Democracies’ strategic challenges

Last week’s Australia-UK Ministerial Consultations (AUKMIN) in Sydney concentrated on reinforcing the resilience, sovereignty and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific. It also focused on Russia and Ukraine, and the potential for war, as highlighted at the weekend by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss when she released MI6 intelligence showing Russian President Vladimir Putin plotting to install a pro-Kremlin puppet leader in Ukraine. The intelligence named Yevhen Murayev, a newspaper publisher with little popular support, as the Russian despot’s pick to lead Ukraine in what would be a brazen replay of 2004, when Mr Putin made a similar attempt. The West must ensure Mr Putin does not succeed in taking over Ukraine as part of his ambition to recreate the old Soviet Union. As Ms Truss said in Sydney, there would be far-reaching strategic implications. China, she said, could use a Russian invasion of Ukraine to launch aggression of its own in the Indo-Pacific: “Russia is working more closely with China than it ever has. Aggressors are working in concert and I think it is incumbent on our countries to work together.”

Ms Truss, a frontrunner to succeed Boris Johnson as British prime minister if he is forced to resign, is correct. The defence of Ukraine’s democracy against Mr Putin’s malign ambitions should be a “line in the sand” against authoritarian regimes. The weekend airlift of 90 tonnes of “lethal US military aid” to Kiev is vital in ensuring Ukraine has the means to defend itself. So is NATO’s preparation to send thousands more combat troops to join battle groups positioned in Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. The message to Mr Putin is clear.

His central demand – that the US must give an assurance Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO, and that the West will cease the deployment of troops and weapons to eastern Europe – is absurd. As US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said after his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva on Saturday: “There is no trade space there – none.” Foreign Minister Marise Payne has expressed full Australian support for the stand against Mr Putin’s aggression.

Against the dangers in Ukraine and strategic tensions in the Asia-Pacific, Paul Keating’s vituperative, irresponsible statement on Sunday was unhelpful to the national interest. “There they were at Admiralty House kidding the rest of us that their ‘co-operation’ added up to some viable policy. Australia’s great Foreign ‘non Minister’, Marise Payne, supported by the increasingly strident and unhinged Defence Minister Peter Dutton standing beside the British Foreign Secretary looking wistfully for Britain’s lost worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries,’’ the former prime minister sneered, claiming the statement by Ms Truss was “nothing short of demented”. However, he seemed prepared to accept at face value Chinese President Xi Jinping’s comment to the Davos audience that “major economies should see the world as one community’’.

Facing global challenges from multiple aggressors, democracies are working more closely together because they must. That is the strategic reality of our times, Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on Saturday: “Either we find ways to add strength through closer co-operation or else we lose ground to aggressive international behaviour from Russia and China.’’ The current outlook could hardly be more different to the more benign world of 2006 when AUKMIN was established.