What are the nature of the security threats Australia faces? How valid are the assumptions that have informed our economic, foreign and defence policy?

Obviously, Australia’s security threats, as for all countries, are many – other foreign powers, bad international actors employing cyber hacking and crime, asymmetric threats (viz. terrorism, drug cartels, other transnational criminal syndicates, including people smugglers), pandemics, and domestic political interference in Australia conducted by both friends and foes.

But the one we are really interested in here today for this conference, and which will hang over all our discussions is, of course, China. That is the 500kg panda in the room.

It is so widely accepted that China is the threat to our national security that it is seldom mentioned by name. It is a revealed truth: true by definition. Perhaps that helps to make it seem more menacing. It is some sort of dark pervasive presence.

Two weeks ago, for example, the Australian Financial Review had an editorial discussing the security threat to Australia which it mentioned three times, but never named. It was obvious the editorial was entirely about China.

Admittedly, sometimes, perhaps for concern that the Australian public are no longer watching, outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald will plaster the front page with menacing red arrows thrusting south from China towards Australia.

Of course, this is all of a piece with the Yellow Peril threat to Australia from the north, which, in turn, was deeply entwined with the racist White Australia policy. In the 1960s, Indonesia was supposed to present an imminent military threat to Australia. We purchased hideously expensive F-111 jets against this threat which were never used in anger and now lie buried in outback Queensland. Or in the 19th century, we built cannon batteries along Australia’s coast against the Russian invasion that never came.

And, shamefully, we wasted Australian lives in Vietnam, joined to the hip of the US, to prevent an imagined downward thrust of communism towards Australia as the South-East Asian dominos were supposed to fall one after the other until Australia fell. Our own ideology had blinded us to such an extent that we were incapable of distinguishing a national liberation struggle from communist imperialism. And we failed to notice that the two communist powers were the bitterest of enemies by the time Australia entered the war in Vietnam.

Our own abysmal foreign and security policy failures should give us cause to pause, reflect and try to do a better job analysing and understanding our threat environment.

The China Threat

The China Threat is usually asserted, but seldom analysed. China’s expanding military strength is given as prima facie evidence that China represents an existential threat to Australia, either now or in the near future. But China’s actual intent, capacity to execute on it and the constraints on its behaviour are rarely, if ever, discussed.

Whether we like it or not, and mainly we don’t, China will become the regional hegemon based on its size, geostrategic location, and continuing strong economic performance. It is best not to try and wish away our enemy by hoping for its economic malaise. As China rapidly moves up the value-added chain and shares the frontiers with the US in the digital economy, we need to plan for China hanging around for a long time

As argued in my recent book, Great Game On, China has now become the pre-eminent power in Eurasia. For the first time in its history, its internal Eurasian land borders are more or less secure. So, like the US at the end of the 19th century, when it consolidated its territory and saw off border threats from the Spanish and the like, and then in the early years of the 20th century, when it established hegemony over the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe doctrine, China is today free to project power globally.

We can anticipate that as a great power it will project power globally and is rapidly building its naval power to do so. Accordingly, no one who has been paying attention to China over the past decade should have been surprised that the PLA Navy went on a sail through in the Tasman Sea. But it was not quite yet Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, that he sent around the world in 1907-9 to demonstrate US global power and which visited Sydney.

While we don’t know what China will do as a regional hegemon, it is unlikely it will want to emulate European 19th century, and US and Japanese 20th century colonialism: influence yes, imperialism no.

What then is China’s Grand Strategy?

As argued in my previous book, China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order, four years ago, as far as one exists, and if one can divine such a thing, it is to make the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, it is essentially inward looking, focused on domestic stability and external security.

A recent Lowy Institute paper asserted that China would seek to shape Australia’s strategic choices, by blockading or interfering with Australia’s shipping. I presume the reference to shipping wasn’t passenger cruise liners but to commercial shipping, much of which is going to, or coming from, China. Again, this is hardly a credible assertion on which to base serious strategic analysis and defence policy decisions.

But whatever China’s intent may be, and we may ascribe the most evil motivations to it, it is also necessary to ask: what is China’s capacity to execute? Failure to ask this question is a fundamental flaw in much strategic analysis. Of course, to answer such a question would require deep knowledge of China, something few analysts have.

Most things are possible, but the key analytical judgment to make is to assign probabilities to various outcomes. On this basis, I suggest that the probability of China becoming an existential threat to Australia, or any other place, except Taiwan, is low. As argued in China’s Grand Strategy, China is, and will remain, a constrained superpower, or as “Prometheus Bound”, as I call it. It is constrained by:

• Geography: 14 countries and 22,000 kilometres of land borders and, although these borders are more secure and settled than they have ever been, they still need defending;
• Its region: it is hemmed in by powerful states – Japan, India, South Korea, and Vietnam, and with most it has had a difficult relationship;
• It is still an empire, with unresolved territorial issues inside its borders — Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong — which absorb vast quantities of resources for internal security; and
• Under Xi Jinping, expenditure on internal security rose faster than on the external facing military.

Most importantly China is utterly dependent on world markets for most of what it needs to keep its own economic engines turning. This, in turn, is crucial for domestic social stability and keeping the CPC in power. And despite Trump’s best efforts to remove this area of vulnerability from China, the economy is still highly dependent on export markets. It is, therefore, hugely vulnerable to sanctions.

So, if the China threat has been much oversold, and its discussion in Australia lacks serious analytical depth, what is the main strategic issue we are facing?

Australia has followed the US into treating China as a strategic competitor, despite our interests aligning in so many areas, not least, of course, in trade. China also does not present an existential threat to the US – no one country could threaten the US in this way in the Western Hemisphere.

Rather, China challenges US primacy, and we have decided that to pay for protection, we will support the US in seeking to maintain primacy over China. In doing so, Australia hopes that it will keep the US engaged in the region, despite being disappointed time and time again.

Australia has defined its interests as being more or less identical to those of the US. An example of this came up in recent days: During an interview on 27 March with Andrew Greene from the ABC, Australia’s Chief of Air Force said, when asked if Australia was over reliant on the US:

“We are well aligned, and we are very comfortable with a strong relationship and that our nation’s interests and the US interests very much are the same and the challenges that we face are the same here in the Indo-Pacific”.

Really? Is that what the broad Australian community thinks? And, if that were true once, does one still believe that to be so with Trump and his MAGA group running the show?

Certainly, we can be pretty sure that it would not think this way over trade, climate change and the US withdrawal from the Paris Convention; gender identity and diversity; foreign aid; national sovereignty as it affects Canada, Greenland/Denmark; or Gaza; and more.

But in all of this, Trump may be helping Australia get its strategic bearings more closely aligned with its actual interests. Trump does not seem to know or care about US exceptionalism. And if he doesn’t, then maintaining US primacy is irrelevant. Vice-President J.D. Vance’s comments about the US’ involvement in useless wars over the past 40 years is saying as much.

In that case, the US could co-exist alongside a hegemonic China. As president Bill Clinton said in the early 90s, the world is big enough to accommodate more than one superpower. This may make Australia’s strategic policy choices more straightforward.