~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 7th December, 2024
In a resounding endorsement of closer defence co-operation with Australia, departing US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has described AUKUS “as one of the most ambitious defence projects in modern history” and Australia as a key ally in America’s global strategy to deter future conflicts in an increasingly uncertain world.
In a valedictory speech to a Washington-based think tank, Sullivan provides revealing insights into the reasons for the pivotal shift in US strategic policy from a peacetime footing to preparing for a potential military conflict with China – a war the US doesn’t want but must be prepared to win should deterrence fail.
Winning won’t be possible without “smarter investment, production, innovation and integration with allies”, says Sullivan. Nor is it achievable without sharing advanced technology, training together and leveraging the advantages of strategic geography. This is why Australia is on the cusp of hosting the largest build-up of US and allied forces since World War II.
The Northern Territory is already a forward operating base for the Australian Defence Force and an important alliance hub. It hosts an annual rotation of more than 2000 US marines, and US B-52 bombers periodically stage through RAAF Base Tindal near Katherine. But much more is to come as the alliance is “operationalised” and spreads its wings across the continent.
HMAS Stirling naval base in Western Australia is on track to become a key allied submarine base. The US Army is preparing to pre-position military equipment in Victoria and Queensland that eventually could support a full division of about 15,000 troops. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has flagged an increase in the frequency and duration of submarine visits and the establishment of a US Army watercraft presence in Queensland as well as the Northern Territory.
The allied build-up is not just about the US. Other democracies are eyeing off opportunities to make ship visits and rotations of their own and exercise with the ADF on our world-class training ranges. As military conflict with China moves from the unthinkable to the possible, once pacifist Japan has undergone an astonishing attitudinal change to defence, doubling defence spending and slowly transforming the country’s self-defence force into a more capable, combat-ready military.
In 2025, for the first time, the newly formed Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade will exercise with Australian and US counterparts in the Northern Territory, complementing a rotation of Japanese F-35 stealth strike fighters. Britain, Europe and India see the developing maritime precinct in Darwin as a potential resupply and maintenance centre for their patrolling ships.
Historically, geography – not firepower – has been Australia’s gift to the alliance. In 1980, the Australian National University’s Desmond Ball – one of country’s leading defence academics at the time – published a controversial book about American installations in Australia titled A Suitable Piece of Real Estate. Referring to an array of US communications, intelligence and early warning facilities, he wrote: “Australia provides an ideal physical location for facilitating an enormous range of the most advanced and critical American defence, scientific and technical intelligence operations.”
More than 40 years later, these facilities are being complemented by a growing US military presence. America’s defence planners see the land down under – especially the Northern Territory – as a geographical sweet spot with unique strategic attributes.
Position is everything in military strategy, as with real estate. Unlike Guam and US bases in Japan and South Korea, the Top End is beyond the range of most Chinese missiles but close to maritime hotspots and the critical waterways that carry 40 per cent of global seaborne trade, 80 per cent of China’s oil imports and 50 per cent of energy trade.
Reprising its wartime role as a crucial allied bastion, the Northern Territory is set to become a key location for defence training, logistic support and operations into a vast area stretching from the Eastern Indian Ocean to the contested islands of the South China Sea.
Remarkably, there has been little explanation from the Albanese government about the purpose and implications of the biggest change in our strategic policy and defence posture since 1942. And this could be just the beginning.
Donald Trump is poised to ratchet up US defence spending. His cabinet is full of China hawks such as Marco Rubio, his nominee for secretary of state, and Mike Waltz, the designated national security adviser. Rubio sees China as the “threat that will define this century”. It’s hard to see Trump reversing the hardening posture of US forces in the region as China continues to aggressively assert its territorial claims at sea.
If Xi Jinping’s military can seize Taiwan and neutralise allies such as Japan and The Philippines, there will be nothing to stop China from dominating the sea lanes that carry much of Australia’s trade and ending more than a century of US pre-eminence in the Pacific. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
But unlike the Cold War, the US needs Australia as much as Australia needs the US. We are now at the centre, rather than the periphery, of the defining geopolitical contest for power and influence between the two leading states of this era. Labor doesn’t seem to grasp this reality. Despite the government’s sober rhetoric about our dire and worsening security environment, defence spending is stuck at about 2 per cent of GDP. Most defence experts say 3 per cent is the minimum necessary to adequately fund the ADF for the challenges ahead, including a former chief, Angus Houston, who co-authored the 2023 Defence Strategic Review.
Trump certainly won’t view 2 per cent as Australia paying its way despite our $US3bn commitment to fund the US submarine program. The game has changed. Three per cent is emerging as the new benchmark for US allies so the next government will come under pressure from the Trump administration to find another $20bn-plus annually for defence.
This is likely to be a fiscal bridge too far for Labor, especially if Anthony Albanese is forced into minority government with the Greens and an assortment of teals and independents who don’t see the need for higher defence spending. If the government doesn’t make the case for a deepening of our alliance commitments, detractors will fill the gap, risking a repeat of the domestic divisions that eroded trust with the US during the Vietnam war. If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider what the reflexively anti-American Greens would do to oppose closer co-operation with the Trump administration in a minority Labor government.
Nearly a decade ago Richard Di Natale, the Greens leader at the time, argued in a speech to the Lowy Institute that Australia’s alliance with the US was a risk to national security, cost an “enormous” amount of money and must be reconsidered. Incumbent leader Adam Bandt is even more adamant in his rejection of the alliance. After Trump’s election victory, Bandt called on Albanese to “urgently cancel AUKUS and reconsider Australia’s relationship with the United States”. Greens defence spokesman David Shoebridge wants to review ANZUS, the foundational treaty underpinning our defence relationship with the US.
Although deeply flawed, the arguments by the Greens and their fellow travellers for dumping the alliance inevitably will gain traction unless the government makes a robust case for a stronger allied presence here. This means rebutting their four central assumptions: that the US, not China, is destabilising the region; our sovereignty and independence are compromised by close ties with the US; the US is the main beneficiary of the alliance; and we are alienating our Asian neighbours.
Let’s start with the claim the US is the chief destabiliser, needlessly driving Australia into conflict with China. This conveniently ignores Beijing’s aggressive assertion of its strategic interests in the seas of the Western Pacific underpinned by an unprecedented peacetime build-up of its military and paramilitary forces that goes far beyond the requirements of national defence.
China’s defence spending has risen on average 10 per cent a year in real terms across the past 30 years while US and Australian defence spending has declined or flatlined. Without explanation or warning, Xi has initiated a rapid expansion and modernisation of his country’s nuclear forces while steadfastly refusing to engage in nuclear arms limitation talks with the US. The number of nuclear weapons in his arsenal will increase from 200 in 2019 to 1000 by 2030. His navy is on track to have more ships than the US and India combined by 2030.
Meanwhile, China’s navy and air force continue to escalate military pressure on Taiwan, regularly intruding into the territorial seas, exclusive economic zones and air defence identification zones of several Asian states, among them Japan, South Korea, The Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia. It rams and fires water cannons at the fishing fleets and coast guard vessels of smaller neighbours in the South China Sea, 90 per cent of which it spuriously claims as its own.
And let’s not forget the attempts to bring Australia and 26 other countries to heel through economic coercion and wolf warrior diplomacy. Both tactics remain part of Xi’s geopolitical tool kit.
The Greens don’t seem to have noticed that these actions are seriously destabilising, especially the continued militarisation of contested islands in the South China Sea in defiance of a definitive ruling by justices of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that Beijing’s claims have no basis in international maritime law.
The real problem is that the Obama administration allowed Xi to get away with these transgressions by being too conciliatory. Democracy, the rule of law and regional stability won’t be preserved absent the military clout to prevent Xi from taking what he wants by force or stealth.
A second trope is that the alliance is a sellout of our sovereignty to Washington. Shoebridge has criticised the government for “unthinking dependency on the US” and the AUKUS agreement as being “designed to entangle us in the US’s next war”. If that’s the case we are in good company since the alliance includes a long list of like-minded democracies that collectively host 170,000 American troops, pre-positioned military equipment, and shared defence and intelligence facilities. Does Shoebridge really believe all these countries are unthinkingly dependent on the US?
No government could survive politically if it were to willingly subordinate its national interests to those of another state. The US did not impose ANZUS or AUKUS on Australia. The agreements were the result of Australian initiatives and security concerns. The reality is that historically both major parties have assessed the benefits of the alliance to be overwhelmingly in Australia’s favour. Detractors who doubt the deterrent value of an alliance with the world’s strongest economic and military power should ask themselves whether Vladimir Putin would have invaded Ukraine if the country had been a NATO member.
Third, far from going to Washington as a supplicant Joe Biden’s long-serving Asia tsar Kurt Campbell believes Australia has successfully achieved an unmatched level of “strategic capture” of the US defence and national security community. It’s hard to disagree.
Labor and Coalition governments have successfully cut beneficial deals for Australia with the US that are the envy of many nations. They include privileged access to US intelligence, technology, space assets and industrial base; the assurance of America’s nuclear umbrella; and, what is often forgotten, deep-pocketed US investment in our infrastructure and defence facilities that demonstrably strengthens the nation’s security.
This was not always the case. Ball legitimately criticised Coalition and Labor governments in the 1960s and ’70s for excessive secrecy about US facilities here and for a lack of sovereign control over satellite ground stations at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory and Nurrungar in South Australia. Ball levelled his most trenchant criticism at the “disingenuous dissembling” of the Whitlam government in refusing to disclose any details about Pine Gap “because they are not our secrets”.
Fortunately, Australia does have sovereign control over what are now joint facilities resulting from decisions taken by Gough Whitlam’s Labor successor, Bob Hawke, and his foreign minister, Bill Hayden.
But Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles seem not to have learned the obvious lesson. If they don’t actively and more openly prosecute the case for a larger and more diverse allied defence presence here the nay-sayers – including potential adversaries – won’t hesitate to fill the gap and undermine public support for the alliance.
Finally, the claim that the alliance alienates us from the region fails the evidentiary test. Defence co-operation with Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore and The Philippines has increased significantly in recent years, as has the regional membership of important defence exercises hosted by Australia.
The 2024 Pitch Black multinational training exercise in northern Australia included nine Asian countries. The ADF participates in a raft of regional military training initiatives such as the Indonesian-run Komodo naval drills that bring together ships from the US and 15 Asian states.
We have bilateral defence arrangements or strategic partnerships with most Asian states. And the convening power of the US has been instrumental in getting Australia a seat at the table of the influential trilateral and quadrilateral security dialogues that include Japan and India, the two largest Asian economies after China.
None of this remotely suggests an Australia alienated or disconnected from our Asian neighbourhood. Without powerful allies, defending an island continent with a population of 27 million is a daunting and probably unachievable goal in an era of intensifying geopolitical and economic rivalry.
Trump won’t make life any easier. But our impeccable alliance credentials are a winning card to play in the inevitable deal-making ahead with the great disrupter, helping to protect Australia from the negative consequences of his second coming.
The Greens should think about the unpalatable alternatives. Cede our independence to autocratic China, which shares few of our interests and none of the Greens’ purported values. Or go it alone by tripling defence spending to compensate for the severe loss of defence and intelligence capability that dispensing with the alliance would guarantee.
Alan Dupont is chief executive of geopolitical risk consultancy The Cognoscenti Group and a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute.