NATO no-show a disservice to the nation, PM

Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese waits before the start of a meeting with NATO's Indo-Pacific partners during the NATO summit.

It’s possible Anthony Albanese is not attending this week’s 75th anniversary NATO leaders summit because he thinks it’s a waste of time. Not NATO itself, surely, but just his participation in the summit.

Australia is not a NATO member, as the Prime Minister repeatedly says when he’s trying to defend his decision not to join other world leaders at the summit. The flawed logic of this attempted justification – given he attended the previous two years – seems lost on Albanese.

What he may have been hinting at is a view that, by virtue of not being a member, there isn’t enough value in his participation; too many of the discussions are for members only and the value of those discussions concerning Australia is insufficient to warrant his time and scrutiny of his travel costs.

If this is the reason, then Albanese’s non-attendance demonstrates a short-sightedness, lack of strategy and absence of ambition in his government’s national security thinking.

By viewing Australia’s NATO engagement only through the lens of our current participation, the Albanese government is failing to lay the groundwork for the closer and deeper relationship to which we should aspire.

NATO’s recurring invitations to the Indo-Pacific four – including Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand – to attend its summits should be seen as more than politeness or box-ticking but an opportunity to strive for more. For Australia no other forum of NATO’s size and scale exists to engage with like-minded democracies on security interests and co-operation.

Thirty-two allied countries, all democracies, have preserved peace in their nations through a powerful collective deterrence. Today that deterrence includes half a million troops at high states of readiness across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace domains.

NATO member nations may not be obliged to come to Australia’s defence, but there’s no doubt they are the nations we’d look to, to deter others from starting a war in our region – and, if ever required, to prevail in such conflict.

The closer Australia, our IP4 partners and NATO can be, the more co-ordinated our actions, the more aligned our strategies, the stronger the deterrence we can create.

NATO and Australia have taken numerous steps together since dialogue and co-operation began under the Howard government in 2005 that was formalised into a partnership model in 2013.

More recently this relationship has taken on an important regional edge via NATO engagement with the IP4 countries, including the attendance of IP4 leaders in the annual NATO leaders summits since 2022.

While NATO logically has a Euro-Atlantic focus, the interconnectedness of today’s world means, as NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg wrote recently, “security is not a regional matter but a global one”.

The evidence of this exists at many levels, most notably through Iran and North Korea’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine via weapons manufacturing and supply, while China’s government supplies critical war enabling technologies.

What happens in the Euro-Atlantic impacts the Indo-Pacific, and what happens in the Indo-Pacific impacts the Euro-Atlantic.

Isolationism by the world’s liberal democracies will render them only weaker and more vulnerable in the future. We must work together to build out our partnerships across the world if we are to deter conflict in favour of international peace and stability.

Unlike many international forums, NATO has been willing to call out the threats posed by these disrupter states.

While highlighting Chinese government cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and control of critical supply chains, last year’s NATO leaders’ communique said “the People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values”.

Such awareness and honesty is to Australia’s great advantage. Having NATO apply its analysis and strategic capabilities to the threats beyond the immediacy of the eurozone strengthens our own national security.

This strengthening is bolstered by our engagement, which is now packing a regional punch via the IP4. Rather than considering limited participation in the current structure of NATO meetings to be unworthy of his attendance, the Prime Minister should have turned up with a plan to secure real value for Australia.

Australia should be seeking to formalise the relationship between NATO and the IP4 to embed our seats at the table, including through possible treaty level undertakings.

In doing so, we should be striving to take areas such as technology co-operation and joint military operations to new levels of collaboration. A government with foresight and ambition also would be urging NATO to develop its own Indo-Pacific strategy. This would address threats and interests in our region specific to NATO members, along with shared threats and interests that align with our own.

There are precedents for such an approach.

For example, the EU released its strategy for co-operation in the Indo-Pacific in 2021, focusing on maintaining a free and open region through deeper engagement and a principled approach to defend international rules and norms.

Having the world’s biggest security alliance adopt similar principles would make our region only safer and help in the fight to deter conflict and uphold respect for the sovereignty of all nations across the Indo-Pacific.

There is reluctance among some NATO members to engage too deeply beyond their region. That’s all the more reason for us to argue the case, rather than inviting NATO to step back from the IP4 by not showing up.

In the past year Iran, North Korea, Russia and China have all stepped up destabilisation, from naval confrontations to joint operations, as well as through terrorist proxies deployed with devastating consequences.

Rather than not turning up – or sending Richard Marles empty-handed – Albanese should’ve gone to NATO with a plan to make our nation, region and world safer by joining with the IP4. If it’s good enough for the leaders of Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, then you have to wonder why not Australia?

The failure to do so stands in stark contrast to Albanese’s predecessors, whose drive and foresight bequeathed Australia’s security architecture, from the Alliance and the Quad through to AUKUS. Unlike Albanese they knew when to turn up and did so with a plan of what to do.

Simon Birmingham is the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs.