AFA4 Defending Australia: Australian Foreign Affairs; Issue 4

ISSUE 4, OCTOBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Australian Foreign Affairs is published three times a year by Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd. Publisher: Morry Schwartz. ISBN 978-1-74382-0667 ISSN 2208-5912 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publishers. Essays, reviews and correspondence © retained by the authors. Subscriptions – 1 year print & digital auto-renew (3 issues): $49.99 within Australia incl. GST. 1 year print and digital subscription (3 issues): $59.99 within Australia incl. GST. 2 years print & digital (6 issues): $114.99 within Australia incl. GST. 1 year digital only: $29.99. Payment may be made by MasterCard, Visa or Amex, or by cheque made out to Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd. Payment includes postage and handling. To subscribe, fill out and post the subscription card or form inside this issue, or subscribe online: www.australianforeignaffairs.com or subscribe@australianforeignaffairs.com Phone: 1800 077 514 or 61 3 9486 0288. Correspondence should be addressed to: The Editor, Australian Foreign Affairs, Level 1, 221 Drummond Street, Carlton VIC 3053 Australia Phone: 61 3 9486 0288 / Fax: 61 3 9486 0244 Email: enquiries@australianforeignaffairs.com Editor: Jonathan Pearlman. Associate Editor: Chris Feik. Consulting Editor: Allan Gyngell. Deputy Editor: Julia Carlomagno. Management: Caitlin Yates. Marketing: Elisabeth Young, Georgia Mill and Iryna Byelyayera. Publicity: Anna Lensky. Design: Peter Long. Production Coordination: Hanako Smith. Typesetting: Marilyn de Castro.

Contents

Contributors

Editor’s Note

Michael Wesley

Dangerous Proximity

Patrick Walters

Spies, China and Megabytes

John Birmingham

Weapons of Choice

Stephan Frühling

A Nuclear-armed Australia

Reviews

Jane Perlez Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping by François Bougon

Matthew Thompson Duterte Harry by Jonathan Miller

Andrew J. Bacevich The World as It Is by Ben Rhodes

Richard Moore Australia’s Foreign Aid Dilemma by Jack Corbett

Mihir Sharma The Billionaire Raj by James Crabtree

Tess Newton Cain Resource Extraction and Contentious States by Matthew G. Allen

Correspondence

The Jakarta Switch: Philips Vermonte, John McCarthy; response by Hugh White

Retreat from Democracy?: Andrew MacIntyre, Amalinda Savirani, Ihsan Ali-Fauzi; response by Tim Lindsey

The Back Page by Richard Cooke

Contributors

Andrew J. Bacevich is a historian at Boston University specialising in foreign policy.

John Birmingham is an author and essayist, and former researcher in the defence department.

Stephan Frühling is an associate professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.

Richard Moore is a Manila-based development consultant and former AusAID deputy director general.

Tess Newton Cain is a Pacific consultant and an associate professor at the University of Queensland.

Jane Perlez is Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times.

Mihir Sharma is a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and the India columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

Matthew Thompson is an author and academic with a special interest in the southern Philippines.

Patrick Walters is executive editor of The Strategist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Michael Wesley is dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.

Editor’s Note

DEFENDING AUSTRALIA

Australia’s military has fought almost continuously since the nation was founded in 1901. More than 100,000 soldiers have died in more than twenty-five separate conflicts, and 2400 are currently on active duty in at least seven countries. These various wars and operations are, with one exception, linked by a convenient thread: they have all occurred elsewhere.

The only time the continent has come under attack since colonisation was during World War II – but, even then, the Japanese decision to launch raids as far south as Sydney and Newcastle was an anomaly. When Japanese submarines shelled Sydney’s eastern suburbs on the morning of 8 June 1942, an army officer was dispatched to guard one of the ruined houses from crowds wanting to see the damage. Four people were allowed in at a time.

This underscores Australia’s unusual approach to its defence: it willingly sends troops to kill and die abroad, but has relatively little fear of being attacked. It plans to buy seventy-two F-35 Joint Strike Fighter combat jets and twelve attack submarines for a total of almost $70 billion, yet its main cities rarely, if ever, bother to run rudimentary air raid drills.

This defence equation, in which the nation sends troops offshore to service alliances with greater powers in order to receive their protection, has been the bedrock of Australian security. It can present dilemmas: if Australia’s main interest in deploying troops is to support an ally, this may lead to a commitment to wars that are not just, or winnable. But it has also helped to secure the nation.

The arrangement has been successful because Australia has, through foresight or chance, been allied to the two nations – Britain and then the United States – that have had military dominance over the Asia-Pacific region, particularly the maritime approaches to this island continent.

Today, the challenge for Australia is whether its defence equation can hold when the foundation on which it rests appears so shaky.

The US dominance of the region is no longer assured, particularly as China asserts authority over its trade routes and beyond. This changing power balance will test alliances, including that between Canberra and Washington. China’s strength and ambitions are already straining relations between the United States and countries such as Japan and South Korea, which are starting to question the extent and durability of Washington’s commitment to their security.

The other challenge for Australia is that the superiority of its military capabilities in its neighbourhood is diminishing as national economies around the region grow. Asia’s military spending is increasing at about 5 per cent a year, compared with Australia’s recent increases in real terms of about 3 per cent. India is rising, and Indonesia’s economy will soon be larger than Australia’s. According to Australia’s 2016 Defence White Paper (the most recent), half the world’s submarines will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region within the next two decades, as will at least half of all advanced-combat aircraft. Meanwhile, changes in technology, such as the development of cyber capabilities and drones, make it cheaper and easier for weaker countries to attack those with superior weaponry.

These developments will require Australia to rethink many of its traditional approaches to its defence, including the role and operation of its intelligence agencies, its choices of hardware, and its handling of alliances and diplomacy.

Australia’s luck has not run out: as Asian nations rise, it is closer than ever to the centre of global power and wealth. But this shift is likely to require fresh approaches to the task of defending Australia, in circumstances in which old tenets and conveniences may no longer apply.

Jonathan Pearlman

DANGEROUS PROXIMITY

The collapse of Australia’s defences in a contested Asia

Michael Wesley

Modern Australia is the product of the first truly global conflict. The Seven Years’ War, fought between a British-Prussian-led coalition and a French-Austrian-Spanish-led coalition, raged across Europe and North and South America, and in Asia and Africa, between 1756 and 1763. When hostilities ended, Europe’s balance of power had been transformed and a new system of imperialism had risen. Empire was no longer about trade; it was about territory. Colonies would be garrisoned, and taxed heavily to pay for the privilege. During the war, Britain had seized some of France’s and Spain’s colonies in North America and Asia, its success demonstrating how potentially vulnerable its own overseas possessions were. Only a dominant Royal Navy could knit the far-flung Empire together, and to be dominant it needed a global string of bases. Australia, at the hinge of the Indian and Pacific oceans, was chosen as such a base.

Before the British, no empire had shown the slightest interest in invading the great southern land. Not Java’s Majapahit kingdom (1293–1500s), nor China’s maritime-minded Yuan (1279–1368) or Ming (1368–1644) dynasties, nor the Spanish or the Dutch adventurers who found its coasts long before James Cook. The strategic value of Australia only became apparent with the complete transformation of power politics wrought by the Seven Years’ War. Before the advent of the British Admiralty’s truly global planning, Australia’s indigenous inhabitants had benefited from a unique geopolitical trifecta. The coasts of their continent closest to the rest of the world looked barren and unremittingly hostile to potential settlers, traders and invaders. Their continent was so big that to find the lush, inviting south-eastern coastlines would require prodigious sailing skills and determination. And compared to Australia’s northern and western coasts, the islands of South-East Asia were much more enticing: they were laden with spices and precious metals, and were home to the world’s most enterprising maritime traders.

The British were also the last empire to contemplate invading Australia. Despite Australia’s periodic scares in the nineteenth century about American, French, German and Russian activities in its environs, none of them had even the most rudimentary designs on the continent. Imperial Japan invaded Australia’s mandate territories of Papua and New Guinea in 1942, from where it bombed northern Australia and infiltrated some of its ports, but it never seriously considered invading its sovereign territory.

To observers from the world’s more conflict-prone regions, the security Australia has enjoyed sits anomalously with its obsession with its own defence. The reason for this is the enduring Australian anxiety about our mismatch between numbers and territory. We have always felt we are too small a population to defend such a vast landmass and such a long coastline. But in the two centuries since the last invasion, Australians have never felt insecure for long enough to change that equation. Neither our immigration policies nor our defence budgets have permitted the sort of sustained demographic or military expansion that would make us feel more secure in our ability to protect ourselves from sustained attack.

We have always felt we are too small a population to defend such a vast landmass

Yet for a nation that doubts its ability to defend its territory, Australia has been remarkably willing to send its soldiers overseas to fight. It is because Australia can’t protect itself that it has always extended its security interests far beyond its coastlines, from South Africa at the time of Federation to Iraq and Syria today. Australia’s strategists have believed that the safety of their indefensible continent depends on a favourable