It isn’t often that US think tanks put pen to paper about Australian strategic and defence policy. All the more reason, then, for us to look closely at those reports that are published, just to see how our American friends interpret the diverse range of signals that emit from both official and non-official sources here. A recent report by the US Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) is noteworthy in this respect. The report bears the bold title, ‘Gateway to the Indo-Pacific: Australian Defense Strategy and the Future of the Australia-U.S. Alliance’, and two of its three authors (Jim Thomas and Zack Cooper) have previous government experience. So readers might reasonably expect to find here a carefully nuanced assessment of the many tangled threads of Australian strategic thinking, especially those that apply to the future of the ANZUS alliance. But I must say I was disappointed in my expectations. Much of the report is narrow and operational in its focus, and Australian strategic policy appears as a caricature of itself.

I think the report places too much emphasis, right at the start, on a judgment that shifts in geopolitics have moved Australia from ‘down under’ to ‘top-centre’ in terms of geopolitical importance. This thesis has previously been associated with the work of Iskander Rehman, the CSBA report’s third author. (His report for the Transatlantic Academy in May 2011 (PDF) has the same central themes.) The thesis wasn’t true when it was first advanced and hasn’t become more so with the passage of time. Australia doesn’t become ‘top-centre’ under the likely shifts in geopolitical power, even allowing for a south-westerly drift of the regional balance point in Asia—strategic weight will remain concentrated in the northern hemisphere. Read more

The 1990 classic film Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts was full of great lines, but the best belonged to veteran actor Ralph Bellamy near the end of the film. Bellamy plays the role of James Morse, an aging naval shipbuilder under threat from ruthless corporate raider Edward Lewis (played by Richard Gere). After falling for the charm of Vivian Ward (played memorably by Julia Roberts) he relents and, rather than strip the assets from Morse’s firm, he goes into business with him. Morse strides out of the meeting with Lewis to announce:

Mr Lewis and I are going to build ships together, great big ships.

The point about Pretty Woman is that it’s Gere’s character who receives redemption not Julia Roberts’, and this is the moment in the film when we know that he has. It’s a feel-good moment. Director Garry Marshall’s choice of naval shipbuilding was no accident. Gere’s character could not have been made good by going halves in a napalm plant or land mine factory. Of all the areas of defence production, naval shipbuilding is probably the most wholesome and surely the most iconic.

As an unavoidably labour-intensive activity, shipbuilding also captures the imagination of politicians eager to ‘create’ jobs. It also turns regular defence bureaucrats into central planners worthy of the Soviet Union. In a little over a decade, there’ve been two attempts by Defence to put out a long-term plan for naval shipbuilding in Australia. Read more