If the People’s Republic of China takes control of Taiwan by force, the results would be disastrous for Australia. You would think this reality would figure centrally in our debate about Taiwan. Instead it has hardly been mentioned.
This is partly because the Albanese government still doesn’t really believe Australia can actually exercise serious power concerning its own military fate.
Instead we must dodge displeasure from Beijing and try to entrap the US into providing for our security in exchange for the minimum possible effort on our part.
It is, of course, obvious that for Washington to ask the Australian government to commit in advance to going to war in alliance with the US in defence of Taiwan if China should move militarily is absurd. No nation gives an iron-clad commitment to war in some hypothetical, unforeseen circumstance. Washington doesn’t give such commitments. It’s still an open question whether a Trump administration would come to Taiwan’s military aid in extremis.
The official US position remains one of strategic ambiguity on this point. However, this American inquiry emerges directly out of the drift and uncertainty that arises from the pervasive, profound lack of seriousness of the Albanese government in defence and national security.
The idea the government has meaningfully or adequately increased the defence budget is ridiculous. No one not on the government’s payroll would even mouth such a ludicrous proposition. Defence accounted for 2 per cent of GDP when the Albanese government came to office; it still does. For several years of the Albanese government, inflation ran way above budget forecast. Defence’s budget is not compensated for inflation above forecast, so Defence’s real purchasing power declined very substantially.
The government has told us these are the most dangerous strategic circumstances since World War II. At the same time the government has embarked on a program to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. Both these realities obviously require a much bigger defence budget.
Most of the increase in defence spending the government has announced, which is still quite modest, doesn’t come into force until the first year of its third term. Many capabilities recommended in the Defence Strategic Review have not been acquired. The recent Australian National Audit Office report demonstrated the government doesn’t even provide the money to keep our pitifully small naval surface fleet in regular working order.
The Trump administration, certainly all US defence officials dealing with Asia, are intimately aware of all this.
As the Treasury advice to the incoming government shows, the government can’t control its domestic spending. It’s not prepared to take hard choices to provide for national security. The very few new capabilities we are committed to – namely the AUKUS subs and Hunter-class frigates – don’t come meaningfully into play until the second half of the 2030s at best.
The first of each of these is scheduled early in the 2030s, but schedules are never met and in any event they’re not a meaningful capability until there’s a fleet of them.
We are reprising, almost eerily, the abject failures of Australian policy in the 1930s. The best book you could read on defence is Jeffrey Grey’s A Military History of Australia. Grey could have been writing about today: “For most of the inter-war period, it is clear that little or nothing was done to increase the government’s ability to carry out its military responsibilities … Australian governments of both persuasions chose to believe that another major war would not occur or that, if it did, someone else would fight it on our behalf.”
Yet Australia knew all about the emerging Japanese threat. The 1930s fate of Australia’s submarines is prophetic of the colossal national mess we’ve made of submarines over the past 20 years. For a while we had two submarines, then finally decided we couldn’t afford them. So we gave them to the Brits. When World War II came, we had nothing, whereas we’d had subs in World War I.
Our surface fleet of destroyers was so old they were routinely described as “ancient warriors”. Grey recounts how small our surface fleet was, yet it was about the same size as our navy today. The consequence? Grey writes: “The Royal Australian Navy was to be handled very roughly by the Japanese.” In 1928, our air force was still flying planes made in World War I.
PRC President Xi Jinping constantly tells his forces to be ready for war. The PRC has built a war economy, securing supply lines and accumulating big stockpiles of key supplies. Famously, Xi has told his military to be capable of taking Taiwan by force by 2027. That does not remotely prove Beijing will take such action, in 2027 or at any time.
The best course for anyone to prevail who doesn’t want war in Taiwan is to provide a stable system of deterrence.
In her recent speech in Kuala Lumpur, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Australia wanted to contribute to deterrence.
Yet how are we doing this? We have almost no military capability of our own, almost nothing to contribute. By hosting US-Australia joint intelligence facilities, and increasing rotations of US troops and aircraft in northern Australia, and in due course hopefully some US subs based or semi-based in Perth, we make a geographic contribution. But that’s it.
The US, already spending 3.5 per cent of its GDP on defence, has just passed a bill raising its military spending to $US1 trillion ($1.5 trillion). But the US can’t do it all alone. This is made more difficult for the US by the strategic alliance of Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, one of the most brilliant US security analysts, wrote recently in Foreign Affairs: “Given how readily (Beijing and Moscow) co-operate, there is a good chance they might overpower US forces if they fought together in a single military theatre … (They) could also wreak havoc by fighting separately but simultaneously.”
In such circumstances, Mastro argues, the US might have to concentrate on one military theatre and for a time leave the other theatres to mostly fend for themselves.
There are no circumstances, given the defence dereliction of this and previous governments, under which Australia could fend for itself.
But more broadly, if we want deterrence to work, all US allies need to add substantially to the quantum of allied military capability so deterrence is credible. We’re not doing this.
Malcolm Davis, of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, argues that the entire security order Australia has enjoyed would break down completely if Beijing took Taiwan.
He says: “If Beijing controls Taiwan, it’s very well placed to project force against Guam, Japan, The Philippines. In a situation where China wins a war (over Taiwan) against the US, or the US backs down, then China can project hegemonic power through the whole of Southeast Asia, including us. I would fully expect Japan and South Korea to get nuclear weapons. If the US is not there, we would face Chinese coercion we couldn’t resist. We’re in a very dangerous situation. We’re facing the prospect of a major war in our part of the world, and we’re not doing enough to prepare for it.”
This is gross national irresponsibility. We’ve seen this movie before. It never ends well.
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