The Contest in the Australian Security Policy Community

In this year-end analysis, former foreign minister Gareth Evans assesses the contest within Australian politics – and the foreign policy, defence and intelligence communities – over how to face a growing array of regional security challenges in 2024 and beyond.

The security concerns that are broadly shared across the Australian policy community also are broadly shared across most of our wider region.

In the case of China, concerns extend to its international law-defying territorial ambition in, and militarisation of, the South China Sea, with its ‘9- dash line’ this year expanded to 10; its repeatedly stated determination to unify Taiwan with the mainland, not excluding the use of force; its continued assertiveness on other territorial fronts with Japan and India; its efforts to increase its presence and influence in smaller but strategically significant regional players; and its transition from a bystander to regular spoiler role in the United Nations Security Council and other multilateral contexts. Above all, there is anxiety about the very significant expansion and modernisation of its military, including nuclear, capability.

In the case of the United States, the increasingly alarming vagaries of its domestic politics have created concerns internationally about its will and capacity to stay the course in its long self-appointed role as regional security stabiliser and balancer, particularly given its distractions elsewhere with Ukraine and now again in the Middle East, and about its retreat from the open trading policies that have contributed to the region’s economic prosperity and stability.

Concerns about US reliability have particular resonance in the context of North East Asia, where the DPRK continues to expand its nuclear arsenal and engage in other military provocations. Conflict between India and Pakistan, the Indo-Pacific’s other perennial security flashpoint, is not imminently likely, but can never be entirely ruled out.

The unhappy reality – and this perception is, again, shared across most of the Australian policy community, as around the region – is that nations can sleep-walk into war. Bellicose nationalist rhetoric, designed mainly for domestic political consumption, can generate over-reactions elsewhere. Small provocations, economic or otherwise, can generate an escalating cycle of larger reactions.

Precautionary defence spending can escalate into a full-blown arms race. With more nervous fingers on more triggers, small incidents can rapidly escalate into major crises. And major crises can explode into all-out war – creating, in this nuclear age, existential risks not only for its participants but for life on this planet as we know it.

All these shared concerns translate into a degree of agreement – but only a degree – across the Australian policy community as to our defence and foreign policy response.

First, accepting that defence preparedness should be governed by potential adversaries’ capability rather than their perceived hostile intent, there is a general recognition that Australia will need to spend more on building our own military self-reliance. But how much more, and on what assets, remains contested.

The Defence Strategic Review initiated by the Albanese Government, and released in April 2023, began the task of defining the kind of expanded and refigured capability Australia will need in response to “the most challenging circumstances in our region for decades”. The review focused on the need to build longer range “defence by denial” capability, with less emphasis on land warfare, vulnerable surface ships and defence of the continent, and more on distant forward defence through enhanced air, underwater and cyber firepower. There is little disagreement about the need for the Australian defence porcupine (or, in our case, echidna) to have more and sharper quills.

But there is still a real issue as to just how long and strong and unequivocally self-managed some of those quills really need to be – above all the nuclear-powered submarines promised by AUKUS. And there is still plenty of scepticism – historically well-founded – as to whether we are really prepared to pay for needed new capability, and able to deliver it with any timeliness.

Second, it is broadly uncontested that we need to spend more diplomatic time and attention consolidating and building, or rebuilding as the case may be, bilateral relationships around the region, especially Indonesia, but also Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, and Japan, South Korea and India.

And, also in the Pacific, where the previous Coalition Government’s largely denialist climate policy has been a significant turnoff for our island friends in recent years. New Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and particularly Foreign Minister Penny Wong, have received deserved praise for their sustained personal commitment.

The ASEAN-centred regional dialogue architecture remains, properly, an important focus, but there is a degree of scepticism as to just how much time and attention we should be devoting to ASEAN itself, as a collective organisation. ASEAN continues to be a supremely important de-fuser of cross-border tensions but has proved frustratingly incapable of helping redress catastrophic human rights violations in some of its member states, above all Myanmar, or offering any kind of collective resistance to overweening behaviour by China.

It is also well understood and accepted that giving new substantive ballast and substance to some of these crucial regional bilateral relationships will require much more creative energy going into building trade and investment ties and more generous and focused aid programs.

A good start on the former front has been made with the publication in September of the Moore report, “Invested: Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040”. This report’s laser-like focus, not on generalities but sectors and sub-regions, follows in this respect the equally impressive 2018 Varghese report, “An India Economic Strategy to 2035”.

On the aid side, while new commitments, focusing very much on the Pacific, were announced in August this year, the total Australian spend has been falling dramatically in recent years. With ODA at just 0.19 per cent of GNI, we are now among the least generous of OECD donors.

Third, although it has its critics on the fringes, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – bringing together the US, Japan, India and Australia – continues to command quite strong support across the Australian security policy community. While the Quad is unlikely to evolve into a fully-fledged military alliance, the new grouping has great combined military clout, and simply by its existence sends a very clear signal to Beijing that any significant further adventurism in the region may be met by a more muscular and united push-back. Recent moves to give the Quad a greater non-military focus, with cooperative initiatives on health security, clean energy, regional connectivity and the like, should contribute usefully to its longevity.

As encouraging as all this more-or-less common ground may be, the reality is that there remains in Australia much that is highly contested within the security policy community, going to the three quite fundamental issues of how we should be positioning ourselves in relation to China, the United States and – in that context – our defence preparedness.

In each case the division can be broadly put this way:

On one side, there is the defence and intelligence community and those think tanks and media who sail with it – above all the largely Defence-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the Murdoch press passim, and a strident section of the Nine media empire – who tend to a pessimistic view of the threat environment and a disposition to approach most problem solving through a primarily military lens.

On the other side, there is the foreign policy constellation of current and former diplomats, and academic, think tank and media analysts and commentators (including me), who tend to be more optimistic about the possibility of peaceful solutions and more willing to champion diplomacy, dialogue and cooperation.

This divide remains very pronounced in the case of China. Since the change of government, Albanese and Wong have been keen to downplay the all-too-common talk under their predecessors about “drums of war” beating. Wong’s speech to the National Press Club in April clearly spelt out the new tone when she said that we should “not waste energy with shock or outrage” at China using its great and growing strength and international influence to advance its national interests, but rather “cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, [and] manage our differences wisely”.

And Albanese has made clear in multiple statements through the course of the year his own strong commitment in this context to dialogue and diplomacy, to cooperation rather than confrontation. All that was clearly bearing fruit with a very visible warming of bilateral relations toward the end of 2023.

But that softer tone has not found much favour with many in the defence and intelligence community, who continue to fulminate privately, and occasionally publicly (as with Defence Industry Minister Conroy raging against “appeasers” in the context of the AUKUS debate at the ALP National Conference in August 2023, and ASIO head Mike Burgess in October 2023 blasting Chinese intellectual property theft as the worst “in human history”) about the scale of China’s military build-up, the imminence of the military threat it poses to Taiwan, the reality of its determination to build Pacific bases potentially threatening Australia, the state-capture risks of its Belt and Road Initiative, the perfidy of its industrial espionage, and the alarming extent of its influence operations, not least within its now very large Australian diaspora.

All this is regularly fuelled by alarmist statements from the Coalition. Tension within the government is well contained for now but remains capable of boiling up at any time.

Tension is also present, and growing, on the question of Australia’s relationship with the United States. There is no serious inclination anywhere to walk away from the ANZUS alliance, with a general recognition of the benefits we continue to derive from access to intelligence, high-end weaponry and technology, and the deterrent utility of the prospect – not guaranteed, but not to be ignored – of the US coming to our defence if attacked. But beyond that the ground is indeed contested.

There are those who are true believers in the moral exceptionalism of the United States, the indispensability of its continued economic and military primacy in maintaining both global and regional peace and good order, and the certainty of its military commitment to Australia’s defence, and who are prepared to follow it down almost any path it should take.

There are many in the Australian security policy community who are much more sceptical on all these fronts. And there are those who strive to keep a foot in both camps. While the Coalition parties remain almost unanimous true believers, pretty much the full response spectrum is evident within the Albanese Government.

Defence Minister Richard Marles is closest to a true believer. Prime Minister Albanese, while comfortable enough talking Washington talk, is an instinctive straddler. And Foreign Minister Penny Wong, while always cautious, is more inclined to scepticism, particularly on the attractions of continued US primacy, being very explicit in her April National Press Club speech about Australia’s national interest lying, above all, in our living in a multipolar region, one “where no country dominates, and no country is dominated … and all countries benefit from strategic equilibrium”.

A cutting-edge issue is whether the US will really feel obliged to rush to our military defence if we are ever seriously threatened, or only do so if its own national interests are also directly at stake. There is a particularly strong case for scepticism in the case of our reliance not just on US extended deterrence but extended nuclear deterrence: it defies credibility to think that Washington would risk losing Los Angeles to save Sydney, or for that matter Seoul or Tokyo. And scepticism on all these fronts will certainly accelerate in the unhappy event of Donald Trump, who clearly regards allies as encumbrances more than assets, regaining the presidency.

One context in which alliance-related tension could clearly explode is if China were to attack Taiwan. China’s long-term ambition to regain Taiwan is clear, but the downside risks of taking precipitate and unprovoked strike action – for both its internal prosperity and stability, and its wider international reputation – would seem to outweigh any possible rewards.

That said, the prospect of an invasion – however remote – will continue to divide Australian opinion. Peter Dutton – then Coalition Defence Minister and now Opposition leader – said in 2021 that it was “inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US” in any military action it chose to take. Defence Minister Marles made clear his own view in October that Australia “cannot be a passive bystander in the event of war”.

But there is a strong view within a large section of the ALP that if it did come to a fight, and one unprovoked by Taiwan, while it would be a tough call not to join in the defence of a fellow thriving democracy, that siren call should be resisted. The argument is that Taiwan has always been a special case, its sovereignty never recognised internationally in the same way as Kuwait or Ukraine’s, and that Australia has little or no capacity to influence the outcome, but a great capacity to suffer if drawn into war at any level.

The biggest defence issue of all currently testing the solidarity of the Australian security policy community, and likely to do so for years to come, is the desirability, and credibility, of Australia acquiring a fleet of eight or more nuclear propelled submarines, under the AUKUS agreement with the United States and United Kingdom. The agreement has come under fire domestically for three main reasons.

The first, which also has had some international buy-in, goes to its implications for nuclear non-proliferation, and is the most easily answerable. The boats will not be nuclear-armed; their propulsion units will be lifetime-sealed, requiring no refuelling or any Australian production of possibly divertible fissile material; and IAEA negotiations to establish effective new safeguards protocols seem close to conclusion.

A much more compelling domestic criticism – taking into account the eye-watering estimated cost of up to $A368 billion over the next 30 years of the proposed SSN program and the gravity defying delivery timetable – is whether these boats, for all the undeniable advantages over conventionally powered boats they bring in range, speed, endurance underwater, firepower and (for now) undetectability, they really are the optimal choice for Australia’s defence needs.

Would not we be better served by spending the same or less money on getting, much sooner, a much larger fleet of conventional boats, many more of which could be simultaneously at sea, and which may well – with expected advances in detection capability over the next few decades – be no more vulnerable than the SSNs?

If the role of the AUKUS boats is to be a useful, albeit numerically marginal, add-on to US underwater capability in the South China Sea, they can no doubt play that part well. But if their primary purpose is to protect continental Australia, and our sea lanes and communication systems, from attack, could we not be as well or better served by a larger, much earlier deployed, conventional fleet?

How much value is really added, here as elsewhere, by moving from a posture of defence of our continent and archipelagic surrounds to one of distant forward defence?

These questions remain basically unanswered.

The remaining big concern about the AUKUS project, increasingly being articulated at least within the more sceptical end of the policy community here, is whether by so comprehensively further yoking ourselves to such extraordinarily sophisticated and sensitive US military technology, Australia has for all practical purposes abandoned our capacity for independent sovereign judgement.

This is a matter not only of to how we use this new capability, but in how we respond to future US calls for military support. The government response is that an Australian flag means just that, and that we will retain complete operational independence in the use of these boats, whatever the context.

But my own experience as Foreign Minister tells me that is not quite the way the world – and American pressure – works. Does anyone really think that a US Congress anxious about depleting US combat capability can be persuaded to exempt Australia from its International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) if it does not believe that the nuclear-powered submarines it sells us will be on call at the click of a presidential finger if the Americans ever believe they need them?

These criticisms going to the desirability of the AUKUS submarine program may well be subsumed by rapidly growing concerns about its basic credibility, now coming from all sides, including – interestingly – some of its most fierce and longstanding supporters. There is now very real doubt as to whether the US Congress, in its present mood, will ever support the sales of three – let alone a possible five – Vanguard submarines to Australia or anyone else.

And, given the history of all three countries in meeting design-and-build targets for complex new defence assets, and there are few if any more complex than nuclear submarines, anyone who thinks the second phase of this project has any more chance of proceeding smoothly to completion has not been concentrating.

And the unhappy reality is that if the whole AUKUS project falls over, as it well might in the next year or two, we have no obvious fallback Plan B. Such, many of us would argue, are the consequences of allowing essentially free rein in security policymaking to hardliners in the defence and intelligence community, as has essentially been the case in Australia for most of the last three decades.

Many of us are hoping that diplomacy will no longer be confined to a second fiddle role, that the kind of extraordinarily productive cooperative relationship between Defence, Foreign Affairs and the intelligence agencies that existed for most of the Hawke-Keating Government years can be recreated, and that Australia will again play the creative and constructive middle power role we have in past on both regional and global security issues. But we are not holding our breath.

The Hon, Gareth Evans AC, KC was Australian Foreign Minister 1988- 96, President of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group 2000-09, and Chancellor of the Australian National University 2010-19, where he is now Distinguished Honorary Professor.

This is an edited version of an article published in the CSCAP Regional Security Outlook 2024.