Memo to Scott Morrison: this bluster will leave us with egg on our face

Illustration: Johannes Leak

Scott Morrison drawing a red line against a Chinese military base in the South Pacific serves one genuinely useful purpose – it helps to alert the Australian people to the absolute seriousness for them of what’s going on between China and Solomon Islands.

However, the Prime Minister’s red line carries the enormous risk of being mocked into derision because of the obvious hollowness of the implied threat.

For an international leader to issue a red line warning is to say that if the nation involved crosses that red line, there will be serious and adverse consequences. What possible adverse consequences could Australia impose on China?

This has, sad to say, an inherently fatuous air about it.

Nothing damaged Barack Obama’s credibility more than when he said for the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad to use chemical weapons would be crossing a red line and the US would respond with severe military force.

Syria duly crossed the red line and Obama did nothing.

His credibility was shredded as a result.

This directly emboldened both China, in the South China Sea, and Russia, in eastern Europe, to much greater adventurism. It would have been better if Obama had never said anything about red lines if he didn’t intend to enforce them.

What possible credibility does an Australian Prime Minister have in drawing red lines that Beijing may not cross?

What will Canberra do to Beijing if it crosses the red line despite our threats and blandishments?

Refuse to get rich by exporting our iron ore to China?

Or perhaps promise that some time in the 2040s or 2050s, if we have by then acquired a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines – and it’s a big if – we will send one of them into Chinese waters, there to bristle silently beneath the sea?

Talk about the Gulargambone Times thundering: We warn the Tsar!

Teddy Roosevelt, the most credible of all US presidents, thought that the US should “speak softly and carry a big stick”.

The Morrison government shouts its strategic warnings from the roof tops and has no “stick”, no actual power, least of all military power, at all.

After nearly a decade of coalition government, we are one of the only rich militaries in the world without one single, armed drone in our arsenal.

Our surface naval fleet is pitifully small, mostly old and radically under-gunned, and we don’t get a new surface combatant ship before 2033.

God alone knows when we will get a new submarine – we are scheduled to still be running the Collins-class boats when they are 40 or 50 years old.

Two years ago, we announced we would establish a domestic missile manufacturing industry.

After two years, we have managed to nominate our preferred industry partners but actually take no physical action to this end at all.

Whereas Ukraine could develop, design, manufacture and deploy its deadly Neptune anti-ship missiles from scratch within a couple of years, and sink a Russian flag ship with them.

The quantity of missiles we possess is pathetic.

None of this sounds like the actions of a nation confidently issuing red-line prohibitions.

We have demonstrated that we do not have sufficient influence in the South Pacific to prevent these Chinese agreements from taking place.

We are very good at bluster and grand announcements of initiatives that will not take physical shape for decades; we are extremely poor at actually doing anything.

The Morrison government would be well advised to radically upscale its actions and downscale its rhetoric.