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Tag Archive for: Alliance
The US–Australia Cyber Dialogue: prioritising cyber between strategic partners
World leaders now discuss cybersecurity as a priority issue with their counterparts in many guises, be it the seemingly endless revelations of state led cyber espionage, state sponsored information leaks, or cyber criminals enjoying an extended reach from distant safe havens. Increasingly digitally-dependent economies and digitised infrastructure are vulnerable to these threats, however they also offer opportunities for governments and the private sector. These systems require resilient cybersecurity if they are to realise their potential and not be manipulated and disrupted.
The issue is a frequent point of contention amongst leaders of the major powers. President Obama regularly exchanges strong views with his Chinese counterpart President Xi over state-led economic espionage and with President Putin in regards to Russia’s apparent mission to reshape the use of cyberspace as a tool for strategic information operations.
The cyber discussion is equally important amongst allies in shoring up economic and national security wellbeing. The partnership between Australia and the US is longstanding and deeply embedded in our national consciousness, but what is often overlooked is the ability of the relationship to evolve to suit the changing international environment. It is this reflexive ability to adapt to new forms of exchange and business that has enabled it to endure.
Cognisant of this and the growing importance of cybersecurity discussions, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull travelled to Washington DC for bilateral meetings with President Obama in January this year, ready to talk cyber security on multiple fronts. Yet he and the team were said to be impressed by how central it was in all of their meetings from President to Secretary: they all wanted to address aspects of cyber security with a tech savvy alliance partner’s PM.
During that trip the PM announced a new US-Australia Cyber Security Dialogue to be convened by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The idea is a simple one: that whilst the two countries are strong alliance partners who have excellent government relationships, there was more that could be done. Bringing together the public and private sector with leading academic thinkers was the clear next step in growing the depth, complexity and strength of the bilateral relationship.
Competition in cyberspace is taking place in the Asia-Pacific at a rate commensurate with the growth of the region’s importance to global business and security. Despite the region’s economic growth easing it’s still expected that during 2016 the regional economy will grow by 6.7%, accounting for one-third of total global growth. This is appealing to businesses and investors for legitimate reasons, but also for criminals wanting their share of the economic prize. Criminals in the region take advantage of a permissive legislative environment, and growing connection speeds to boost their operations here. Combine this with the already increasingly tense geo-strategic circumstances, which are often replicated online, and cyberspace is one of the key emerging domains for competition in the twenty first century.
One of the practical responses to this regional dilemma is collaborative cyber capacity-building projects involving US and Australian governments, but perhaps more importantly, collaborating with the private sector entities who are keen to have a fair opportunity to build their digital businesses in the Asia-Pacific. Bringing the private sector in at the design phase of projects is vital for building effective capacity building around the region. There is a pressing need to expand our cooperation into supporting regional countries to engage cyberspace more securely so they can protect their strategic and economic interests. The growth of stable, trusted digital markets in the region will also assist Australian and American businesses to engage the region digitally with the confidence that they will not fall victim to cyber criminals, or regulations that impede their ability to compete. Capacity building in the region supports security and economic growth, and a combined approach to enhancing the capability of the region to protect itself from cyber threats would be beneficial to governments, business and society.
The multi-faceted nature of the threat posed by cyberspace requires a multi-faceted response. Unlike other traditional security issues, cyber security cannot remain purely the purview of states. To keep up with the threats posed by other, resources must be pooled and expertise and information shared. In the online world, Australia faces a strategic picture filled with foes constantly rewriting the rule book as to what can be achieved though disruption and disinformation online. But governments are not the exclusive targets. States looking to gain a competitive economic advantage are targeting the private sectors of other nations in pursuit of the nugget of information or intellectual property that will guarantee a domestic payday. Working together to practice combined and cooperative responses to cyber threats that affect public and private entities will be key to managing the risk of cyber threats to both sectors.
The Australia-US cyber security dialogue recently held in Washington DC examined all these issues and how best to manage them in a cooperative manner. The robust bilateral and cross-sectoral discussions identified a work plan that ASPI and CSIS will progress over the coming 12 months. Three focus areas were highlighted: programs to coordinate capacity-building efforts, undertaking a joint US-Australia industry-led cyber exercise, and conducting research on how to overcome bilateral and regional barriers to digital trade.
Bilateral cooperation between longstanding partners to address these issues will advance our interests in cybersecurity in the region and further afield, providing better security outcomes for Australia, the US and the region. The inaugural Australia-US Cyber Security Dialogue laid important ground work towards this effort, but continued dedication to this important issue is vital in order to progress our respective interests in cyberspace. In this vein ASPI and CSIS will work together to ensure that the 2017 Dialogue builds on this success when it is held in Australia.
Comprehend the ally
The first rule of alliance management is to understand the ally.
For a junior ally, that’s core stuff. Read the great and powerful friend. Find the meanings. Relate domestic trends within the ally to international tides or torrents.
If your alliance rests on a commitment to ‘consult together’, then constantly consider the nature of the people to be consulted. A treaty, for instance, with this Article III:
‘The Parties will consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific.’
People around Canberra who can recite Article III from memory usually carry on to the first sentence of Article IV:
‘Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.’
Constitutional processes, indeed.
Constitutional processes is a fine, formal phrase for America’s presidential pandemonium.
Electoral dynamics weren’t at front of mind (think new Cold War and lingering fear of Japan) when those articles were adopted and signed in San Francisco in September, 1951, entering force in April, 1952 as the ANZUS Treaty.
The constitutional processes phrase rests on the truth that any alliance between democracies has roots in domestic politics.
Electoral dynamics will trump much else in 2016 for the two ANZUS allies.
An election year in Australia, coinciding with the US election, is a moment to ponder the first rule.
Canberra’s discussion of ‘alliance management’ is one of myriad examples of the central importance of the alliance in Oz strategy and defence thinking.
Attempting ‘alliance management’ is a step up from the old idea of having to pay the insurance premium.
Maybe Australia is making progress if it has moved from merely paying the price to some attempt at management. Much of the last decade could be read as premium payment rather than management mode, but management remains a laudable aim.
As in most years, Australia has a lot of strategic business (White Paper, submarines) of passing note to Washington.
Those big declarations and decisions will not completely obscure, as they often do, that rule-one-requirement to keep an eye on the fundamentals of the ally.
And understanding the many ways the peoples of the US and Australia see the world in different colours.
What does the current US political process tell us about where the great ally is headed? Pick your pundit, take your choice.
My guide through America’s massive media blather is the 80-year-old doyen Elizabeth Drew.
Here’s Drew on the US politics of frustration and the belief that Washington is dysfunctional:
‘The Republican strategy of trying to keep Obama from succeeding has boomeranged on the party itself. Over the period of Obama’s presidency, many voters have come to view the established politicians as out of it and irrelevant, and so the thing to do in this election is to try something new.’
The public rejection of US conventional politics means the politician who presents as nihilist is in sync with the zeitgeist. Drew’s diagnosis: ‘This fascinating election is also a troubling one. The centre isn’t holding and both parties are so deeply divided as to raise the question of whether any victor will be able to govern.’
Able to govern? Refer back to rule one. Thank Kim Beazley for six years hard graft as Washington Ambassador and ask Joe Hockey to go hard. And rework the wisdom attributed to Wilde, Shaw and Churchill: this is an alliance separated by a common language.
Also consider the wisdom of a previous Oz Opposition leader who went on to do a good job in Washington. Andrew Peacock in 2003 listed four areas where the national beliefs of Australia and the US differ sharply:
- interpretation of the meaning of political freedom
- attitudes towards the role of religion in public life and the challenge of American exceptionalism
- the place of wealth and economic status in society
- attitudes towards war and the standing of the military.
Michael Evans uses those Peacock points in a fine essay for Quadrant on the different political cultures of the two allies. He adds a fifth: different frontier legacies.
America’s frontier produced the personal liberty, individual energy and spirit of innovation of the land of the free and the home of the brave.
In the Great Southern Land, the harsh bush frontier fostered social equality and collective endurance alongside a talent for improvisation.
One example illustrates many of those separate features: different national attitudes to guns and the right to keep and bear arms.
John Howard tells a nice yarn about speaking at the George W. Bush presidential library and being asked about his proudest political achievements. The first two (joining the US in the war on terror and balancing the budget) got loud applause. Then the third on the list: ‘We brought in national gun control laws. The audience went ‘uuuhhh’… it was like the sound of air exhaling from a balloon.’
Michael Evans posits (and John Howard would agree) that there’s no greater responsibility in Australian statecraft than ‘ensuring smooth American–Australian alliance relations through the translation of cultural affinities into congruent policy interests.’ Amen.
As Malcolm Turnbull said of the presidential pandemonium in a Q/A in Washington last month: ‘I’m sure that we will work with whoever the American people in their wisdom choose.’ Amen, to that, too.
Note the plea Turnbull added to that pledge to follow America’s democratic flow. The PM asked Washington to maintain ‘America’s commitment to continuing to underpin that rules-based international order’ and to keep providing the ‘Pax Americana’ goodies. Amen and hallelujah.
The contents and contests of The Alliance
Australia’s nightmare about the US alliance has two versions: home alone or crushed by the embrace. Opposing dreads: Oz abandoned versus Oz abused.
For decades, home alone was dominant. Oz would call but Washington would not answer the phone. America would be off attending to Europe or doing the Middle East and the antipodes would fall off the map.
Richard Nixon’s Guam doctrine moment—allies have primary responsibility to defend themselves—is a classic in the abandonment Parthenon. The development of the Defence of Australia doctrine was partly a Guam response: we can’t rely on America post-Vietnam. We’d better do it ourselves.
Today, that looks a bit last century. The other nightmare dominates. The fear is no longer that the US will fail to deliver. The worry is what the US will demand and what Oz is able to deliver in response. This is the dangerous alliance vision of Malcolm Fraser.
For all the uncertainties about the US rebalance, the pivot offers one answer as conclusive as you get in this game. Australia’s nightmare is no longer being abandoned. Fear only what we’ll be asked to do. And whether we’ll want to do it. One nightmare fades as the other becomes vivid. The motif of the fading abandonment nightmare was insurance—stay loyal and pay the premiums. The new motif is alliance management, still with lots of loyalty.
As always, the view from Washington is different. The dichotomy is America’s ability to demand and deliver. Any future threat to US alliances in Asia—short of war—will come from the US itself, because of what it demands or fails to deliver. This is quite a duality: the danger of an America that asks too much or delivers too little.
American smarts in handling its allies and quasi allies (both reassurance and delivery) will be more important than Chinese pressure in this peacetime equation. Chinese pushiness helps the alliances. In much of Asia, China is making the US argument for the US.
We ask a lot of Washington. The US must do chameleon duty, adjusting alliance demands and delivery to suit individual partners.
Such currents get a workout in the ‘candid audit’ of the alliance by Canberra’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) and Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). It’s an excellent effort by two thinkers from the US and two from Australia—good analysis illuminated by sparks and jabs generated between two far-apart capitals. Unpack the title: ‘The ANZUS Alliance in an Ascending Asia’.
The NZ part of ANZUS disappeared in 1986. Washington wanted what the small ally wouldn’t do (the demand/deliver dichotomy at work). The ANZUS usage works for a Washington audience. Just as easy in Australia to refer to The Alliance. The One. The Only. The Alliance—so revered it needs no other identifier.
Canberra and Washington agree on Ascending Asia for the title, then spend the rest of the document wrangling over what it means.
Throbbing away within the ANU cloisters, the SDSC is a broad church, as the Centre’s Professor Hugh White proves by taking a bite out of the study, saying ‘it seems to evade the hard issue at the heart of the strategic choices confronting both Australia and America today: what order do we wish to see in Asia in the Asian Century, and what role should America aim to play in it?’
Hugh is entitled to mark hard because he’s been bold in giving his own answer; he has the bruises to prove it.
The report starts with the usual positives about converging and closely aligned interests and how The Alliance is thriving. Then wrangling. Three dark examples:
- ‘Do the complexities of Asia’s ascent mean that the United States–Australia alliance is now entering its twilight years’?
- ‘The reality is that neither Washington nor Canberra has a clear or consistent China policy’.
- ‘Leading Australian political figures now debate whether this apparent divergence of security and economic interests presages a dilution of the United States–led alliance system in the region. These public debates by the United States’ closest ally in the Pacific have some senior US officials quietly questioning whether Japan may in future replace Australia as the most trustworthy ally should US and regional tensions continue mounting with Beijing’.
My response to 1: Not if the alliance addiction of the Oz polity and the alliance sentiments of the Oz voters are any guide.
Number 2 is true. This column’s line is that the grand strategy the US and Australia have used for China since the end of the Cold War—Engage & Hedge—is broken. Engage & Hedge no longer run in parallel and aren’t even in parallel universes.
Number 3 gets a big laugh and a serious response.
The laugh: Who knew Malcolm Fraser could scare ‘senior US officials’? Washington, the most raucous polity on the planet, asks Oz to be seemly!
The serious point is that Canberra is comfortable with the strategic convergence and Asia focus in The Alliance. The debate about ‘entrapment’—as the report calls it—is a proper and valid discussion that will get louder and ever more important. The reference to Japan as rising ally prompts the thought that the highest level of alliance angst is to be found in Tokyo, not Canberra. Japan’s worry is that the US may not be entangled enough—come the China crunch, America may not deliver for Japan. Alliance angst is a constant ache.
The challenges of peace
The human, economic and political consequences of going to war are familiar and terrible. Hardly less onerous, but much less familiar, are the problems of restoring a nation when the guns fall silent.
How to manage returning troops when the parades end and the bands and the bunting disappear? How to heal the physical and psychic wounds of warfare? How to return a society to peace and tranquillity after the killing stops? How to shift an economy from a wartime to a peacetime footing? How to satisfy the pent up desires and demands of people suddenly liberated from wartime austerity and discipline?
These aren’t priority questions for strategic studies, but they’re critical policy questions and they’re the central theme in Stuart Macintyre’s new book Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and reconstruction in the 1940s. It’s a complex and multi-layered story of national renewal and renovation by far-sighted politicians and bureaucrats who planned and established the foundations of modern Australia.
It was no easy task: there were no formulas, no precedents, and onrushing post-war strategic and economic challenges—including the Cold War and militant communism—helped to frustrate efforts to create a freer, fairer domestic society and international order.
Mcintyre shows how political leaders like Chifley, Evatt, Dedman and Menzies, and officials like Coombs, Wilson, Downing, Copland and the formidable Trevor Swan, often rose above their own limitations to preside over the historic tasks of demobilisation and reconstruction after World War II.
They set in train social, political, economic and eventually cultural changes that eventually transformed what was a stolid white provincial Anglo-Celtic society mired in myths of male mateship and democracy. Pre-war Australia today looks remote and distant, its development somehow arrested by recurring hardship and the limited vision of its leaders.
Macintyre shows how the groundwork for reconstruction was laid by John Curtin in 1942 while the war was still raging. He was persuaded to establish the Department of Post-War Reconstruction under Chifley and staffed with the best and most far-sighted officials.
Chifley’s overarching vision was of a heavily planned and managed social democracy which would ameliorate the effects of poverty and unemployment. Australia would become a benign, caring and redistributive State in which poorer workers would be protected (although, as Macintyre points out, indigenous Australians remained invisible).
Much pioneering work was done: there was Coombs’ famous white paper on full employment. Great efforts were made to assist farmers. Health, education, child support and pharmaceutical benefits were all expanded—although conservative and other special interest resistance forced compromises.
The return of hundreds of thousands of demobilised troops imposed huge pressure on resources; as did the pent-up demand that had mounted during six years of war. Macintyre details the demand for housing, health care, education, retraining, employment and other benefits that prompted publication of the free booklet ‘Return To Civil Life’.
Macintyre concludes that demobilisation went ‘remarkably smoothly’. But the national economic and the foreign policy environments were unremittingly rough and threatening. Labour shortages led to pressure for wage rises and to damaging strikes by public transport workers, stevedores and coal-miners. The rise and influence of communist officials in trade unions coincided with what Macintyre calls the pernicious effects of the Cold War.
Australia’s alliances were strained when Chifley opposed the US policy of containment of Communist power. In 1946 Australia agreed to collaborate with the UK to set up the Woomera rocket range to develop and test long-range missiles. Breaches of security in Australia prompted the Americans in 1948 to suspend the flow of classified information to Australia. Chifley responded by setting up the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
The election of the Menzies government and the ANZUS treaty finally brought Australia firmly into the American orbit as the political and ideological outlines of modern Australia came into clearer focus.
The point is that wars don’t end when hostilities end and the instruments of surrender are signed. Wars transform societies that fight them; they transform leaders and followers for good and ill. For winners and losers they create the immense problems and immense opportunities involved in defining the content and quality of the peace.
Australia’s post-war leaders responded to these challenges by pursuing visionary principles with pragmatic policies. The pivot, as Macintrye admiringly calls him, was Chifley who ‘set terms of political legitimacy that lasted until the 1980s’. It was a remarkable achievement and well worth Macintyre’s elegant and detailed retelling.
General MacArthur on the US pivot to Oz
Turn to Douglas MacArthur for a tough and true description of what Australia means to the United States.
It’s 1942. The US commander is meeting Australia’s Prime Minister John Curtin to plan the war against Japan and America’s new alliance with Australia.
MacArthur tells Curtin that America sees Australians as a bunch of bronzed Brits, tied to Britain by blood, sentiment and allegiance to the Crown. That analysis shows its age, but MacArthur’s following thoughts resonate today as they did 72 years ago:
The United States was an ally whose aim was to win the war, and it had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia. …In view of the strategical importance of Australia in war with Japan, this course of military action would probably be followed irrespective of the American relationship to the people who might be occupying Australia.
Tough messages needed at AUSMIN
Australia’s new Foreign and Defence Ministers will sit down for the first time with their US counterparts in Washington on Wednesday (Thursday morning Australian time) at the annual AUSMIN consultations. Julie Bishop and David Johnston, along with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, will say that the alliance relationship is strong and that the two countries have many strategic interests in common.
The reality is that Canberra and Washington each harbour doubts about the other’s strength of commitment to alliance cooperation. Both countries should use AUSMIN to assure themselves that they really are committed to current plans increasing defence engagement.
2% of GDP: it might be logical, but is it rational?
Remarkably, there’s now bipartisanship in Australian Defence. Both major parties agree that the Defence Budget should be 2% of GDP. The only difference is the timing in getting there. While some express doubts, there’s a certain logic to this position. Its rationality is less easily discerned.
Logically this declaration cuts through worries about strategy or the ADF’s role. There are some who see the Defence budget as buying insurance; the more you buy, the less you’ll lose if some predetermined event occurs. Seen this way it’s just like car insurance—spend a bit and get third party, spend more for comprehensive, spend even more and cover the windscreen, lower the excess and so on. The attraction of this risk management policy is that it avoids having to have a strategy. And devising strategies are intellectually demanding. We’re still recycling Paul Dibb’s 1987 deterrence by denial strategy—even though the Cold War has ended, China’s risen, the Arab Spring has come (and gone?) and cyber war is the new black. Read more
The Alliance is dead, long live the Alliance
Our well-worn alliance with the US ceased to exist a little while ago, at least in the way we’ve known it for several decades. The familiar parameters within which Australia operated for many years have now vanished. Today, new ones have arisen that will shape the alliance’s future. This new beginning will progressively impact Australian defence, foreign and domestic policies in many ways, some quite fundamental.
A child of the Cold War, the US–Australia alliance reflected American implementation of its containment grand strategy and Australian concerns over a revanchist Japan. When the ANZUS treaty was signed in 1951, Menzies’s foreign minister, Percy Spender considered it a disappointment compared with the NATO treaty signed only two years earlier. Under the NATO treaty, an attack on a signatory firmly committed the US to respond militarily in the threatened country’s defence. ANZUS, in contrast, only committed the US to consultations in times of crisis. Moreover, Spender was also frustrated that the US was unreceptive to the idea of Australian military personnel being involved with the American joint staff in operational defence planning. Spender considered ANZUS a base-level document that would need upgrading later, although this never eventuated. Read more
Alliances: three cheers for the Anglosphere
Almost inevitably, I find myself disagreeing with another column by Hugh White, this time in The Age newspaper of 9 July, in which he damns the foreign policy of the Gillard government, condemns the poverty of Tony Abbott’s thought on the issue and praises the perspicacity of Kevin Rudd, because he ‘understands’ the effect of strategic change in Asia. That’s a target rich environment, but I’ll limit my rebuttal to just one aspect of Hugh’s piece: his casual dismissal of the Anglosphere:
[Abbott’s] deepest commitment is to the ‘Anglosphere’—the agreeable idea that the world should continue to be run from Washington and London, by people just like us. In Washington last year he went so far as to say that ‘few Australians would regard America as a foreign country’. This is a very strange thing for a national leader to say. Indeed for sheer sentimental silliness it ranks with Gillard’s words to Congress: ‘America can do anything’.
A more cursory dismissal of a core Australian strategic interest would be hard to find, although it has to be said that the Anglosphere is one of those international institutions about which it’s cool to sneer. So old fashioned. So, well, English. How can this relic of an old order have a place in the Asian Century? The short answer is because the Anglosphere demonstrates itself time and time again to be the engine of global order and the essential enforcer of international stability, even at a time of sweeping strategic change. Read more
Nuclear disarmament: be careful what you wish for
Because I’m not prone to ‘all or nothing’ thinking, I’ve never subscribed to the view that Australia can’t advance a sensible agenda for arms control because of our alliance relationship with the United States. But that appears to be the position of Tim Wright, who rather admires the disarmament credentials of Mexico and Chile at the same time dismissing Australia’s approach because of our hosting of the Joint Facilities and other bomb-snuggling behaviour. In this reasoning, nothing short of a nuclear-weapon free defence posture is acceptable, along with a total ban on nuclear weapons, thus making it possible for us to join progressive Latin Americans and New Zealand.
We should be clear what this approach would actually mean in terms of alliance relations with the United States. Preventing access to US ships and aircraft because they might be carrying nuclear weapons would bring us to an immediate crisis in alliance relations, probably serious enough to break the relationship. New Zealand’s ban on port access led to an almost 30 year freeze in defence relations. That rift is only just being repaired now and the port access question (of US ships visiting New Zealand, but not the other way around) remains unfinished business. New Zealand might have been independent and nuclear free during the freeze, but it was also mostly inconsequential in global security terms, including on disarmament and had only a limited effect on regional security matters. Australia would not get off so lightly, not least because we’ve worked hard to make the alliance closer in recent years. Read more