What's Australia's defence strategy?
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Ask that question to any policymaker in Canberra and three things will usually be at the top of their list.
The first is our alliance with the United States through the ANZUS treaty.
The second is the AUKUS pact that brings together Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The third is the role that India will play in balancing China in the region, particularly through the Quad agreement.
Even when policymakers talk about Australia's own defence capabilities - like nuclear submarines or long-range missiles - they are often linked to one of these three alliances.
But there's one big problem with these three pillars of our defence strategy: they all rest on shaky foundations.
Start with the United States. It's no secret that the United States is a much less reliable ally than it once was, and it seems naive to think this is going to get better any time soon.
If current polls are anything to go by, Donald Trump is likely to be president of the United States again in just over 12 months. This is undoubtedly a bad thing for Australia, including our defence alliance, given his "America First" mantra.
The last time Trump was president he turned on allies in Europe, undermined global co-operation on everything from trade to climate, cosied up with dictators and came very close to hitting Australia with trade tariffs.
Whether he would ditch the AUKUS pact and cancel the submarine deal is an open question.
Congress has already cast doubts over AUKUS. In a rare show of unity, the top Democrat and the top Republican representatives on the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote an alarmed letter to President Joe Biden saying they were increasingly concerned AUKUS would rob the US of much needed submarines.
America is not the ally it once was. The United Kingdom and Europe aren't much better.
The UK, primarily through Brexit, is withdrawing from the world and pursuing a much narrower foreign policy.
Europe - for good reasons - is much more focused on Russia than it is on Asia, as highlighted by President Emmanuel Macron's recent remarks that France wouldn't necessarily follow America in a conflict with China over Taiwan.
Western governments look to India for hope. They have high hopes that India is going to step-up and provide a bit of balance against the might of China. This is why western allies have (unsubtly) renamed the "Asia Pacific" to the "Indo-Pacific".
The things playing in favour of this strategy are that India's population will soon overtake China's and its economy is growing faster than China's, too.
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The things working against this strategy are that India's economy remains tiny by comparison - one-fifth the size of China's measured at market exchange rates - and India appears to have very little desire to play the role that western allies want it to play.
India has a cozy relationship with Russia and is friendly to other enemies of Western governments, such as Iran and Afghanistan. Its economy is relatively closed, inward looking and highly protectionist. The human rights record of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is troubling.
Nor is India known for being a particularly constructive or engaged player in global forums. Its recent G20 host year was almost exclusively focused on domestic issues in India. It was only after protest from other countries that it dropped references to Modi's domestic political slogans and included more issues of concern to other members.
Australia is in a pickle. What should we do?
Our current strategy is to use new forums like AUKUS and the Quad to try and keep the United States and United Kingdom engaged in Asia, and to try to get India to step-up and play a balancing role in the region.
These strategies are swimming against the tide. The uncomfortable truth is that, for the foreseeable future, the United States is declining in relative global importance, the United Kingdom hasn't been globally important for decades and India isn't very interested in being globally important at all.
The first thing Australia needs to do is stop focusing all its alliance frameworks on countries that don't live in Asia.
If things go badly with China, the United States will retreat to northern America and the United Kingdom will go back to Europe.
Australia can't do either of those things. We live in Asia. Our allies need to live here, too.
Working with India and Japan through the Quad is a step in the right direction. But what about the rest of Asia? What about Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and other ASEAN countries?
This is another way our current strategy gets us into trouble. AUKUS and the Quad make many of our friends in Asia a bit nervous given they are often seen as being antagonistic towards China. The more we pursue these US/UK-centered alliances as our core defence strategy, the harder it is to build new alliances with countries in the region.
The US and UK will always play a vital role in Australia's defence strategy, but Australia needs to diversify.
We need to find security within Asia, not outside of it, with the countries that are growing in importance, not shrinking, and to focus more on the issues and multilateral frameworks Asia cares about, like development, financial stability, climate finance and institutions like ASEAN, the WTO and development banks.
Australia has too many eggs in too few baskets, and the baskets are getting more and more fragile by the day.
- Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Adam Triggs
Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
