Last week a Chinese naval task group led by a Renhai-class guided missile cruiser, one of the most powerful surface combatants in Beijing’s fleet, passed well within cruise-missile range of the Royal Australian Navy’s Fleet Base East in Sydney, then conducted an unannounced live-fire drill in the Tasman Sea, disrupting commercial airline traffic before turning west into the Great Australian Bight.
Australian aircraft and warships shadowed the task group, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong challenged her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, at the Johannesburg G20 summit which both were attending. Questions were raised at Senate Estimates, and a political debate broke out. In normal times, this incident would have dominated national-security news for days. These are not normal times.
The task group’s transit overlapped with a visit to Australia by US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon issued a statement on the Chinese warships. Instead, anyone watching the American media last week would have seen US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, as a US-Ukrainian minerals deal fell over amid sharp recriminations.
After his shouting match with Trump, Zelenskyy flew to London for crisis talks with European leaders. That same weekend, Russian forces captured two more villages in Ukraine’s east, and a Russian missile strike killed up to 150 Ukrainian troops and 30 foreign instructors near the town of Dnipro. The next day, Washington suspended all military assistance to Ukraine with immediate effect, and two days later cut all intelligence support, damaging Ukraine’s air defences and hampering its ability to launch long-range missile strikes.
Vice-President Vance mocked an Anglo-French peacekeeping force proposed during Europe’s talks with Zelenskyy, suggesting that a US minerals deal would have been ‘a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.’ French forces fought in Afghanistan, of course, British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; both committed forces for the campaign against Islamic State, and all NATO nations contributed to at least one of these wars.
Given all this, it may surprise some readers to hear that I consider President Trump to be a valuable gift. Trump is a gift because his brash, mercurial demeanour—unpleasant though it may be—is a blessing in disguise. His abrasiveness scrubs away the veneer of fine words that often obscures the nature of America’s relationship with allies.
For Americans, phrases like ‘the free world,’ the ‘rules-based international order’ or the ‘shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific’ help soften the transactional reality of US global primacy, which—while also benefitting others, including Australia—was set up by Washington primarily in America’s own interests.
For Australians, this reality is sometimes shrouded by sentimentality about ANZUS or AUKUS, a supposed alliance of democracies, the memory of America ‘saving’ Australia from Japanese invasion during the Second World War, or the belief that a common language and shared cultures somehow outweigh national interests. They do not.
Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary in 1848, famously argued that ‘we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ Seventy years later, US President Woodrow Wilson told a British audience ‘not [to] speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither…There are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests.’
Australian governments, whatever their declared policies, have always understood this, recognising that our prosperity and safety depend on a stable, peaceful global environment, which we have historically been too small to secure on our own. Australian strategists must therefore reckon with the real-world mismatch between our vast territory, our globally-connected, trade-dependent economy, and our small population.
As the planet’s sixth-largest country by area, Australia has the world’s twelfth-largest economy by nominal GDP, but only its fifty-fourth largest population. Separated by sea from trading partners, our national survival depends on lengthy maritime supply chains. In consequence, we have historically followed what I once called the ‘forward school of Australian statecraft,’ in which we partner with whatever great power, or group of powers, comes closest to sharing our values while also being able to secure the global environment. By contributing to a stable, secure, connected international system underwritten by a friendly power, we advance our own interests.
For forty years, from 1901 to 1941, that friendly power was the British Empire. Australia’s strategy was to support the empire economically and militarily, participating in free trade within (but not outside) the empire and contributing to expeditionary operations—from Sudan to South Africa, Gallipoli to the Somme—in return for the security and prosperity only a friendly, world-spanning system could provide.
To be sure, the Imperial Defence relationship was more than merely transactional: there were (and are) strong ties of blood and affection between Britain and Australia—and, of course, we share a head of state. But in 1941, when the empire proved unable to deliver, Australia immediately and unceremoniously pivoted to America. As Prime Minister John Curtin wrote three weeks after Pearl Harbor, ‘without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’
Since then, and especially since the signing of the ANZUS treaty in September 1951, Australia has looked to America as our principal partner. Bipartisan support for the alliance, real friendliness between our two peoples, and the democratic ideals that both governments profess, should not blind us to the underlying hard-power reality of Australia’s relationship with the United States.
We partner with Washington not for sentimental reasons but because we need an ally powerful enough to stabilise the global system, yet friendly enough to do so without harming our interests or limiting our local freedom of action. Professor Clinton Fernandes has called Australia a ‘Sub-Imperial Power’. Some might quibble with his choice of words, but this is precisely the point—underlying realities, not surface sentiments, are what matter in geopolitics.
Even with America’s recent run of internal instability, external defeats and failures of deterrence, no other global power is currently both strong enough and friendly enough to fit the bill. If one were to emerge, and the United States ceased to hold up its end of the bargain, one might potentially imagine a future John Curtin—equally without pangs or inhibitions—throwing in our lot with that other power.
No such power exists. But what if Washington were simultaneously declining in relative military strength, lacking in national will to secure the global system, moving out of alignment with our values, damaging our trade, bullying its partners and becoming unreliable as an ally? What if, at the same time, no other power was strong or friendly enough to take America’s place? In that case, 124 years after Federation, we would have to stand on our own feet and, finally and fully, grasp our independence.
That would be hard, and very costly, but it might still be the right thing to do, in order to serve our interests over the long term. If we followed this course, we would have no choice but to spend significantly more on defence and, even more importantly, to stop thinking of national security as a specialist skill practised by a small cadre of professionals on behalf of the rest of society.
We would have to be ‘all in’ as a nation, putting mobilisation, resilience and self-reliance—in defence, yes, but also in energy, industry, technology, education, health and agriculture—at the heart of all aspects of policy. We would need to focus on national cohesion, political will, institutional trust and shared culture. We would have to treat neighbours as more important (because permanent parts of our region) than distant allies, however friendly.
In such a hypothetical scenario, where our traditional nuclear-armed ally was no longer reliable, Australia might need its own sovereign nuclear deterrent, or at least an extremely capable array of long-range non-nuclear strike assets. We would certainly need powerful theatre-level missile defences to compensate for loss of US extended deterrence. We would need a much larger and more powerful navy, and an army and air force capable of projecting substantial forces at scale, over long duration and alone, if necessary, across our region.
All of this would impose more expense on our economy, and demand more of our people, than a policy of outsourcing security to distant allies. It would be both costly and controversial—and pursuing it would demand considerable political will and leadership skill.
Paradoxically, however, Australia’s increased capacity and self-reliance in this scenario would make us much more valuable as an ally. We could contribute more—and could thus expect greater consideration of our national interests—in any alliance effort we chose to join. Rather than being taken for granted, Australia’s voice would carry more weight in any council of war, as well as in peacetime deliberations. Australia would, in short, be an adult among adults, a regional great power in our own right.
Some might argue that the ANZUS alliance already gives us a security guarantee, offering such strong assurances of US assistance in the event of conflict that we would be foolhardy to abandon it. I agree wholeheartedly with the last part—it would be the height of folly to recklessly walk away from the alliance. I concur with both Penny Wong and Andrew Hastie, among many others, that ANZUS is a central pillar of Australia’s national security.
But for anyone who thinks ANZUS is a security guarantee, I have bad news: the alliance offers no such thing. Articles II and III of the treaty commit the signatories to ‘maintain and develop their individual capacity to resist armed attack’ and ‘consult together, whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific.’ Article IV, the closest ANZUS comes to an actual guarantee, merely notes that each party recognises that ‘an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.’
Contrast this with Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document, which was signed in 1949, two years before ANZUS. Article V makes no mention of ‘constitutional processes.’ The signatories simply state that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and…if such an armed attack occurs, each of them [will] assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.’
ANZUS is far less direct, and much less of a commitment. American ‘constitutional processes’ do not commit the US Government to respond in kind to an armed attack on Australia: far from it. Rather, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson in 1918, there are only two things which might do so: community of ideals and of interests. All this is obvious, of course, to anyone who thinks about this stuff for a living—it’s just that not many people do.
To the extent that ANZUS encourages us to outsource thinking on national security, trusting that somebody else has it covered, it can harm us by encouraging passive complacency. In this sense, over-dependence on allies could be considered a contemporary version of the Singapore Strategy, the between-the-wars policy that allowed Australian governments to economise on defence spending, while ‘successive British governments assured their Australian counterparts that, in the event of Japanese southward expansion, a battle fleet could be in Singapore within 6 weeks.’
In the event, as every schoolchild knows, no fleet materialised: Singapore fell, and Australia found itself fighting for its life, largely alone, for the next year. Could we hold out against such odds, without our major ally, for a similar time today? To take one example, could we secure the global petroleum imports without which Australia runs out of fuel in seven to eight weeks? A Chinese flotilla in the Tasman Sea, alarming Australians but largely ignored in Washington, underlines the urgency of that question.
In the wake of last week’s events, Europeans are experiencing an overdue wake-up call, as President Trump not only continues demanding NATO nations spend more on defence, but also imposes tariffs on allies, while Vice-President Vance mocks Europe’s military prowess and both Trump and Vance scold President Zelenskyy while cutting aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.
A few weeks ago, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen acknowledged this, writing that ‘the world needs a policeman—and since World War II the U.S. has filled that role. But what if the policeman no longer exercises his authority over geopolitical gangsters—or becomes abusive toward the world’s most steadfast rule followers?’ Mr. Rasmussen is not wrong, but it is a little odd to see European leaders now acting so surprised over a policy shift that President Trump has been telegraphing for years.
More broadly, President Trump is different in style but not substance from previous US presidents: in his call for NATO to spend more on defence, he is using harsher language to make substantively the same request as his four predecessors. Presidents or policy advisers from both parties periodically make similar statements about Australia, though often conflating (as our own politicians also do) greater expenditure on weapon platforms with improved national defence capacity.
Australians should not make the mistake of focusing on personality, thinking that Trump himself is the problem and once he leaves the world stage things will revert to normal. Rather, he represents the new normal for a global security environment which—as his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, noted a few weeks ago—is increasingly multipolar and defined by great-power spheres of influence.
According to Rubio, ‘it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was…a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.’
One might think that, if the new administration really regards the world as multipolar, it would perhaps be less dismissive of regional allies. Doing more in our own defence, agreeing when our interests align while being prepared to disagree when our values diverge, might paradoxically build respect in the relationship.
In an increasingly dangerous, multipolar and unstable global environment, President Trump is a cold dose of reality. He offers us a valuable gift: a wake-up call, if we are willing to listen to it.