A presentation by Professor Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister, to the University of Melbourne Australian Peace and Security Forum Webinar Abandoning our Fears: Finding Peace and Security in our Region, 8 July 2025.

Last weekend, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a speech which sections of the Australian media, the defence and security establishment, and the leadership of the Coalition Opposition, found shockingly provocative. He went so far, in delivering the John Curtin Oration, as to insist that we were a independent country, in which we “think and act for ourselves”, “follow our own course and shape our own future”, “speak for ourselves as a sovereign nation”, resist “our security [being] outsourced” and need “an Australian foreign policy anchored in strategic reality, not bound by tradition”.

This was too much for the Murdoch press’s Greg Sheridan, for whom this was a “bizarre ’look away from America’ speech” which would “diminish, if not undermine, the US-Australia alliance”, and has “lost sight of what our enduring national interests at play here are”. For Strategic Analysis’s Peter Jennings, Albanese was “appeasing China …and antagonising the US”. And for Opposition leader Sussan Ley, with the Nine newspapers pressing her to fan the flames, “now is a time to build our influence in Washington, not diminish it” and “many Australians will wonder whether this speech at this time was in our national interest”.

My own instinct, on the contrary, is that this was a speech which the overwhelming majority of Australians would warmly embrace. Australians are never very good at doing deference, and we have a particular distaste for overt sucking-up. We still cringe at the memory of Harold Holt’s “All the way with LBJ”, and collectively wince at the kind of “daddy knows best” language felt necessary by NATO’s leadership last month to keep Donald Trump on side. And unquestionably a big factor in Labor’s recent landslide election win was the widespread perception that the then Opposition leader Peter Dutton was overdoing not only the admiration for, but the grovel to, Trump’s America – described with memorable succinctness recently by Harvard’s Stephen Walt, no soft lefty, as being a country, under its present leadership, “weaker, sicker, poorer, dumber, more indebted, less admired, more divided, and maybe no longer a genuine democracy”.

A rather more legitimate concern in response to the Albanese speech, and one that I certainly feel, is that the Australian Government is in fact not putting its defence and foreign policy money where the prime minister’s mouth was. The reality is that we are militarily as enmeshed with the US as we have ever been, becoming ever more so, and that our capacity for independent, sovereign, decision-making is becoming ever more at risk.

There is the proposed AUKUS transfer to us by the US of super-sensitive nuclear-propulsion technology, based in reality — if not formal agreement — on the expectation that the submarines in question will be, for all practical purposes, an extension of the American fleet, available at the click of a presidential finger to support the US in any military enterprise, however misguided or against our own national interests, in which it may choose to engage. There is the Stirling submarine port, and Henderson dry-dock facility, both near Perth, and a possible further east coast submarine base, all now freely available for US use. There is the Darwin marine base, and the critically important B-52 base at Tindal. All of this in addition to the Pine Gap facility, crucial for missile early warning and targeting as well as general intelligence collection, and long understood to be a likely early target if we were ever drawn into conflict alongside the US.

So we now have targets on our back right across the continent, all painted on the assumption that these American bases are an insurance policy price worth paying for the protection we would be buying from the US under the ANZUS alliance, and as a return for ‘a hundred years of mateship’. And all on the assumption that we face a real threat of military attack in the foreseeable future – maybe as early as 2027 – from a formidable regional foe, the People’s Republic of China. It is my view that neither of these assumptions is well-founded, and that Australian defence and security policy needs to be refocused accordingly.

China Threat? There is certainly much about China’s recent behaviour to justify security concerns in our region, including its international law-defying territorial ambition in, and militarisation of, the South China Sea; its repeatedly stated determination to unify Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary; its dramatically increasing military capability, including a nuclear arsenal; its manifest desire to resume its historical role of regional hegemon, to whom obeisance is due, in Southeast Asia; its continued assertiveness on other territorial fronts with Japan and India; and its efforts to increase its presence and influence in smaller but strategically significant regional players, including the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste.

All that acknowledged, I don’t believe any of it remotely warrants panic. Much of the behaviour in question is no more than can, and should, be expected of a hugely trade-dependent, not just regional but now global, economic superpower, resentful of any continuing claim by America to unchallenged primacy in regional and global affairs, and wanting to claim its own strategic space, and to generally reassert some of its historical greatness after more than a century of wounded national pride. There is no reason to assume that, Taiwan apart, China would ever contemplate outright military aggression — Hitler, Tojo or Putin-style — against any of its regional neighbours, let alone the US.

And even in relation to Taiwan, the explanation which I repeatedly heard in Beijing last week for China’s increasingly menacing air and naval activity around the island seems at least prima facie plausible: that it was all about deterring Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te from stepping over the declaration-of-independence line he seems increasingly inclined to straddle, and not foreshadowing outright attack in any foreseeable future, which would only ever be prompted by such a declaration.

There is certainly not much for Australia to fear from the mere fact of China’s regional assertiveness, and military build-up. Not only has there never been any suggestion of China having designs on our territory, but with Beijing closer to London than Sydney, physical invasion has always been wildly implausible logistically, and will remain so. The ‘Red Alert’ Age and SMH front-pages of March 2023, with their portrayal of Chinese fighter planes headed towards us, was scaremongering of the most irresponsible kind, and the angst generated by this year’s (cheeky but hardly threatening) circumnavigation of our continent by a small Chinese naval task force not much less so.

What does pose a risk to us is a major war erupting between the US and China, which is certainly not inconceivable over Taiwan, and Australia joining in on the US side, under pressure from Washington. Outright invasion of Australia might not be an option, but grey-zone operations, blockade attempts and hit-and-run attacks on particular facilities — the increasing number of major US military installations on Australian soil being obvious targets — certainly would be. The crazy irony is that with AUKUS and its associated commitments we are spending an eye-watering amount to build a capability to meet military threats which are only likely to arise because we are building that capability and using it to assist the United States!

If sanity does not prevail, and war does erupt, this is not a fight it would make any sense for Australia to join. While obviously we should and would deplore any attack on a flourishing democracy, the reality is that Taiwan has always been a special case, not enjoying the same kind of universally recognised sovereignty as Kuwait or Ukraine. Our involvement in a war in its defence would make almost zero military difference, but come at vast cost to us, above all economically, with the overnight severance of all links with our major trading partner that it would obviously entail.

American insurance? The stark reality is that the insurance policy we have long thought to be buying through our alliance enmeshment with the US — and are now proposing to take to dramatic new levels with the AUKUS submarine project and all the basing side-deals that go with it — can simply no longer be relied upon, if indeed it ever could.

Whatever the psychological comfort it might have offered us in days gone by, ANZUS has never legally bound the US to defend us, even in the event of existential attack. Washington will, no doubt, shake a deterrent fist, and threaten and deliver retaliation, if its own assets on Australian soil are threatened or attacked, but that’s as far as our expectations should extend. The notion that extended nuclear deterrence justifies our prostration — that the US really would be prepared to sacrifice San Francisco for Sydney — is, and always has been, a ludicrous delusion.

Donald Trump’s second-term presidency puts that conclusion beyond reasonable doubt. He sees allies as free-loading encumbrances rather than assets; has no respect for international law and institutions; has no instinct to push back against the excesses of authoritarian governments; and thinks rather — to the extent he thinks consistently at all — in terms of every major power (including Russia, China and the US itself) having within its own sphere of influence unrestricted licence to act as it pleases (politically and militarily, if not economically). And all that in the context of the US no longer having, objectively, the comparative military power it once had to impose its will on China and perpetuate its leadership in our region, with its oft-proclaimed “pivot” to Asia so far producing very little in the way of additional hard-power projection.

Refocusing Australian defence and foreign policy. All this means that there is a fundamental need for Australia now to rethink and refocus our defence and foreign policy. I have argued at length elsewhere for this to be built around four guiding principles: Less America, More Self-Reliance, More Asia and More Global Engagement. I’ll leave for another occasion the case for a more global engagement, including on issues not directly immediately relevant to our security and prosperity, and in that context our national interest in being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen at a time when Trump’s America has abandoned any claim to such decency. But as to the first three of my principles, what in bald summary would they involve?

Less America for me does not mean walking away from the ANZUS alliance, which has delivered us important technical, logistic and intelligence support in the past and hopefully will continue to do so, but it does mean frankly recognising its limits, for all the reasons I have mentioned, and our becoming far less dependent on it. Nor does Less America mean for me welcoming an American retreat from our region, where it can continue to play an important balancing role, concentrating China’s mind on the risks of over-reach – but it does mean recognising frankly that the days of US primacy are over, and adjusting our expectations accordingly.

More Self-Reliance — on the premise that defence planning must of course be based on potential adversaries’ capabilities, not on assumptions, however reasonable, about their intent — means we are going to have to get used to doing more, spending significantly more, and prioritising that expenditure more wisely. As the prime minister insists, it’s not a matter of identifying an arbitrary percentage of GDP, but rather focusing on the capability we most need. Scrapping the AUKUS submarine project — which is highly contestable on deliverability, cost-benefit and loss of sovereign agency grounds — would create most of the necessary budget room to do just that.

In shaping our future capability, we should support not a continuation of the forward defence strategy we have more or less explicitly adopted in recent decades, but what Sam Roggeveen calls the “echidna strategy …spiky but unthreatening”. Recognising that this particular echidna would need to be able to both fly and swim, such a strategy would focus on making our adjacent seas and skies unsafe to the point of impenetrability for any opposing force, through a combination of air, underwater, missile and cyber detection and destruction capabilities, with significant reliance on autonomous delivery systems.

More Asia means Australia actively pursuing, as the present government is, to be fair, effectively doing, strengthened political, and where possible military, relationships on both a bilateral and minilateral basis with our key Asian regional neighbours — Japan, South Korea, India and in Southeast Asia — with whom we have obvious common interests. All of us have strong economic relations with China, none of us really want to be forced to take sides in the China-US strategic contest, and none of us want to be collateral damage if things go pear-shaped. But, equally, we all have an interest in ensuring that China does not over-reach, and in concentrating China’s mind on the prospect that overdoing its hegemonic aspirations in the region will be met with serious push-back, not just individually but collectively.

More Asia also means for me Australia trying to develop with China itself not just a one-dimensional economic relationship, but a more multidimensional one, particularly in the multilateral sphere where we should be actively exploring the scope for co-operation in a whole range of global and regional public goods issues – from climate change to nuclear arms control, terrorism to pandemics, peace-keeping to responding to mass atrocity crimes, and defending free trade. To do so would be entirely consistent with the mantra often repeated by Albanese and Wong that in dealing with Beijing we should “co-operate where we can, disagree where we must, and manage our differences wisely”.

Keeping our balance as we walk a tightrope between China and the US is not an enterprise for the diplomatically or politically faint-hearted. The stakes could hardly be higher. But if we can stay calm, keeping our heads when too many around us seem in danger of losing theirs, and recognising that by far the best way of achieving national security is always co-operatively — finding our security with others rather than against them — there is every chance that we can succeed.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.