The U.S. Protection Division’s announcement of a evaluation of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) pact in June despatched shockwaves by way of the Australian nationwide safety institution. Whereas some commentators have tried to downplay these issues, the evaluation’s chief, Undersecretary of Protection for Coverage Elbridge Colby, is a famous skeptic of the pact. Amongst U.S. protection and army leaders, Colby just isn’t alone in holding “very critical issues” about AUKUS. There’s a actual likelihood that the deliberate switch of three to 5 Virginia-class nuclear submarines will probably be canceled, postponed, or renegotiated for an unacceptably excessive value. And the USA’ preliminary choice to halt weapons shipments to Ukraine—since reversed—displays Colby’s willingness to ruthlessly prioritize U.S. army preparedness.
In the meantime, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has resisted U.S. requires Australia to boost its protection spending targets. Such calls have come amid heightened nervousness about the way forward for the alliance, solely worsened by the Trump administration’s refusal to exempt Australia from its tariffs. In a latest landmark speech, Albanese emphasised that “Australia’s safety and our prosperity rely on participating with our area, as ourselves,” pointedly defending Australian international coverage independence. Renewed issues in regards to the alliance have come at a very delicate time for Australia, as Albanese concludes an prolonged and well-received journey to China. Through the journey, Albanese met with President Xi Jinping and different Chinese language leaders—notably earlier than he has met with Donald Trump.
No matter its final result, the AUKUS evaluation poses a basic problem to the overwhelming prioritization of protection concerns within the U.S.-Australia relationship, and Australian international coverage usually. AUKUS was supposed to be, in former Nationwide Safety Advisor Jake Sullivan’s phrases, “a strategic marriage between the USA and Australia for half a century.”
The top of AUKUS wouldn’t essentially entail a strategic divorce. Extra levels of freedom could in reality strengthen the U.S.-Australia alliance long-term, enabling every nation to prioritize its most urgent financial and safety pursuits. But how Australia ought to conduct its international coverage past protection cooperation with the U.S. stays unclear. Three latest books present a possible method ahead.
Members of the U.S. and Royal Australian Air Drive observe an MC-130J Air Commando II flying in formation off the coast of New South Wales, Australia, throughout an train on July 3, 2021. USAF/Cowl-Pictures.com
In Girt by Sea, lecturers Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis rethink Australian safety, with a specific give attention to its maritime dimensions. In a major vote of confidence, International Minister Penny Wong helped to launch the guide in 2024 and has referenced it repeatedly throughout regional and worldwide boards.
Girt by Sea: Re-Imagining Australia’s Safety, Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis, La Trobe College Press, 304 pp., $36.99, April 2024
Since ending up as a senior advisor to Wong in 2019, Allan Behm has authored two new books on Australian international coverage. No Enemies, No Mates explores how Australia can overcome the historic pathologies that, in Behm’s view, have impeded its strategic pondering. The 2024 sequel, The Odd Couple, extends his argument by way of a richly detailed examination of Australia-U.S. relations previous and current.
All three books are skeptical of elevated army spending normally and AUKUS specifically. They don’t, nonetheless, disavow the Australia, New Zealand, and United States (ANZUS) safety treaty, nor do they deny the potential menace posed by Chinese language regional hegemony. As a substitute, they completely doc the shortcomings of Australian international policymaking to put the foundations for a brand new method.
For Strating and Wallis, any effort to rework Australian international coverage should begin with critically reevaluating “what and whose safety we imply after we say ‘Australia’s safety.’” Of their telling, how one imagines Australia profoundly influences who its international coverage serves. The novelty of this method lies of their give attention to Australia’s “six maritime domains,” pointedly marginalizing distant allies akin to the UK. It additionally foregrounds the heterogeneity of a area now extensively known as the Indo-Pacific.
In truth, Strating and Wallis take specific challenge with the idea of the Indo-Pacific, which featured prominently in Australia’s 2017 International Coverage White Paper and has dominated the nation’s strategic pondering for the reason that publication of Rory Medcalf’s extremely influential 2020 guide, Contest for the Indo-Pacific. From the Australian authorities’s perspective, contributing to collective Indo-Pacific safety constitutes a key crucial of AUKUS.
Itself an act of strategic creativeness, the time period “Indo-Pacific” frames India, the USA, and supposedly likeminded companions as allies in a joint quest to withstand China’s problem to the rules-based worldwide order. Strating and Wallis are fast to remind the reader that this narrative overlooks entrenched strategic variations amongst “likeminded” states, in addition to the Individuals’ personal coercive tendencies. However they go additional, arguing that “geography continues to render Southeast Asia and the South Pacific as Australia’s major areas of strategic curiosity”—provided that the “Indo-Pacific area is so huge that it might be unrealistic for a center energy akin to Australia to hunt to safe it totally.”
By attending to the political results of Australia’s strategic vocabulary, Strating and Wallis additionally try to maneuver past the totalizing framework of U.S.-China competitors. They persuasively argue that “[m]any states within the Indo-Pacific are predominantly involved with financial improvement and nation-building reasonably than strategic competitors,” and that “[a]n Indo-Pacific technique that fails to account for the financial priorities of regional states is one that’s doomed to fail.” A lot of their coverage suggestions consequently revolve round points akin to local weather change, improvement help, transnational crime, and, extra idiosyncratically, unlawful, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Girt by Sea is, for essentially the most half, a cautious guide that expertly seeks to nudge the nationwide safety institution towards a much less defense-oriented method. The identical can’t be stated of Behm’s bitingly sensible No Enemies, No Mates.
No Enemies No Mates: Restoring Australia’s International Relevance, Allan Behm, Upswell, 320 pp., $29.99, March 2022
Behm writes with the authority and freedom of an unshackled former insider. He depicts Australia as a rustic that was as soon as admired for its progressivism however is now a “nation of flunkeys.” Behm additional laments that Australia has change into, for the USA, a “vassal, participating in conflicts within the Center East and Afghanistan which had been none of our enterprise, terrorism however.” Naturally, AUKUS is available in for particular criticism for “demolish[ing] 4 a long time of nationwide strategic coverage targeted on the direct defence of Australia.”
What explains the dire state of Australian international coverage in Behm’s eyes? The guide turns repeatedly to historical past to discover how racism and misogyny have “situation[ed] Australia’s strategic mindset, shaping each our understanding of the world round us and the responses we’ve got to it.” His evaluation traverses the colonization and ongoing dispossession of Australia’s First Nations peoples; the Australian slave commerce within the Pacific; Prime Minister Billy Hughes’s infamously concerted opposition to Japan’s racial equality clause proposal on the 1919 Paris Peace convention; and the legacy of the “White Australia” immigration coverage.
No Enemies, No Mates supplies a well timed rebuke to those that imagine that Australia is, by its very nature, a progressive worldwide actor. But the guide is in the end redemptive. Behm is raring to point out how, after confronting its historic pathologies, Australia can leverage its appreciable diplomatic acumen and financial clout to construct a greater and extra affluent world. In an identical vein to Strating and Wallis, Behm facilities “human safety” issues akin to local weather change, pandemic response, and nuclear nonproliferation.
Strating, Wallis, and Behm’s shared emphasis on “human” and “non-traditional” safety in some methods already feels borrowed from the post-Chilly Struggle second. However this sense has change into unattainable to disregard for the reason that second inauguration of Donald Trump. Brick by brick, Trump has sought to dismantle the pillars of twenty first century liberal internationalism, from exiting the World Well being Group and the Paris Local weather Settlement to defunding USAID. This assault has been additional compounded by Europe’s personal defense-driven international assist cuts.
The dawning of this “new world dysfunction” has already prompted renewed requires elevated Australian army spending, together with from Wallis. China’s continued financial and army ascent, an unpredictable Trump administration, and the broader collapse of the worldwide improvement and commerce orders current Australia with tough challenges on a number of fronts. These challenges additionally elude an solely regional method. In any case, tariff wars don’t cease on the ocean’s edge.
U.S. Commerce Consultant Robert Zoellick (left) and Australian Commerce Minister Mark Vaile signal free commerce agreements in Washington on Might 18, 2004. REUTERS
On this context, Behm’s appraisal of Australian financial and commerce diplomacy in The Odd Couple is especially illuminating. Earlier than detailing the 2005 Australia-U.S. Free Commerce Settlement’s (AUSFTA) quite a few faults, Behm incisively describes the strategic logic behind negotiating an FTA with the USA as looking for “safety in opposition to American protectionism.” He defends AUSFTA as “good in elements” because it “cemented an financial relationship,” whereas denouncing its extra coercive parts and rejecting its alleged safety side-benefits as “simply one other step within the ANZUS lengthy con.”
The Odd Couple: The Australia-America Relationship, Allan Behm, Upswell, 230 pp., $29.99, July 2024
Behm additional praises Australia’s commerce diplomacy within the 1986-1994 Uruguay Spherical negotiations—which led to the institution of the World Commerce Group—as “imaginative, ‘big-picture’ and broad-sweeping in its ambition for each an equitable world buying and selling system and a distinctively Australian position in it, significantly in Asia.”
On April 2, Trump ruthlessly uncovered the hollowness of Australia’s FTA wager, subjecting Australia to a ten p.c tariff price regardless of the USA having a commerce surplus and having fun with largely unwavering Australian protection assist. The authorized standing of the AUSFTA did little to forestall the Liberation Day carnage, even when its quick financial penalties for Australia have thus far been minimal. However now, the USA is threatening extra tariffs on Australia’s multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical export business of as much as a mammoth 200 p.c. The proposed tariffs have come regardless of prior Australian concessions in AUSFTA relating to its pharmaceutical sector rules, concessions which Behm presciently critiques.
The solar rises over a Royal Australian Navy submarine berthed in Backyard Island, Australia, on Jan. 21, 2021. POIS Yuri Ramsey/Australian Protection Drive/Getty Pictures
Finally, Behm, Strating, and Wallis name for a humbler, extra inclusive, and extra regionally targeted method to Australian international coverage that places diplomacy and improvement on an equal footing with protection. A mixture of Strating and Wallis’s foregrounding of Australia’s maritime safety and Behm’s name for a regionally anchored Australian multilateralism would serve the present authorities effectively as a blueprint for a post-AUKUS future.
When it comes to the U.S.-Australia protection relationship, the top of AUKUS would additionally enable for better strategic prioritization, with Australia refocusing on its direct protection whereas the USA navigates its nice energy relationship with China. Because of this, Australia might liberate assets for a international coverage agenda that’s much more aware of its quick financial and safety pursuits than AUKUS ever was.
That being stated, enterprise as normal on world improvement and commerce governance merely received’t reduce it. Australia can not ignore the epochal shift going down in the USA and past. It should as an alternative interact constructively with the brand new protectionist wave, which can even sign the downfall of the neoliberal free commerce order as we all know it. This wave has been pushed each by concern inside rich nations like the USA in regards to the distributive penalties of unfettered monetary and commerce globalization, in addition to a worldwide south-led backlash in opposition to the hypocrisy of many WTO guidelines and their constraints on improvement policymaking. Creating nations in Asia akin to Indonesia and Vietnam have notably capitalized on the USA’ abandonment of free commerce to pursue their very own protectionist, industrialization agendas.
Slightly than looking for “safety in opposition to American protectionism,” Australia ought to as an alternative assist to chart a brand new path ahead for world commerce by way of bilateral, regional, and multilateral diplomacy. Given Australia’s liminal place as a worldwide north state within the Asia-Pacific area, it’s significantly well-placed to revive its custom of artistic financial multilateralism. However it would require first acknowledging Australia’s comparative marginality as a worldwide protection actor. Attaining elevated protection independence, albeit with extra modest ambitions, would then present Australia with far better strategic credibility in pursuing this generational multilateral endeavor.
Australian policymakers may even must endure one closing act of strategic creativeness: rethinking the nation’s ironclad dedication to free commerce. In any other case, Australia will probably be unable to assist strike a worldwide discount with the USA and its regional neighbors on managed commerce, the lodestar guiding us out of this era of worldwide financial dysfunction.
