The noise over meeting US demands on military spending underlines the fundamental problem at the heart of Australian defence policy: there is no strategy.

You can walk into any pet shop in Australia and find the resident galah talking about what percentage of GDP Australia should be spending on its defence, with apologies to Paul Keating.

The numbers appear to oscillate anywhere from 2.5% to 3%, sometimes higher. It is not so much a case of defence dither, though there has been a great deal of that in recent decades, as defence blather.

Nevertheless, it remains probably the best barometer of  the Australian response to Donald Trump so far. It assumes the repetition of a figure, as if to signal a defence preparedness endlessly coming of age, will keep Trump happy.

While the Albanese Government is likely to be soon at odds with Trump over Ukraine, the Middle East, tariffs, social media and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, it is also playing for time as an election looms, hoping that there are no further punch-ups with the US president before polling day.

But the noise over meeting US demands on defence spending once more underlines the fundamental problem at the heart of Australian defence policy.

Other than continuing the long evolution of integrating Australian forces with their US counterparts and thus assuring US concern for our ultimate defence, there is no strategy.

The government’s rhetoric about the country facing its most dangerous external environment since World War II has set a chilling stopwatch, counting down the unforgiving minutes. Yet, its capacity to deliver a meaningful capability to meet the hour of peril operates on a different chronology entirely: that of Old Father Time.

And the lobby here that seeks to conciliate Trump is not yet prepared to dismiss him as unreliable. Once they do, they will likely come to the same conclusion as ANU strategic studies professors Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin Smith, who on the weekend said that “arguments that say only ‘more is better’ will get us nowhere”.

And they added the crucial point that “Defence needs a story to tell – a conceptual framework, agreed and accepted by the machinery of government, as the basis for considering more specific issues and initiatives".

It is not so much how much Australia has to spend, it is how we spend it.

And to make those decisions Australia needs a post-Trump strategy. It would be idle to predict what decisions Trump will make on China’s claim to Taiwan. Though Taiwan, with Ukraine in mind, is understandably jumpy.

Can Canberra run budget plans and a defence acquisitions policy with a Pentagon led by Trump? That course almost certainly leads to disappointment. This is not an argument to sever defence relations with the US, but to factor in Trump’s unreliability to defence decisions.

There needs to be a serious discussion inside government about the likely need for a new paradigm of tailored defence and offence, as long argued by Dibb, long-time defence analyst Professor Hugh White, and the Lowy Institute’s International Security program director, Sam Roggeveen.

And such a strategy, and the choice of weapons it proposes, must come before a budget.

‘Irreversible collapse’

Opposition Leader  Peter Dutton gave some inkling of the need for a new approach when in a major speech in Sydney last week he talked about the need for “rethinking defence”.

He said that “a modern defence force needs missiles, drones, uncrewed undersea vessels, and small surface vessels armed to the teeth”.

Yet Dutton still sees AUKUS as the “linchpin” of defence co-operation with Washington and has committed to purchasing 28 more F-35 fighter jets from the US at a cost of $3 billion: the very same aircraft that leaders and strategists in Canada, Portugal and Germany now argue should be subject to review, if not cancelled altogether.

The conservative British commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recently noted concerns over Washington’s access to the F-35 operating systems: the fear, though hotly disputed, about whether the Pentagon can remotely paralyse an aircraft.

Evans-Pritchard concluded “the fact that this discussion is even going on in the highest circles of European defence and foreign policy exposes the complete collapse of confidence in the US military alliance. In my view it is irreversible".

The history of past defence crises offers some precedents. Australia did have a robust debate about its defence in the 1930s. But they were very different times: the country simply did not have the resources it has today.

If any comparison is useful, it might be Canberra’s reaction in the late 1960s to Britain’s decision to withdraw its military position from east of Suez. The reconsideration this prompted in cabinet was not out of immediate fears for Australian security, but because of the additional costs of maintaining its forward defence position in the region as Britain departed.

When then-minister for external affairs Paul Hasluck asked his department to examine the problem, he told parliament he had done so “not as an emotional or tendentious exercise but as a hardheaded practical one in the interests of Australia”.

Gough Whitlam, then opposition leader, had more or less accepted the increase to Australia’s defence bill, but added that the British decision was the moment for the country to “seek an accommodation with the region as the only basis for lasting and secure peace”.

The bottom line remains: if Trump does turn against Australia, it might force us to think what there is to Australian foreign policy other than the US alliance. At any rate, surely the case for less noisy declarations of loyalty is now rock solid.

And it brings to mind Keating’s point that some of the enormous investment in the American relationship over the past two decades might have been better directed to binding ourselves with Indonesia rather than futile escapades in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Republished from AFR, 20 March 2025