War and peace in Asia’s new order: Australia’s duty

Our subject this evening is “War and peace in Asia’s new order: Australia’s duty”. Why do I refer to duty? Because Australia has not just an interest but an obligation, a responsibility.

We often hear this kind of language applied to climate change. We are called upon, as a nation, to look beyond our self-interest and to act on behalf of humanity.
It is rarer to hear that Australia has such a duty towards the promotion of peace.

But I would argue that this ought to have a higher priority than climate change. Climate change remains an urgent challenge and threat, but as Bill Gates wrote on his website recently: “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization”.

Of course, our friends in the Pacific would object. Climate change certainly does threaten their civilization.

But viewed globally, I would argue that war, and in particular nuclear war, remains the most urgent and truly existential threat to humanity.

And although our attention is on Europe at present, I still think it is in our own region that the greatest risk of nuclear war lies, because we are witnessing the rare and historically dangerous transition away from one great power’s dominance of Asia towards something else, something still undefined.

It is worth thinking briefly about the differences between climate change and war as policy problems.

Climate change is typically described as a tragedy of the commons: individuals, companies and states, acting in their own self-interest, overuse and deplete a shared, limited resource, leading to its destruction.

War is a different kind of problem. In relations between states, we are dealing with a phenomenon commonly referred to as the security dilemma, in which one state's actions to increase its security can be perceived as threatening by other states, leading them to take countermeasures that ultimately make everyone less secure and more suspicious.

So, they are distinctly different phenomena. But in both cases, self-interest is in tension with the common interest. 
And in both cases, a debate has emerged about whether we need to somehow overcome these dynamics through radical action, or whether we simply work within the constraints they impose.

For instance, the climate debate is now split between, on the one hand, ecomodernists who focus on technology and incentives, such as a carbon tax, to solve environmental problems, and on the other hand, various de-growth philosophies which argue that global warming can’t be addressed without radical change to our economic system.

It appears the first group is winning. There is no economic transformation in prospect to deal with climate change.  As the quip goes, it is still “easier to imagine the end of world than the end of capitalism”.

For the subject of this lecture tonight, it illustrates a vital point: although we need to look beyond our narrow interest, we can’t wish self-interest away, and we cannot assume that any nation will be willing to embark on major changes to the existing system to achieve peace.

So, our solution to the challenge of maintaining peace between the great powers in Asia cannot be that we should abolish the states system and enshrine a one-world government.

Peace, to my mind, is not a revolutionary political project. The states system is here to stay and so is the security dilemma.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote a famous essay, “Towards Perpetual Peace”, and it is said the title was intended as a dark joke. Kant was in his favourite pub where he saw a picture hanging on the wall. It was a depiction of a graveyard titled “Perpetual Peace”.

In other words, the only permanent peace is in the afterlife. On this earth, peace is temporary.

The roots of the post-World War II global order lie in this sense of tragedy. I think this is what Dag Hammerskjold meant when he said the United Nations was brought into existence “not to bring us to heaven but to save us from hell”. The search for peace, in this telling, is not a revolutionary political project but a daily struggle to avert catastrophe.

In fact, as I will try to argue tonight, in our present circumstances, peace is a project that should seek to prevent or at least slow down transformational change. It is also a project which will often clash with other worthy causes, including the rights of smaller countries.

If we wish to prioritise peace and reduce the prospects of a catastrophic war between the US and China, difficult choices will be unavoidable. To understand these choices, we need to clearly examine the challenge that a rising China presents.

What China wants

I’ve spent most of my career, first in the intelligence world in Canberra and now in the think tank world, watching China’s rapid advance as a military power. It is truly impressive and truly unsettling.

You probably all saw images from the Beijing military parade. It showed not only that China is a big military power - easily the second biggest, after the US – but that it is becoming a technological leader. China is building a world class military force. Beijing military parade reinforced a lesson that close observers have known for some time: that China isn’t just an imitator of foreign tech, and it isn’t just catching up. In many respects it has caught up, and in some it is ahead. It is a true leader and innovator in military technology.

China’s military modernisation is arguably the most dramatic we have seen from any country since World War II. The really worrying thing is that it has achieved all this while barely breaking a sweat – it spends roughly 2% of GDP on defence, versus 3.4% for US.

Naturally, we ask ourselves: what’s it all for?

The first answer is Taiwan. China wants the capability to retake the island by force, if it feels it needs to do so.

As for China’s broader ambitions – well, who knows? Does it want to dominate Asia? Does it want to rule the world? We don’t know.

Maybe China’s leaders themselves don’t have a clear plan. But I think we can say one thing with relative certainty: no nation of China’s size will indefinitely submit to being a secondary or subordinate strategic power in its own region. Since the end of World War II, China has had to put up with US dominance in the Asia Pacific, but it doesn’t have to anymore. So we should assume China wants to push the US out of Asia.

To understand that simple point, we only need to examine the mirror-image: what if China was the status quo power and the US was the rising power? And what if China had 70,000 troops stationed in Canada and an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in Cuba? Would the US stand for this arrangement indefinitely? The question answers itself.

What America can live with

When we understand China’s motives and objectives in this way, it can appear as if conflict between the great powers is inevitable – both the US and China want what only one of them can have – leadership in Asia. It is a zero-sum game. That’s why we hear so much talk of a new Cold War.

But the likelihood is that US won’t fight for leadership because not only is China rising, but the US is in relative decline.

When I refer to US decline, your mind probably turns to the Trump administration: its contempt for America’s democratic institutions, its self-defeating protectionism, the president’s support for the January 6 riots in the Capitol.

But that’s only a small part of what I mean. And in fact, I think there’s every reason to be optimistic about the US over the long term. It has all the ingredients for continued success and prosperity.

But so does China.

China has the economic scale to take on US power as no other country has ever done – since the US became a great power, no competing great power or even coalition has ever had more than 60% of US GDP. China passed that mark in the middle of the last decade. There’s no getting around China’s size. As the economic historian Adam Tooze put it recently, China’s rise represents “the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history.”

To take on a country of that scale you need a really good reason; an existential reason. And nothing in American behaviour over last three decades indicates it wants to fight China for leadership.

And why should it? America is a highly secure nation surrounded by vast oceans  east and west, friendly nations to its north and south, a huge economy and military, and thousands of nuclear weapons.

There is a lack of evidence that the US rally wants to take on China. Since Beijing began its military modernisation drive in the early 1990s, there has been no US military build-up in Asia to counter-balance it. US defence spending today is at historically low levels. No US president has faced the nation to say that countering China is now America’s defining mission, as Truman did in 1947 when he announced the containment doctrine against the Soviet Union.

These are 30+ year trends, but the Trump Administration is accelerating them. It appears set on a course which accords far less importance to America being the leading power in Asia.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, speaking at the Reagan Library just a few days ago, advocated for “an approach aimed not at domination but rather at a balance of power, a balance of power that will enable all of us, all countries, to enjoy a decent peace in (the) Indo-Pacific…”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in January: “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power…that was an anomaly. It 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.”

Trump himself treats China as an equal: he referred to his recent meeting with Xi Jinping as a “G2”. And he is arguably the first president since Nixon to regard the Chinese Communist Party as completely legitimate.

The broader point here is not to think just about the Trump Administration; this is a thirty-year trend that is reinforced by economic fundamentals: China is just too big for the US to take on.

So, we should assume the US won’t compete with China for leadership in Asia. We should assume that China will become leader, and that the US ultimately won’t resist this change.

What Australia can do

If that’s all true, what does Australia even need to worry about? Won’t this conflict recede all by itself? Won’t the two sides just revert to a balance of power, in which neither tries to dominate but both act as a check on each other’s grand ambitions?

There are two problems with that optimistic reading.

1. The status of Taiwan.
2. China’s broader regional ambitions.
    

Australia can offer help on both those fronts:

1. It can persuade America to take on a new role in the region not centred on defending Taiwan.
2. Deterring China independently and non-provocatively, thus offering a model that the region can emulate. 
   Taiwan

I said earlier that, to achieve peace between the great powers, we might have to compromise on other principles. It gives me no satisfaction to say it, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that one of those things is the status of Taiwan.

A Chinese takeover of Taiwan, whether it happens by force or merely the threat of violence, would be a disaster for its people. Taiwan is a successful democracy whose citizens enjoy personal freedoms and a standard of living denied to those of the People’s Republic.

But Taiwan is the primary, and perhaps only, point of zero-sum difference between Washington and Beijing. It is a point of direct contention in which both sides want what only one of them can have. Their interests are presently irreconcilable.

With Taiwan excepted, a stable balance of power between US and China is within reach.

I would stress that I am not advocating for the US to “hand over” Taiwan to China. That is not within Washington’s remit anyway. And in fact, I would favour continued and even accelerated US arms sales to Taipei to boost Taiwan’s own deterrent. But I am saying that the US, with Australian encouragement, should revise the implicit security guarantee it offers Taiwan.  It should stop assuring Taiwan that the US will defend the island.

I acknowledge the obvious objections to this position. It appears to reward aggression, it looks like appeasement, and it encourages China’s broader ambitions (China’s appetite for territorial aggrandisement may grow with the eating).

But we must also consider the possibility that revising America’s position on Taiwan creates improved conditions for a stable regional order.

Professor Hugh White, with whom I otherwise have a great deal in common, has written that “If (the United States) abandons Taiwan, its entire position in East Asia will be severely, and perhaps fatally, damaged.” But on the contrary, American allies such as Australia, South Korea and Japan might be grateful that the US kept its powder dry. They would also understand that maintaining their alliance with the US can save them from the expensive, difficult and dangerous job of developing their own nuclear deterrent.

With the US no longer committed to defending Taiwan, the US mission in Asia would be simplified and clarified. The US is legally and historically tied to Taiwan’s security, and during his recent term, President Biden repeatedly pledged to defend the island. But the US position has grown markedly weaker in material terms. As China’s military capability has grown, so have the sacrifices the US would need to make on Taipei’s behalf, including the possibility of nuclear escalation. US security interests in Taiwan now need to be so vital that Washington would be willing to fight World War III to defend it. At the very least, it is debatable whether Taiwan meets this threshold.

Should the US choose not to defend Taiwan, this debate would be settled. The US would be shown to be a power with limited security interests in Asia because it was not prepared to take major risks or suffer substantial losses in defence of Taiwan.

Thereafter, it would no longer be viable for Washington’s remaining partners and allies to base their security on the premise that the US would, if necessary, fight a nuclear war on their behalf.

Yet the US would still have one remaining security interest in the region, one which aligns with the interests of its allies and partners, and for which it would need regional bases: to deny China the opportunity to achieve regional dominance. Preventing Chinese domination of Asia keeps China occupied in its own region. A China which dominated its region would have a freer hand to further its global ambitions. To illustrate the point, it’s worth considering America’s position in the Western hemisphere. The US would have been far less well positioned to play its global role in the post-World War II system if the Western hemisphere had been permanently contested by another great power.

Maintaining that kind of presence in Asia only requires that the US have enough air and maritime forces in place to resist any Chinese effort at regional dominance. The US doesn’t need to be capable of winning a war against China, only to deny China the prospect of victory. This mission would not require unaffordable resourcing or risk major losses.

Would Beijing put up with a US presence on these terms?

China almost certainly wants complete US retrenchment from Asia and probably wants to dominate the region. But other than status, it’s not clear that such a goal would come with enough benefits for China to risk war to achieve it. Regional dominance will not be an important enough goal to go fight America over.

Deterring China in a post-American future

So, I’ve argued that Taiwan is the wrong place to draw the line against China’s ambitions, and that Australia should encourage Washington to rethink its position. But we nevertheless must draw a line because China’s ambitions could easily stretch to achieving such a position of dominance in Asia that the region, including Australia, becomes a supplicant.

Australia wants peace, but not at any cost.

If Taiwan is the wrong place to draw that line, then the right place is maritime Asia, which offers natural advantages to the defender.

Australia can offer an example here.

In The Echidna Strategy, I tried to revive an idea that gained prominence in Europe in the 1980s, which went by the name of “non-offensive defence strategy”.
Yes it’s an awkward formulation. Borderline tautological. But it was an attempt to escape, or at least ameliorate, the security dilemma – more security for me does not have to mean less security for you. And it only works if we design our defence forces correctly, such that they are capable of defending but with little or no capacity to attack.

To draw a crude analogy, you could arm yourself with a rifle to protect your home from invaders. But to others living in your neighbourhood, that same rifle could easily become a tool for invading the homes of others. So, by making yourself more secure, you make them less secure, and thus invite them to arm themselves too.

The European scholars behind non-offensive defence strategy saw this dynamic at work across the Iron Curtain and asked, why do we need a rifle at all? Why not a really big fence?

In an Asian context, a better metaphor than a fence would be a moat. Because ours is a maritime environment, and if China wants to impose itself as the dominant power in Asia, it will need to dominate the oceans and the skies above them.

The maritime environment is perfectly suited to a defensive approach because the advantage for the defender is so substantial. It is far easier and cheaper to defend than to attack. Ukraine is proving this point, making it impossible for Russia to use its substantial advantage in naval power, even though Ukraine barely has a navy of its own.

Australia can set an example for the region. An Echidna Strategy cannot stop China from becoming the leading military power in Asia. That’s inevitable. But it can make it very costly for China to ever dominate. It can blunt Chinese power just enough to ensure we maintain our sovereignty and are free from coercion.

Conclusion

As I close, I want to recognise that I have come a long way from where I started. A speech about peace has become a speech about defence and deterrence. But as I said at the outset, the search for peace is a business for hard-headed, practical people, not utopians and ideologues.

Ultimately, decisions about war and peace in Asia will be made in Beijing and Washington, not in Canberra.

But we can help.

First, our defence force can set an example for countries around the region for how to deter without provoking. Second and more importantly, we can try to persuade the United States to accept the full implications of China’s rise. Unfortunately, it is far from clear that we ourselves have accepted these implications.