Shift required in strategic vision to keep region secure

Canberra needs to get closer to Joko Widodo’s Jakarta and maintain a polite distance from Xi Jinping’s Beijing.

President Xi Jinping reviews a naval parade this week. Picture: AP

Terrorism may prove to be a defining topic for the federal election. The horrendous events in Christchurch followed by the Sri Lankan bombings on Easter Sunday and so-called Islamic State’s foiled plot to attack Anzac Day commemoration ceremonies on the Gallipoli peninsula all point to a threat that is changing but not going away.

Governments have little choice other than to keep strengthening intelligence gathering and law enforcement agencies to stay ahead of multiple threats. It’s difficult to escape the reality that somewhere, at some time, Australia may face a mass casualty attack, be it in Gallipoli, Bali or one of our major cities.

This points to a truth unacknowledged in the election: while the major parties run on economic and lifestyle issues, the biggest challenge the next government will face will be an unravelling security order in our region.

Since the end of World War II we have built our security around a US-led “international rules-based order”, which is fraying as badly as the democracies did in the 1930s.

It’s anyone’s guess how much of the rules-based order will survive across the next decade. Future Australian governments will champion its cause but the national security committee of cabinet needs to do more than just pine for a dead parrot. Australia’s leaders will have to work much harder to shape key relationships in ways that promote our interests.

Three big challenges will confront whatever government ­emerges after May 18. First, we need to reduce our economic dependence on an increasingly auth­oritarian and assertive China. Second, we need to keep a reluctant US engaged in Asian security while building a stronger defence force, able to act alone if necessary.

Finally, we need to assert our security leadership in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Indonesia could be the linchpin for a stronger regional approach, but it will take imagination and effort from Canberra to deliver that.

It’s not that counter-terrorism is a second-order issue but, measured against these strategic challenges, we need to test the balance of our financial investment in the intelligence, security and policy agencies dealing with these multiple problems.

China challenge

On China, the next government’s biggest difficulty is working out how to break it to the public that the Chinese Communist Party now presents more risks than opportunities. Australia has benefited from the Chinese economic miracle but the era of “peaceful rise” Deng Xiaoping championed is long gone, replaced with an assertive, nationalistic, Leninist one-party state intent on ousting the US as the region’s dominant power and expecting other countries to defer to its interests.

In the interests of selling China commodities, education and apartments, Australia will look the other way for as long as it can, but the reality is that our strategic interests are fundamentally different to those of the CCP.

A Morrison or Shorten government must urgently get its strategic thinking in order on how to respond to President Xi Jinping’s China. Canberra has shown growing spine on this issue in toughening anti-foreign interference laws and in the belated recognition that there should be some limits to Chinese ownership of critical infrastructure including the future 5G mobile network.

Much more, however, needs to be done. Australia’s universities have built such a dependence on Chinese fee-paying students and in aligning their research agendas to suit Communist Party development priorities that a crisis of business sustainability is inevitable.

Australia’s states, free from any responsibility to think about national security, continue to see China as nothing more than a money-making opportunity.

It is astonishing that Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews continues to champion Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative when the federal government and opposition are significantly more reserved about aligning to the scheme. Before flying to a BRI congress in China, Andrews told state-owned news agency Xinhua on Wednesday: “To not engage at the Belt and Road Initiative level I think would be a significant barrier to stronger relations between Victoria and China.”

So, here we have an Australian state government backing a Xi initiative that Canberra and many other developed democracies won’t endorse because of concerns that it promotes Chinese political and strategic objectives and builds overdependence. There is clearly a need for a future federal government to do a better job of engaging universities, state and territory governments and businesses around some of the risks of aligning too closely to the CCP.

Of course Australia should trade with China, but we urgently need a strategy to diversify economic relations to stop the quelling effect that Beijing’s economic dominance is having on our ability to think and speak directly in favour of our strategic interests.

Beijing respects strength

My experience of engaging with People’s Liberation Army generals as a senior Defence official was that Beijing will respect a country that argues strongly in favour of its own interests. Having a capable, combat-experienced and hi-tech defence force allied to the US also helps in negotiations with China.

Our government should do some strategic planning on alternative China scenarios instead of assuming that economic growth and unbroken party dominance is the only possible future. This assumption pays no attention to China’s history of frequent and often bloody political change. We need to be ready for a variety of political outcomes.

If Australia’s China challenge is to strengthen our capacity to operate independently from Beijing’s aspiration to dominate the region, the key task with Washington is to keep the US productively engaged in Asia-Pacific security. This is not just a problem about Donald Trump, although the US President adds an idiosyncratic quality that doesn’t help. Well before Trump, the Obama administration had dropped the ball on Asian engagement. It was the Obama administration that wrongly decided China’s military annexation of the South China Sea was not strategically important enough to warrant a concerted response. Barack Obama promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, offering the region a vehicle other than China to promote economic growth and open societies. But Obama also lacked the cut-through to get congressional support for the TPP.

Trump and Obama remain on a unity ticket to minimise US military engagement in the Middle East and elsewhere, and both rightly pushed allies to spend more on their own defence capabilities.

Whether or not Trump sur­vives to a second term, we are likely to see a US demanding more of its allies and refusing to engage on security issues that may be more directly important to regional countries.

The US military and intelligence establishment and congress remain strongly in favour of military engagement with Pacific allies, but the price of Washington’s direct involvement is growing.

Traditionally Australia has been the key shaper of the US alliance. Not unreasonably, we spend more time than Washington thinking about the alliance relationship. So the future of the alliance and what’s done in its name is Canberra’s to drive. Our next government will have to get out of any comfort zone of basking in the cosy rhetoric about “100 years of mateship” and focus on giving the US every reason to prize what we bring to the relationship.

Trump remains a wildcard. My fear is he will turn some rhetorical heat on Australia in the way he has towards Canada and European allies. Canberra has been lucky that the White House’s domestic worries mean it hasn’t been asking Australia tough questions about our level of defence spending (still below 2 per cent of gross national product) or our supine refusal to undertake freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea.

This run of luck won’t hold. A key task for the next government will be to develop an agenda for growing alliance co-operation that engages the US, brings Japan closer into the partnership and wins the approval of Trump and his successors. Of course this won’t be cheap, but it’s the price of the leading role we claim for ourselves in regional security.

The third big strategic challenge for our government will be to lift our relations with Southeast Asian countries to a new level of engagement. Most current ties are good but, with the exception of Singapore, they fall well below what Australian governments have aspired to achieve.

If our 2016 defence white paper is to be believed, the key priority driving our acquisitions of new submarines, amphibious helicopter carriers and frigates is to contribute to the security of “maritime Southeast Asia” — a body of water that looks suspiciously like the South China Sea.

Reach out to Jakarta

The white paper makes it clear our security starts with a secure Southeast Asia that is able to look after its own defence interests, is able to resist pressure from regional great powers and looks to us and our allies as partners of choice.

On its present trajectory, it’s not clear that most Southeast Asian countries share any of these objectives. Our government’s task must be to strengthen regional confidence in the role that we and our allies can play in promoting their security.

It’s a net positive for Australia that Joko Widodo has been re-elected as Indonesian President but, like Australia, Jakarta primarily looks north when it thinks about security.

Successive Australian governments have declared they wanted to build a “strategic relationship” with Indonesia, which, if anything, means we must deepen ties and build a shared approach to thinking about our defence and security.

This aspiration won’t be achieved unless an Australian prime minister is prepared to take an audacious and significant step to enhance defence co-operation with Indonesia.

Why not think about a joint Australian-Indonesian maritime squadron patrolling our northern approaches? Why don’t we invite an Indonesian Air Force squadron to operate out of Darwin near the US marines? Why don’t we suggest an Australian submarine home-ports out of Surabaya?

To even start that conversation, our next prime minister should make it his business to get as close to Joko as French and German leaders have done with each other in the postwar period.

The Franco-German connection was born from strategic necessity but Australia and Indonesia have no less compelling reasons to work together. It will be Canberra’s job to take that first step to closer relations. Failure to do so will be a massive error of strategic vision.

Peter Jennings is executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.