Australia’s former military chief Sir Angus Houston this week summed up the current strategic circumstances as “the worst I have ever seen in my career and life”.
Houston, along with former Labor defense minister Stephen Smith, were this week appointed by the government to conduct a comprehensive review of the Australian Defense Force’s structure, troop placement, combat readiness and investment plans for new weapons and platforms.
The truncated nature of the review, just six months, minimizes the likelihood of sweeping changes, but it is expected to recommend moving forward with some projects, cutting others and stocking up on relatively inexpensive armed missiles and drones.
The message will be more capable sooner, including upgrades to existing platforms, such as the installation of long-range Tomahawk missiles on Collins-class submarines, while we expect new submarines and frigates to be delivered from the decade of 2030
Michael Shoebridge of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute says the military needs “disposable, expendable, expendable and replaceable” weapons.
“They are everything Australian industry is best at producing more than exquisitely expensive capabilities like infantry fighting vehicles, aircraft and ships,” he said.
Houston’s grim assessment is shared by Asia Society Policy Institute senior fellow Richard Maude, who was the architect of the Turnbull government’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.
He says Australia and the world “are grappling with a China that is not just more powerful but more assertive, nationalistic and authoritarian”, while the US can no longer maintain the world order it built.
“We are moving into a different era, a multipolar era where American interests and values can no longer dominate as they did, and this is a much more difficult period for Australia,” he says.
“People lose historical perspective”
Former ASIO chief Dennis Richardson argues that things always look worse in the present. Andrew Meares
But former spy chief and secretary of the foreign and defense departments, Dennis Richardson, argues that things always look worse in the present.
He points out that in the 10 years after Houston was born in 1947, the Iron Curtain had fallen, the Soviet Union had acquired the nuclear bomb, war had broken out in Korea, the Communist Party had taken over China, Australian troops they had been deployed in the Malayan emergency and communist insurgencies had appeared in Southeast Asia.
“I am in no way trying to diminish the current challenges. China is clearly determined to be the dominant regional and global power,” Richardson says.
“However, people lose historical perspective. We have to be careful about grand statements that things have never been worse.”
“An explosion of flashpoints in the region”
This week’s drama in the Taiwan Strait has gone nowhere. In the year to date, there have been 148 incursions by China involving 677 aircraft in what Taiwan considers its airspace. In the 11 months to November last year, there were 230 raids by 886 aircraft, according to Taiwanese government data cross-referenced by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
“While we may not be as close to global nuclear war as we were during some Cold War crises, it is hard to disagree with Sir Angus’s general premise,” says IISS researcher Henry Boyd for defense and military analysis. “The current geopolitical environment is probably the worst it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the outlook is not likely to improve over the next decade.”
“There has been an explosion of flashpoints in the region,” says Collin Koh, a researcher at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, based at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
“The border issues between China and India are far from resolved. The East China Sea could get out of control. The South China Sea is under control, but there are strong undercurrents, and then there are the Korean peninsula.
“A lot of these involve China, and my question has always been whether China is willing to engage in multiple theaters of operations at once. If they’re going to fight a war with the Americans, that’s going to call out a lot of their attention and resources.The question then becomes: how will they contend with regional rivals like India and Japan?
This is a potential inhibiting factor when it comes to China’s decision on escalation or whether it should manage a crisis.
“Second, we might have assumed earlier this year that China had reached a point of confidence that it could process a short, sharp conflict,” says Koh. The war in Ukraine has paid for it. “China will examine the assumptions they had. The risk is that an operation they thought could be limited could spiral out of control.”
There are similarities between the situation in Taiwan and the Cuban Missile Crisis between the Soviet Union and the US in 1962, in which two great powers were close to a confrontation, says Teuku Rezasyah, an international relations expert at Padjadjaran University, Java western
“But at that time there was only one serious situation. That’s not the case today.”
The danger is that both Russia and China seem to see the United States as weak and have decided that now is a good time for them to continue their expansion. “The United States must return to the role of peacemaker and mobilize multilateralism; it must embrace as many partners as possible. Washington must become part of the solution, not part of the problem,” says Teuku.
One China remains the ‘least worst political option’
Scenes from Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
The escalation of tensions over Taiwan comes as Canberra and Beijing take steps to mend bilateral ties after the switch in the Albanian government’s election. Foreign Minister Penny Wong follows a policy of “strategic balance”, whereby countries are not forced to choose, but can make their own sovereign decisions, including who they align with.
Wong, and his opposition counterpart Simon Birmingham, urged both China and the United States this week to de-escalate and preserve the status quo, in a bipartisan reaffirmation of the One China policy, in which Australia recognizes the claim from Beijing that Taiwan is a province of China. People’s Republic of China maintaining unofficial ties with Taipei.
Former diplomat Colin Heseltine, who was Australia’s de facto ambassador to Taiwan from 1992 to 1997 and had stints in Beijing, says not even ardent China hawks are advocating abandoning One China .
Heseltine, now an AsiaLink adviser at the University of Melbourne, laments, however, that Australia’s commitment to Taiwan has retreated, noting that he became concerned that a minister would visit the island every year and that he would have to pursue a free trade agreement.
“It hasn’t had its day,” Heseltine says of the One China policy.
“Getting rid of it would lead to all kinds of bad ramifications. Everyone has an interest in maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.
“I don’t know if it’s feasible in the long term to maintain the status quo.”
Maude describes One China as the “least worst political option we have because the alternatives are so much more dangerous.”
Maude says the US approach of “strategic ambiguity” about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid if China attacked served two purposes to preserve the status quo: to deter China from invading and to discourage Taiwan from declaring independence.
But what if China upsets the status quo without provocation and the US responds militarily? Former Defense Minister Peter Dutton said last year it would be “inconceivable” that Australia would not join, although he scaled back those comments earlier this year.
Wong declined to comment on a “hypothetical” this week, but Heseltine says it’s hard not to see Australia getting involved in some way.
“Australia would be under so much pressure from the US and the future of the alliance could be at stake. It’s one of those imponderables for the government,” he says.
US President Joe Biden himself has also sent mixed signals about strategic ambiguity, after saying the US would respond to an attack, forcing aides to later retract those comments.
Heseltine is scathing about Pelosi’s visit, saying it was a “stupid thing for her to do” that has irritated China and made Biden look weak.
“It cannot be said that as a result of his visit Taiwan is safer or more secure. What did he achieve other than chaos in the place?”