Last week, I argued that Australia needs stronger defence. Today I suggest how that might be achieved.

Current plans strengthen Australia’s defences slowly. For example, the first of our ‘future submarines’ won’t enter service until the early 2030s, and we won’t have twelve boats until the early 2050s. The glacial pace of strengthening the ADF is consistent with 2016 Defence White Paper‘s assessment that ‘the United States will remain the pre-eminent global military power over the next two decades’—a critical judgment that the latest US National Intelligence Council assessment calls into serious question.

That’s giving the DWP more credit that it deserves. We know that neither the scale nor pace of plans for the ADF has anything to do with balancing strategic risks and costs, let alone soothsaying about where the US will be in 20 years. Instead, today’s plans are the consequence of an ad-hoc decision to spend 2% of GDP on defence by an arbitrary date. To pretend otherwise is to mistake numerology for strategy.

What’s more, today’s plans are little more than a re-hash of the Rudd government’s abandoned 2009 plan. Not only do today’s plans have their genesis in far less challenging times, but we’re starting seven years late.

There are limits to what can be done to adapt existing plans to looming challenges. Woe betide anyone who upsets the cosy political economy of naval shipbuilding. And Defence would strongly defend the current inter-service division of spoils. Absent a major crisis, existing misallocations and inefficiencies are baked in; our only option is to add to existing plans.

The quickest and most cost-effective way to strengthen our defence would be to enhance the readiness and sustainability of existing capabilities. Stockpiles of munitions and spare parts should be made sufficient for prolonged independent operations, and additional personnel should be signed-up to increase the availability of existing platforms for deployment. We should analyse where and how we can get the most worthwhile boosts to capability for each extra dollar spent. Plans to upgrade the ADF’s airfields and port facilities should be brought forward.

Next, we should examine the feasibility of keeping selected existing platforms in service beyond their planned retirement date—even if only as reserve capabilities. Our 71 classic Hornet fighters would be a perfect candidate, but we’ve probably passed the point of no return. If only we’d had the foresight to complete the centre-barrel replacement program.

What about new capability? Naval platforms might seem an obvious solution, but they take too long to build. At the beginning of WWII, Australia planned to build eight 2,500 ton Tribal-class destroyers—only three were delivered prior to war’s end. And, although the Army can expand quickly, I think we have adequate land forces for the moment. So it’s to the RAAF we must turn.

Aircraft are supremely useful in our part of the world, and mature designs are available from existing production lines. We should investigate expanded purchases of current and planned ADF combat aircraft. Think of it as an insurance policy—a contingency plan—with any final decision contingent on a further deterioration in the strategic outlook.

Even with the cautious approach outlined above, strengthening the ADF would cost money, and that would pressure the government’s finances. But a triple-A credit rating will be of little solace if we enter a major conflict unprepared.

Australia’s security depends on more than its military defence. So, here are three further areas for priority action:

First, we need to revitalise our diplomatic capacity. After years of cuts and growing demands for consular services, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is stretched to the limit. Australia’s diplomats are the government’s eyes, ears and voice in foreign capitals. Now, more than ever, the government needs the unique insights and influence that only well-staffed and properly resourced embassies can deliver.

Second, Australia’s resilience to geopolitical disruption should be bolstered. Sophistry around Australia’s non-compliance with the requirement to hold 90 days of fuel has gone on too long. If it’s good enough for China, Japan, South Korea, the EU and the US to maintain strategic fuel reserves, what makes Australia think that it can rely on foreign markets in a crisis? A strategic reserve of oil and other critical commodities should be created without delay.

Third, the government needs to practice its decision-making and crisis management skills. The National Security Committee should commence a program of structured simulations (wargames) to hone the government’s response in a strategic crisis. No ADF unit would ever deploy without having competed an extensive exercise program to confirm its readiness, and no lesser expectation should prevail for the government’s higher decision-making processes.

Alongside a strengthened defence force, those three measures would better position Australia to deal with the challenges of an increasingly unstable and uncertain world. But there’s one more thing: we need a strategy.

For what it’s worth, I’d double down on the US alliance. It’s true that the relative strength of the US in North Asia is declining, but the US will continue look to Australia as an anchor on the western side of the Pacific even if it is pushed from North Asia. Nothing would please me more than a squadron of US Virginia-class nuclear submarines operating from an Australian port, except perhaps the boats being dual-crewed by RAN sailors. But I know that a great many people would disagree with me; barely a day goes by without a call for Australia to take a ‘more independent’ position—which is code moving away from the United States. We should be talking about the choices we might have to make. It’s possible, and even likely, that in the ‘dark and difficult near future’ an Australian government will have to makes rapid decisions with profound consequences for generations to come.

The forthcoming Foreign Policy White Paper is an opportunity for the government to put forward its narrative for Australia in the 21st century. I wish them luck. Even a half-truthful rendering of our current situation would include grave uncertainties and unpalatable truths. But anything less than that will be a missed opportunity to spur on the nation-defining debate we need to have.

*In 1935, ex-prime minister William ‘Billy’ Hughes wrote a book with this title arguing against appeasement and in favour of rearmament, he was forced to resign from the Lyons government for his efforts.

Realists argue there’s only one genuine philosophical principle to guide a nation’s foreign policy.  In the first recorded debate between realists and idealists, Thucydides reported the Athenians telling the Melians, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Thucydides foreshadowed the realist worldview that nations, ‘are concerned with their own security, act in pursuit of their own national interests, and struggle for power’. Realists believe that the international environment is anarchic and that, consistent with their capacity and opportunities, states will always act in their own economic, ideological and security interests. Philosophically, the new Foreign and Trade White Paper (FTWP) should be firmly based in realism.

An overriding, one size fits all, ‘philosophical framework to guide Australia’s engagement, regardless of international events‘ will either prove to be unworkable—and be ditched at the first intractable crisis or problem—or, if followed irrespective of the specifics of a situation, lead to increased tensions and conflict as other nations pursue their own interests with vigour. Effective implementation of foreign policy involves compromise and accommodation, as well as pursuit of objectives. Sometimes avoiding harm to one’s national interest and mitigating or minimising harm is a good outcome.

The realist paradigm that drove Cold War strategies appeared to be outdated after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath, George H.W. Bush spoke of a new global order: ‘A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle’; adding that ‘No peaceful international order is possible if larger States can devour their smaller neighbours’. But political realists are feeling smug these days. The underlying anarchy of the international environment appears to be pushing through the thin veneer of the post-Cold War order. Nations are increasingly ignoring the web of conventions, norms and rules governing the behaviour between states that seemed largely settled.

The rules-based order—or liberal internationalism—pursued by the US and its allies appears to be fraying. The international law governing interstate conflict has been flouted with impunity on numerous occasions so far this century. The US-led invasion of Iraq is considered by many to be a breach of international law.  The case is strong that ‘no international or domestic legal act can justify’ the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 or the creation of the separatist states. Similarly Russia’s annexation of Crimea is demonstrably ‘a fundamental breach of international law‘. Russia’s actions in Aleppo are seen as beyond the rules of war governing attacking civilians. The Saudi air campaign in Yemen has shocked its allies.  That the Arbitral Tribunal found China’s South China Sea claims to be extinguished has had no tangible effect, as China refuses to acknowledge its jurisdiction and continues its activities. But those a just the tip of the iceberg.

The neoliberal consensus underlying globalisation and the advance of free trade and liberalisation of capital is breaking down. Financial liberalisation and globalist economics are being questioned in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.  The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), both of which were touted as vehicles for economic growth and greater security are—if not fatally wounded—unlikely to come to fruition in their current forms. More significantly for our foreign policy formulation, the vigorous pursuit of those trade arrangements has produced a nativist reaction in the US and has been a rallying cry for nationalist opponents of the EU project. The Brexit vote was as much a rejection of the rules-based European Union as it was a rejection of Brussel’s continued advocacy of free trade agreements.  The British reaction put nationalistic considerations first.

To drive Australia’s foreign policy on the assumption that we possess the only legitimate organising principles for the world and that our policy should be to ‘shape the thinking of other nations’ not only sounds like cultural and political imperialism, but is more crusade than policy. Russia and China are revisionist powers—a fact neither hides—with realist approaches to foreign affairs. China’s success in Africa is directly related to realist policies. The spread of liberal democracy has been halted or reversed in countries like Thailand and Turkey, and around the world putative democracy is a screen for sham elections and authoritarianism. The ardent pursuit of liberal internationalist norms is likely to be unproductive policy.

If the FTWP is to be of long-lasting benefit in the conduct of Australian foreign policy—rather than a liberal internationalist wish list—it must be firmly based in a realist understanding.

Australia needs a forward-looking foreign policy to guide the efforts of our hardworking diplomats. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s intention, as reported recently, to commission a Foreign Policy White Paper is timely. As Graeme Dobell’s post notes, we need a political document with a policy punch.

The procession of largely disappointing Defence White Papers over the past decade masks the fact that it is 13 years since Advancing the National Interest and over a quarter of a century since Australia’s Regional Security (a Ministerial Statement rather than a White Paper) saw the light of day.

For the past two decades, Australia’s foreign ministers and their department have dealt competently with the day-to-day issues and occasional crises. They’ve been good at transacting the business of diplomacy. But one has to go back to Gareth Evans to find a foreign minister who set an agenda, worked at it tirelessly with his department, and delivered results. The Chemical Weapons Convention, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, the ASEAN Regional Forum and the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons are enduring testaments to a transformational foreign policy.

A transactional foreign policy deals with things as they occur. It has no plan. It’s pragmatic rather than purposive, reactive rather than visionary. A transformational foreign policy, on the other hand, is targeted, preferring principle to pragmatism, direction to simple responsiveness, enduring benefits to activity for its own sake.

The incoming Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Frances Adamson, may well have her work cut out, the greatest brake on progress being, perhaps, her own minister. During the Deputy Leaders’ debate held at the National Press Club on 21 June 2016, Julie Bishop had this to say. ‘In our pragmatic approach to foreign policy we deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.’ This observation goes to the heart of the narrowly transactional approach to foreign policy that has characterised Australia’s foreign policy for the past 20 years.

For all her energy and undoubted hard work, Bishop has neither identified nor advanced any of Australia’s longer-term interests and hopes. She hasn’t sought to create a world as Australia might wish it to be—surely the principal goal of a foreign minister who wants to make a difference. Here are a few issues that she could consider for inclusion in a transformational foreign policy agenda.

The strategic relationship (or contest, perhaps) between the US and China is the force that will shape the Asian region for the rest of this century. Australia’s security and prosperity depend on how that is managed: if tension and a consequent arms race is the result, Australia will spend ever more on defence and our standard of living will drop. If, on the other hand, the US and China are able to accept that each has legitimate strategic interests in Asia and that cooperation rather than competition is the relationship paradigm, the entire Asian region (including Australia) will be well served. We have to work at this, however. It won’t just happen, especially while the US represents itself as the setter and arbiter of ‘the rules-based international order’ and China continues to employ aggression as the salve for ‘the century of humiliation’.

The greatest assets we have in managing this complex relationship between China and the US are our neighbours, who are affected just as much as we by a competition for strategic dominance. And Indonesia, a nation with a bright economic and political future, will inevitably take centre-stage in a transformational approach to regional strategic affairs. It’s in Australia’s interests to work closely with Indonesia to achieve this.

In terms of Australia’s international reputation and image, our refugee policy, in the guise of a border security policy, has been a disaster. We are seen in the UK and the US as lacking both compassion and smarts. The plight of some 60 million refugees globally is a major international problem—one that Australia needs to address in company with like-minded countries. We need a totally transformed diplomacy towards countries of first resort—particularly Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand—and a completely re-engineered approach to the UNHCR. We need to work more energetically with the UN to tackle the main cause of the global refugee problem—civil war. And we have to stop exploiting economically indigent countries like PNG and Nauru. The global community needs a transformational approach to refugees. So do we.

In the newly-minted anthropocene era, the consequences of global warming are increasingly entrenched, no matter how much we hide behind the fact that other economies are bigger carbon polluters than we are (though there’s no escaping the fact that we are the biggest carbon emitter on a per capita basis). The scrapping of the Clean Energy Future package in 2013 may have played well for some on the domestic political scene, but it damaged Australia’s international reputation as a serious player on global warming issues. We have a responsibility as much to our regional neighbours as we do to future generations to mitigate the effects of global warming and to adapt to the inevitable environmental changes.

Closer to home, Australia’s relationship with Indonesia remains formal and brittle, Papua New Guinea is teetering on the brink of social collapse, Timor Leste is locked in litigation with us on sea bed boundary issues and our relationship with New Zealand is supercilious where it isn’t dismissive. We need to invest in these relationships: exchanging emojis isn’t enough.

Of course, we can continue to deal with the world as it is, staggering from issue to issue, crisis to crisis, without much of a sense of what it is all about or where we might be headed. But the challenge for a government that likes ‘to live in exciting times’ is to manage the excitement rather than being overcome by it. That demands planning and strategy. That’s why a contemporary and purposive Foreign Affairs White Paper is so important.