Tag Archive for: Foreign Policy

The trade routes vital to Australia’s economic security

A recurrent theme in Australia’s defence strategy has been our reliance on and need to defend Australia’s trade routes in a globalised world. The vulnerability of Australia’s limited stockpiles of critical goods and its concentrated sources of supply have driven military capability and planning for decades and remain a justification for strategic investments.

The 2023 Defence Strategic Review argued that the danger of any power threatening to invade the Australian continent was remote, but that an adversary could implement military coercion at a distance with threats against our trade and supply routes. With limited resources and finite defence capability, yet vast interests at sea, it’s important that Australian security and economic planning is trained on the most critical pain points in our sea lines of communication. Strategy and planning must derive from up-to-date and accurate data about what we trade, via which routes, and to and from which specific locations.

We also need to understand the factors that contribute to our resilience. They include the depth of supply options, the availability of alternative routes and the sheer strength in numbers which our shipping enjoys when it enters the mighty flow of commerce through the waters of our Asian trading partners. This report explores our trading routes in peace-time. Any conflict would bring sharper focus on what shipping and what trade is truly necessary and on what can be done to secure it. However, the strengths and vulnerabilities of our linkages to the world are evident now and are the focus of this report.

Concerns have been sharpened by the assaults by Houthi militias on commercial shipping through the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the entrance to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, disrupting the 12% of global trade that passes through those waters.2 In addition, drought has slashed the capacity of the Panama Canal, which in normal seasons handles a further 5% of world trade.

Surprisingly, the course and operation (who is moving what) of Australia’s trade routes has received extraordinarily little analysis. The last significant public paper on the topic was conducted by the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics (now the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, BITRE) in 2007 and was based on data from 2001 to 2004. The profile of Australia’s trade has changed radically since then. This report makes five key policy recommendations and the first of these is that the government fund BITRE to update its 2007 study of trade routes so that Defence can make assessments of how best to secure Australia’s trade routes.

A dangerous combination of complacency and tolerance could be born of a view that conflicts are in faraway locations. The reality is that few saw either of the current wars as imminent when they started, and we mustn’t make the same mistake in our region. A central finding in this report is that the greatest risk to the security of our trade routes lies relatively close to home, in the narrow channels through the Indonesian archipelago through which more than half Australia’s maritime trade must pass. Another strong conclusion is that trade has a surprising resilience in the face of conflict: it is important to understand the sources of that strength and develop plans to maximise it.

National resilience: lessons for Australian policy from international experience

The strategic circumstances that Australia contemplates over the coming decades present multiple, cascading and concurrent crises. Ensuring a safe and secure Australia, able to withstand the inevitable shocks that we’ll face into the future, will require a more comprehensive approach to strategy than we’ve adopted over the past seven decades. We can’t rely on the sureties of the past. The institutions, policies and architectures that have supported the nation to manage such crises in our history are no longer fit for purpose.

The report highlights lessons drawn from international responses to crisis, to assist policymakers build better responses to the interdependent and hyperconnected challenges that nations face. The report brings together the disciplines of disaster management, defence strategy and national security to examine what an integrated national approach to resilience looks like, and how national resilience thinking can help Australia build more effective and more efficient responses to crisis and change.

The report concludes that now is the time to commence action to deliver a national resilience framework for Australia. Collective, collaborative action, enabled by governments, built on the capability and capacity of Australian industry and the community, and aimed at the goal of a resilient Australia, can ensure that we’re well placed to face the future with confidence.

Where next for the Australia–South Korea partnership?

The strategic partnership between Australia and South Korea holds great potential in an increasingly challenging time. The two nations have many common strategic interests and both can rightly claim to be regional powers. However, the relationship remains a relative underperformer compared with other key regional relationships and has suffered from inconsistency. When Canberra’s contemporary relationship with Seoul receives attention from Australian analysts, it tends to be framed largely in the context of the threats posed by Pyongyang.

While some uncertainties remain over the long-term trajectory of South Korea’s foreign and security policy due to concerns that Seoul’s current vision is tied to the Yoon government as opposed to being embedded in longer-term statecraft, the structural basis for deeper engagement between Seoul and Canberra is sound. Investing in the relationship is in both nations’ interests. Building bureaucratic and commercial frameworks for cooperation now would help ensure that bilateral strategic alignment is less prone to future changes in government.

This paper assesses the Australia–South Korea partnership through the three-pillar structure outlined in the 2021 Australia-South Korea Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and offers recommendations for strengthening the relationship. These recommendations include furthering strategic cooperation by incrementally aligning key trilateral formats, developing bilateral cooperation in critical technologies including those relevant to AUKUS Pillar 2, and nurturing collaboration with respect to the Indo-Pacific clean energy transition.

Building whole-of-nation statecraft: How Australia can better leverage subnational diplomacy in the US alliance

Australia and the US are both federations of states in which power is shared constitutionally between the national and subnational levels of government. However, traditionally, one domain that hasn’t been considered a shared power, but rather the constitutionally enshrined responsibility of the national governments, has been international affairs (in the US Constitution through Article I, Section 10 and other clauses and in the Australian Constitution through section 51 (xxix), known as the external affairs power). For this reason, foreign-policy and national-security decision-makers in Washington DC and Canberra have rightly seen themselves as the prime actors in the policymaking that develops and strengthens the US–Australia alliance and all global relationships, with limited power held by subnational governments.

However, in our globalised and digital world, constitutional power no longer means that subnational governments have only narrow roles and influence on the international stage. While national governments will continue having primary responsibility for setting foreign policy, subnational governments have offices overseas, sign agreements with foreign governments, and regularly send diplomatic delegations abroad. Recent events, including the Covid-19 pandemic, have highlighted subnational governments’ decisive role in shaping, supporting, adapting to and implementing national and international policy. The pandemic, including post-pandemic trade promotion, demonstrated that the relationships between layers of governments in both federations are essential to national security, resilience, economic prosperity and social cohesion.

Subnational governments have vital roles to play in helping to maximise national capability, increase trust in democratic institutions, mitigate security threats and build broader and deeper relationships abroad. At the subnational level in Washington and Canberra, people-to-people, cultural and economic links create the deep connective tissue that maintains relationships, including those vital to the US-Australia alliance, no matter the politics of the day. But that subnational interaction must be consistent with national defence and foreign policy.

Australia’s federal system should help facilitate international engagement and incentivise positive engagement while ensuring that the necessary legislative and policy levers exist to require the subnational layer to conduct essential due diligence that prioritises the national interest. In this report, the authors make a series of policy recommendations that will support the development of such a framework.

‘Doing good deeds quietly’: The rise of intelligence diplomacy as a potent tool of statecraft

‘Intelligence diplomacy’ – using intelligence actors and relationships to conduct, or substantially facilitate, diplomatic relations – is a potent tool for statecraft; useful in specific circumstances to either enhance conventional diplomacy or create subtler lines of communication. Intelligence diplomacy, its increasing utility and potential hazards, is the subject of Doing good deeds quietly, the latest report from ASPI’s Statecraft & Intelligence Centre.

The report finds that governments turn to intelligence diplomacy when a variety of circumstances – and critically those governments’ assessments of related capabilities and effectiveness of their intelligence services – makes use of intelligence actors or relationships attractive and advantageous.

Furthermore, Doing good deeds quietly finds that governments should use intelligence diplomacy selectively and purposefully, in concert and collaboration with other arms of policy, and with robust, agreed policy objectives and parameters. They should also be wary of over-use, for the effective utility of intelligence diplomacy depends in part on prudent and selective application.

For politicians, policymakers and the interested public, understanding the important role intelligence diplomacy can play in international relations provides a fuller sense of what it is that intelligence agencies actually do in their name.

Incels in Australia: The ideology, the threat, and a way forward

This report explores the phenomenon of ‘incels’—involuntary celibates—and the misogynistic ideology that underpins a subset of this global community of men that has become a thriving Internet subculture. It examines how online spaces, from popular social media sites to dedicated incel forums, are providing a platform for not just the expansion of misogynistic views but gender-based violent extremism.

It raises key questions regarding Australian efforts to counter misogynistic ideologies within our nation. If there’s a continuum that has sexist, but lawful, views on gender at one end and gendered hate speech at the other, at what point does misogynistic ideology tip into acts of gendered violence? What’s needed to prevent misogynistic ideologies from becoming violent? And how do we, as a society, avoid the epidemic levels of violence against women in Australia?

This report doesn’t intend to provide answers to all of those questions. It does, however, seek to make an important contribution to public discourse about the increasing trend in misogynistic ideology through examination of a particularly violent community of misogynists, and proposes a range of policy options for consideration to tackle the threat that misogynistic ideology poses to Australia.

This report makes six recommendations designed to reduce and, where possible, prevent the risk of future occurrence of incel and similar violence in Australia. The recommendations include greater awareness raising and policy recognition that incel violence can be an ideological form of issue-motivated extremism which would provide certainty that incels could formally fall within the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)—in addition to law-enforcement agencies—and would encourage tailored education programs focused on engaging young males at risk from indoctrination in this extreme subculture (along with their parents).

An inflection point for Australian intelligence: Revisiting the 2004 Flood Report

The 2003 Iraq war, and more particularly intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi WMD, led to a broad-ranging inquiry into Australian intelligence conducted by Philip Flood AO. Flood’s July 2004 report has proven an inflection point between the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) of the immediate post–Cold War period and today’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Flood laid out an ambitious vision for Australian intelligence and forcefully advocated for sovereign intelligence capability. The scope of his review extended beyond more than ‘recent intelligence lessons’ – that is, Iraq’s WMD, the 2002 Bali bombings and the unrest that led to 2003’s Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands – to the effectiveness of oversight and accountability within the AIC (including priority setting), ‘division of labour’ between AIC agencies and their communications with each other, maintenance of contestability in intelligence assessments, and adequacy of resourcing (especially for the Office of National Assessments – ONA).

It was in addressing these matters that Flood laid the foundation for the future NIC, upon which would be constructed the reforms instituted by the L’Estrange-Merchant review of 2017.

Importantly, Flood’s recommendations significantly enhanced ONA’s capabilities—not just analytical resources but also the resources (and tasking) needed to address the more effective coordination and evaluation of foreign intelligence across the AIC. This was a critical step towards the more structured and institutionalised (if sometimes bureaucratic) NIC of 2023 and an enhanced community leadership role for, ultimately, ONI.

In addition, the Flood Report identified issues that remain pertinent and challenging today – including the vexed issue of the public presentation of intelligence for policy purposes, the central importance of the intelligence community’s people (including training, career management, recruitment and language proficiency), intelligence distribution (including avoiding overloading time-poor customers), the need to maximise collaborative opportunities between agencies, and how best to leverage intelligence relationships (including broadening relations beyond traditional allied partners).

Informing Australia’s next independent intelligence review: Learning from the past

The Australian Government commissions a review of its intelligence community every five to seven years. With July 2023 marking six years since release of the last review’s report and, with funding already allocated in this year’s federal budget, the next one is likely to commence shortly.

The best starting place for the forthcoming review is the work that precedes it, so reflection on 2017’s Independent Intelligence Review proves valuable. This report, Informing Australia’s next independent intelligence review, reflects on the experiences of the 2017 review and the implementation of its recommendations, and draws lessons to inform the terms of reference, approach and suggested focus of the next review.

In doing so the report identifies three broad topics upon which the next review can most profitably ground its work: attracting, building and retaining a skilled workforce; adapting to rapid and profound technological change; and leveraging more, and closer, partnerships. It also highlights how the past six years have raised important and challenging questions in relation to each of those broad topics and identifies opportunities to further advance the future performance of the National Intelligence Community. In addition, specific recommendations are made to inform government’s planning and preparation for the new review.

ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker

ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker – The global race for future power

The Critical Technology Tracker is a large data-driven project that now covers 64 critical technologies spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. It provides a leading indicator of a country’s research performance, strategic intent and potential future science and technology capability.

It first launched 1 March 2023 and underwent a major expansion on 28 August 2024 which took the dataset from five years (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years (2003–2023). Explore the website and the broader project here.

Governments and organisations interested in supporting this ongoing program of work, including further expansions and the addition of new technologies, can contact: criticaltech@aspi.org.au.

What’s the problem?

Western democracies are losing the global technological competition, including the race for scientific and research breakthroughs, and the ability to retain global talent—crucial ingredients that underpin the development and control of the world’s most important technologies, including those that don’t yet exist.

Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.

China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas.1 The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country.2 China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.3

A key area in which China excels is defence and space-related technologies. China’s strides in nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles reportedly took US intelligence by surprise in August 2021.4

Had a tool such as ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker been collecting and analysing this data two years ago, Beijing’s strong interest and leading research performance in this area would have been more easily identified…

Had a tool such as ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker been collecting and analysing this data two years ago, Beijing’s strong interest and leading research performance in this area would have been more easily identified, and such technological advances would have been less surprising. That’s because, according to our data analysis, over the past five years, China generated 48.49% of the world’s high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines, including hypersonics, and it hosts seven of the world’s top 10 research institutions in this topic area.

The US comes second in the majority of the 44 technologies examined in the Critical Technology Tracker. The US currently leads in areas such as high performance computing, quantum computing and vaccines. Our dataset reveals that there’s a large gap between China and the US, as the leading two countries, and everyone else. The data then indicates a small, second-tier group of countries led by India and the UK: other countries that regularly appear in this group—in many technological fields— include South Korea, Germany, Australia, Italy, and less often, Japan.

This project—including some of its more surprising findings—further highlights the gap in our understanding of the critical technology ecosystem, including its current trajectory. It’s important that we seek to fill this gap so we don’t face a future in which one or two countries dominate new and emerging industries (something that recently occurred in 5G technologies) and so countries have ongoing access to trusted and secure critical technology supply chains.

China’s overall research lead, and its dominant concentration of expertise across a range of strategic sectors, has short and long term implications for democratic nations. In the long term, China’s leading research position means that it has set itself up to excel not just in current technological development in almost all sectors, but in future technologies that don’t yet exist. Unchecked, this could shift not just technological development and control but global power and influence to an authoritarian state where the development, testing and application of emerging, critical and military technologies isn’t open and transparent and where it can’t be scrutinised by independent civil society and media.

In the more immediate term, that lead—coupled with successful strategies for translating research breakthroughs to commercial systems and products that are fed into an efficient manufacturing base—could allow China to gain a stranglehold on the global supply of certain critical technologies.

Such risks are exacerbated because of the willingness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to use coercive techniques5 outside of the global rules-based order to punish governments and businesses, including withholding the supply of critical technologies.6

What’s the solution?

These findings should be a wake-up call for democratic nations, who must rapidly pursue a strategic critical technology step-up.

Governments around the world should work both collaboratively and individually to catch up to China and, more broadly, they must pay greater attention to the world’s centre of technological innovation and strategic competition: the Indo-Pacific. While China is in front, it’s important for democracies to take stock of the power of their potential aggregate lead and the collective strengths of regions and groupings (for example the EU, the Quad and AUKUS, to name just a few examples). But such aggregate leads will only be fully realised through far deeper collaboration between partners and allies, greater investment in areas including R&D, talent and commercialisation, and more focused intelligence strategies. And, finally, governments must make more space for new, bigger and more creative policy ideas – the step-up in performance required demands no less.

Partners and allies need to step up and seriously consider things such as sovereign wealth funds at 0.5%–0.7% of gross national income providing venture capital, research and scale-up funding, with a sizable portion reserved for high-risk, high-reward ‘moonshots’ (big ideas). Governments should plan for:

  • technology visas, ‘friend-shoring’ and R&D grants between allies
  • a revitalisation of the university sector through specialised scholarships for students and technologists working at the forefront of critical technology research
  • restructuring taxation systems to divert private capital towards venture capital and scale-up efforts for promising new technologies
  • new public–private partnerships and centres of excellence to help to foster greater commercialisation opportunities.

Intelligence communities have a pivotal role to play in both informing decision-makers and building capability. One recommendation we make is that Five-Eyes countries, along with Japan, build an intelligence analytical centre focused on China and technology (starting with open-source intelligence).

We outline 23 policy recommendations for partners and allies to act on collaboratively and individually. They span across the four themes of investment and talent; global partnerships; intelligence; and moonshots. While China is in front, it’s important for democracies to take stock of their combined and complementary strengths. When added up, they have the aggregate lead in many technology areas.

  1. Visit the Critical Technology Tracker site for a list and explanation of these 44 technologies: techtracker.aspi.org.au/list-of-technologies. ↩︎
  2. Australian Signals Directorate, ‘Intelligence partnerships’, Australian Government, 2023 ↩︎
  3. See ‘China’s science and technology vision’ on page 14. ↩︎
  4. Demetri Sevastopulo, Kathrin Hille, ‘China tests new space capability with hypersonic missile’, Financial Times, 17 October 2021 ↩︎
  5. Fergus Hunter, Daria Impiombato, Yvonne Lau, Adam Triggs, Albert Zhang, Urmika Deb, ‘Countering China’s coercive diplomacy: prioritising economic security, sovereignty and the rules-based order’, ASPI, Canberra, 22 February 2023 ↩︎
  6. Fergus Hanson, Emilia Currey, Tracy Beattie, The Chinese Communist Party’s coercive diplomacy, ASPI, Canberra, 1 September 2020, online; State Department, China’s coercive tactics abroad, US Government, no date, online; Bonnie S Glaser, Time for collective pushback against China’s economic coercion, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 13 January 2021, online; Marcin Szczepanski, China’s economic coercion: evolution, characteristics and countermeasures, briefing, European Parliament, 15 November 2022, online; Mercy A Kuo, ‘Understanding (and managing) China’s economic coercion’, The Diplomat, 17 October 2022. ↩︎

Be’er Sheva Dialogue 2022 – Proceedings and Outcomes

The Eighth annual Be’er Sheva Dialogue was held in Canberra on 21 November 2022. We kindly thank the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), the Pratt Foundation and the Embassy of Israel in Australia for their support and partnership in the development of this year’s Dialogue.

The Dialogue is named in honour of the Battle of Beersheba (1917), with the 2022 Dialogue marking the 105th anniversary of the battle. Since its inception in 2015, the Dialogue has brought together defence officials, senior parliamentarians and analysts from both Australia and Israel to discuss areas of shared strategic interests and challenges, as well as the potential for collaboration.

Discussions during the Dialogue affirmed the significant potential for growth in the security relationship, especially military to military cooperation and sharing experiences and perspectives of defence industry. A recurring message during the Dialogue was that Israel’s experience with respect to sovereign development of defence and security capabilities and enhancement of weapon systems could be a valuable one for Australia to learn. This was highlighted by the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister the Hon Richard Marles MP in opening the Dialogue:

Australia looks to Israel as an example of a nation which has been a leader in defence strategic thinking—be it in regard to its defence industry capabilities (and the innovation system, economy and workforce built around that) or in regard to its deep cultural relationship with science and technology. As we look forward, we need to think about how we can continue to deepen our bilateral relationship, which also extends to the relationship between our militaries and defence industries.

Richard Marles, Be'er Sheva 2023

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The Be’er Sheva Dialogue remains an invaluable forum for having these candid and constructive debates.

We look forward to the 2023 Be’er Sheva Dialogue in Israel.

Tag Archive for: Foreign Policy

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