Dr Alan Dupont presented in Panel 4 at Sovereign and Security Forum on Monday 31st March, 2025.
How can Australia pursue its national interest in a “might is right” world? Can we save the multilateral furniture? Can we work with other countries to mitigate the economic damage from Trump’s tariff war? Is CPTPP a model for the future?
I believe the Trump ascendancy presages a radical change in Washington’s approach to the US alliance.
Mutual trust, shared interests and values have little or diminished weight. Trump, the dealmaker, doesn’t distinguish between friends and foes. This means the major beneficiaries of his second coming are more likely to be autocratic challengers, who have no love for America, at the expense of traditional friends and allies, who are being treated with disdain.
The US president has made it crystal clear that he wants supplicants, resources and real estate to make America great again. Unfortunately, on the evidence so far, MAGA looks like being at everyone else’s expense.
We need to inoculate ourselves against Trump’s destructive and anti-democratic impulses by hedging against the real possibility that the US alliance will lose its deterrence value and its utility as a defence and foreign policy multiplier for Australia – that’s my Plan B. The issue is can we trust an “America first America” as The Australian’s Cameron Stewart asked in a recent column.
Gareth may be surprised to know that I’m on unity ticket with him in believing that an efficacious Plan B means less America, more self-reliance, more Asia and a dash of global engagement although we shouldn’t neglect Europe and our Kiwi friends across the ditch.
I’m not advocating that we sever the alliance. But it would be prudent to rethink what a more limited and transactional alliance can deliver. And it’s time to do more for ourselves. Like Europeans, we have freeloaded on the US for too long to the detriment of our own defence and national security capabilities.
But I beg to differ with Gareth on these points.
Ruling out measures to improve our security because they paint more targets on our back only encourages adversaries to weaken our defence by trading on our fear of attack. As I have argued elsewhere, the “we are a big target” argument flies in the face of strategic logic and alliance practice. Yes, we are a target. But that is the price we pay for our independence and sovereignty, as does any self-respecting country.
Are China or the US going to change their policies because they fear being targeted? Is this a new national security praxis that should determine our strategy? If so, then we should prepare for an avalanche of threats from adversaries who think we will buckle at the first sign of pressure.
Echidna strategies that are spiky but unthreatening are manifestly inadequate for the threatening world we now confront. I much prefer a venomous sea-wasp strategy. Sea wasps can be lethal to those who touch it.
While Xi Jinping remains China’s COE – “Chairman of Everything” – it’s difficult to see how Beijing can be a genuine security partner for Australia simply because a “China first China” poses more of a challenge to our sovereignty than MAGA America. That’s not to say we shouldn’t trade with China or attempt to improve bilateral ties. But let’s understand the limits to rapprochement. We shouldn’t delude ourselves that Xi is invested in the success of the democracy project.
I’m all for multilateralism and being a good global citizen. But the multilateral institutions and norms established by the West as the foundational pillars of Pax Americana are demonstrably crumbling.
It’s not a question of saving the multilateral furniture but rather renovating it for the times. Key international institutions are either dysfunctional, struggling for relevance or have been coopted by the powerful for their own national interests.
We need to put more effort into alternative or complementary approaches to traditional multilateralism. This means smaller, more flexible and focused minilaterals, plurilaterals, coalitions of the willing and meaningful strategic partnerships that measurably contribute to our hard and soft power.
We should emulate the Philippines by intensifying middle-power cooperation with like-minded countries to check Trump’s excesses and “resist the hegemonic ambitions of revisionist states”, as Richard Heydarian argues.
Let me make four suggestions of my own in answer to the question of what we should do to protect our sovereignty and astutely navigate a “might is right world.”
First, Australia is more dependent on free trade than most nations. But we can’t remain open if everyone else is erecting trade barriers. With globalisation waning and the WTO losing its relevance and capacity to settle disputes, accelerated trade diversification is a no brainer.
It’s a dangerous and potentially fatal dependency to rely upon one country for 30 percent of our export income particularly one that shares few of our interests or values, is rapidly decoupling from the West and moving from mercantilism to semi-autarky.
Second, with protectionism on the rise and global supply chains increasingly disrupted by geopolitics we should take a leaf from the playbooks of China and the US and increase support for priority sovereign capabilities in advanced manufacturing, defence industry, cutting-edge technology and critical minerals processing.
Third, Australia desperately needs a world class defence industry capable of exporting to the world. We are already competitive in many areas of design, innovation, advanced manufacturing and R&D. But pockets of excellence and niche capabilities aren’t enough.
We still import most of our major defence equipment. Australian companies are bit players in a defence industry universe dominated by big, largely American prime contractors. And we have no defence industry strategic plan or a funding model that meets our needs and provides a pathway to greater defence self-reliance.
The answer is to scale up and join up like Israel, Sweden and more recently South Korea. Growing a competitive defence industry must be a national priority. But it can’t be left to Defence which doesn’t have the expertise or authority to implement the necessary changes. Prime Ministerial leadership is essential.
Finally, these trade, defence, industry, technology and foreign policy initiatives must be integrated into a national security strategy fit for today’s turbulent times.
It’s a bipartisan failing that despite widespread calls for such a strategy, the first and only one ever produced in this country was by the Gillard government in 2013.
What a different world that was. In the foreword to her national security strategy, Gillard wrote: “Our strategic outlook is largely positive. We live in one of the safest and most cohesive nations in the world. We have a strong economy. A major war is unlikely … our alliance with the United States is as strong as ever.”
I venture that it would be a much different foreword today.
To conclude, in addition to Gareth’s four main points – albeit with my qualifications – we need greater trade diversification, less China, more sovereign capabilities, a world class defence industry and an overarching national security strategy to bind them.