Australia on frontline of Chinese aggression: US
The US congress has heard proposals including a new defence pact involving the US, Canberra, Japan and The Philippines, and stronger supply chains with Australia.
The US congress has issued a bipartisan call for greater engagement with allies to counter Chinese “grey-zone” activities, and accused the PLA-Navy of trying to “intimidate Australia” with its circumnavigation of the country and live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea.
Less than two weeks before Anthony Albanese’s October 20 White House meeting with Donald Trump, fresh proposals were floated in a congressional hearing to better deter Beijing, including a new Pacific defence pact involving the US, Australia, Japan and The Philippines.
Questions were also raised in the hearing on Tuesday (local time) about whether Canberra could be relied on to support the US in the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait during a discussion about the need to bolster collective defence arrangements.
With Australian miners recently revealing the Trump administration’s interest in taking up equity stakes in critical minerals companies, US senators were told the development of stronger supply chains with Australia and Japan would help reduce Chinese leverage over Washington.
Raymond Powell – a retired US Air Force colonel and defence attache to Australia from 2017 to 2020 – told the hearing that Canberra was a “natural partner” and “a mining superpower”.
“We should be signing deals in this space, aggressively thinking about capital pooling, but also offload agreements,” he said. “It just represents a tremendous opportunity for enhancing alliance cohesion in the region.”
Ely Ratner, the former assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs from 2021 to 2025, said “we need to build secure supply chains with our allies and partners, not closing ourselves off from the rest of the world”.
The warning from the US congress came after Australia’s top intelligence chief, Office of National Intelligence director-general Andrew Sherear, said competition between authoritarian powers and democracies was increasingly being fought in grey-zone warfare, or the “space between genuine peace and overt war”.
Speaking to a Senate estimates hearing in Australia this week, Mr Shearer said grey-zone conflict was now “central to strategic rivalry in the global struggle between a new axis of authoritarian powers and democracies”.
“Cyber attacks, political interference, disinformation, economic coercion, and the use of paramilitary and proxy forces to pressure and intimidate are now routine,” he said.
The need for the Trump administration to develop specific regional contingency plans, including for a Chinese blockade of the Second Thomas Shoal, a military overflight of Taiwan or a maritime incursion close to Taiwan’s shores, were also discussed, along with the need for partners to lift defence spending.
Democratic senator Chris Coons, the ranking member of the Senate foreign relations subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and international cybersecurity policy,
warned that China was trying to “change the facts on the ground in the Indo-Pacific just as (Vladimir) Putin did with Crimea in 2014”.
“They’re hoping they can salami slice their way into asserting control of the region and forcing the United States out,” he said. “If we don’t change course, if we continue to dole out concessions to China and look the other way as they change facts on the ground, we may well lose the fight for the century,” he said.
Senator Coons and the Republican chair of the subcommittee, Pete Ricketts, issued a joint warning that Australia had been one of the nations in the Indo-Pacific subjected to Beijing’s more aggressive “ICAD (illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive) activities”.
Senator Coons said: “We saw a large Chinese naval task group conduct a full circumnavigation of the continent and live-fire exercises without warning, an enormous show of force intended to intimidate Australia.”
Senator Ricketts said that Chinese warships staged “unprecedented live-fire drills in a show of force meant to intimidate and stress test Australia’s ability to respond” – evidence that China’s ICAD tactics were expanding “throughout the region”.
“Xi Jinping has referred to this as the smokeless battlefield that will allow communist China to win without fighting,” he said. “The good news is we have allies and partners who are bravely confronting Beijing’s ICAD behaviour. But they’re currently over-matched. The United States must do more to even the scales and strengthen their resilience.”
Mr Powell, now the executive director of the SeaLight Foundation, said China’s grey-zone activities represented a “more successful expansionist threat than Russia’s because it has mastered the art of winning without fighting”.
Dr Ratner, the deputy national security adviser to vice-president Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017, said America “can and should do more to strengthen our allies” and that it was “profoundly in America’s interest to have partners who can provide frontline defences against China’s coercion”.
“When our allies are more capable, they can do more on their own,” he said. “They can contribute more to our collective defence and, in doing so, they can help to strengthen deterrence and reduce the costs and risks shouldered by US forces.
“This is why the Trump administration, tactics aside, is doing the right thing by urging our partners to spend more on defence.”
Dr Ratner, now a principal at The Marathon Initiative think tank, proposed a Pacific defence pact between the US, Australia, Japan and The Philippines, and described it as a “win-win for the United States”.
“We have great alliances with those three countries,” he said. “But those alliances are not connected with each other.
“The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, today we are not prepared to fight as a collective with our allies and partners.”
Raising Canberra’s position on Taiwan, Republican senator John Cornyn said that after speaking to Australian parliamentarians he had come to “question who might join us” in any “collective defence of Taiwan that the United States was involved in”.
“Who can we rely on, besides ourselves?” he asked.
Mr Powell said Australia was “not the 51st state and does not necessarily sign up to everything that we decide to do, even though they have been extraordinarily consistent in supporting US operations throughout the decades”.
On managing US relationships with allies such as Australia, he said the US needed to calibrate its rhetoric to “bring them in, rather than sort of find reasons … to cleave them off”.
“It’s very important … that we sometimes when we when we’re talking out loud, remember that the Australian people are listening.”
In his written submission, Dr Ratner suggested that the US should build on the AUKUS agreement and the Quadrilateral security dialogue to combat “grey-zone activity” from China.
“Further deepening these configurations should be a top priority in US efforts to combat PRC grey-zone activity,” he said.
Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said the use of sanctions against China would be important in responding to its grey-zone tactics.
“We need to make clear to the Chinese that specific Chinese state-owned entities and banks could become targets of US financial sanctions,” he said.
Mr Singleton said US allies and partners should be encouraged to join with America in supporting a “unified sanctions framework”, although he said there would “probably have to be some select carve-outs in certain cases”.
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