Tag Archive for: Britain in the Indo-Pacific

By filling gaps, Britain shows the way for Pacific islands’ second-level supporters

Britain is becoming a model of what a smaller partner in the Pacific should be. Since announcing its Pacific Uplift policy five years ago, Britain has taken small but stable steps in building its presence and delivering support, with a focus on filling in gaps in the assistance delivered by like-minded primary security partners in the region, such as Australia, the US, New Zealand and France. 

While it will never be one of the largest partners in the region—nor should its focus stray too far from threats closer to home—this is how Britain can best maximise the value of its support, ensuring that its engagements and programs don’t overlap with existing assistance and that they build on existing networks.  

This means listening to Pacific partners and like-minded diplomatic and security officials in the countries to understand where others aren’t already delivering support and then financing projects, delivering training, providing humanitarian and disaster relief supplies and bringing in supporting ships where and when they are most needed. 

Britain is already doing many of these things well but on a small scale. Now it is time to build on the successful initiatives it has implemented in the region and solidify its place as a leader of smaller partners.  

By its own admission, Britain stepped too far away from the Pacific in the century. In 2019, with Brexit looming months ahead, it sought to signal to the Pacific region its intent to revitalise its engagement and support. The Pacific Uplift, aligned with Australia’s Pacific Step Up and New Zealand’s Pacific Reset, saw expansion of British diplomatic presence and led to deployment of two Royal Navy patrol ships to the Indo-Pacific in 2021. 

By opening or re-opening three more high commissions, Britain now has six embassy-level missions in the region, behind only Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China and the US. But as a development partner, it is further behind.  

Data from the Lowy Insitute’s Pacific Aid Map shows that in 2021, the latest year for which figures are available, Britain ranked 17th among donors to the region, although its former contributions through EU aid are counted separately. Many of the largest UK projects since data collection began in 2008 were focused on support to the British overseas territory of the Pitcairn Islands. 

Money talks in the Pacific, but it isn’t the only way to have a positive impact there. Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu, like Australia and New Zealand, are Commonwealth realms with King Charles III as head of state. Six other Pacific countries—Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu—are also members of the Commonwealth. 

Through the Commonwealth, Pacific island countries pursue common goals and values with Britain and other like-minded countries on a range of security issues—for example, by participating in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association’s Conference on AI, Disinformation and Parliament. Samoa will host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in October this year.  

Britain’s engagement isn’t as heavily scrutinized as that of Australia or the US. Likely reasons include its scale of engagement and the modest level of popular interest. Sentiment analysis of online comments in Pacific island countries demonstrates that, despite being part of AUKUS, Britain is rarely, if ever, singled out for criticism or comment when security pact is discussed.   

By not being bogged down in long-standing assistance packages and geopolitical tensions, Britain has been able to be agile in its approach and has so far listened well to the needs of the Pacific. 

British renewable energy and climate-change adaptation projects work to address the single greatest threat to the region. Alongside initiatives like providing media training through BBC Media Action to Solomon Islands, these activities demonstrate British commitment to reinforcing efforts of the Pacific’s other development partners or filling gaps that they’re not addressing. 

Britain’s defence engagements are similarly aimed at providing value without adding immensely to the burden of time-constrained Pacific security forces and governments, which welcome greater assistance but cannot give more time to its delivery at the cost of other commitments.  

In 2021, the patrol ships HMS Spey and Tamar were deployed to the Indo-pacific region for at least five years. Their crews train alongside Britain’s allies, carrying out maritime security and constabulary patrols to address transnational issues such as smuggling, terrorism and other illegal activities and undertake defence engagement visits across Pacific island countries, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. 

As well as undertaking smaller operations, since 2022 the ships have participated in Pacific Partnerships, the largest annual multinational preparedness mission for humanitarian and disaster relief conducted in the Indo-Pacific. In the 2022 mission, Tamar worked alongside nearly 1500 personnel from Australia, the US and Japan in Palau and the Philippines. 

Coordination is essential in a crisis, as when the submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apia’s  eruption climaxed in January 2022. Spey moved to Tahiti to collect relief stores to be offloaded in Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, and Britain also coordinated for additional assistance to be delivered on Australia’s HMAS Adelaide.  

The presence of the patrol ships has also enabled Britain to pursue shiprider agreements in the region, in which countries mix personnel and vessels to bolster local constabulary work. Spey visited Fiji in March 2022 to for the signing of a shiprider memorandum of understanding in which the Royal Navy and Fijian civil and military maritime authorities will cooperate in combatting such illegal maritime activity as illegal fishing and drug smuggling. Putting this agreement into practice, Tamar has just conducted a first joint patrol with New Zealand and Fiji, operating in Fiji’s exclusive economic zone. 

If Britain wanted to step up further in this space, it should commit more ships to the region, and, like Australia, seek to develop a stronger maritime advisory presence. 

Britain is leading the way in demonstrating how secondary supporters of Pacific island countries can offer boutique, highly skilled and well targeted assistance packages. Now it’s time to focus on scaling up that assistance to reach more countries across the region more frequently. 

Australia and Britain deepen defence cooperation, but are they allies?

Australia and Britain have concluded a new treaty-level Defence and Security Cooperation Agreement (DSCA). To what extent does this move the dial of their close defence relationship towards a formal alliance? This question matters because the informal, customary nature of the Australia-UK relationship may no longer be appropriate for the strategic tests that lie ahead. 

The answer is that they’ve moved significantly closer to becoming de facto allies, with commitments that approach, though do not quite reach, the level of Australia’s alliance with the US, ANZUS. Also, Anglo-Australian military cooperation is intensifying. 

The DSCA includes a clause that, according to Friday’s AUKMIN joint statement, codifies ‘the established practice of consulting on issues affecting our sovereignty and regional security’. This may not sound like much of an elevation on the face of it, but then Article III of the ANZUS treaty is similarly based on an agreement to consult. ANZUS Article IV further commits both parties to ‘act to meet the common danger’. The Australia-UK DSCA may not be so explicit in terms of its commitments, but the process of closer coordination it has initiated is still likely to be consequential, including the establishment of regular staff talks to discuss and coordinate collective action in response to the most pressing threats in each country’s region.  

The other noteworthy point about the DSCA is that it includes a status of forces agreement (SOFA), to smooth two-way access for the armed forces of both countries. This is the first time that Britain has concluded a NATO-standard SOFA outside of NATO. While the DSCA is not yet in the public domain, the SOFA is apparently more legally permissive than the reciprocal access agreements that Australia and Britain have each separately signed with Japan. 

The decision to upgrade the existing Anglo-Australian defence agreement follows a steady convergence of strategic outlooks and deepening defence activities over the past five years. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said this week that Australia’s relationship with Britain had become ‘much more strategic’. He also noted that that the ‘UK has a much greater presence in the Indo-Pacific than we have seen in a very long time.’ 

Yet many Australian commentators remain unconvinced that Britain is, or can be, a consequential and durable security partner for Australia. These doubts have seeped into criticisms of AUKUS that have intensified in recent weeks, including questions about British industrial ability to deliver on the SSN-AUKUS project. 

Despite the advent of the DSCA and a flurry of defence and security announcements around last week’s AUKMIN meeting, including confirmation that BAE Systems will build the SSN-AUKUS submarines, Marles and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong stopped short of describing Britain as an ally. That remains a bridge too far for the Australian government, possibly for political reasons as well as legalistic ones, since Labor has more Anglosceptic tendencies than the Liberal and National parties. 

Nevertheless, AUKMIN confirmed that the two sides share closely aligned threat perceptions and a strong belief in the inter-connectedness of the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic. 

The impetus to upgrade their defence relations is mutual. The 2023 DSR contains a little-noticed but clear demand signal from Australia that ‘engagement with the United Kingdom in the Indo-Pacific must be enhanced, including through AUKUS.’ 

While the bilateral defence relationship has been generally a comfortable one, underpinned by a common professional military culture, it has waxed and waned in intensity. Since 2021, AUKUS has played an important forcing function, motivating Britain and Australia to formalise and elevate their bilateral defence interactions to a level closer to the alliance relations that each has with the United States.  

And AUKUS is significantly more than just a capability development and technology-sharing initiative. It commits the US and Britain to forward deploy submarines, in an arrangement called ‘Submarine Rotational Force—West’ (SRF-West), from the late 2020s. This is as part of triangulated strategic effort to close Australia’s submarine capability gap and bolster deterrence. Britain’s commitment to send one of its seven Astute-class submarines to SRF-West was the major driver on the UK side behind the new SOFA. This is how allies behave.  

The bilateral defence relationship has meanwhile grown alongside AUKUS. Ministers agreed at AUKMIN to enhance cooperation on amphibious and littoral manoeuvre. Later this year, Britain’s Littoral Response Group—South and a Commando contingent will be involved in the annual Predators Run exercise in Australia with US and Australian forces. This will build on the Royal Gurkha Rifles’ participation in Exercise Predators Walk last year. Next year, Britain’s Carrier Strike Group will take part in another exercise, Talisman Sabre, marking an important certification milestone for the aircraft carriers of the Queen Elizabeth class. It was also announced at AUKMIN that Britain will contribute personnel to the Combined Intelligence Centre within the Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation. Australia, for its part, is continuing to send military personnel to Britain for AUKUS-related activities and to train Ukrainian troops there. 

Australian and British armed forces have in recent decades had only limited overlap in frontline equipment, but commonality is now growing, enhancing inter-operability. Under the Seedcorn program, British crews are embedded in Australia learning to operate the E-7 Wedgetail air-surveillance aircraft. Britain, like Australia, already operates the P-8 and F-35. Their two navies will both operate frigates based on the Type 26 and a common AUKUS submarine design. Both armies will also operate the Boxer armoured fighting vehicle. 

Large-scale industrial collaboration should further help to undergird the Anglo-Australian defence partnership. Work on the Hunter frigate program and SSN-AUKUS will endure for decades. AUKUS Pillar I will require careful coordination to ensure workforce mobility across all three partner nations without poaching. 

After a long period of semi-absence from the region, the British government has delivered convincingly on the defence components of its so-called tilt to the Indo-Pacific. The next challenge for Whitehall, affirmed in last year’s Integrated Review Refresh, is to make an Indo-Pacific presence a permanent part of British strategic settings.  

British general elections are due later this year, but UK Labour is solidly behind AUKUS and understands the need to remain deeply and broadly engaged in the Indo-Pacific. A change of government should help with political alignment. 

If Labour wins, it will inherit AUKUS, Britain’s Dialogue Partner status with ASEAN, and older parts of the regional defence architecture where the UK and Australia have long worked closely together, such as the Five Power Defence Arrangements (which the AUKMIN ministers endorsed as an anchor of peace and stability in the region). 

Doubts about the willingness of British governments to fund defence adequately are perennial, but many of the most effective military elements of the UK tilt to the Indo-Pacific have been delivered on a shoestring. What matters most is maintaining a political consensus that a persistent British defence presence in the Indo-Pacific is important to sustaining the UK’s long-term security and prosperity. 

The UK is more strategically aligned with Australia now than at any time since the early 1960s or even earlier. Their shared path might never take the form of a de jure alliance, but, as last week’s developments demonstrate, they are well on track to becoming de facto allies. 

Australia and Britain deepen defence cooperation, but are they allies?

Australia and Britain have concluded a new treaty-level Defence and Security Cooperation Agreement (DSCA). To what extent does this move the dial of their close defence relationship towards a formal alliance? This question matters because the informal, customary nature of the Australia-UK relationship may no longer be appropriate for the strategic tests that lie ahead. 

The answer is that they’ve moved significantly closer to becoming de facto allies, with commitments that approach, though do not quite reach, the level of Australia’s alliance with the US, ANZUS. Also, Anglo-Australian military cooperation is intensifying. 

The DSCA includes a clause that, according to Friday’s AUKMIN joint statement, codifies ‘the established practice of consulting on issues affecting our sovereignty and regional security’. This may not sound like much of an elevation on the face of it, but then Article III of the ANZUS treaty is similarly based on an agreement to consult. ANZUS Article IV further commits both parties to ‘act to meet the common danger’. The Australia-UK DSCA may not be so explicit in terms of its commitments, but the process of closer coordination it has initiated is still likely to be consequential, including the establishment of regular staff talks to discuss and coordinate collective action in response to the most pressing threats in each country’s region.  

The other noteworthy point about the DSCA is that it includes a status of forces agreement (SOFA), to smooth two-way access for the armed forces of both countries. This is the first time that Britain has concluded a NATO-standard SOFA outside of NATO. While the DSCA is not yet in the public domain, the SOFA is apparently more legally permissive than the reciprocal access agreements that Australia and Britain have each separately signed with Japan. 

The decision to upgrade the existing Anglo-Australian defence agreement follows a steady convergence of strategic outlooks and deepening defence activities over the past five years. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said this week that Australia’s relationship with Britain had become ‘much more strategic’. He also noted that that the ‘UK has a much greater presence in the Indo-Pacific than we have seen in a very long time.’ 

Yet many Australian commentators remain unconvinced that Britain is, or can be, a consequential and durable security partner for Australia. These doubts have seeped into criticisms of AUKUS that have intensified in recent weeks, including questions about British industrial ability to deliver on the SSN-AUKUS project. 

Despite the advent of the DSCA and a flurry of defence and security announcements around last week’s AUKMIN meeting, including confirmation that BAE Systems will build the SSN-AUKUS submarines, Marles and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong stopped short of describing Britain as an ally. That remains a bridge too far for the Australian government, possibly for political reasons as well as legalistic ones, since Labor has more Anglosceptic tendencies than the Liberal and National parties. 

Nevertheless, AUKMIN confirmed that the two sides share closely aligned threat perceptions and a strong belief in the inter-connectedness of the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic. 

The impetus to upgrade their defence relations is mutual. The 2023 DSR contains a little-noticed but clear demand signal from Australia that ‘engagement with the United Kingdom in the Indo-Pacific must be enhanced, including through AUKUS.’ 

While the bilateral defence relationship has been generally a comfortable one, underpinned by a common professional military culture, it has waxed and waned in intensity. Since 2021, AUKUS has played an important forcing function, motivating Britain and Australia to formalise and elevate their bilateral defence interactions to a level closer to the alliance relations that each has with the United States.  

And AUKUS is significantly more than just a capability development and technology-sharing initiative. It commits the US and Britain to forward deploy submarines, in an arrangement called ‘Submarine Rotational Force—West’ (SRF-West), from the late 2020s. This is as part of triangulated strategic effort to close Australia’s submarine capability gap and bolster deterrence. Britain’s commitment to send one of its seven Astute-class submarines to SRF-West was the major driver on the UK side behind the new SOFA. This is how allies behave.  

The bilateral defence relationship has meanwhile grown alongside AUKUS. Ministers agreed at AUKMIN to enhance cooperation on amphibious and littoral manoeuvre. Later this year, Britain’s Littoral Response Group—South and a Commando contingent will be involved in the annual Predators Run exercise in Australia with US and Australian forces. This will build on the Royal Gurkha Rifles’ participation in Exercise Predators Walk last year. Next year, Britain’s Carrier Strike Group will take part in another exercise, Talisman Sabre, marking an important certification milestone for the aircraft carriers of the Queen Elizabeth class. It was also announced at AUKMIN that Britain will contribute personnel to the Combined Intelligence Centre within the Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation. Australia, for its part, is continuing to send military personnel to Britain for AUKUS-related activities and to train Ukrainian troops there. 

Australian and British armed forces have in recent decades had only limited overlap in frontline equipment, but commonality is now growing, enhancing inter-operability. Under the Seedcorn program, British crews are embedded in Australia learning to operate the E-7 Wedgetail air-surveillance aircraft. Britain, like Australia, already operates the P-8 and F-35. Their two navies will both operate frigates based on the Type 26 and a common AUKUS submarine design. Both armies will also operate the Boxer armoured fighting vehicle. 

Large-scale industrial collaboration should further help to undergird the Anglo-Australian defence partnership. Work on the Hunter frigate program and SSN-AUKUS will endure for decades. AUKUS Pillar I will require careful coordination to ensure workforce mobility across all three partner nations without poaching. 

After a long period of semi-absence from the region, the British government has delivered convincingly on the defence components of its so-called tilt to the Indo-Pacific. The next challenge for Whitehall, affirmed in last year’s Integrated Review Refresh, is to make an Indo-Pacific presence a permanent part of British strategic settings.  

British general elections are due later this year, but UK Labour is solidly behind AUKUS and understands the need to remain deeply and broadly engaged in the Indo-Pacific. A change of government should help with political alignment. 

If Labour wins, it will inherit AUKUS, Britain’s Dialogue Partner status with ASEAN, and older parts of the regional defence architecture where the UK and Australia have long worked closely together, such as the Five Power Defence Arrangements (which the AUKMIN ministers endorsed as an anchor of peace and stability in the region). 

Doubts about the willingness of British governments to fund defence adequately are perennial, but many of the most effective military elements of the UK tilt to the Indo-Pacific have been delivered on a shoestring. What matters most is maintaining a political consensus that a persistent British defence presence in the Indo-Pacific is important to sustaining the UK’s long-term security and prosperity. 

The UK is more strategically aligned with Australia now than at any time since the early 1960s or even earlier. Their shared path might never take the form of a de jure alliance, but, as last week’s developments demonstrate, they are well on track to becoming de facto allies.