The Australian way of war and peace

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought geopolitical struggle to Europe, but storm clouds are gathering across the Indo-Pacific as well, as the shadow of a global contest between authoritarianism and democracy becomes a reality. In this maritime super-region spanning the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the People’s Republic of China is pursuing hegemony, an external manifestation of the nationalist authoritarian control that has hardened in recent years under Xi Jinping. This quasi-imperial push to dominate the region that is the world’s economic centre of gravity is at least as much about subordinating the interests of a myriad of other nations and communities as it is about challenging the United States.

Understanding how these other powers are responding to this new era of strategic danger is crucial to helping Europe define its choices as the realities of confrontation and the risks of conflict involving China accumulate. In the multipolarity of the Indo-Pacific, many such studies manifest: Japan’s growing resolve, South Korea’s self-assertion, the Philippines’ maritime resistance, Vietnam’s resilience, India’s rise and Taiwan’s special defiance. But for Europe, the Australian story may be the most illuminating of all. Since 2016, Australia has dealt with influence and interference operations, economic coercion and strategic encroachments in its neighbourhood. Canberra’s experience of weathering these challenges and preparation for future tension provides distinct lessons in statecraft, leadership and security, especially for the democratic middle and smaller powers of the world.

China’s authoritarian assertiveness, pressure and expansive regional presence have given Australia a bracing reality check – so much so that an ‘Australian way’ of comprehensive national security toward war and peace in the Indo-Pacific is emerging.

This journey is still at an early stage and no destination is permanent, but some features are already clear. The Australian way combines internal fortitude – including new safeguards for national infrastructure and democratic institutions – with external strengthening. The latter element involves alliance and partnership as much as national military modernisation. Indeed, given Australia’s singular mismatch of extensive interests and limited capabilities, defence self-reliance is meaningful only in an alliance context.

Most historic among the country’s defensive measures is the 2021 AUKUS arrangement to acquire nuclear-powered submarines and maintain an edge in critical technologies, in intimate cooperation with the United States and the United Kingdom. This is not only about ensuring Australia maintains a technological lead but has naval power projection suited to the vast distances of its region: a kind of coming of age as a truly Indo-Pacific power. At the same time, there is a premium on statecraft: a strategic equilibrium in which the pursuit of deterrence is accompanied by diplomacy. Australia’s tradition of aiding its neighbours in the Pacific Islands and South-East Asia has been modified with a strategic purpose: to help them develop resilience and protect sovereignty, quietly proving the staying power of democratic partnership.

In Australia, it would be hard to imagine a bolder signal of strategic change than a left-wing stalwart of a Labor government preaching the virtues of AUKUS. But this is precisely what occurred when defence industry minister Pat Conroy confronted his party faithful head-on about their anti-nuclear, anti-American and anti-British pieties, taking the stage at a 2023 party conference to insist: ‘If you’re pro-human rights, you need to be pro-AUKUS. If you’re pro-peace, you need to be pro-AUKUS.’

Just as the decisions by Sweden and Finland to pursue NATO membership have challenged old assumptions about neutrality and alignment, so, too, is Australia taking some profound departures to secure its future and a rules-based order in a contested Indo-Pacific.

At a superficial glance, Australia’s strategic situation and policy choices would seem to have little meaning for Europe. So much is different. Australia is ‘a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation’, as described by its first prime minister Edmund Barton in the movement towards this federation of former British colonies in 1901. More than a century later, there remains an extraordinary dissonance between a modest-sized population (26.5 million people in 2023) and vast continental and maritime territory, which encompasses 5 per cent of the Earth’s surface. The confluence of geography, history, resources and population has bestowed the country singular circumstances. This is a developed democracy with Western political foundations. The country is located far from its traditional allies, and it has had a complex quest to find its place in an Asia-centric regional order. Its contemporary multiculturalism brings an advantage: far from the Anglo-Saxon bastion Chinese propaganda depicts, Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world, with 29 per cent of its population born abroad. At the same time, successive Australian governments have underscored a unifying sense of national values, marked not by race or religion but by political, economic and religious freedom, liberal democracy, equality and mutual respect.

Likewise, Australian statecraft has for many years now sought to define the nation’s geographic place in the world as a source of strength and advantage. That is the story of the Indo-Pacific, which Australian diplomacy has pioneered for more than a decade – in a bipartisan fashion across two changes of government and five prime ministers – and which history will acknowledge as a significant legacy of its middle-power diplomatic activism. This reimagined the nation’s home region as not Asia-only but Asia-plus. It reflected the connectedness of the Pacific and Indian Oceans as a strategic system and the enduring importance of global stakeholders in this vast maritime space. In 2013, an Australian defence white paper became the first official strategy by any nation to redefine its region of strategic interest as something called the Indo-Pacific. Not merely a new name for the late twentieth-century notion of the Asia-Pacific (which tended to exclude India and the Indian Ocean), this was a deliberate act of geopolitical imagination to define a region to which Australia automatically belonged, thus transcending debates about whether Australia could be narrowly defined as an Asian or Western country.

Admittedly, under the current Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Australia is being more selective in its deployment of the very Indo-Pacific terminology it has long championed. This is mostly to acknowledge the sensitivities of small Pacific Island nations, who read the language as embedding their region in a US-China power struggle they would prefer to avoid. Even so, Australia’s most consequential policy actions remain unequivocally Indo-Pacific, from AUKUS (focused on a submarine base on the nation’s west coast) to deep diplomatic investment in ‘Quad’ coordination with India, Japan and America, and an intensification of access and interoperability arrangements under the US military alliance – all in the context of balancing and deterring China.

The idea of the Indo-Pacific is not some cartographic fancy. For many nations, it is useful because it explains and encourages the balancing and dilution of Chinese power through an array of new partnerships across collapsed geographic boundaries.

It undercuts China’s insistence that its assertiveness in the vital sea lanes of the South China Sea is somehow not the rest of the world’s business. It rejects Xi’s conceit that international connectivity can be diminished to a Belt and Road that happens to begin and end in Beijing, with so many other capitals merely waystations. It provides a metaphor for collective action, code for a pivotal region where China can be prominent but not dominant. In a global discourse often dominated by Beijing’s transgressions and triumphalism, or simplistic narratives of US-China bipolarity, the Indo-Pacific idea offers a useful alternative. It is about steadiness and solidarity among many nations.

Along with Japan, Australia quietly led an accelerating diplomatic campaign in the 2010s to promote the Indo-Pacific. This reframed an Asia-centric region to reflect growing economic connectivity and strategic contest across two oceans, driven in substantial part by China’s expanding interests and influence, and the need for coordination in pushing back. Thus, starting as something of an intellectual insurgency, the term Indo-Pacific fast became a new orthodoxy. Australia’s initiative in 2013 (reinforced in a foreign policy white paper in 2017) was succeeded decisively by Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy in 2016, with the late Shinzo Abe proving the concept’s most determined proponent – unsurprisingly since it built on his 2007 idea of the ‘confluence of the two seas’. Together, Abe and Australian conservative prime minister Malcolm Turnbull encouraged the United States to adopt an Indo-Pacific strategy, which it did initially (albeit with too narrow a military focus) under the Trump administration. Indo-Pacific strategy has been a vital pillar of continuity between the foreign and defence policies of Republican and Democratic administrations, with Joe Biden taking a more comprehensive approach that recognises economics, technology, development, information and public goods as integral elements alongside deterrence.

Success has many authors, and the Indo-Pacific idea has benefited from a diversity of champions. India was crafting its own inclusive vision, promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018. The initiative of Indonesia in pushing fellow South-East Asian nations towards the 2019 ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific was a crucial turning point in legitimising a much wider array of Indo-Pacific converts, especially in Europe.

In the past few years, the Indo-Pacific tide has spread to the EU, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea.

France, as a resident power with its Pacific and Indian Ocean territories, was an early mover towards the concept. It has maintained an Indo-Pacific vision, even though Australia’s AUKUS deal – and sudden abandonment of a major French submarine contract – damaged trust between these democracies.

Although Chinese propaganda predictably seeks to accentuate the differences among the varied Indo-Pacific policies – and it is true that some recognise the need for deterrence more openly than others – the commonalities loom large, across Australian, Asian, American and European positions alike. These include respect for a rules-based order and peaceful status quo, the upholding of the sovereignty of nations large and small, and a recognition that the region’s security challenges cannot be addressed in narrow, localised ways that enable coercion and aggression.

For Australia, the Indo-Pacific provides the conceptual framework for a broader strategy of national security, international engagement and coalition-building. This involves a recognition of darker currents of geopolitical competition and the end of a long era of hope – or naivety – in which security and prosperity were staked on the promise of globalisation. For a resource-rich nation, reliant on free if managed flows of trade, investment, people, technology and knowledge, this was of course an attractive proposition.

From at least the 1980s, Australia’s economy became relentlessly open, diplomacy was underpinned by optimism and engagement, and security policy focused on non-state challenges, such as terrorism, disaster relief and – where necessary – the stabilisation of neighbouring weak states. Where larger geopolitics came into play, the United States came to the fore as Australia’s ally and the sole superpower and underwriter of regional peace.

No single turning point explains the recent hardening of Australia’s security outlook. It is a China story but not about China alone.

Australia has never been capable of providing for more than a portion of its overall defence, but some steps towards greater security self-reliance came well before the contemporary China challenge. In the 1980s, a journey began towards self-reliant combat capabilities for the Australian continent, albeit against limited threats. This ‘defence of Australia’ concept was challenged amid the expeditionary demands of the global ‘war on terror’. But echoes can be found today, as Canberra looks anew at the need for deterrence to keep a prospective adversary far from the nation’s shores. The AUKUS nuclear submarine will take many years, indeed decades, to fully deliver, but other strike weapons such as missiles could be added to the Australian arsenal within years. Moreover, Australia is open about its possession of offensive cyber capabilities.

For the first decade of this century, a dominant narrative in Canberra’s external policy thinking was that the rise of China was largely good news. Geopolitical rivalries from the twentieth century were diminishing through the logic of economic enmeshment. This story was consistent with Australian short-term economic interests. China was overtaking Japan as the nation’s top trade partner, especially through its appetite for iron ore. The popular sense was that this relationship helped the nation weather the global financial crisis of 2008.

Yet the start of Australia’s security wake-up was also around this time. America’s economic pain gave China’s strategic elite a jolt of confidence. The first ripples of Beijing’s assertiveness were being felt in the South China Sea. And on Australian soil, the nationalist rallying of thousands of Chinese students – to suppress dissident voices during the 2008 Olympic torch relay – was a foretaste of the foreign interference controversy that would flare up some years later. Mandarin-speaking Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd was mistaken by some observers as being soft on China: in fact, his defence strategy of 2009 – calling for a modernised navy and expanded submarine fleet – was an early sign that Australia was worried about future major power aggression.

To be sure, the external policy settings in Canberra were still mixed. An ‘Asian Century White Paper’ in 2012 envisioned a cornucopian future. In 2014, the conservative (and otherwise hawkish) Prime Minister Tony Abbott welcomed Xi Jinping to parliament with words of a wide-ranging partnership of mutual benefit. But national security undercurrents were gathering force, driven by Xi’s push for domestic control and regional dominance, and the growing clash of political systems and values.

Many international observers were surprised when, in 2016, Australia began tightening its policy settings for self-protection; nominally in a country-agnostic fashion but in practice against China.

This was very much a set of independent policy initiatives begun well before the Trump administration toughened America’s own China stance; indeed, Australia – along with Japan – led the way in this, as with the wider Indo-Pacific strategy.

Under the conservative governments of Malcolm Turnbull and then Scott Morrison, a wide-ranging national security effort included laws to criminalise foreign interference, ban foreign political donations and invoke federal powers to restrict subnational governments from freelancing on external policy (such as a Chinese Belt and Road agreement by the government of the state of Victoria). Intelligence funding and powers increased, new security-related departments and agencies were established and security screening on foreign investment tightened. Most starkly, Australia in 2018 became the first nation in the world effectively to ban Chinese state-influenced vendors Huawei and ZTE from involvement in 5G networks, the nervous system of a wired economy. Defence modernisation was pursued with a stress on conventional capabilities for deterrence and warfighting in a maritime region. Internationally, Australia stepped up its involvement as a development and security partner in the South Pacific, pushed for the revival and rapid deepening of the Quad, strengthened alliance cooperation with the United States, and initiated AUKUS in 2021.

All these moves need to be understood in light of Australia’s difficult choices as a middle power in a contested Indo-Pacific, where many nations now hold profound concerns about China’s massive military expansion and its demonstrated willingness to coerce or compromise the sovereignty of smaller powers. But there is also an important global dimension, including Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Strikingly, the Albanese Labor government, elected in May 2022, has kept all the security building blocks put in place by conservative governments.

This is despite Labor’s foreign policy settings and rhetoric placing more emphasis on engagement with South-East Asian and Pacific neighbours (including through a more ambitious stance on climate change). Notably, Australia has sustained outspoken bipartisan support for Ukraine, including in supply of military equipment, despite the ambivalence of many of the Asian nations that Canberra needs to work with in managing the China challenge.

In 2023, the Australian government is promoting a ‘stabilisation’ of relations with China, prompting some concern among partners and within conservative ranks that this could lead to the erosion of the national security achievements of recent years. The official rhetoric is cautious and disciplined. This is intended as a contrast to the Morrison government’s willingness to get ahead of the global pack as one of China’s most forthright critics, including in calling for an independent inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic – the moment Beijing chose as the tipping point towards its campaign of economic coercion. But the policy settings seem little changed.

Since 2020, Australia has weathered economic sanctions (especially against agriculture), and public opinion across the political spectrum has become deeply suspicious of Beijing.

No serious politician in Australia harbours the illusion that relations with China can be founded on trust. Foreign minister Penny Wong talks of the need for ‘strategic equilibrium’ in the Indo-Pacific. But in a region where China seeks hegemony, this does not mean equidistance between China and America. Rather, it is a polite way of talking about full-spectrum balancing involving diplomacy, economics and development as well as hard power – and working with a wide range of partners to ensure that what remains of regional order is preserved and temptations for aggression constrained.

None of this preparedness guarantees that Australia will be fully ready for the storms and shocks ahead. Like most democracies, this is a nation that remains less than the sum of its parts when it comes to being ready to mobilise for crisis. For instance, Australian politics, following the unpopular deployment of conscripts to the Vietnam War, has long been allergic to the idea of national service. The private sector and subnational levels of government remain only loosely connected to the national security effort. The nation’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities have become plain, in embarrassing mass data breaches across the private and healthcare sectors. Above all, although the current Australian government has many of the building blocks of a whole-of-nation security strategy – especially in foreign and defence policy – it remains nervous about articulating the full challenge to the general public. There is yet to be a full and open acknowledgement that one day the nation may need to be ready for major conflict in its region; words like ‘mobilisation’ and ‘war economy’ are yet to enter polite discourse in Australia, but even that may prove a matter of time.

What has occurred in Europe today could erupt in the Indo-Pacific tomorrow, especially with China’s regular threats to seize Taiwan. The Covid-19 pandemic, Putin’s war, China’s strategic tensions with other powers: all these factors have strained or jeopardised supply chains and other global economic interactions in different ways. For Australians, they are raising awareness about economic dependence and a long complacency over national preparedness. Resilience, diversification and deterrence are becoming standard terminology in the policy debate. At the same time, parts of the business community would prefer to pretend away the woes of recent years (or the long-term brittleness of China’s authoritarian model) and focus only on short-term profit. Moreover, the wider Australian community has plenty else to worry about – including cost of living, social cohesion and the impacts of climate change – and is not seeking conflict.

What happens next in Australia’s strategic voyage is a matter of contingency, for sooner or later China’s region-wide assertiveness is likely to present Canberra with hard choices.

So many crises are plausible: confrontation in the East China Sea with Japan, in the South China Sea with the Philippines, across the disputed border with India, or with US forces anywhere across the Indo-Pacific. A Chinese effort to pressure or suborn a South Pacific government could compel a clash of wills with Australia, determined to remain the partner of choice in its neighbourhood. Outright aggression against Taiwan remains a nightmare scenario, not only for US allies in the Indo-Pacific but for the whole world.

And any question of contingency is also a question of leadership. The several Australian prime ministers who have so far found themselves standing up to Beijing took on the mantle of national security with some reluctance. Australia’s present leadership has the opportunity to consolidate their ragged but vital achievements and with it the responsibility to prepare the nation for the Indo-Pacific tempest ahead.