Australian defence in the Asia-Pacific century

Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National Universtiy and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute of International Policy in Sydney. As New Zealand prepares to undertake its own defence assessment over the coming months, Professor White reflects on the Australian government’s take on potential strategic threats to the region.

Look behind the headlines about Chinese threats and twelve submarines, and you will find in Australia’s new White Paper a strange and uneasy document reflecting strange and uneasy times. The impressive thing about the White Paper is that it raises the big hard questions about Australia’s strategic future.  The disappointing thing is that it then shies away from these questions, and evades the job of providing answers. That tells us something about the Rudd government, which is developing a reputation for avoiding hard decisions. But more fundamentally it shows just how hard the choices that Australia confronts are. There are implications here for New Zealand as well as it launches its own Defence White Paper process this year.

The core message of Canberra’s White Paper is that Australia cannot take for granted that the benign strategic order which has kept Asia so stable and Australia so secure in the decades since Vietnam, will endure. That order has been based on US primacy, which is being challenged by China’s rise. The most important and startling sentence in the document is the one in paragraph 4.23 that says “By some measures China has the potential to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2020”.

Economic power is the foundation of strategic power, so if that is true, Australia cannot assume that American strategic primacy in Asia will remain uncontested, or that if contested, it will prevail.  Even more disconcertingly, it means we cannot assume that the Anglo-Saxon maritime primacy that has ultimately underwritten Australia’s security since 1788 will last much longer.

The implications of that for Australia’s strategic posture and defence capabilities are profound indeed.  For all the talk of self-reliance, Australia’s defence policy has been absolutely framed by the belief that American primacy places tight limits on the kinds of strategic risks we might face, and especially that we might face alone.  If that primacy fades, we have hard choices to make.  Do we continue to support the US, if it gets drawn into more intense strategic competition with China?  Or do we go it alone?  If we go it alone, do we try to build forces that give us independent strategic weight as a middle power, or do we relegate ourselves to the ranks of the small powers which lack independent strategic weight and must therefore simply hope for the best?

Confronted with these questions, the Rudd government didn’t know what to think.  In places, the White Paper seeks to avoid the implications of China’s rise by asserting a contradictory hope that American power might continue unabated anyway. In other places it hopes that if changes come, they will be decades away and will be preceded by plenty of warning.  Reluctant to spend more money on defence in a fiscal and economic crisis, the government deferred any significant transformation of Australia’s force structure to later decades.

But the underlying message is nonetheless clear. After two decades of wondering whether, in the post-Cold War world, we need to worry any longer about the risks of old-fashioned strategic conflict between states, Australia has decided that it does. After four decades of sheltering under American uncontested primacy, Australia has recognised that this may pass. And after two centuries of assuming that an Anglo-Saxon major power will always be there in Asia to help us if needed, Australia has started to wonder what we would do if they are not there in future. 

As New Zealand undertakes its own Defence White Paper, similar questions may arise.

Main image: Canberra War Memorial, used under a Creative Commons licence