THE FIX

Solving Australia’s foreign affairs challenges

THE FIX

Susan Harris Rimmer on how Australia can shape the G20 agenda

“Australia has made an impact on the G20 recently, showing that our leadership is welcomed … It could do more with the right support.”


THE PROBLEM: The Group of Twenty (G20) is an association of twenty advanced economies whose purpose is to promote “strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth”. It has been meeting at the ministerial level since 1999 and the leader level since 2008. Australia is a member, along with other major economies such as China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.

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Author Response Image Credit: Pixabay

Author Response

Correspondence

In my essay “The Jakarta Switch” I argue, among other things, that Indonesia faces some big decisions about how it wants to operate in the new Asia – an Asia in which China will wield a lot more power and influence, while America will wield a lot less. I comment that Indonesia’s decisions will be immensely significant for Australia, because they will help determine how closely we can work together, and working with Indonesia will be very important indeed for us as we navigate the new Asia in the difficult decades ahead.

Both Philips Vermonte and John McCarthy, in their responses to that essay, send the ball back across the net, suggesting that Australia too has some choices to make. They say that if we want to work more closely with Jakarta to manage the strategic and economic consequences of Asia’s power shift, we need to get our own thoughts in order as well.

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Author Response Image Credit: Pacific Air Forces Public Affairs

Author Response

Correspondence

I am grateful for Alison Broinowski’s and Paul Bracken’s thoughtful comments on my article, “A Nuclear-armed Australia”. They approach their responses from what seem at first very different angles: in Broinowski’s case, the history and arguments that have sustained the strong public support for nuclear disarmament in Australia; in Bracken’s, the role of nuclear weapons in future relations between the great powers. But the common theme underlying both responses is the shape of the future international “nuclear order” – the strategic environment within which Australia will have to develop its policy towards nuclear weapons.

Australia’s historical support for non-proliferation was rooted in a clear-eyed analysis of our strategic circumstances and the benefit of keeping nuclear weapons from our neighbourhood – a point made very clearly in then foreign minister Gareth Evans’ statement on Australia’s regional security in 1989, for example. This is still an important consideration against Australian nuclear proliferation, and it is an argument that should fare much better in the face of geostrategic change than the ideational aspirations that have come to dominate the non-proliferation movement in recent years – a fact that makes the significant reduction in Australian government funding for regional non-proliferation efforts over the last twenty years all the more deplorable.

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Author Response Image Credit: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt Daniel Wetzel

Author Response

Correspondence

Jim Molan and Michael Shoebridge have each thought deeply, for a long time, about the challenges of defending Australia. Molan has served this country in uniform and has faced the rapidly evolving nature of warfare and coercion firsthand. Shoebridge’s long and distinguished career in the Department of Defence has given him a decisive role in shaping the evolution of Australia’s strategic policy.

Both commentators take issue with contradictions and assumptions in my essay, but seem to spend a lot of time agreeing with me.

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Author Response Image Credit: CPL Brad Hanson

Author Response

Correspondence

The diversity of responses to my article reveals the competing factors to be resolved when formulating strategic policy and allocating national resources.

I agree with much of what Tim Costello writes. Like him, I think that even a modest increase in our development and diplomatic resources in the Pacific region would offer a greater return in terms of security than further boosting the defence budget. And Costello is right to point to a Pacific policy that does not give sufficient weight to developing our regional partnerships – especially in a world where China is exerting substantially more influence. In that context I’d suggest we might also usefully put some thinking into our relationships in the Indian Ocean region.

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Response to Michael Wesley’s “The Pivot to Chaos” Image Credit: Lance Cpl. Osvaldo Ortega

Response to Michael Wesley’s “The Pivot to Chaos”

Correspondence

In the debate on Australia’s strategic options regarding a rising China and an uncertain United States, Michael Wesley’s “The Pivot to Chaos” is a welcome intervention. There is much in his argument to agree with. With Trump in the White House, Wesley urges Australia to, like many Asian countries, adopt a less sentimental and moralistic view on US power. He rightly points out the limits of American commitment to the region, and argues that the United States’ habitual display of military force has done little to deter rivals in the region; instead, it often helps motivate them to catch up.

Given the changing strategic environment of the Asia-Pacific, Wesley issues a daring and timely call for reimagining Australia’s place in the region and recalibrating its foreign policy. Such reimagining is indeed long overdue. Yet his essay is short on detail as to how the reimagining may take shape, beyond an emphasis on moderating China’s behaviour and convincing the United States to shift to a balancing role in the region. These are reasonable goals, but it remains unclear to me what policy adjustments Australia should make to achieve them.

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Response to Andrew Davies’s “Can Australia Fight Alone” Image Credit: PJF Military Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Response to Andrew Davies’s “Can Australia Fight Alone”

Correspondence

In “Can Australia Fight Alone?” Andrew Davies acknowledges increasing strategic uncertainty, but concludes that the only credible scenario in which Australia might need “greater self-reliance” is extensive operations in our near neighbourhood, focusing entirely on war with Indonesia. If we conduct operations far from our shores, we will invariably be positioned alongside our major allies, so can rely on them. As a result, says Davies, “we should resist the push for extra defence spending”. “Our armed forces,” he claims, “can do everything they are likely to be able to do, whether in coalition operations far from home – in which case, we’re likely to be alongside our major suppliers – or operating alone in our own backyard, which tends to be less demanding, at least in terms of sophisticated capabilities.”

This is a comforting thought, but like so much Australian strategic analysis, it is deeply flawed, and dangerous to the independence and perhaps even existence of this nation. In the great tradition of hope-based strategic thought, it focuses on the past rather than the present and the future.

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Response to Tim Lindsey’s “Retreat from Democracy?” Image Credit: Pixabay

Response to Tim Lindsey’s “Retreat from Democracy?”

Correspondence

Tim Lindsey’s excellent essay, “Retreat from Democracy?” (Australian Foreign Affairs 3, July 2018), lays out clearly just how much the political climate in Indonesia has changed over the past decade. The optimism about extending democratic reform is gone, as is the hope that systemic corruption might be wound back, and there is an increasingly conservative mood as religious chauvinism is fanned by Islamist hardliners.

Such changes are a cause for genuine concern. But the picture is not all bleak. Perspective and expectations make a difference. Compared to Indonesia’s recent past, the picture is depressing. But compared to the experiences of other young democracies, it is less so.

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Response to Hugh White’s “The Jakarta Switch” Image Credit: Pxfuel

Response to Hugh White’s “The Jakarta Switch”

Correspondence

In “The Jakarta Switch”, Hugh White argues we should come to regard Indonesia as a strategic asset – that a strong Indonesia determined to maximise its room for manoeuvre in a region dominated by China would be in Australia’s interests. As always, he forces us to think.

Indonesia’s national strength and political outlook, and the nature of its relationship with China in, say, 2030, are moot. But it will be much wealthier, will want to avoid domination by China and will be located where it has always been, astride our northern approaches. For these reasons alone we should seek greater strategic contiguity with Indonesia. This argument has more resonance if, as many fear, the American regional presence diminishes.

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