s not quite correct. In the paper cited, ‘Understanding deterrence’, Mazarr defines deterrence by denial as seeking ‘to deter an action by making it infeasible or unlikely to succeed, thus denying a potential aggressor confidence in attaining its objectives’; he gives ‘deploying sufficient local military forces to defeat an invasion’ as an example. This is very different from simply raising the cost of any gains.

In fact, if you are only looking at raising the cost of gains, then you are engaging in deterrence by punishment. Mazar defines deterrence by punishment as threatening severe penalties (costs) if an attack were to occur. This distinction was first established by Glenn Snyder, and has since been explored more by Lawrence Freedman, to show that punishment is not just about counter-value targeting (hitting an adversary’s homeland) but about inflicting unacceptable military losses.

But why does this pedantic definitional distinction matter?

Imprecision in the definition of deterrence affects three key elements for capability decisions: force structure, operational tempo and alliance relationships.

The difference between assuring an adversary that you will defeat their attack, as opposed to only imposing costs, will dictate, first and foremost, just how many platforms you need render an attack infeasible. To declare a strategy of denial, Australia would therefore require a fleet of B-21s (as a joint force) capable of defeating an adversary’s attack, not just inflicting losses. Any quick calculation of how many platforms it would take to do that would drive the force structure designers to require (among other capabilities) a larger fleet than a force that’s only expected to exact costs.

A deterrence-by-punishment strategy, then, assures significant costs, rather than defeat. And that’s a distinction that has implications when you sit down to design a force and pay for it. A deterrence-by-denial strategy simply costs more, and requires more platforms, than a punishment strategy.

The difference in the two strategies will also affect the operational tempo required of the fleet (and of the force as a whole). Deterrence by denial would require more frequent, more intense and larger demonstrations of the capability to defeat an attack than deterrence by punishment. The B-21’s contribution to a joint force’s ability to render attacks infeasible would place significant strain on a fleet. That would be especially so if the strategy called for denial but there was only enough money for a fleet that could inflict punishment. The distinction between the two strategies has real implications for how operational planners would have to use the B-21.

Lastly, the distinction affects alliance relationships. The US is well versed in deterrence. It has a strong scholarly capability and institutional memory. Therefore, if Australia were to say that it was going to enact a deterrence-by-denial strategy and join the B-21 program, then it would set up expectations in Washington that it will acquire a larger fleet than it intends to acquire, and that it will exercise more frequently than it plans to exercise. Anyone who has worked with the US in the Australian Department of Defence can point to an example where the US military came to an event with a size and scale that Australian forces just couldn’t match—and sometimes that Australia didn’t want. For example, exercising capabilities in the region with a large denial force and its attendant size and tempo can have unwanted consequences for Australia’s immediate neighbouring countries. If Australia is going to speak the language of deterrence with its biggest ally, it must make sure they are defining deterrence in the same way.

Hellyer and Nicolls’s report expertly analyses the arguments for and against the B-21, and importantly it outlines the alternative options. In addition to the analysis, it is essential to clearly define Australia’s strategic intent, and then match that to the capability options that are on the table. I strongly suspect that while Australia may wish to deter by denial, it would only be able to afford and sustain a B-21 fleet (and consequently a force structure) that can inflict deterrence by punishment—and that distinction matters.

Here’s a priority list for Foreign Minister Marise Payne’s foreign arrangements taskforce to apply the Australian government’s new veto power over states’ engagement with foreign governments: Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative memorandum of understanding with China; a dozen Confucius Institutes located at Australian universities (New South Wales removed one from its own Education Department in 2019); and, at last count in 2018, 1,741 agreements between Australian and Chinese universities. In 2007, according to Universities Australia, there were 488 Australia–China university agreements. Close to a fourfold increase in little more than a decade should have sounded warning bells.

By comparison, in 2018 there were 996 agreements with universities in the United States, 568 with Japan, 558 with Germany and 502 with the United Kingdom. We have cooperated with these countries for decades, have comparable university systems and research cultures that are proudly independent of government, and share similar values and strategic outlooks.

Yet in a mere 10 years, university cooperation with the People’s Republic of China, an authoritarian and repressive political regime that does not share our values and has diametrically opposed strategic objectives, has come to dominate our universities’ international research horizons.

Under a policy known as military–civil fusion, Xi Jinping has subordinated much of the science and technology research effort of Chinese universities to the priorities of the People’s Liberation Army and China’s wider security and intelligence sector.

Research at ASPI led by Alex Joske shows that thousands of PLA researchers have studied at Western universities and disproportionately at Australian institutions compared with our Five Eyes intelligence partners. In some cases, PLA military connections were known, but in others they were obscured.

Can anyone be surprised that the Australian government saw a pressing need to review the international engagements pursued by our universities? Apparently so. Universities Australia Chief Executive Catriona Jackson says, ‘[W]e remain concerned that the laws will deter international partnerships, which are the lifeblood of research, knowledge and job creation.’

One test the foreign arrangements taskforce might like to apply in assessing these agreements is whether they advantage the Chinese military and intelligence apparatus more than our own. There are likely to be rich research funding opportunities for the first Australian universities that break away from the China income stream to focus on science and technology supporting the national security of Australia and our allies.

No doubt there are areas of research taking place between Australia and China that are benign, but over time Australians will probably be shocked to learn how tightly we have linked research activities in areas that have obvious military application.

That is because Beijing, through its ‘Made in China 2025’ plan, has a laser-like focus on buying or stealing the best science and technology knowledge from democracies to give it an unassailable lead in critical areas. This shapes how the Chinese Communist Party engages with our universities.

Was it ever intelligent to link our university sector so closely to that of the PRC? In a world where China wants to supplant the US as the dominant military power in the Indo-Pacific and Beijing will angrily reject any Australian expression of sovereignty, how can it be good for our universities to be connected like this?

While unpicking research connections will be the toughest task under the Australia’s Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Act 2020, pushing Confucius Institutes off campuses should be an easy decision; universities should never have agreed to have them in the first place.

Confucius Institutes act to stifle on-campus debate about Beijing’s behaviour by holding their continued funding over the heads of university administrators.

As for Victoria’s BRI memorandum, this confection is uniquely a fixation of the Premier Daniel Andrews. How any state or territory would think it intelligent to deepen its economic dependence on the wolf warriors of Beijing defies rational analysis.

The federal government’s determination to work its way through state, territory and university agreements with foreign entities is necessary and commendable. It shows the world that Australia will not let itself be compromised and is prepared to end agreements unwisely entered into in earlier times.

That said, there is scope for improvement. The bureaucracy tenaciously sticks to the line that the new framework is ‘country-agnostic’ and ‘arrangement-agnostic’.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade can stand ready to repel interference from Uganda, but make no mistake: 80% to 90% of the problem comes from the CCP. Pretending this is a country-agnostic matter is what allows Universities Australia to claim, incorrectly in my view, that collaboration even with Five Eyes countries could be subject to ‘cancellation by any future Foreign Minister’.

We must also hope that DFAT’s foreign arrangements taskforce won’t go the way of the Foreign Investment Review Board and conclude that its core task is to facilitate keeping and making foreign agreements as the most important objective. In the current circumstances, we need a tough national security mindset to look after Australia’s interests. DFAT will need help on that front.

Here is another task that DFAT must be better funded to perform: democracies everywhere are looking at Australia’s struggle with the PRC and wondering if we have the bottle to stick with the fight. We need to persuade those countries that our battle is their near-term future. All democracies have an interest in strengthening their internal and external arrangements against the PRC’s relentless predation. Canberra has lessons to share and a need to bring the democracies further into our camp so that Beijing understands we are not alone.

For the past 30 years, geoeconomics has trumped geopolitics. The relative stability of international relations, driven by the absence of great-power rivalry and ideological competition, created an environment conducive to global economic growth. Opening markets and lowering barriers to investment and trade across borders seemed to be in everyone’s interests.

In such a benign geopolitical atmosphere, consensus emerged on the best way to do business. Supply chains stretched across the world, and companies in developed countries found it cheaper to source the components of manufactured goods in China. Globalisation allowed for ‘just in time’ delivery, with companies keeping inventories low and precisely calculating supply and demand.

However, the broad acceptance of this model obscured the increased risk to and potential loss in resilience of supply chains.

The onset of Covid-19 and the glaring vulnerabilities the pandemic has revealed in national capabilities have made clear that the current international economic model is insufficient to meet the threats nations face in an era of hardening international geopolitical competition.

Before the pandemic, there was increasing talk in Canberra, Washington and elsewhere about the need to diversify supply chains, build better economic resilience among democratic nations, and tighten coordination among allies to enable them to resist China’s state-led economic and political coercion.

This discussion had only recently begun gaining steam, but it has now burst into public view because the debate is no longer theoretical. Developed countries like Australia and the United States now realise that they are dependent on China not just for education and tourism dollars, but also for the production of essential items such as healthcare equipment and pharmaceuticals.

The national security community’s long-held concern about overdependence on Chinese supply chains and production is now shared more broadly than ever.

So, what’s the solution? Some suggest repatriating domestic manufacturing capacity, while others predict a return to globalisation after the worst of the coronavirus crisis abates. In reality, neither of those approaches is likely to work. Instead, the best solution is supply-chain diversification and cross-border resilience.

Earlier this month, Japan became the first country to significantly underwrite efforts to shift supply chains out of China. Tokyo earmarked ¥243.5 billion (A$3.6 billion) of its Covid-19 economic stimulus to help its manufacturers move production out of China and back to Japan or Southeast Asia.

Japan isn’t the only country taking a hard look at domestic manufacturing.

Australia’s industry, science and technology minister, Karen Andrews, has said it’s wrong to be totally or heavily reliant on supply chains that come from overseas. She echoed Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s admonition that his government would be looking ‘carefully at our domestic economic sovereignty’.

The US government has issued a number of executive orders intended to reduce supply-chain vulnerabilities and there’s a bipartisan bill before Congress to reduce American reliance on China for the production of pharmaceuticals. Senator Marco Rubio explained, ‘There comes a point where, as a nation, we have to ask ourselves what are the critical goods that you must retain the ability to make even if it’s not the most efficient outcome.’ Elizabeth Warren, who co-sponsored the bill with Rubio, called this a ‘common sense solution’.

A growing number of nations now realise that they need to stockpile more goods, ensure that their supply chains come from trusted partners, and build up their industrial capacities. But national manufacturing capabilities cannot be built overnight or cheaply. It’s also unrealistic to expect that nations will be able to develop domestic production capacity in every critical industry.

Moreover, whatever emerges in the wake of the pandemic will not be the same form of globalisation we had before. Prior to the outbreak, there were already calls to limit globalisation, with increasing restrictions on immigration in the developed world, and multinational trade deals becoming less politically viable.

Concerns over China’s predatory economics were driving governments to restrict foreign investments and tighten export controls on critical technologies. The pandemic will accelerate these trends.

Ultimately, neither rapid national self-sufficiency nor deglobalisation is a viable option.

However, there’s a middle path for democratic nations: an economic alliance structure, in which countries strengthen their capabilities in mutually supportive ways. Our existing alliances now have the opportunity to move beyond the military realm and into the economic arena.

This system would seek security through greater diversification and would necessitate revisiting the rules under which global trade operates, including encouraging certain countries to become trusted suppliers for like-minded nations.

Australia could, for example, take the lead on critical minerals while the US could build on its existing technological strengths. Further investment could be made to enhance production capabilities for medical supplies in Southeast Asia. Scandinavia could take the lead on mobile communications, while Germany could further develop its advanced manufacturing capabilities.

Regardless of the industry, government support would be required if manufacturers were to remain economically viable against companies subsidised by the Chinese state.

To be sure, doing this will have costs—to governments, which would need to support certain industries, and to citizens, who will have to pay more for goods that come from trusted providers. But it will also have benefits for governments, for business and ultimately for citizens seeking greater security and better health.

Warning: This post contains specialist language. For a glossary of terms, see here.

The Tour de France might be one of the best ways of understanding shifts in global security and the implications of those shifts. It gives insights into American leadership under President Donald Trump, into how US allies and partners are beginning to work together, and into how China is using a historic opportunity.

Someone wins the Tour every year, but it’s never an individual victory. To win, you need to be part of a team. Individual champions can win individual stages, but without the backing of other riders they fall back to the pack.

You can guess who I’m thinking of here: the flamboyant rider Trump and his new team, America First. Trump saw his old team, Team Ally—an international hodgepodge of like-minded riders of varying abilities—as costs, even though they’d had a dominant record on the Tour for years. In his mind, if not on the track, he’s the fastest rider on the Tour. His team was just holding him back. Trump inherited Team Ally when he got selected in 2016 over previous Tour winner Barack Obama, and he didn’t like it. So he founded his own team in time to start this year. Unfortunately, he’s its only rider.

He now pedals alone, occasionally throwing bidons at the wheels of his previous team members Angela Merkel, Theresa May and the reliable and pretty quick support rider Shinzo Abe. Even Malcolm Turnbull, a rock-solid rouleur in every race he’s ridden with Team Ally, who faithfully did the grunt work of bringing Trump water bottles and energy bars, doesn’t quite know what to make of his old mate’s change of heart. Emmanuel Macron rode some early stages with Trump, but they’ve not been seen together in recent days.

The fact that Team Ally keeps following him and helping him stay ahead of the peloton is just making Trump crankier. That they’re riding a lot of US bikes—some borrowed, some purchased—has provoked loud recriminations and demands for money that have played out in public on most nights of this year’s Tour.

Trump sees China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin as formidable competitors and worthy adversaries. In his vanishingly few introspective moments, he may even worry that they’re faster than America First. He admires their rule-breaking and seems to want to copy it, but has been held back to date by the team lawyers. He loves the plucky North Korean grimpeur Kim Jong-un, despite knowing he gets his speed from the concealed mini nuclear engine buried deep in the bike frame—which he says he won’t use on some future Tour, in the 2030s maybe.

Trump hasn’t yet noticed that the European riders on Team Ally are forming their own breakaway group and having late-night after-stage chats over doughnuts with Turnbull, Abe and Team India’s Narendra Modi.

In previous Tours, Team China has had a pretty lonely ride. Under lead rider Hu Jintao, the team was known as a strong competitor mainly interested in corporate sponsorships, with fourth-place stage positions and no podiums. In recent years, the flood of money that Xi has used to re-equip other teams’ riders and help out with their lavish hotel bills before and after the race has bought him a lot of help on the ride. Xi’s shift to rebrand it Team Xi with himself as the lead rider in perpetuity, along with his aggressive riding and no-holds-barred tactics, has also changed things. He’s offered to rebuild sections of road in time for next year’s Tour.

Some riders are starting to wear Xi’s colours in a loose acknowledgement of their work together. Xi knows they don’t love him, but he’s clear-headed in understanding that if he keeps splashing the cash he might just be on the podium in Paris wearing the maillot jaune. He’s thinking of a decade of Tour dominance. He knows people eventually learn to like winners.

Xi worries about holding his team back home together so that the money keeps flowing. He knows that continued corruption scandals there could bring him undone, and he’s also worried that Team Xi is getting known for its rough-house tactics with other riders, allegations of bike sabotage, payoffs and rumours of violence at home. Lance Armstrong is not far from his thoughts. None of that shows on the Tour.

With almost 30 years since its last Tour victory, Team Russia is in every stage to win, and if not, then to make damn sure its archrivals don’t. This has led to nasty claims and counterclaims of bike meddling and substance abuse. Team Russia tends to blame the victims and keep riding. Bashar al-Assad is helping as a domestique, and mercurial Hungarian Viktor Orbán and Greek rider Alexis Tsipras are providing informal back-up. But Putin’s courting of the charismatic and notoriously tough-riding Turk, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, may cause trouble in the group. It’s already a case of too many individuals, not enough team.

As with every Tour, there’s human drama outside the leading group. The spectacular mid-week crashout off the Col de Portet by UK rider Boris Johnson caused a media frenzy. Holding his twisted bike, Johnson swore at helpful spectators and jeered at local farmers. His post-stage remarks didn’t clear much up. He claimed that his exit from the Tour was a planned manoeuvre that modelling showed would make him stronger in future races, while also accusing a European race official of teargassing the corner where he left the track.

It’s exciting to pick this year’s Tour winner from this pack of riders. It’s unlikely to be Trump, and it’s hard to see Putin on the podium (but if does get there, the Union Cycliste Internationale might launch an agonisingly slow, obstructed inquiry). Next year looks even harder for America First, whose corporate affairs look likely to be dogged by disputes with sponsors. Xi might win this Tour. To come out on top in future years, though, he’ll need a team, not a bunch of riders with split loyalties, held together by cash and favours. That’s a tough transition, and Xi will stay distracted by issues at home.

We also shouldn’t forget the strengths that have made Team Ally so dominant for decades—strengths that are still there in training, fitness, equipment and teamwork. So, the smart money’s already looking at the chances of a revitalised Team Ally winning next year’s Tour after they develop a new strategy that doesn’t rely so heavily on a single champion rider. Rumour is they’ll keep their US bikes, but there’ll be no more ‘loaners’ without ready money put down.

As President Trump and Prime Minister Turnbull prepare to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea, and the centenary of the United States’ entry into World War I, we might also reflect on the 50th anniversary of another important, if less dramatic, stage in the wartime history of the Australian-American alliance. 1967 was a turning-point in the Australian government’s attitude to the Vietnam War, with important ramifications for American policy.

To persuade Washington to remain committed to the region, Australia had volunteered a battalion of combat troops in 1965, when the Americans had only been suggesting an increase in the number of advisers. Harold Holt’s impulsive exclamation on the White House lawn in June 1966 that Australia was ‘all the way with LBJ’ was also designed to strengthen American will.

After fighting the November 1966 election on the issues of the Vietnam War and conscription, Holt won what was then the biggest majority in Australia’s electoral history. With that public support, he began 1967 by committing additional units of the Army, RAN and RAAF, so that Australia become the only ‘third country’—that is, ally of South Vietnam and the United States—to provide forces from all three services.

Holt personally seemed inclined to increase Australia’s task force from two to three battalions, to the consternation of ministers and senior officials. They had supposed that Australia was following its established pattern of offering effusive rhetorical and diplomatic support to its major ally, but providing only the smallest number of boots on the ground necessary to convince Washington to remain committed.

As the year wore on, and the casualty lists of both regulars and conscripts lengthened, Australian public opinion on the war began to turn sour. The protest movement gained momentum, despite being divided into two clear wings.  Moderates simply wanted an end to Australian involvement in a war that they considered unwinnable and unnecessary, while the radical ‘New Left’ portrayed the war and conscription as the products of a capitalist, parliamentary democracy whose institutions should be overthrown.

Those developments reflected major shifts in public opinion in the United States. In Washington, Johnson’s civilian and military advisers argued vehemently over Vietnam strategy. At the centre of the contest were requests from the American military commander, General William Westmoreland, for an increase in the American troop commitment. In a typical Johnsonian compromise, Westmoreland got part but not all of what he wanted. American troop numbers rose by about 100,000 during 1967, to their peak level of around half a million.

To secure additional troops from an increasingly hostile Congress, Johnson needed to show that the war had the whole-hearted support of its allies in the region. Johnson sent two of his most trusted advisers, Clark Clifford and Maxwell Taylor, on a July mission to secure more troops from allies such as Australia and New Zealand. Given Australia’s prominence as an outspoken hawk, they were optimistic, but they met unexpected resistance.

While battles raged in Parliament, in the media and on the streets about the war, conscription, the American alliance and Australian foreign policy, the Treasurer (and later Prime Minister) William McMahon was complaining of the growing burden of the war on Australia’s economy. So when Clifford and Taylor met the Australian Cabinet, Holt and his colleagues tried to persuade the Americans that Australia had already reached the limit of its capacity to contribute.

Only after Johnson had unleashed the full force of his persuasive powers on the unfortunate McMahon during a visit to Washington did the Holt government agree, extremely reluctantly, to commit a third battalion to the task force in Vietnam. That, they insisted, was the absolute limit of the Australian commitment. When Holt’s successor John Gorton announced during the Tet offensive in February 1968, that there’d be no further increase to the Australian force, many assumed that he was placing his personal imprimatur on a commitment that he had long questioned. In fact, he was stating publicly what the Holt government had privately decided, and had told the Americans, several months earlier.

Clark Clifford later wrote that he was struck by the fact that Australia, which had sent hundreds of thousands of armed men overseas in World War 2, was now reluctant to commit more than about 7,000 in Vietnam. This, he claimed, contributed to his own decision to turn American policy towards withdrawal when he served as Johnson’s last Defense Secretary in 1968, after Robert McNamara had resigned in a virtual admission that his Vietnam policy had failed.

From the end of 1967 onwards, the atmosphere within the Australian government over the Vietnam war was totally different from when the year began. The focus of attention became how to bring Australian troops home as the Americans withdrew theirs. Holt’s successors were caught between the escalating financial costs of the commitment and the political costs of an increasingly unpopular war. Public opinion polls in the US turned against the war in 1968 and in Australia in 1969, but the turning-point for the Australian government came in 1967.

Fifty years on, as we debate the possibilities of greater independence within the alliance, it’s worth remembering that, even in the war that is often cited as the classic example of Australia’s ties to American military might, we weren’t really ‘all the way with LBJ’.