‘It is up to all of us to work towards a strategic equilibrium in the region.’

— Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Singapore, July 2022

The Asian century isn’t turning out how Australia had hoped.

A decade ago, Australia embraced Asia’s dynamism and sweeping change.

Today, the dynamism still delivers, but on the change front we’re desperately seeking a balance of power and some equilibrium. The region pulses with superpower competition, political nervousness, diplomatic neuralgia and strategic angst.

The road has got rough in the 10 years since Australian optimism was defined by the ‘scale and pace’ of Asia’s ‘extraordinary ascent’, a ‘truly transformative’ period that’d deliver ‘a new phase of deeper and broader engagement’. Next month marks the 10th anniversary of that happy deeper-and-broader vision, expressed in a white paper titled Australia in the Asian century.

Download the Asian century report here and recall the ambitious 2012 roadmap from Julia Gillard’s Labor government, with its confident statement:

Beijing and Washington both want to develop constructive relations and avoid conflict: their governments have consistently said so; the intensity, structure and sophistication of their engagement, often underestimated, has shown it; and they have deeply interlinked interests that will push them that way.

We are optimistic about the ability of China and the US to manage strategic change in the region.

The US would ‘remain the most powerful strategic actor in Asia for the foreseeable future,’ the white paper predicted, even as China and India were ‘changing the established strategic order’.

The confident liberal internationalism of Australia in the Asian century flavoured but did not dominate Gillard’s defence white paper the following year. Indeed, the 2013 white paper was the moment when Canberra adopted ‘Indo-Pacific’ as both geographic and strategic frame, and the ‘Asian century’ usage started to ebb.

By the time of the 2016 defence white paper, Australia was desperately worried about the international rules of the road. The white paper used ‘rules’ 64 times—48 of them in the formulation ‘rules-based global order’. Canberra fretted under headings that read ‘The rules-based global order’, ‘A stable Indo-Pacific region and a rules-based global order’, and ‘Australia’s interests in a rules-based global order’.

The 2017 foreign policy white offered bright hopes but dark visions: ‘Today, China is challenging America’s position.’ The paper affirmed the US alliance, expressing Canberra’s faith that the US would stay top dog: ‘The Australian Government judges that the United States’ long-term interests will anchor its economic and security engagement in the Indo–Pacific.’

The last time I heard ‘Asian century’ get a gallop in Canberra was in 2017 from Labor’s shadow foreign minister, Penny Wong. If Labor won the 2019 election, she said, it’d adopt much of the tone and intent of Australia in the Asian century. Wong was a member of the cabinet that adopted the white paper and it forms part of her policy memory and political geography; trouble is, the times and the terrain have changed.

That tough reality is captured in the new Labor government’s mantra about continuity of defence and foreign policy delivered with a different tone.

The first two Asia speeches delivered by Wong as foreign minister, in Singapore and Malaysia, both hinge on the phrase ‘strategic equilibrium’. The aim, she says, is ‘an order framed by a strategic equilibrium where countries are not forced to choose but can make their own sovereign choices, including about their alignments and partnerships’.

In Singapore, Wong pointed to the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus as structures for regional engagement: ‘Not to solve all its problems, but to give space to states which have a legitimate interest in the region to contribute to a strategic equilibrium.’

The same theme is in Wong’s earlier Malaysia speech, placing ASEAN at the centre of the Indo-Pacific and thus at the centre of the balancing effort:

We are diverse nations, but we all agree that we want to live in a region that is stable, prosperous and respectful of sovereignty. Where disputes are guided by international law and norms, not by power and size. A region that is peaceful and predictable. These are the same principles articulated in the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. Achieving this requires a strategic equilibrium in the region. ASEAN is the foundation of this equilibrium—it is the centre of the Indo-Pacific region.

In seeking balance, Wong has several times nominated the US and ASEAN as ‘indispensable’.

The discussion of China, though, is a call for responsibility. Wong quotes former prime minister Paul Keating on the need for China ‘to accept and respect restraints on the way it uses its immense strength’, and Singapore’s PM Lee Hsien Loong on the need for China ‘to wield this strength with restraint and legitimacy’.

Increasingly over the past decade, Australian rules-and-order references have become a lament for what’s going or gone.

Rules are what we’d prefer. Order is what we need. For the moment, just getting to equilibrium is what we’re working at.

Attention has often focused on China’s undersea fleet of conventional and nuclear-powered submarines, as an integral component of an anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) complex that also includes shore-based aircraft, land-attack and anti-ship missiles, integrated air defences, an extensive sea mining capability, and enabling assets. More recently, observers point to China’s recently commissioned Liaoning aircraft carrier—currently undergoing sea trials and landing exercises—as a move in a different direction towards a blue-water fleet.

It is therefore refreshing to see Sam Roggeveen’s recent posts in The Interpreter that brings some needed attention to China’s fleet of advanced frigates and destroyers, now being produced in greater numbers even as its submarine inventory has apparently plateaued. He offers the provocative argument that Beijing is turning away from A2/AD (and in a purely maritime context, sea denial) for the more ambitious objective of sea control—or perhaps that it simply sees its existing anti-access capabilities as ‘good enough’. Read more

There are all sorts of reasons that the Persian Emperor Darius I finally decided he’d had enough and prepared to invade Greece. After all, it was probably just a matter of time before the noisy, quarrelsome inhabitants of that rugged, mountainous and impoverished backwater finally came to the attention of the most powerful man the world had ever seen.

Today we think of Darius the Great as Persian but, as ruler of the Achaemenid Empire, he was hailed as ruler throughout the known world—from Egypt to Iran; from Thrace to Scythia. The key primary source ‘document’ of his reign is actually a massive inscription carved, high up on a rock cliff, on the old road to Babylon. It’s 15 metres high by 25 meters wide—but the key point for us is that, just like the Rosetta Stone, it’s a proclamation in three languages: Persian, Babylonian and Elamite. Darius’ Empire was so great that translation was necessary to ensure that he was understood. Read more

When talking about current defence and security matters there seems strong agreement on at least one characteristic: that the future is uncertain. Of course that’s true, and many things could potentially happen but, even so, what does this uncertainty mean for Defence?

Defence could choose a single future scenario, press on with that and hope for the best. A fundamental problem in basing force development on a particular anticipated future is that if those specific circumstances don’t eventuate, the force acquired might prove quite ineffective. This happened to Australia in the grim days of 1942. The inter-war emphasis on acquiring warships to be based in Singapore to undertake coalition naval operations (PDF) proved completely inappropriate to the actual circumstances that eventuated. Precious time and resources were squandered preparing for an eventuality that didn’t happen, while consuming resources that could have created the force structure that was actually needed. Read more

The 2013 Defence White Paper says that: ‘There is no credible risk of Australia’s national interests in the Southern Ocean and the Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) being challenged in ways that might require substantial military responses over the next few decades’. But in the decades to come, major military conflict between the major powers could well have an Antarctic dimension, given the possible role of Antarctic bases in surveillance and satellite monitoring. There’s also the possible scenario where we might have to deal with illegal, unreported or unregulated resource exploitation in our territory or elsewhere in Antarctica.

Over recent weeks, contributors to The Strategist have looked at a range of issues relating to our Antarctic policy, and have set out a cluster of major national interests that we pursue in the Antarctic. These include sustaining opportunities for critical scientific research and cooperation, resource conservation and environmental protection, and geostrategic interests that involve economic and security considerations. The last relates to maintaining a stable political and legal order in the region, especially the demilitarisation of the continent, that’s dependent on the preservation of the Antarctic treaty.

The Antarctic treaty is the international vehicle through which we pursue our polar interests. It continues to serve our national interests well, particularly in offsetting any latent conflicts over territorial claims. This year’s Defence White Paper points out that in coming decades the Antarctic treaty might come under pressure as resources become scarcer elsewhere. The Madrid Protocol forbids exploration and exploitation of Antarctic minerals but, as Pat Quilty’s post noted, ‘Ultimately, resources of sufficient strategic or economic value will be exploited for a resource hungry world. International agreements can always be re-negotiated’. Our diplomatic efforts to protect and advance the Antarctic treaty are being diminished by shrinking resources in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has responsibility for leading our delegations in treaty meetings. (This year’s budget subjects DFAT to significant efficiency measures.) Read more