Alliances, resources central to future national security

Australians who are deeply concerned about national security and our place in a volatile, dangerous region would have found important reassurance at this newspaper’s Defending Australia conference at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday. It is available on our website. Americans, US Studies Centre chief executive Michael Green told participants increasingly supported the ANZUS alliance for pragmatic reasons because it made them safer. Australians too. ANZUS has been the cornerstone of our security for almost 75 years and, judging by Monday’s speakers, it will remain so. That is regardless of Donald Trump’s unpredictability, any inclination in the US towards isolationism and the “America first’’ AUKUS review led by US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby, a sceptic about aspects of the pact because of US difficulties in lifting submarine production. That review, Mr Green wrote on Monday, would “put a premium on Australia’s ability to articulate its strategy and to explain what Canberra is doing to make it succeed”.’

The need to increase Australian defence spending, a prime topic of current discussion in strategic policy circles on both sides of the Pacific, is so clear it should be beyond debate. Anthony Albanese, however reluctantly, needs to accept that reality before he meets the US President on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada on Wednesday morning, Australian time. But the Prime Minister can approach the meeting confident about our major ally’s commitment to the region, for the US’s sake as much as for Australia’s.

Conference guest Mike Gallagher, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, former Republican congressman and founder of the Friends of Australia group on Capitol Hill, told Cameron Stewart the Trump administration was committed to the Indo-Pacific, to increasing the US’s military presence and that of its allies. It also was committed to revitalising US shipbuilding, especially submarine production, which had broad bipartisan support in congress. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth made the administration’s position clear at the Shangri-La security dialogue in Singapore, Mr Gallagher said. In Singapore Mr Hegseth also spelled out that Australia needed to increase defence spending from 2.02 per cent of GDP (and projected to increase to 2.33 per cent by 2034) to 3.5 per cent, a push Mr Albanese is resisting. So, at Monday’s conference, did Defence Minister Richard Marles. After initially claiming to be open to the conversation on spending, Mr Marles claimed on Monday that increasing spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP would undermine the quality of the investment. But the government has wedged itself on defence, with the “glaring gulf between its rhetoric around our strategic circumstances and its defence funding commitments” called out by our great and powerful ally, as Strategic Analysis Australia head of research Marcus Hellyer wrote in our Defence Report on Monday.

Mr Marles also made one of the most important points at the conference, acknowledging that China’s ever expanding war machine posed the greatest risk to Australia and to regional stability. The risk was not invasion, he said, but potential disruption of sea routes and sea lines of communication. Several speakers noted that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s powerful emergence from 2014 to 2016 marked the beginning of the most serious threat to the region. That observation was reflected in the news on Monday that Mr Xi told Vladimir Putin in Moscow last month that China and Russia, once sworn enemies, were joined by “a spirit of eternal neighbourliness”. Mr Xi was on his 11th visit to Moscow, which has received Iranian and North Korean support in its illegal war on Ukraine. The behaviour of those four nations, in different ways, is far outside acceptable international conduct. That is one reason the West owes Israel a debt for its brave resolve in acting to prevent Iran, a big backer of terrorism, from gaining nuclear weapons.

At such a time, enduring and sustainable alliances built on mutual benefit are vital. It is an opportunity for the government to “reinstate self-reliance as the foundation on which the US and Asia ultimately rest”, the Australia Institute special adviser Allan Behm argued on Monday. Doing so at the expense of the US alliance, however, is a risk our nation must never contemplate.

This extraordinary time, The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Michelle Gunn, told the conference, could prove a “hinge moment” in which national resilience, deterrence and alliance are being redefined. For policymakers and the public, few debates have been as important to our future since 1945.