Rory Medcalf

In defence of the Indo-Pacific: Australia's new strategic map

The 2013 Australian Defence White Paper categorically termed Australias zone of strategic interest the Indo-Pacific, the first time any government has defined its region this way. This raises questions about what the Indo-Pacific means, whether it is a coherent strategic system, the provenance of the concept and its implications for Asian security as well as Australian policy. Indo-Pacific Asia can best be understood as an expansive definition of a maritime super-region centred on South-East Asia, arising principally from the emergence of China and India as outward-looking trading states and strategic actors. It is a strategic system insofar as it involves the intersecting interests of key powers such as China, India and the USA, although the Indo-Pacific subregions will retain their own dynamics too. It suits Australias two-ocean geography and expanding links with Asia, including India. The concept is, however, not limited to an Australian perspective and increasingly reflects US, Indian, Japanese and Indonesian ways of seeing the region. It also reflects Chinas expanding interests in the Indian Ocean, suggesting that the Chinese debate may shift towards partial acceptance of Indo-Pacific constructs alongside Asia-Pacific and East Asian ones, despite suspicions about its association with the US rebalance to Asia. Questions about Australias ability to implement an effective Indo-Pacific strategy must account for force posture, alliance ties and defence diplomacy, as well as constraints on force structure and spending.

Reimagining Asia: From Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific

The label Indo-Pacific is replacing Asia-Pacific as a framework for regional order. In the contest to define Asia conceptually, the broader label has strategic consequences in managing China’s rise while also incorporating the United States into an inclusive region. Various leaders have introduced new terminology such as “Act East” and “confluence of two seas.” They point to a maritime super-region with its geographical center in Southeast Asia. It serves as the intersection of the interests of at least four major powers as well as of significant middle powers. The scale of the Indo-Pacific dilutes the ability of any one country unilaterally to shape the regional order. The economic and strategic interconnectedness of this two-ocean region translates into both mutual benefit and mutual vulnerability.

Malcolm Fraser's Asia Delusion

Malcolm Fraser’s book Dangerous Allies (Fraser with Roberts 2014) has rightly been taken to task, even by broadly sympathetic readers, for the way it caricatures US foreign policy (White 2014). It leaves the absurd impression that almost everything Washington does in the world today is a wilfully dangerous extension of the neoconservative crusade of a decade ago. The book has at least one other equally unsettling flaw: the way it misreads or misrepresents contemporary Asia. The author privileges his own version of China’s strategic priorities and sensitivities far above the interests and perspectives of other Asian countries. This lack of balance, combined with a false depiction of the USA, greatly weakens the credibility of the book’s core conclusions about revisiting and perhaps ending the security alliance between the USA and Australia. Fraser’s argument rests on a sequence of highly dubious propositions: that the USA is not upholding the status quo but is instead actively expanding its military power in Asia in order to ‘contain’ China; that China is not being assertive or challenging the status quo in a destabilising way; that the USA and Japan, not China, are expanding their military capabilities in Asia in dramatic and destabilising ways; that Japan has no cause for concern about a rising China; and that Asian security problems such as the disputes in the South China Sea can be managed without a role for the USA. Fraser heaps up these assertions, and more, to conclude that deepening the Australia–US alliance puts Canberra out of step with most of its region and on a needless confrontation course with a largely benign China. So if the book gets Asia wrong, it gets the alliance wrong too. In some quarters, of course, Mr Fraser’s critique of the alliance, written with the assistance of Cain Roberts, has been praised for urging independence in Australia’s international outlook. No reasonable person would disagree with the view that an independent foreign policy is a good thing for any self-respecting country. It is also in the national interest for a former leader to tell the nation what he really thinks about big strategic issues, so in that sense Mr Fraser’s

Cocos and Christmas Islands: building Australia’s strategic role in the Indian Ocean

ABSTRACT Australia’s Cocos Islands and Christmas Island are remote islands with potentially great significance for Australia’s strategic role in the eastern Indian Ocean region and the wider Indo-Pacific. This paper explores the growing militarization of islands throughout the Indian Ocean in the context of growing strategic competition in the region. It then considers the strategic value of Australia’s Indian Ocean territories and makes recommendations about the further development of defense infrastructure to potentially support Australian air operations in Southeast Asia and the eastern Indian Ocean. Upgraded facilities on both Cocos and Christmas would provide Australia with valuable leverage in its relationships with regional defense partners and the United States.

Australia And China: understanding the reality check

ABSTRACT Between 2016 and 2018, Australia’s perceptions of China underwent a significant reality check, with global implications. Australia has been a first mover in pushing back against Chinese foreign interference, including via new foreign influence and interference laws. The recalibration of Australia-China relations, and the events and policy debate that proceeded it, is instructive for other countries seeking to respond to the more assertive and coercive elements of Chinese foreign policy. This article sets out the drivers of Australias reality check, presents a chronology of key events, and examines how Canberra can now move relations with Beijing forward under the conditions of the new normal that has been established.

National security: between theory and practice

In the process of bringing together this special issue of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, we were struck by how frequently the term ‘national security’ is used and abused, by both academics and policymakers. Some use it to refer to conventional statist threats. Others employ it as a broad catch-all for anything that may create or imply harms against anyone in a particular polity. Still others use the term to justify an array of populist and politicised policy choices with apparently little to justify the link between the threat and the referent object—that is, the thing being secured. This is confusing to say the least. After all, it is often assumed that national security implies a particular set of underlying judgments about the ways in which political communities might go about guarding against potential harms. To the extent that the nation state remains the referent object of security under such a formulation, characterisations like this are broadly correct. But it is also then often assumed that national security implies a particular type of security concept, not to mention security practice. It has become commonplace, for instance, to refer to a ‘traditional’ national security paradigm, as though the state is somehow irrelevant or incapable of adapting to change (Sil and Katzenstein 2010). Our view is that it is cartoonish at best to depict national security as an old-fashioned (Newman 2010) and narrow field of study. We further believe that it is erroneous to dismiss it as the exclusive domain of realpolitik and outmoded conceptions of the national interest in contemporary international society. We therefore agree with T. V. Paul and Norrin Ripsman’s (2010) observation that states remain the basic security actors in international relations, and this means that deepening our knowledge of national security in contemporary circumstances is vital. This is especially so since state capacities in identifying, categorising and responding to harm have become stretched by globalisation, advancements in technology and the rise of a host of threats, from transnational actors to natural disasters. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that national security has been absent from the literature on security studies. There has been much contemporary scholarship on national security policy in democratic nations, centred especially on the transatlantic space (for example, Dannreuther and Peterson 2006; Webber, Sperling, and Smith 2013). In addition, a large body of work exists on the national security postures of Asian nations, particularly Japan (for instance, Hughes 2004; Lind 2016; Oros 2008), China (Christensen 2011; Ji 2015) and Australia as well (Medcalf 2014). Often this has been done using a specific theoretical lens, or from a particular paradigmatic perspective. Regional-security-complex theorists (Wirth 2015), neoclassical realists (Saltzman 2015) and liberal

Imagining an Indian National Security Strategy: the sum of its parts

ABSTRACT India’s power and interests continue to grow in the Indo-Pacific region and globally, yet its national security policymaking approaches have not kept pace. These may have been barely adequate for India’s twentieth-century experience as a regional power tending towards strategic restraint, but currently constrain India from being able to harness its considerable national capabilities to protect larger and more complex interests. This article identifies five key obstacles to a more coherent and effective approach to national security: lack of staffing depth in policy and intelligence; weak structures for ensuring inclusive consultation in policymaking; a disempowered military when it comes to strategic decisions; a lack of security expertise among civilian officials and politicians; and an absence of whole-of-government guidance in making and expressing policy. Many reforms are necessary, but two enabling early steps are identified and recommended: the creation of a Chief of Defence Staff position to elevate military coordination and authoritative input to policy, and the preparation of a National Security Strategy to define and guide overall policy.