July 2024 will go down in history as one of the most momentous months in American politics. Between the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, US President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and the rise of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, it is hard to keep up with the frantic pace of political events. While some may look to the past for guidance or reassurance, it is unclear if any historical comparison can truly match the sheer drama of recent weeks.

Since it became clear that Trump would once again be the Republican Party’s nominee, Democrats have framed the election as an existential battle between democracy and authoritarianism. Biden is portrayed as a Winston Churchill-like leader who will not only protect democratic institutions and values in the United States but also defend Europe’s freedom, by supporting Ukraine. By contrast, Trump is often depicted as ‘America’s Hitler’—as his own running mate, Senator J D Vance, once called him—bent on turning the country into an autocratic dystopia. This was the Biden campaign’s narrative, and if her early remarks are any indication, it will also be Harris’s.

Not surprisingly, Republicans see things differently. In a private conversation, one adviser to the Trump-Vance campaign used an unexpected historical analogy. Instead of comparing the US to Britain during World War II, he drew parallels with postwar Britain, which was, in his view, victorious but overburdened. In the war’s aftermath, Britain’s primary political battle was internal, with the Conservative Party, which stood for the elites and the British Empire, facing off against the worker-friendly Labour Party, which focused on winning the peace at home.

My interlocutor said that today’s Democrats reminded him of the Conservatives, who represented the upper class, embodied the political establishment, and sought to maintain the trappings of a global empire during a period of retrenchment. Trump and Vance’s pro-worker agenda, he claimed, more closely mirrors that of the postwar Labour Party.

After World War II, the Labour Party held particular appeal for the working class, who felt that they had borne more than their fair share of the burden of the war, suffered the consequences of internationalist foreign policies and been generally left behind. Similarly, Trump and Vance claim to speak for ‘forgotten’ Americans, and the key focus of their campaign is reinventing the Republican Party’s class base.

Trump and his supporters often point out that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. Now, GOP advisers are seeking to rebrand ‘country-club Republicans’ as ‘working-class Republicans’. When Vance said he hoped to celebrate his mother’s 10 years of sobriety in the White House, he was speaking to a very specific audience of working-class Americans struggling in places ‘blown out by globalisation’, as one Republican strategist put it to me.

Moreover, just as the postwar British left railed against the pernicious influence of upper-class elites, Trump and Vance are targeting the Washington establishment. In his iconic 1941 essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, George Orwell, a fervent Labour supporter, called for replacing Britain’s out-of-touch mandarinate. The Make America Great Again movement is similarly suspicious of the national-security establishment, military leadership and big business, all of which today’s Republicans associate with the Democratic Party. As part of its Project 2025 agenda, the Heritage Foundation advocates firing the 50,000 federal civil servants who comprise the administrative state and replacing them with a new leadership class. It’s a step that Vance has enthusiastically endorsed.

But for my interlocutor, the most relevant parallel between today’s US Republican Party and the postwar British Labour Party lay in their stances on their respective countries’ global role. After World War II, Britain faced the choice either to maintain its empire or, as Labour advocated, to focus on improving welfare at home. According to Trump’s strategists, the US now faces a similar choice.

At his rallies, Trump often criticises what he views as US strategic overreach, noting that, as president, he did not start a major war or initiate any foreign interventions. Electing him, he argues, would bring both greater peace and a renewed focus on domestic prosperity. Vance’s vision—which focuses on raising the minimum wage, expanding social protections, and bolstering corporate regulation—has a quasi-social-democratic quality.

To be sure, my Democratic friends, much like most reputable historians of postwar Britain, will see the comparison to Labour as absurd. After all, Trump’s first term focused more on courting plutocrats and cutting taxes for the rich than on building a welfare state. The Biden administration, for its part, has done a lot to help left-behind voters, especially through major policy initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act. But, if the Trump-Vance campaign gets its way, voters will not recognise that.

In the lead-up to November’s presidential election, Democrats will undoubtedly attack Trump and Vance for their extreme views on abortion, the US constitution and Ukraine—views that do not align with mainstream public opinion. But they must also work to dismantle the narrative that Trump and Vance are champions of the working class.

In a sense, postwar Britain does carry an important lesson for Democrats today. Churchill was widely expected to win the 1945 general election, but the majority of British voters ultimately embraced the Labour Party’s agenda of trading imperial glory for rebuilding the domestic economy. Trump, Vance, and their strategists hope that their promise to make America great again will resonate in a similar way.

Consequently, Harris will need to devote as much effort to countering Republicans’ cultural and policy-based appeals to workers as she does to addressing the threats to reproductive rights and the constitution. To defeat Trump in November, Democrats must convince voters that they are the true party of the American working class.

 

After more than four years of negotiation, economic-assistance funding has been approved under the Compacts of Association, the agreements that govern US relations with Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia. But will US policymakers, diplomats and legislators stay focused on engaging with those and other Pacific island countries? Or will attention fade?

Renewed Compact funding is not an end in itself, especially as China pursues strategic objectives across the Pacific. Given the strategic environment, the United States cannot walk away from continued focus on the Pacific Islands.

The Good

Since 2018 the US has not only negotiated a new tranche of funding for the three Freely Associated States under the compacts. It has also has worked with Australia, Japan and New Zealand to greatly extend electrification in Papua New Guinea and has commited to upgrading Lombrum Naval Base on PNG’s Manus Island.

When the Biden Administration took over the reins of Pacific islands policy in 2021, it fire-hosed the space. It penned a first-ever Pacific islands strategy, twice hosted Pacific island leaders at the White House, renegotiated US access to South Pacific tuna fisheries, agreed on defence cooperation with PNG, opened two Pacific embassies and announced plans for two more.

Finally, US$7.1 billion of renewed funding under the Compacts passed into law in March 2024.

In six years, the United States has gone from modest engagement in the Pacific islands to being a serious player. But there have been bumps along the way.

The Bad

Electrification in Papua New Guinea is moving at a snail’s pace, with some pointing the finger at state utility PNG Power. US involvement in upgrading Lombrum Naval Base seems to have vanished.

The speedily concluded PNG defence agreement set off concerns over US intentions in the region, felt by Australians as much as by Papua New Guineans. In discussions, the author learned from US negotiators that Australian diplomats had tried to white-ant the talks by calling into question Washington’s reliabililty. The Americans wondered why the Australians would do that.

Then at a 2023 meeting held at the Washington headquarters of the United States Institute of Peace with officials from Papua New Guinea’s foreign ministry, the author witnessed confusion between the two sides. It became clear that miscommunication within PNG’s foreign ministry and with the United States had fed a negative narrative. Happily, they were able to clarify things.

New embassies in Solomon Islands and Tonga have opened, but those planned for Kiribati and Vanuatu have not. Failure to open the mission in Kiribati is most concerning. Previously, Kiribati and the US have shared a sound relationship, but things seemed to have changed following Tarawa’s switch of its one-China recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Tarawa’s slow-walking the opening of the US embassy worries Washington. The Biden administration has had a frosty relationship with the Solomon Islands government while it has been led by Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. The US offered in 2019 to send US Peace Corps volunteers to Solomon Islands, but the Sogavare government did little to advance plans. Honiara, like Tarawa, seems to be ignoring Washington’s entreaties.

The rough and tumble of diplomacy is nothing new. Every new initiative has growing pains, but somethings are just ugly.

The Ugly

Every US announcement that involves new spending comes with an asterisk that reads ‘subject to Congressional funding’. Too often, no one notices.

Both parties in Congress supported funding of the Compacts of Free Association, but passing the legislation still took months. Dysfunction was sown by turmoil over filling the role of the speaker of the House of Representatives and by repeated Congressional demands for cuts elsewhere to offset the US$7.1 billion. Leaders of the Freely Associated States called into question whether the US was serious. Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine remarked that relationships were ‘gradually being destroyed by party politics’.

Passage of the legislation came only after tremendous efforts to lobby members of Congress. Given the centrality of the three freely associated states to US defence planning in the Pacific, that’s concerning. What prospects would more legislation have?

What is to be Done?

American diplomacy, policymaking and development assistance all rely on Congress. The House of Representatives holds the purse strings. Without its buy-in and consent, funding will always be an issue.

The United States formerly drew down its engagement in the South Pacific to save money, leaving the region in the hands of Australia and New Zealand. The three countries didn’t have identical interests, but the differences were not too important when the Pacific islands were not strategically crucial to Washington. They are now, however, and the United States absolutely must be involved—and must maintain its focus.

Congress cannot play games with funding of initiatives in the Pacific. Nor can policymakers merely continue with existing and outdated programs. Too much is at stake. More needs to be done to explain the needs of the Pacific to the executive and legislative branches of government, especially such basic needs in the islands as healthcare, trade and employment. By addressing them, the United States can both help improve the lives of Pacific islanders and create lasting bonds of friendship.

Those bonds will help counter China’s malign strategic efforts in the region.

Kim Beazley was appointed as Minister for Defence on 13 December 1984. He oversaw a revolution in Australian defence, as profoundly important in shaping the nation as were the economic reforms of the time. His enduring legacy is the idea of self-reliance in the defence of Australia. The 1987 Defence White Paper that Beazley delivered, taken together with the 1986 Review that he commissioned (prepared by Paul Dibb), stand—like Newton’s Principia—as the foundational model for defending Australia.

Beazley acknowledges humbly that he benefited from the work of others, including Dibb, and academics such as Tom Millar, Hedley Bull, Bob O’Neill, Coral Bell, Des Ball, and Ross Babbage. This credit is well due. However, only an actively engaged minister, intellectually as well as politically committed to the task, could have brought forth such a revolution at the time in thought and practice.

Australian defence strategy during the 1950s and 1960s had been framed around forward defence. At the time, Australia was a strategic backwater, where no questions of geopolitical significance were going to be settled militarily, or otherwise. The establishment of the joint facilities at North West Cape, Nurrungar, and Pine Gap, over the period 1963-69, did nothing to change this. Their profound implications for Australia’s defence, and its alliance with the United States, were not crystallised until the 1980s. Again, Beazley played the pivotal role, something to be examined at another time.

Australia received a number of strategic shocks in the late 1960s. First, the United Kingdom announced in July 1967 that it was withdrawing from ‘East of Suez’. Then, more significantly, Richard Nixon announced in July 1969 what became known as the ‘Guam Doctrine’. In Asia, allies of the United States would be expected to take up the principal burden of defending themselves, with minimal US support, unless they were threatened by nuclear-armed adversaries, and where the United States had applicable alliance commitments or interests which would warrant direct combat involvement.

Policy thinking within the Department of Defence had already started to shift in the direction of self-reliant defence. (Stephan Fruehling’s research on this quiet shift is the benchmark.) However, it was the Guam Doctrine and the commencement under Nixon of the long US withdrawal from Vietnam that tolled the bell for forward defence. The Fraser Government announced self-reliant defence as policy in the 1976 Defence White Paper, without however changing military strategy, or force structure priorities.

This is the situation that Beazley inherited in 1984. In the face of the Department of Defence and the three services—the army, navy and air force—not being able to agree on what the ‘defence of Australia’ actually meant in terms of military strategy, force structure, and funding, Beazley commissioned Dibb in February 1985 to examine Australia’s defence capabilities. Dibb was able to draw upon the groundbreaking work of the Strategic Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University—one of the most consequential contributions to policy by the Australian academy.

Based on Dibb’s 1986 Review, the 1987 White Paper established the self-reliant defence of Australia as the organising principle of our defence strategy. Given the prevailing strategic environment, it concluded that the ability to deal with ‘low level’ and ‘escalated low level’ threats, which could be mounted with little warning, would drive decisions on force structure.

The 1987 White Paper did not exclude the possibility of Australia’s having in future to contend with the possibility of more substantial conflict. Australia could prepare for such a contingency by means of ‘strategic warning time’. It could use time effectively to expand the force to meet a growing threat. It was judged that the Soviet Union would not likely mount a conventional attack on Australia (but would target Australia during a strategic nuclear exchange), and that regional powers would require at least a decade to develop the capabilities which would be needed to mount a substantial attack. During that time, Australia would be able to expand its force in anticipation.

Self-reliant defence did not mean armed neutrality or isolationism. The alliance with the United States retained its salience in Australian grand strategy, but the 1987 White Paper declared that Australia would not seek, or expect, unrealistic—and therefore non-credible—levels of commitment to the defence of Australia by US combat forces, save for the protection afforded by US nuclear weapons through extended deterrence. Further, Australia would contribute to US security, and global stability, by way of hosting the joint facilities. Self-reliant defence and the Australia-US alliance cohered in this model.

The 1987 White Paper expounded the ‘law’ of defence in depth, which meant, crucially, denial of access by an adversary through the sea-air approaches to Australia. This ‘law’ functioned as the overriding discipline on the development of the force. This approach turned into a strength the vast expanse of northern Australia, the extensive sea-air surrounds of the continent, and the archipelagic arc that extends from Sumatra to Fiji, a strategic barrier through which any adversary would have to project force against Australia, creating defensively advantageous choke points and operating areas.

Two decades later, the 2009 Defence White Paper sought to apply and update this model in light of China’s strategic and military rise. From around 2006, worrying disturbances had begun to be discerned in Australia’s strategic environment, of the kind that would warrant consideration of force expansion. At the same time, the United States, concerned about China’s growing military heft, was formulating military strategies in response, such as Air Sea Battle.

The 2009 White Paper was a systematic attempt by the Rudd Government to tackle the following strategic problem: the warning clock had started to tick; Australia might in future face the prospect of being in armed conflict with a major power; consequentially, a larger force would need to be built over time as a hedge. The maritime-focused ‘Force 2030’ was the result (note the choice of year). Force 2030 was to be the initial base upon which force expansion could further occur, as judged necessary over the 2010s and beyond.

Careful and deliberate consideration was given to the military strategic implications of ‘more substantial conflict’, to use the 1987 formula. The 2009 White Paper directed that an enlarged ‘primary operating environment’ for the ADF be adopted, expanded further north and west, in order to more effectively seek to deny access through the sea-air approaches against a major power adversary. Force projection as far forward as maritime Southeast Asia was contemplated, an evolution of the 1987 model—not its repudiation.

The 2009 White Paper stands in the arc of Australian defence strategy as the road not taken, when we still had time. A further 15 years on, Australia today has to contend with the very prospect of ‘more substantial conflict’ that was contemplated theoretically in the 1987 White Paper, and considered specifically in the 2009 White Paper.

Over this time, the Indo-Pacific strategic order has been transformed. US primacy is being challenged. China has accelerated its military expansion (including of its strategic nuclear forces). It has become more assertive and coercive in its behaviour, while still calibrating its actions so as to avoid, for the foreseeable future, direct military confrontation. Its partnership with Russia is becoming effectively a military alliance, creating the possibility, should it come to a clash, of a two-front war. China appears to have decided to be ready to use force to achieve its strategic aims, perhaps from 2027.

An examination is required of the strength of China’s resolve to go to war, as well as the respective perceptions of China and the United States of each other’s resolve to wage war against the other. There is no more strategic question. For strategic planning purposes, we should assign a 10 percent probability to the likelihood of major war in our region in the 2020s. This could arise from coercion and assertiveness on China’s part, which could raise the risk of misadventure, and which could in turn lead to conflict. Or war might come more deliberately, a function of Beijing’s calculus of victory.

While Australia would retain always a sovereign right to determine its interests in the light of prevailing circumstances, it is likely that we would be a combatant in any such war. China would not be in doubt as to our geostrategic utility to the United States. Of course, there would be the issue of ANZUS treaty obligations, and the reality of the deep strategic integration that now exists between Australia and the United States, formed through the joint facilities, and more recent Australia-US ‘force posture’ initiatives.

Australia’s security dilemma is now acute. Force expansion should have occurred over the past 15 years, as warning time counted down. Instead, the force remains configured for what was termed 40 years ago ‘escalated low level conflict’—when defence spending as a fraction of GDP was 2.5 percent, as compared with 2 percent, a difference of around $13 billion, in 2024-25. While the defence-GDP ratio is not in itself a planning tool, it is a valuable aid for analysis—a shorthand for the structural funding of defence, which can be tracked across time. In order to have built the force that we would now need for ‘more substantial conflict’, defence spending over the past 15 years should have been lifted steadily to at least 3% of GDP. We spent more at times during the Cold War, without being seriously threatened by major conventional attack.

There are, of course, competing demands on the budget which have to be balanced responsibly. The difference with other areas of spending is that structural underfunding in defence could one day lead to military defeat, and national peril as a result. Defence spending as a proportion of GDP should be increased quickly to at least 3%. This is a broad estimate of what it would take to address capability deficiencies that would be exposed in high-end combat with a major adversary. This increase in funding would be fiscally daunting, and would challenge Defence and industry, both of whose capacity to deliver would have to be dramatically enhanced in very short order.

Faced with the credible prospect of the jaws of war leaping violently at us during this decade, we are going to need a bigger force. Without this, Australia would be hard pressed to defend itself in a major war without a substantial degree of force augmentation from the United States in a number of areas of capability deficiency. So much for defence self-reliance. Recent policy directions, in the form of the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, and the 2024 National Defence Strategy, the latter being informed by the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (the most comprehensive examination of defence since the 1986 Review), have recognised this. Remediation is underway. How quickly or effectively is something for another day. Nations go to war with the force that they have, rather than the one that they need. We now have to make do with what we have, and what we can quickly build. How we got to this position of looming peril is not a useful question, for now. History will render that judgement.

Defending against a major power adversary would still require a strategy of defence in depth, and the denial of access in the sea-air approaches. Being prepared to operate forward of the archipelagic shield, along a north-south axis in maritime Southeast Asia, and in the Central Pacific (for instance, in the Guam-Bismarck Sea corridor), would represent a further evolution of the 1987 model, not a repudiation. Similarly, being prepared to operate along an extended east-west axis in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as part of a coordinated sea lane protection effort would be in keeping with the 1987 model, which indeed anticipated such operations.

New technologies and methods are of course today evident, not least in relation to cyber- attacks, technology-enabled cognitive warfare, space warfare, and advanced forms of strike weapons such as long-range hypersonic missiles. While complexity has increased and, in some cases, proximity is not always as critical, the geography of warfare has not been fundamentally altered. While the evolving interplay of technology, the character and logic of war, and the saliency of geography is a larger issue, and would require a more detailed exposition, the 1987 model still applies, even though engagement distances have increased, ‘kill chains’ have become more complicated, and the cyber and space domains have overcome some geographical constraints.

In the absence of being able to conjure instantly into being an expanded force, there are measures that we could take immediately which would allow us to make best use of operational warning time (such warning time is measured not in years, but in months). Here is an initial outline, not listed exhaustively nor in any detail:

• The National Security Committee (NSC) should commission from the Secretaries Committee on National Security a periodic strategical appreciation of the prospect of major power conflict in the Indo-Pacific, to be prepared by a dedicated national security planning staff, which would cover indicators and warning signs; possible conflict triggers and pathways to war; the likely shape of such a war, by phases (conflict initiation, duration, and termination); and possible courses of hostile action against Australia (in the cyber, cognitive and kinetic domains).
• Operational plans should be reviewed by the NSC, with the minister for defence leading on military defence, and the minister for home affairs on civil preparedness and national mobilisation. A new War Book should be prepared on the latter, covering, for instance, disruption of critical infrastructure and essential services, and cognitive warfare on national will and morale.
• Australian-US operational planning should be overseen by the minister for defence and the US secretary of defense, under the auspices of AUSMIN, as political authority for such planning matters, with a view to ensuring that plans for the defence of Australia cohere with broader US operational planning. Consideration should be given to expanding such planning in due course, in the first instance through staff-level discussions with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Canada, New Zealand and possibly others.
• The Australian Military Theatre should be formally established, led by an Australian allied force commander and based on clear boundaries, with flexible provision being made at the edges for selective forward force projection by the ADF in maritime Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific. A sea lane protection strategy should be developed, in accordance with the principles set out in the Radford/Collins agreement of 1951 (which should be urgently reviewed and updated).
• The government should assure itself that the ADF could rapidly mount sustained around-the-clock operations in relation to the following key tasks in the Australian Military Theatre, and beyond as required:
  • situational awareness covering the sea-air approaches, the eastern Indian Ocean, maritime Southeast Asia, the Central Pacific, and the South Pacific, as well as relevant sea lanes, and offshore and undersea infrastructure;
  • sea denial (especially anti-submarine warfare) and sea lane protection;
  • air superiority and air defence, especially against long-range air threats;
  • strategic strike, especially for the purpose of denying sea-air access;
  • land operations, especially in remote northern Australia, with a view to defeating raiding forces, and in the littoral environment; and
  • key installation protection, including ports, airfields, and offshore and undersea.
• Capability areas that would require urgent remedial effort, such as missile defence and possibly naval mine warfare, should be addressed, with a view to accepting force augmentation from the United States (as might be available), until such time as self-reliant solutions could be implemented.
• Plans to rapidly activate ADF bases should be reviewed, especially in relation to the line of airbases that runs through Cocos (Keeling), Curtin, Tindal, Scherger and Townsville. Plans for base hardening and dispersal of the entire ADF should be similarly reviewed.
• Mobilisation plans should be reviewed, covering logistics, war stocks, maintenance and sustainment (fuel supplies require particularly close attention). Rapid production and restocking agreements should be put in place, either with Australian firms, or as required within the context of allied supply chain and defence production arrangements.
• A national cyber defence shield to protect critical infrastructure and essential services should be activated, based on real-time threat sharing, public-private cyber defence arrangements, and pre-agreed plans for the Australian Signals Directorate to lawfully act as required to defend the most crucial systems.

These and other efforts could be undertaken soberly and responsibly, without undue alarm being caused. Given the state of the world, a well-informed public would understand their necessity. These measures would be precautionary and defensive. At the same time, statecraft that is designed to reduce tensions and secure peace should, of course, continue to be pursued.

As Beazley would appreciate, there are many ironies to be found in this 40-year arc of policy. The United States avoided deep engagement in Australia’s defence in the 1950s and 1960s, when we sought its protection. Today, the strategic backwater of Australia has become a bastion for a US military strategy of denial. In the event that Australia and the United States were to decide to act together to meet the common danger of armed attack in the Pacific area, our forces would effectively constitute an integrated order-of- battle. The successful defence of Australia would for us be an existential act in our national interest. It would at the same time be a vital strategic objective for the United States, as a matter of its own hard interests.

Despite having opted for self-reliant defence in the 1980s, in a major war Australia would find itself having to rely to an uncomfortably significant degree on US force augmentation. This is the price of not building the force that we needed as the warning signs flashed, when we still had time to do so. Today’s force could well handle low level conflict. To that extent, the logic of the 1987 model holds true. A cold comfort, as no such conflict is in prospect.

Ironies aside, Beazley also has a keen sense of the tragic in world history. He is a strategic pessimist, seeing the world as it is. This includes an appreciation that there is an even darker possibility. If a well-armed major power, unchecked by the United States, were to decide that access to our resources or land, or both, would be in its interests, and that Australia would be useful to it in other ways, we would not necessarily have the strategic, economic, demographic and military means to preserve our sovereignty or stave off national subjugation. How we would defend ourselves were US primacy to fade gradually, or shatter suddenly, and how much military heft would Australia require in such a world? Beazley’s Principia would be the starting point for arriving at an answer, but perhaps we would need an Einstein to build on the Newtonian model, as Australia grappled with a completely different, and more hostile, power relativity.

No amount of astute diplomacy, skilful statecraft, or the building of regional architectures would offset the strategic shock and adverse ramifications of a world where US primacy was a memory, like that of British naval mastery and strategic preponderance in the nineteenth-century.

Beazley gave us the conceptual tools with which to formulate, and reformulate, Australian defence strategy. As in physics, so it is in defence—concepts have a long arc, and models are bequeathed for future use, and refinement. Beazley is modest, and so he will probably be embarrassed by this praise, but to adapt Alexander Pope on Newton:

The laws of defending Australia lay hid in night; God said, ‘let Beazley be’, and all was light.

In these darkening days, thankfully we have that light.

Advanced artificial intelligence technologies are being adopted at an unprecedented pace, and their potential to revolutionise society for good is enormous. Since ChatGPT was first released by OpenAI in November last year, AI technologies have been elevated in the international consciousness at a rate few technologies have achieved.

However, AI also poses significant risks, from data leakage and privacy violations to deliberate disruption and attack. The importance of mitigating these risks and ensuring the responsible development and deployment of AI technology is only increasing.

On 1 June the Australian government, through the Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic’s office, released a discussion paper on the need to regulate AI. This could see AI technologies assigned risk levels, requiring organisations to understand the risk profile of AI they implement.

This reflects a broader conversation happening around the world, as seen by recent efforts by the US to engage with industry leaders and promote responsible innovation.

On 16 May, Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s testimony at the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law highlighted the potential harms of AI and need for tougher regulation. This follows meetings between President Joe Biden and the heads of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI on 4 May to discuss the potential direction of the technology and the options for mitigating risks. The meeting focused on safety, security, human and civil rights, privacy, jobs and democratic values, and what can be done to protect citizens from AI-related risk.

The meeting came against a backdrop of speculation that AI may be at an ‘inflection point’ that will be remembered for decades to come. Over the past six months, incredible technological advances have been achieved under the mantle of AI, surpassing what even experts in the field had thought possible in the near to medium term. This includes large-language models, advanced visual capabilities, and breakthroughs that some expect will enable autonomous vehicles to replace human freight drivers.

The speed and extent of these advances have led some experts to warn that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The Future of Life Institute wrote an open letter calling for a pause on AI development. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the ‘godfather of AI’, quit Google, citing concerns about the technology’s dangers. Eliezer Yudkowsky, an expert well known for urging caution on AI, called to ‘shut it down’. These public appeals come alongside an increasing awareness that what was once an academic challenge is increasingly becoming a practical one.

Attacks on AI systems are happening in the real world. One public-interest initiative—AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Incidents and Controversies—has kept a register of AI incidents and attacks ranging from automated generation of fake news, failures of autonomous systems like self-driving cars, and political propaganda being released as deepfakes. Some thinkers in the humanities, including Yuval Harari (author of Sapiens and Homo Deus), even claim AI has the power to ‘hack’ society thanks to its ability to influence human cultures and norms.

Biden’s meeting with industry leaders recognises a new challenge, albeit in the context of an existing trend: when the biggest technological advances and are made and controlled by private industry, governments have to be proactive to mitigate risk. This is a challenge for the rest of the world too, since the biggest advances in technology globally tend to occur in a few very large companies in the US. Remaining at the cutting edge of AI requires the significant financial and hardware resources  that these companies are willing to invest. The training of GPT-3, the large-language model that underpinned ChatGPT, for instance, cost millions of dollars. This is of particular concern in the security context. When model information is held as proprietary by these companies, information about how to secure it is ceded to them.

Adversarial machine learning in particular poses a significant threat, because it allows malicious actors to manipulate AI systems and potentially harm individuals or organisations. For example, an attacker could manipulate the data used to train an AI system for facial recognition to make it misidentify certain individuals.

Many countries are already taking steps to promote responsible innovation and risk mitigation in AI. In the US, initiatives include a blueprint for an AI bill of rights, the AI risk-management framework and a roadmap for standing up a national AI research resource. The EU has established the European AI Alliance, which aims to promote ethical and trustworthy AI, and the AI4People initiative, which aims to develop a set of ethical guidelines for AI. Australia recently created the National AI Centre’s Responsible AI Network. China recently proposed draft measures to regulate generative AI, the form of AI behind deepfakes and text generation. In 2017 the Chinese government released a development plan for new-generation AI, which aims to establish China as a world leader in the technology by 2030.

However, with development of AI moving too fast for even the experts to keep up with, it’s fair to worry about what hope policy and regulatory systems have. Already, misinformation, deepfakes and mistrust are clawing away at democratic institutions. There’s even discussion about how AI could be weaponised in interstate conflict. The most pressing question, though, is whether AI might be a risk to humanity at large. If it turns out to be the existential threat some leaders say it may be, the global community must do more to work together to create an AI positive future.

The United States has (re)discovered industrial policy. As President Joe Biden’s national security strategy puts it, the administration views ‘modern industrial and innovation strategy’ as the backbone of the future economy. It is an economic policy, a trade philosophy and a political strategy focused on making as much as selling, producing as much as buying, and dignity as much as efficiency.

As a foundation for a shift to a post-neoliberal economy and society, this policy framework has potential, particularly with its emphasis on strategic public investment. But to meet the full spectrum of challenges facing Americans, it must go further, embracing new ways of making goods and providing services that emphasise the value of relationships and healthy local economies.

As the name suggests, industrial policy is rooted in an era when the term ‘industry’ was synonymous with making things at scale through mass production. Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik describes contemporary industrial policy as an illustration of a new doctrine of ‘productivism’, which emphasises good jobs at good wages distributed ‘throughout all regions and all segments of the labor force’. Unlike neoliberalism, productivism recognises the critical role of government and civil society when it comes to job creation; unlike Keynesianism, it focuses on supply-side measures that would enable workers to provide for themselves rather than rely on redistribution and social transfers.

Biden’s signature legislative achievements, the CHIPs and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, with their many ‘buy American’ provisions, certainly fit this description. Likewise, the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which Biden signed into law in November 2021, is already putting construction crews to work on roads and bridges in every state, and promises to create plenty of jobs to expand broadband access.

The administration’s industrial policy focuses on investing intensively in domestic energy production and manufacturing, with an emphasis on some sectors—like semiconductors, advanced computing and biotechnologies—that promise to create good jobs requiring increasingly educated and well-compensated workers. Realistically, however, all manufacturing will rely on steadily increasing automation, powered by artificial intelligence, which threatens to leave millions of workers behind over the long run.

A more radical shift is required. What we need is an economic and social paradigm that incorporates the value of interpersonal relationships and seeks to harness our ability to help each other thrive. Such an approach would embrace production but insist that workers be connected to one another, to what they produce and to the broader ecosystem on which we all depend. In line with the doughnut economics framework proposed by the British economist Kate Raworth, it would recognise that prosperity depends on our ability to care for ourselves, one another and the earth through policies that ‘meet the needs of the people within the means of the planet’.

Such an approach would also seek to reinvent the service economy. The goal would be to bring about a vast expansion of care jobs—which depend on the nature and quality of our relationships—to include every conceivable form of human interaction that produces health and wellbeing at every stage of life, including education, coaching, therapies, mentoring, training and guiding.

First, however, we must examine the assumptions that shaped our old economic policy paradigms, starting with human nature. Previous policy frameworks conceived of us as homo economicus, pursuing our self-interest through rational calculation and competition. But biology, sociology, anthropology and psychology have all shown that human beings need connection and belonging as well as individual agency. By fostering healthy and supportive relationships, we are more likely to achieve our individual goals.

Neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualism over mutualism has come at great social cost. As US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has pointed out, the country is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic: 60% of Americans and 75% of the country’s younger people are struggling with feelings of social isolation. It turns out that the pursuit of human happiness requires care and community as much as the freedom to go our own way.

Seen through this lens, the new breed of industrial policy rests on flawed philosophical foundations. While emphasising local and regional development priorities, it is still based on the logic of competition among states, localities and entities. Moreover, these emerging policy frameworks still view prosperity as a function of economic growth. A better approach, particularly for regional economic development, would treat wellbeing as an end in itself rather than a by-product of higher output.

Ongoing experiments highlight the potential benefits of an economic framework rooted in connection, community, care and participation. The Industrial Commons in Morganton, North Carolina, for example, is fostering a regional textile manufacturing ecosystem through an integrated network of employee-owned industrial cooperatives using cutting-edge technologies to reduce waste. In its quest to create long-term local prosperity, the organisation plans to develop land for worker-owned housing, social cooperatives and a community-based ‘maker space’.

Another experiment combining innovative technology with community, care and participation is the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, which has created a network of community and labour organisations, anchor institutions and small businesses focusing on innovation in digital fabrication technology. Regional community-led non-profits such as the Good Work Institute of Hudson Valley, New York, insist that there’s ‘another way’ rooted in ‘care and connection, and wise stewardship of our shared resources.’

These efforts are illustrative of a broader groundswell. They may not look like the high-tech factories envisioned by Biden’s new industrial policy, but these local initiatives are building economic models based less on mass production than on customised connection, scaled-up through networks. The policy framework we need should foster an economy that supports the industries of human flourishing on a healthy planet.