Uncertainty and a refocus on self-reliance

Anthony Albanese has a golden opportunity to recast our defence strategy.

US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance at Memorial Day observances at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlingotn on May 26. Picture: AP

Temperamental US Pres­i­dent Donald Trump is forcing America’s partners to reappraise its reliability as an ally. He is the ultimate disruptor, offering Australia and NATO a rare opportunity for independent and co-ordinated approaches to national security, free from American adventurism and participation in wars it couldn’t win. And America’s Asian friends are right on to it.

Trump invokes a long-overdue and thorough reappraisal of our security dependence on the US and our faith in the ANZUS Treaty as the guarantor of our national security. Now is the time for self-direction in our partnership with America.

Trump is not an aberration. He is a particularly American phe-nomenon. The American presidency is fundamentally imperial, and the President is always the final arbiter.

The re-elected Albanese government faces a truly historical moment. It has, in Paul Keating’s unforgettable words, been “kicked up the arse by a rainbow”. Unlike lightning, rainbows evidently strike twice. Albanese is the lucky beneficiary of two such rainbows.

The first is the Trump presidency. The global community is dismayed by Trump’s wilfulness and scorn for traditional American approaches to global affairs. But it is precisely here that Trump creates an unparalleled opportunity.

The second is the government’s sweeping electoral victory in May, particularly the Coalition’s annihilation as an effective opposition. The impetuous “uncoupling” of the Liberal and National parties completed that demolition. Reunited, they are in the same bed again, dreaming different dreams and trusting their nuclear-powered and armed chastity belts to protect what remains of their political virtue.

For the first time since John Curtin’s win in 1943, the Labor government has clear air to govern without the Coalition’s permission.

With few exceptions, the repudiation by opposition leader Simon Crean of John Howard’s war in Iraq being one, Labor has fallen in behind the Coalition’s support for America’s strategic recklessness. In its Anglophone naivety, the AUKUS “deal” on nuclear-powered submarines shows what forelock tugging can do to our image as a confident and independent country.

Moreover, it diminishes our reputation for defence planning and force structure integration. To most of Asia, we look like sycophants with too much money and too few brains.

Australia’s accommodation of and dependence on the US – training areas and B-52s in the Northern Territory and Virginia-class submarines in Western Australia – together diminish the relevance and quality of our defence and foreign policymaking.

But as earlier Labor governments found, first-principles thinking can deliver extraordinary policy results.

Between 1983 and 1996, Kim Beazley and Gareth Evans repositioned Australia’s regional economic and security policymaking.

This was no accident. Both turned their minds to defining our national interests – the objectives of foreign and defence policy – and advocating the values underpinning those interests to advance the national interest (interest defined in terms of power, as the progenitor of international relations theory Hans Morgenthau observed).

The same opportunity now presents itself to the Albanese government. Beazley shook up the defence establishment. He initiated a renegotiation of the arrangements underpinning the joint Australia-US defence facilities, introducing an integrated management system that made the facilities truly joint.

He also commissioned a team of smart defence policy operators to articulate the core principles on which Australia’s defence is planned and its military force acquired. The result was the Defence of Australia 1987 white paper.

Its opening sentence? “The Australian people expect that Australia shall be able to defend itself.”

Just as Kim Beazley directed clever defence insiders to conduct a first-principles review, so a revival needs to begin with an appraisal of the risk posed by American unreliability Kim Beazley. Picture: Martin Ollman

Beazley promulgated strategic policy based on the realities of the Asia-Pacific world and the advantages (and problems) deriving from the geo-physical dimensions of warfare. The outcome was, in short order, the Australian-built Collins-class submarines, the Anzac-class frigates, initial planning for airborne early warning and control aircraft and a revitalised army built on agility and mobility.

Beazley’s legacy is remarkable. It survives but needs resuscitation.

Just as Beazley directed clever defence insiders to conduct a first-principles review, so a revival needs to begin with an appraisal of the risk posed by American unreliability and an analysis of the assumed threat posed by China – both centred on a restatement of our national interests.

Evans arrived in the foreign affairs portfolio like a tornado, demolishing comfortable habits that mirrored a timorous approach to regional and global affairs. Nothing was too insignificant for Evans’s attention. For him, the big picture comprised myriad little ones, and he and his department tackled the lot. The Hawke-Keating governments backed him in.

From finalising a chemical weapons convention to creating the Canberra Commission to eliminate nuclear weapons, from a deft response to a coup in Fiji to delivering a peace plan for Cambodia, from setting up the Cairns Group to founding the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, Labor governments recognised opportunities and realised them.

In late 1989, the Hawke government considered parallel cabinet submissions from Beazley and Evans. Australia’s strategic planning in the 1990s reaffirmed the 1987 white paper. Australia’s regional security advocated a multidimensional and multi-agency approach to security policy.

Both documents remain strikingly contemporary and relevant – a telling indictment of 35 years of missed opportunities and wasted effort since.

In so doing, they transformed the transactional approach of the post-war years to a transformational results-focused foreign and defence policy program. In combination, this delivered a national security policy that had strategic impact. Moreover, they repositioned Australia as a “good international citizen” rather than an American acolyte.

Labor can do this again. Defence Minister Richard Marles is in the box seat to reset our national security strategy, to reformulate our defence policy and to reorganise his department. A disciplined approach to capability development and spending should be an early target. Marles is positioned to ditch the faith-based policy that constrains imagination and replace it with a self-directed approach to the realities of our national defence.

Instead of a blind acceptance of ANZUS and the eternal availability of American protection, Marles can reinstitute self-reliance as the foundation on which our relationships with the US and Asia ultimately rest. Trump makes it clear that American protection is no longer a given, if it ever was.

Marles is positioned to rebalance our military capabilities to refocus and reposition the ADF as a national defence force rather than an expeditionary adjunct to American adventures. And while he’s at it, he might fix the out-of-control bureaucratic bloat and rank inflation that have produced a Defence organisation that no longer is match fit.

Marles has to escape the two straitjackets that so constrain the national defence conversation: the expansion of defence industry; and the even more problematic 3.5 per cent of GDP spending benchmark.

Defence Minister Richard Marles is in the box seat to reset our national security strategy, to reformulate our defence policy and to reorganise his department. Picture: Martin Ollman /NewsWire

To build defence industry without a strong and extended national industrial base is tantamount to funding sheltered workshops to service a monopsonist purchaser. Far from being a force multiplier, captured industrial capacity is little more than a heart-lung machine for rent-seekers and pork-barrellers.

Similarly, arbitrary spending targets feed sacred cows rather than meet competing needs. Australia is already the 12th biggest defence spender as a percentage of GDP, though why we spend so much and whether we get value for money is moot.

A predetermined division of the GDP cake might suit lazy ministers but it cannot provide the flexibility and agility needed to meet the expectations and needs of a modern democratic society.

Regional power balances and relationships are transforming before our eyes. A national security policy must at last face up to China’s regional dominance and regional neighbours whose security policies are increasingly tolerant of China’s assertive diplomacy and military posturing.

Their economies are quickly outgrowing ours. Our economic interdependence with China is already clear. No amount of handwringing and babbling on about economic diversification or, even more absurd, economic decoupling will alter the fact our national security policy must position us to work with China, not alienate it.

Her ability and experience qualify Foreign Minister Penny Wong to reconfigure Australia’s regional posture and, more significantly, its credibility as a collaborative, creative and independent actor on the global stage. America’s pivot out of Asia has already persuaded Southeast Asian leaders to recalibrate their economic and security relationships with each other and with the rest of the world. This creates another fabulous opportunity.

A deeper and more substantial alignment with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations members remains a difficult task, made more so by the continuing erosion of our language and cultural skills. But it is a necessary one, demanding a bigger and deeper diplomatic footprint. That is exactly how agency is built: active diplomacy and clever military capability working hand in glove.

Of course, holding the ring in all of this is Jim Chalmers, something that often eludes the national security community.

Without a strong economy, a strong strategic position and effective international agency are nothing more than a dismal cocktail of aspiration and ambition. In a turbulent global economic environment, Australia is doing pretty well. Why? The fiscal fundamentals are right and the government is steering a careful course. In the G20, and G7 to which we are invited, we are a consistent performer. This is central to our national power, and our ability to leverage our economic strength and reputation will drive the Albanese government’s ability to realise the opportunities it now has available to it.

As Morgenthau pointed out 80 years ago, diplomacy is what coalesces the elements of national power and generates agency in the pursuit of national interests. To this end, the Albanese government has the opportunity of a lifetime.

But the opportunity of a lifetime lasts only for the lifetime of the opportunity. Albanese should grab it now.

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Allan Behm is the author of No Enemies, No Friends (Upswell, 2022) and The Odd Couple (Upswell, 2024), and special adviser at The Australia Institute, Canberra.