Australia's new defence strategy unveils a significant strategic shift in foreign policy to meet new threats from China
It's a hawkish new strategy for an uncertain new world.
On Wednesday, the Federal Government unveiled a significant shift in Australia's strategic posture that could reshape foreign and defence policy for years to come.
The headlines about the Defence Strategic Update have focused on the big dollar figures and lethal new hardware being touted by the Coalition.
But it's worth looking harder at the fine print of the document to try and glean clues about how Australia will navigate the increasingly treacherous shoals of 21st century geopolitics.
Defence planners are paid to prepare for the very worst, but the outlook in the Defence Strategic Update is still strikingly grim.
While launching the new strategy, the Prime Minister painted a bleak picture of a globe beset by distrust and surging geopolitical tensions.
The world after COVID-19 would be "poorer, more dangerous and more disorderly", Scott Morrison warned.
Just in case anyone missed that point, the Prime Minister repeatedly drew comparisons to the decade before World War II, when resurgent nationalism and xenophobia in Japan and Germany led to global calamity.
That analogy might strike many as alarmist, but you can see why Australian thinkers and politicians are so worried right now.
Strategic competition between China and the US is intensifying, and their naval vessels are eyeing each other warily in hotspots like the South China Sea.
The looming threat is a "military miscalculation" leading to a sudden, irreversible escalation of hostilities which blooms into a shooting war.
And the document at the heart of Australia's new defence doctrine lays this out in stark language, broaching the unthinkable with bracing clarity.
"While still unlikely, the prospect of high-intensity military conflict in the Indo-Pacific is less remote than at the time of the 2016 Defence White Paper, including high-intensity military conflict between the United States and China," it reads.
A war between the two great powers is a nightmare scenario for every nation, not just Australia. But it would present Australia's top leaders and bureaucrats with particularly urgent and frightening decisions.
It's not just the threat of a miscalculation which is keeping military planners and top bureaucrats in Canberra awake at night.
China's extraordinary rise has disrupted the status quo in Asia and fuels much of the anxiety which seeps into almost every word in this document.
The new strategy is coy about this uncomfortable fact. China is mentioned only nine times, and mostly in combination with the resident great power, the United States.
There are two mentions of Beijing's "more active pursuit of greater influence in the Indo-Pacific" but no detailed discussion of why Australia is so worried about its astonishingly rapid military build-up.
But when the strategy warns that "coercion, competition and grey-zone activities directly or indirectly targeting Australian interests are occurring now", there are no prizes for guessing which country is front of mind.
The problem is not that Australian planners are certain that China will ramp up these activities, or that they are convinced Australia will inevitably become embroiled in a future conflict with Beijing.
The problem is uncertainty. They are not certain about how Beijing will exercise the power it has rapidly accumulated. And they are worried about its sharp authoritarian turn.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-02/australias-new-defence-strategy-strategic-shift-foreign-policy/12412650
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