The importance of the ‘rules-based global order’ as a defence priority appears as frequently in the 2016 defence white paper as ‘self-reliance’ did in the 1987 DWP. It’s the leitmotif of the publication.

Multiple challenges from state and non-state actors are identified throughout DWP 2016. The ‘rules-based order’ rationale underpins the equal priority extended to global commitments as a force structure determinant for the ADF with the more traditional focus on the defence of Australia’s approaches. The rationale’s emergence deserves some analysis, particularly when it comes to Australian involvement with the US rebalance to Asia. The saliency of the concept of the ‘rules-based order’ wasn’t a product of an allied imperative—it’s as much a product of Australia’s efforts to influence American strategy.

The origins of the saliency of a priority, given the ‘rules-based order’, don’t lie in the multiple challenges to it identified in DWP 2016. It lies in one of them: the strong pursuit by China of its claims in the South China Sea. It has become the crucial moral/legal rationale legitimising American-led demonstrations of freedom-of-navigation rights against assertions by states in the region attempting to unilaterally assert maritime borders.

The US stance has become a key prop of its Asian pivot. The impact of the ‘rules-based’ formula, though it scoops up a multiplicity of states engaging in potentially breaching actions, hits a fault line largely with the actions of the rising regional contending power, China. That leitmotif is easy to assume as policy for Australia when standing with the US in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. That isn’t to belittle our stands on sanctioning Russia over Ukraine, joining the struggle against ISIL, and confronting pirates in the Red Sea. Those actions are costly but the politics are diffuse. Upholding the rules-based order in the South China Sea means metaphorically standing on the rock. We aren’t one of many but one of a few, and with a position that clashes with the interests of a powerful friend, not a distant delinquent.

In the tabulation of an alliance’s costs and benefits, that weighs on the cost side. Perceptions of the impact of the actions supporting the principle lie at the heart of the notion that Australia confronts a choice between a valued ally and our preeminent trading partner. From China, our stance has produced ungentle chiding about standing on Beijing’s toes against the tide of history. Policy should reflect Australian recognition of new power realities, not old principles in their mind. Putting the ADF where our mouth is when it comes to a ‘rules-based order’ involves hard choices and political discomfort.

Here we need to remember recent history. There’s a perception here among commentators, and among our Chinese interlocutors as well, that Australia has been a spectator in the process of the American pivot and is now reacting with knee-jerk loyalty. The question as to whether we are capable of standing aside from our ally is now being asked. It implies we were a passive observer of the American move and are now obliged to make a considered judgement. This misses an important point, well known among American policymakers who watch our willingness to come up to the mark. Far from being a passive spectator of the pivot, we actively, and influentially, engaged in the debate. We did so with some senior US officials pressing the other way.

Our pivot position resulted from a segue by us out of the then-Rudd government’s effort to create an Asia–Pacific Community. That proposition—announced in 2008 and pushed heavily diplomatically in 2009—was foundering by 2010. When I was sent to Washington, I had two major charges. One was to ascertain the red line on American assessments of Iran’s advance to a nuclear weapon which when crossed would provoke a pre-emptive strike. The other was to deepen American engagement in Asia, hopefully through support for our Community, and if not that then at least through US membership of prime Asian regional organisations.

I was surprised by the first direction. I didn’t appreciate how finely poised the Australian government perceived the possibility of a putative American or Israeli strike. Their concern was understandable given the possible devastation that would be wreaked on the economies of our neighbours with even a temporary disruption of oil supplies, not to mention the fate of armed forces we’d deployed in the Gulf.

The second charge wasn’t unexpected. Since World War II, engaging the United States in our zone of strategic significance has been an Australian objective. The desirability of this hadn’t been qualified by calculations of the attitudes of China, the contesting power in the region, and a friend if not an ally. We weren’t in the business of quibbling about American engagement. We realised in the aftermath of the Middle East wars and the global financial crisis that the US would now make choices about its external engagement priorities. We talked about the ‘sunny uplands’ that would manifest before American eyes, should they take the Asian road. There was an argument to be had and we were in it. How this played out, I will examine in part 2.

Back in 2013, Ashley Tellis nicely captured some of the core truths about Australia and its relationship to nuclear weapons:

‘Currently, the sole example of an Asian state possessing latent nuclear capabilities, but with an arguably low dependence on nuclear weaponry, is Australia. Thanks to favorable geography and the benefits of US extended deterrence, Australia enjoys the best of both worlds: distance from the most significant threats, yet protection by the globe’s most capable power. Should technology or politics ever alter these realities, however, Australia could develop significant nuclear capabilities. The country has a fascinating, though not well-known, history of entanglement with nuclear weapons.’

Australia’s unique status, complemented by its conflicted identity on nuclear weapons, means that any official government commentary on the nuclear issue attracts exegetical analysis. Large conclusions tend to be drawn from brief sentences. But in the case of DWP 2016, the challenge is greater than usual. The document contains only fleeting references to nuclear matters, and extended nuclear deterrence rears its head only once.

The relevant piece of text is para 5.20, reproduced here to keep the topic in context:

‘Australia’s security is underpinned by the ANZUS Treaty, United States extended deterrence and access to advanced United States technology and information. Only the nuclear and conventional military capabilities of the United States can offer effective deterrence against the possibility of nuclear threats against Australia. The presence of United States military forces plays a vital role in ensuring security across the Indo-Pacific and the global strategic and economic weight of the United States will be essential to the continued effective functioning of the rules-based global order.’

So, what do those sentences tell us about current Australian government thinking in relation to nuclear weapons? In truth, remarkably little. Some might see a hint of ‘sole purpose’ in the second sentence—namely, the suggestion that we rely on US nuclear capabilities solely to offset nuclear threats. But a careful reading doesn’t support that interpretation. The paragraph doesn’t, for example, offer any judgment as to what deters the possibility of conventional threats against Australia, so leaving open a potential role for US nuclear capabilities in that broader role.

Apart from the cautiously-phrased thoughts offered in para 5.20, nuclear aficionados will search in vain for judgments about the continuing efficacy of nuclear deterrence, whether in its general or extended form. The word ‘nuclear’ appears only ten times in the document—seven times in relation to North Korea, South Asia, Iran and the broader issue of WMD; once in relation to the specialised support that Defence might be called upon to offer in response to civil emergencies; and twice in para 5.20. While simple word counts don’t prove much, ‘nuclear’ appeared 26 times in the 2009 White Paper and 27 times in 2013. It’s hard to imagine that the core issues have become less salient in the intervening years.

In this year’s White Paper there’re no statements about the continuing resiliency of nuclear deterrence as an inhibition on great power war. Similarly, there’s no judgment that our major ally will continue to rely upon nuclear deterrence to underpin its strategic power. There’s no speculation of the sort offered in the 2009 version about the ‘significant and expensive’ alternatives that might confront Australia if US extended nuclear deterrence were to prove incredible. The 2013 White Paper shied back from that hypothetical and this latest offering exercises a similar discretion.

Nor is there any coverage of a more worrying possibility: that other US allies—either in Asia or elsewhere—might begin to find US nuclear assurances strategically unsatisfying and move towards their own indigenous nuclear arsenals. One of the most compelling reasons for Australia to support US extended nuclear deterrence is because it helps underwrite the security of nearly 40 US allies and partners worldwide, many of whom confront larger and more immediate adversaries than we do. If extended nuclear deterrence starts to break amongst that group of allies and partners, we’ll be living in a different world.

It’s probably expecting too much to hope that any Australian Defence White Paper would offer a comprehensive view of Australian thinking on nuclear weapons. But nor should government statements shy away from the issue to the extent this one does. With a wave of nuclear modernisation occurring across the globe, including in the US, and the world settling into a Second Nuclear Age markedly different from the first, governments should be prepared to articulate and defend their thinking about nuclear strategy when they have the opportunity. Bald statements about our continuing faith in extended nuclear deterrence are no longer enough. We should be exploring options to strengthen deterrence in a rapidly-changing world.

US allies would be well advised to keep a weather eye on the nuclear modernisation debate now unfolding in Washington. That’s because they have important interests at stake—including the future of extended nuclear deterrence and assurance. Those interests are sometimes obscured by the scale of the modernisation challenge now confronting Washington. Just about every delivery vehicle in the US arsenal is approaching end of life. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, ballistic-missile-carrying submarines, strategic bomber aircraft and tactical nuclear aircraft are all scheduled for replacement over the next decade or two. Many warheads need refurbishment. So too do national command and control centres. That’s because modernisation happens in waves. The bulk of the arsenal was built in the 1950s and modernised—under Reagan—in the 1980s.

With so much on the table, critics of the modernisation agenda have fertile ground to plough. Does the US need to retain all three legs of its strategic triad? Does it need to replace every delivery vehicle, or can it get by with fewer of each? And what of the tactical mission? Analysts Lawrence Korb and Adam Mount have recently argued that the US should rein in its modernisation plans, including by eliminating the tactical nuclear mission. They worry that a new bout of modernisation in the current context of rising geopolitical tensions ‘could do serious damage to the global nonproliferation regime, as well as to relationships with some US allies who remain invested in disarmament’.

If Washington were to eliminate the tactical nuclear mission, it wouldn’t need to modernise its stock of B-61 nuclear bombs. It could withdraw 200 nuclear warheads from Europe. And it wouldn’t need a special variant of the F-35 to pick up tactical nuclear tasks. That would save a bucket of money. But disarmament isn’t the most important consideration here. The tactical mission is uniquely targeted to support US allies. Can the US strategic arsenal readily fulfil that role? In one sense, it doesn’t much matter if a particular target is destroyed by a tactical or a strategic warhead. But in terms of maximising deterrence and assurance effects, the shape of the arsenal matters a lot. During early crossings of the conventional-nuclear firebreak, it’s important that nuclear use be both discriminate and restrained. The strategic arsenal’s not as flexible as some might think for signalling both commitment and restraint to an adversary. Nor is it good at signalling assurance to an ally.

Let’s start with the ICBMs. Washington has now de-MIRVed its entire ICBM force. So in theory this leg of the triad offers great flexibility for possible use in early nuclear exchanges. But neither of the Minuteman warheads (the W78 and the W87) is small; indeed they have yields of about 350 kilotons. Moreover, the location of US ICBM fields means that just about any use of an ICBM against a regional aggressor in the Middle East or East Asia would require overflight of Russia by a nuclear-armed missile. When is a US president ever going to authorise that?

The nation’s fleet of ballistic-missile-carrying submarines don’t suffer from an overflight problem. But the yield of their warheads is still large—indeed, the W88 warhead is probably the most powerful ballistic missile warhead deployed by the US. And SLBMs typically carry multiple warheads, which sounds like overkill for most tactical nuclear missions. Perhaps—as Elbridge Colby has argued—some SLBMs can be deployed with fewer, low-yield warheads, deliberately to enhance the options for discriminate, restrained nuclear response. But that’s not where we are now.

Still, there’re other problems with SSBNs/SLBMs. In US doctrine, those submarine assets represent a secure second-strike capability. They’re not usually poised at the conventional-nuclear firebreak. Moreover, deployments are largely invisible—once the submarine sets forth on its mission it disappears from view. It’s hard for a submarine to signal a commitment to an ally during a time of tensions. When the US wanted to strengthen its assurance of South Korea after the recent North Korean nuclear test, it conducted an overflight of South Korea with a strategic bomber. It didn’t put another SSBN to sea: it wanted to be seen—and heard.

Strategic bombers aren’t invisible. They’re great for assurance, but face challenges in actually conducting their mission. As air defences get steadily better and more capable adversaries enhance their anti-access area-denial capabilities, bombers will find it harder to penetrate to their targets. True, many of those difficulties also attend the tactical nuclear mission and the assets devoted to it. The B-61 bomb is a gravity bomb, and requires the aircraft to be virtually in visual range of the target before use. But that’s an argument for a more versatile tactical arsenal, not for eliminating the current one.

The shape of an arsenal is important, even if it’s not the sole determinant of an effective nuclear strategy. And a tactical nuclear arsenal has one big, important political message for allies that the strategic nuclear arsenal can’t deliver. It says that Washington takes its extended nuclear deterrence and assurance commitments seriously. A strategic nuclear arsenal is just that—it’s an arsenal whose central limits are negotiated with Russia, and which is dedicated to the protection of US vital interests. The US would retain much of its current strategic nuclear arsenal if it had no allies at all. In short, if Washington were to head down the path of eliminating the tactical nuclear mission, it could do serious damage to relationships with allies who remain invested in national and international security.

The end of 2015 witnessed three seemingly unrelated developments: the establishment of a space hotline between Washington and Beijing, the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (Space Act), and the positive decision on jurisdiction by the arbitration court in Manila’s suit against Beijing concerning the South China Sea. The hotline seeks to minimise incidents arising from satellite operations and ASAT tests, while the legislation could pave the way to private exploration and exploitation of natural resources, including asteroid mining. The court decision, however, means that China’s claims and activities in the South China Sea will come under the scrutiny of an international judiciary. The question is whether the current confrontation between China and the US concerning the legal status of the South China Sea is a harbinger of things to come in the space commons.

Two contradictory aspects of space have significant bearing on this question. Space has long been seen in military terms—the ultimate ‘high ground’ from which to master other battlefields. But space law has derived to a great extent from the law of the sea, including the key principle that the high seas (waters beyond 12 nautical miles from a country’s shores) can’t be appropriated by any nation, being open to navigation by ships of any flag. Thus, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) reads that ‘Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means’. The passage has prompted much controversy, since it’s unclear whether it restricts or even bans the exploitation of natural resources from the Moon, asteroids, and other celestial bodies, given that the treaty also says space ‘shall be free for exploration and use by all States’.

At one extreme, some observers believe that the ban on territorial claims also means a prohibition on economic activities, which would require a further treaty, probably providing for some sort of international authorisation (with the International Seabed Authority often cited as a template). At the other end, some voices see the ban as concerning only national territorial claims, not economic activities by private enterprises. You could draw an analogy with fishing in the high seas: open to private companies from different countries, yet not amounting to the appropriation of those waters.

However, fishing doesn’t require the permanent or at least long-term control over a given physical space. A trawler simply goes through international waters, which remain open to navigation by other trawlers or ships. Of course there’s the issue of overexploitation, and the well-known concept of ‘tragedy of the commons’, but unless fishing boats are used in non-lethal asymmetric warfare, overexploitation needn’t lead to a territorial conflict. However, to mine an asteroid, you have to occupy it, thus excluding other companies. Given that US legislation lays down that asteroid exploitation must comply with ‘the international obligations of the United States’ and thus the OST and absent any provisions for international agreements or royalty-sharing, the only logical conclusion seems to be that the US Congress envisions the allocation of space resources as grounded on a ‘first-come first-served’ basis. That is, whoever makes it to an asteroid can mine it, and if the actor is under American jurisdiction, its activities will be regulated by US Law.

There are some problems with this approach. First of all, less technologically advanced countries may not welcome the idea of . Despite impressive advances in its space program, China may well consider that it’s unlikely to make it first to the most attractive corners of the solar system, in which case Beijing would oppose US legislation. On the other hand, the PRC may feel optimistic and conclude that there’s enough time to catch up, thus taking a more nuanced view. That could be one of the reasons for China’s silence to date. Second, it may not always be clear what operating in an asteroid or an area of the moon actually means. When exactly is a company entitled to exclude others? Is it necessary to actually start production? Does it suffice to reach it first and somehow mark it?  To make matters more complex, in the South China Sea effective occupation involves a human presence, which furthermore provides a tripwire, with states often ready to use non-lethal force while remaining prudent not to open fire on each other’s personnel. However, space exploration is likely to be robotic to a large extent, and therefore the question arises whether the lack of a human presence may make violence more likely, since loss of life won’t be at stake.

It should perhaps not surprise us that Beijing is silent on those issues, given that China still hasn’t managed to master its near seas. However, it’s unlikely that, in the longer term, China will simply accept US legislation on natural resources in space. Instead, we could see a move to negotiate an alternative set of regulations, perhaps under the much-touted banner of ‘new type of great power relations’ and incidents once there’s both an established US and Chinese presence in space. The limited human role may make it easier for Beijing to engage in the kind of non-lethal warfare we’re seeing in the South China Sea, with the goal of preventing the normal operations of US corporations, forcing Washington to negotiate. That may be facilitated by the OST’s ambiguous reference to ‘military’ forces and personnel and China’s reliance at sea on myriad quasi-state forces, from maritime militias to private fishing vessels, operating in a murky legal arena, a strategy that may well be deployed in space.

This year saw the 40th anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. It also marks the 40th anniversary of an enduring conspiracy theory—that Kerr’s controversial action was instigated by US and UK intelligence agencies, especially the Central Intelligence Agency, with the Defence Department head, Sir Arthur Tange, as the link between Langley and Yarralumla.

By a mixture of design and coincidence, the year has also seen the publication of several books that bear, to varying degrees, on this theory. So how does the theory look now?

Two longstanding proponents of the theory, Guy Rundle and Brian Toohey, have used the anniversary to restate their views. They note, correctly, that the political-constitutional crisis of October-November 1975 coincided with a crisis in the Australia-US intelligence relationship, with elements of the CIA fearing that the Labor government wouldn’t renew the agreement on the ‘joint facility’ at Pine Gap. Tange was hugely agitated over the government’s handling of this issue. After adding other circumstantial evidence, including supposed links between Kerr and US intelligence agencies, observers like Toohey and Rundle joined the dots.

In November, Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston published The Dismissal: In the Queen’s Name to coincide with the 40th anniversary. It’s Kelly’s third book on the subject—each one, as he likes to quip, definitive—and it does include a good deal of new evidence, especially on the reactions of the Queen’s advisers to Kerr’s actions. The Dismissal was clearly composed and published at remarkable speed, with the inevitable side-effects of repetition and ill-chosen words. (For example, the authors describe a Palace official’s opinion of Kerr as ‘contemptible’, when they clearly mean ‘contemptuous’, reversing the meaning.) In journalistic style, they put the new material at the front of the book, which will only be meaningful to those who are generally familiar with the story.

Nevertheless The Dismissal is a fascinating and important account, blending the new material with the previous evidence. It’s as definitive as we are ever likely to see, unless Kelly writes a fourth version, with the narrative flow of his other political histories. Kelly and Bramston are ruthlessly critical of all three principals—Malcolm Fraser, Gough Whitlam and Kerr. Each man still has his defenders, but few arguments withstand the force of the book’s critical analysis.

One of the 19 chapters is devoted to demolishing what Kelly and Bramston call ‘The CIA Myth’. They reiterate the view, held by Kelly since 1976, that the security crisis and the constitutional crisis were parallel but unconnected. In the last 40 years, despite great efforts by Toohey, John Pilger and others, no-one has ever uncovered any hard evidence that the CIA or Arthur Tange was improperly implicated in the dismissal.

On the contrary, research has provided further indications that the smoking gun is never likely to be found. In my 2006 biography of Tange, I analysed the evidence concerning Tange’s role, or non-role, in the two crises, as well as the third crisis of spring 1975, the Indonesian intervention in East Timor. I argued that Tange’s actions and principles, as well as all available evidence, ran counter to the conspiracy thesis.

That contention was confirmed this year by James Curran’s Unholy Fury, a detailed, archive-based analysis of the crisis in Australia-US relations in the Whitlam-Nixon years. As Curran shows, Nixon ordered a fundamental re-examination of the ANZUS relationship, including the joint facilities: but by 1975, Nixon had been brought down by Watergate and his successor, Gerald Ford, was working to patch up the relationship. Nothing in Curran’s extensive research pointed towards CIA involvement in the dismissal.

Another 2015 publication, Jeremy Hearder’s biography of Sir James Plimsoll, brought another perspective to bear. Plimsoll was ambassador in Washington in the Whitlam years. Curran and Hearder give similar, but slightly divergent, accounts of Whitlam’s use, or failure to use, Plimsoll’s skills during the crisis in Australia-US relations.

Furthermore, Plimsoll and Kerr were both members of the Army’s wartime Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. Rundle and others make much of Kerr’s involvement in DORCA, which they claim led to his close links with US intelligence agencies. In fact, DORCA wasn’t an intelligence organisation. As Graeme Sligo’s The Backroom Boys has shown, Plimsoll and Kerr were both involved in DORCA’s involvement in the area of military government.

When John Blaxland’s second volume of the official history of ASIO, The Protest Years, appeared, The Dismissal was already in press, but it too confirmed that ASIO records provided no evidence to support the CIA-Tange-dismissal theory. Moreover Blaxland’s account of ASIO’s activities in the 1960s and early 1970s showed that the bureaucratic politics of the period pointed in the opposite direction. As Secretary of External Affairs in the 1960s and of Defence in the 1970s, Tange had major confrontations with ASIO. He also had deep reservations about the CIA’s actions against foreign governments, which as he told the Americans undermined popular support for the alliance.

So we can end 2015 with even more confidence that the dismissal of the Whitlam government was instigated by Kerr himself, with no involvement by the CIA, other intelligence agencies, or Arthur Tange.

Finally, here’s a suggestion for those readers of The Strategist preparing courses for potential managers of our strategic, diplomatic, military or political affairs: prescribe a case study on Australia’s handling of the alliance crisis of the early 1970s, with a reading list based on the books mentioned here. The students would learn much about how to handle, or not to handle, a diplomatic crisis; and they would also learn a lot about what really matters, to both Australia and the US, in our most important alliance relationship.