Transcript

How concerned should Australia be about the UK’s ability to deliver its side of AUKUS?

What role can middle powers play as the international order becomes more fragmented?

How should Australia and its partners balance alliances with their own national interests in a more contested world?

In part two of our geopolitical update, Sharryn Parker is joined by Charles Edel, Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva and Euan Graham to discuss AUKUS, the role of middle powers in a changing world and how Australian can build greater strategic agency while still deepening the US alliance.

Transcript

(This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.) 

Sharryn Parker

Welcome back to the National Security podcast. I’m your host Sharryn Parker, coming to you from Canberra – the traditional land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people.

This is part 2 of our geopolitical update with Doctors Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva, Charles Edel, Euan Graham.

As we get into it, here is something to think about:

We are now closer in time to the year 2050, than we are to the year 2000.  

Our only constant, after death and taxes, is the lack of certainty in the strategic environment. If the definition of national security is duty of government to protect the citizens, economy and institutions of the sovereign state, then surely a fixed point for Australia are its alliances. You know where I’m going with this.

Friction with the US is now common in affairs of state, Canada’s recent US trade-war experience has tested that assumption pretty directly. Rather than cower to the economic strength of our great and powerful ally, PM Mark Carney has said ‘Canada has everything we need to pivot, and prosper.’ In its effort to provide national security, his government is looking to deepen economic ties elsewhere, including with Europe.

In part one, we looked at the pressures facing the United States, the effect of wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, we’ve taken a gander at China’s strategic positioning efforts, and touched a little - on how Australians perceive all of it.

In part 2, we dig a bit deeper into what’s happening closer to home. We look at the Indo Pacific, with the emergent BRICS economies, the role of middle powers and how  Australia makes sense of global power as the gloves, it appears, are coming off. Lets drop back into the conversation at the subject of AUKUS, its deterrence capacity, and why we are aiming to do it.

So we can talk about the Australian community and its lack of understanding and its lack of what the threat is. We can see how it's playing out with the US. We can consider AUKUS as the deal amongst three. What if we have a look at the UK and see how they're actually dealing with it at the moment? You talk about our industrial base not actually keeping up. We know that there's been promises made by the UK Prime Minister around three per cent GDP for Parliament next. Should we be worried about that as well?

Euan Graham

We should certainly be keeping a close and dispassionate eye on defence policy, the defence economics and the politics around the defence debate in the UK because there's a lot riding on it for Australia. Historically, the relationship has often been informal in nature and based on assumptions about the closeness of the two countries, history, culture and historical links. But I think we need a more belt-and-braces approach given that Australia is depending on the UK for the delivery of its future nuclear submarine fleet, at least the larger part of it. And also a major shipbuilding venture with the Hunter frigate, which is based on a UK design. And who knows, potentially even Australia may be interested in the Future Global Combat Air project, which groups the UK, Japan and Italy in a tripartite consortium. The UK is in a slightly odd spot in that Keir Starmer, the former prime minister, was unseated partly because he was deemed to be weak on defence. And yet Andy Burnham, although it's early days, has given no clear indication that he's bringing a markedly different approach to defence. And in fact, in questions in parliament recently, he said that he would not put national security ahead of social security. So that was a pretty clear and, in Australian ears, not an alarming statement.

Sharryn Parker

Do you see that changing?

Euan Graham

I think the UK, on its own merits, given the declining situation and the threat it faces in common with other European countries from Russia, clearly needs to be spending more on defence. Not lost on the UK armed forces and their chiefs either. But we have no indication that the UK is going to put a date on the three per cent commitment. It is committed to 3.5 per cent by 2035, but 2035 is still a decade off. And there's been a kicking of the future submarine numbers into the long grass recently as well. The signs are that not much has changed. On the other hand, I don't think that Australia should either take it on sort of family trust that the UK will deliver, but conversely, it shouldn't assume that the UK will fail. And that's often the kind of stump reaction you get in a debate here, is, well, the Brits will never show up with their submarines or the Brits are only in it for the money. Because you do hear quite a lot of that. And I think this is something I'm planning to write on. We need a more systematic understanding of the UK and a broader base than just the defence relationship. We need to revive maybe a dialogue with the UK that allows Australia to flesh out its understanding so that it's not just through these alternating vectors of historical closeness or this is a replay of 1942 and the UK won't show up. It's got to be more rigorous than that.

And, what I do take hope from is that AUKUS is not just about the UK doing the right thing to deliver for the benefit of Australia. It's about building its own future nuclear submarine capability. It will be a common design that's produced between the UK and Australia called SSN-AUKUS. And that, I think, I'm more hopeful that the UK has and is continuing to make the investments it needs in its submarine construction base that will deliver that. But as here, there are clear problems around the opportunity cost of investing in AUKUS for other parts of military capability. There's a crying need to invest in air defence in the UK. I would like to see a much stronger commitment from the current prime minister, who's also interestingly got the former defence minister now over his shoulder as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who holds the purse strings. That will be a very interesting test of the where-you-stand-is-where-you-sit test for John Healey, having made the transition from defence to Treasury.

Sharryn Parker

So, Charles, what do you have to say to all of that when you actually look at AUKUS? I know you've got some AUKUS thoughts in the works as well. Is there a necessary thread that needs to be developed between Australia and the UK to make it work properly?

Charles Edel

Yes. Sorry, you want more than that. Let me make a narrow point about AUKUS, but then, because the actual issues that have been raised by my colleagues are so sprawling, maybe we should draw back a little bit, and I'll raise one or two of those. So, look, the narrow point I would say about AUKUS is yes, very much alive to what Euan said. He's channelling Ronald Reagan with his trust but verify about where the British submarine industrial base is.

Charles Edel

You know, AUKUS, particularly in Australia, makes people head for the hills and find their own tribes, right? And so you have one of two reactions that AUKUS elicits. On the one hand, you'll have a bunch of people saying, look at all AUKUS has accomplished thus far. And you'll have another group of folks saying, but look at what it's failed to accomplish and how it will never materialise on time. And, you know, to a certain degree, any honest accounting of AUKUS needs to take both of those into account at the same time. Obviously, what it's established thus far, a rather extraordinary amount of legal, political, bureaucratic, totally boring, totally down in the weeds and absolutely necessary preconditions for it to happen, while also noting that the entire point of AUKUS is, back to the point earlier, to deliver deterrence against China in the Indo-Pacific region. And it has not yet done that. It never could do that within the first five years. But the more honest assessment is: where has it made progress? What are the limiting reagents to that actually  occurring? In a democratic nation, there is always going to be a tension here. None of us, I think, would willingly say, let's take our tax dollars and put it into non-social goods. That's where we want our money to go to. But there's also a broader context about what is going to keep us safe, healthy, happy and wise. And, you know, there's this, at least from my perspective, I find this silly fake debate about whether or not Australia is a good ally of the US or a bad ally of the US, if the UK is a good ally of the US or a bad ally of the US, as predicated upon whether or not you spend two or three or five per cent of your GDP on defence. I think that's a red herring. Because that number was a conjured-up number, right? That was a number that the United States started using with its NATO allies after Russia's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 to try to up defence spending. The better metric, I always think, is not how much would you spend pegged against GDP, but are you spending enough relative to those who would do you harm? And in that category, the clear answer is no. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, we could go down the list, but that's a pretty good starting place, especially China, especially Russia, have mobilised their economies to fight wars. And when you mobilise your economy and start using those assets more aggressively, as we've seen from both those nations, you need to have the ability, deterrence, to have enough to respond to them.

Sharryn Parker

 Sure, but where does Australia sit on that measure?

Charles Edel

The West, the countries that we're talking about, have not kept pace. I think we've all recognised that. But that's the conversation that we're at. The other issues that I'd just throw out, which may or may not be useful for our spanning-the-world conversation, but I think what we're all talking about is the fact that when we look at these episodic moments, and I don't mean to diminish any of them, but we're kind of looking at what's happening in Ukraine, we're looking at what North Korea is doing. You know, when we step back, it's very clear. Euan says he has great faith in the Australian public. I think that's true for most democratic publics. They're not unaware of what's going on. We have clearly entered an era that's much more violent, where those who are most dissatisfied are purposefully testing, pushing, probing and violently overturning the bounds of what is permissible conduct. The world is in many ways shifting into blocs centred around authoritarian countries and those who are not as willing to subscribe to the laws that they put forward. And in many ways, it's not even a multipolar world. If we kind of narrow the scope simply to talk about AI, we have a bifurcating world about the kind of tech stacks, a Chinese tech stack and an American-led tech stack, that has vast implications. So I would just make the point that when people feel unsettled, which they should feel based on the news that we see simply when you kind of pick up your feed, when you pick up the newspaper or when you turn on the radio, we have entered into a new era. And the question is not how much money we want to put towards it, but are we doing enough to keep our population safe and where they should be? And again, I would just from my vantage point say that the right metric is always to judge this as relative to those who would do you harm.

Sharryn Parker

That's a really interesting way to actually put that out there, straight back to that threat idea and what that actually looks like. Explaining that to a nation, particularly Australia, that feels so very far away from everywhere else. We can turn around and have a look at all of the hegemons as they are playing out now, or the hegemon plus potential usurpers. The rest of us though are rising middle powers, middle powers, et cetera. Do we, they, have a say? Must it be a collective, or do we need to look at them very differently?

Charles Edel

Yeah, I'll be real brief on this. I hate the word hegemons. I mean, like I studied Greek history too. I hate the word hegemony. And this concept, and by the way, with American foreign policy being where it is, with America First being kind of the way that America and Washington and Trump talks about what America's in, you could be forgiven for thinking that Washington's motive at this point is not to dominate various regions. That is the language of the Trump administration, clearly.

Sharryn Parker

How else do we view it?

Charles Edel

 I think what has actually consistently been the evolving stance of the United States, which is that the United States does not need to be the top dog in every region, and clearly cannot be in the Indo-Pacific. In fact, what I think that you're seeing as a fair amount of continuity, I'm shearing off some of the edges of the Trump administration here. What the United States would like is for collectively there to be enough throw weight for those who are very concerned about destabilising actions emanating out of Moscow, out of Beijing, to be able to push back in a way that rests some more agency into this. This is how Penny Wong describes the situation all the time, right? She always talks about Australia wanting there to be a favourable or a strategic balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. You need to pay attention to the most important word in that phrasing, which is favourable or strategic. That means bending in Australia's favour. And so I think that what the United States really wants is for countries like Australia, countries like the UK, to do enough that collectively there is contribution to make sure that the region is not swallowed up by an aggressive hegemon or a leader trying to flip the script.

Sharryn Parker

Dilnoza, I can see you wanting to say something.

Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva

I'd like to highlight two points. Number one, my colleague mentioned the concept of trust and then Charles gave really good examples about different alliances and so on. What I see today is basically the trust is not that strong in the international system overall. That links to my earlier point about President Trump's foreign policies. You referred to it like, you know, focusing on America, but we can also refer to it more as an isolationist policy, which is more about focusing on the Western hemisphere, you would say. That can be good for the United States, but then if you look at how their allies felt, particularly with regards to NATO and their securities, that could be something to consider because all these allies, European allies, including Australia, they had to figure out that they should not fully rely on the United States. They should think of their own securities themselves. And that kind of, in a sense, helped the other authoritarian countries to think, the West is not as strong as it used to be. So it is now with different poles. And that's the narrative they use today in different platforms. And that helps those authoritarian states to offer to the wider world, as they call it Global South, we have an alternative arrangement if you want to join this alternative arrangement. This is what you see in the West is happening. So it kind of didn't really help with that. The second point I wanted to mention is that, looking at all the issues we've mentioned today, the Middle East war, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and deterrence in the Pacific, what I see today is really we're kind of back to realism, good old realism.

Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I remember in my security classes where we talked about how the number of casualties from interstate war has declined and the most casualties were from terrorism, civil war and domestic unrest, basically. And when Russia invaded Ukraine and the war in the Middle East and now war in Iran, this whole changed everything. Absolutely. And what we see today is that if you are powerful, you get to do what you want and international institutions like the UN will only be limited to the power those great powers have allocated to them. And in this regard, I think the word hegemon is still valid, whether we like it or not. So there are hegemons and I agree that the world is becoming more, if we call it multipolar or not, but basically multiple poles or blocs. And last point is that I think moving on, what we see is that states, whether middle powers, smaller states, great powers, are all acting in their national interests.

Sharryn Parker

I’d hazard now is the time to bring up BRICS program, for our listeners who hate an acronym BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa who have engaged as a collective to ensure their burgeoning interests are heard on the world stage.

Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva

Look at the case of India, for example. They hosted BRICS just this week. We know India is a very good ally of the Western countries. They are part of Quad, they're an important partner in the Pacific, but they also talk and cooperate with other countries like China and Russia very well under the umbrella of BRICS or under the umbrella of SCO. That shows as an example how states, whether small, great or middle, or you can say emerging great powers, will always be acting. And what we see today is that they are still acting in their national interest. They are not really sticking to one bloc only. And that will be the feature, in my view, as we have multiple poles in the world. And just one more point about Russia I'd like to highlight is how in Russian discourse they constantly frame that they're actually at war with the collective West. They use the actual words "collective West", which includes everyone. They believe they're not fighting with Ukraine itself, but they're actually fighting with the collective West.

Sharryn Parker

Is it an ideology?

Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva

 It is a strong ideology. And I recently watched an interview by Foreign Minister Lavrov and a journalist asks, if that's the case, why are we so patient? I'm not quoting, but I think it's accurate paraphrasing. And then Lavrov gave a very diplomatic answer, but the idea was that the next step would be very dangerous for them as well, which is linking to, you know, are you going to attack NATO countries or are you going to do something about NATO countries and what will be the consequences of that? But otherwise, they still very widely frame it as they are fighting themselves, just Russia alone with the collective West.

Sharryn Parker

Euan, what are your thoughts?

Euan Graham

Well, Charles doesn't like the word hegemon. I don't like the word middle. The problem if you're a middle power is you're always looking up, and that tends to induce a self-limiting approach to statecraft, which none of the countries, including Australia, can really afford. Australia has made quite an amount of progress in terms of its regional statecraft. They've lifted up several relationships with Pacific Island countries to treaty status. In quite impressive succession, we've had treaties with Papua New Guinea, with Fiji. If the Solomon Islands follows, that will be a significant clutch. Australia's relative power in the Pacific is much stronger. It's weaker in Southeast Asia, and maybe that tells its own story that there's one relationship that has been raised to a new treaty recently this year, that's with Indonesia. But to my money, there's much less underneath that and it's more of a symbolic-level agreement. The relationship that I'm really looking at for the future is Japan because I think it is, and this is something I will be writing on shortly for the National Security College, it's a relationship that really justifies being described as a grand bargain, potentially. We mustn't fall, however, into the trap of assuming that because we are quote-unquote natural partners, that the process will be natural. It'll be anything but. It will require big investments of political will. There's a debate about what these other countries below the major power level should do. Canada has taken one particular standpoint under Mark Carney that seems to be very much a reaction to Canada's particular problems and dependence on the United States. And I would add that my critique of that is, if you're framing a coalition of so-called middle powers as an alternative to the United States, the problem with that is hard power can't be aggregated like GDP. Maybe if you're used to aggregating, as in the form of being a central banker or a finance minister, that logic may work. It doesn't work in the world of hard power because you will not get the same aggregate level of capability. And if you're trying to counterbalance China, which is essentially the strategic problem that Australia, Japan and others have in this region, you cannot do it without the United States. Just the arithmetic won't add up. For that reason, I think we see a very different approach from Japan, which has doubled down on the alliance with the United States, and Australia, which also will maintain the United States at the core of its security policy. Not out of sentiment, but bottom line, out of national interest because there is no other way to make the numbers add up when you are facing a country of China's scale and also its own axis of cooperation with Russia, North Korea and the others that we've mentioned.

Sharryn Parker

I think as we take this very rapid trip around the world, I should probably end it with a single question to each of you. I think that question is going to be, for the next 90 days or the next quarter, from your area of expertise, what do you think that actually looks like? Can I start with you, Charles, and the US?

Charles Edel

Sure. Let's go back to the very first question that you asked me. What does America look like now? What's the temperature? Hot and getting hotter. So the US will have its midterm elections in early November. After that, things will change. Not drastically. The Trump administration still has two more years to go in office, but the institutional constraints, the political friction between the executive and legislative branches, the constraints as both parties and individuals begin to jockey for positioning, and that includes in foreign policy, will look different, all while Donald Trump is doing what Donald Trump does, which is making the world pay attention to him, which means that he's going to get, I think, wilder as the institutions and the institutional constraints look to become more binding. Those are two vectors that point against each other, which portend a lot, but we're not quite sure what yet.

Sharryn Parker

And Dilnoza, for you.

Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva

If I answer this question from my field of expertise, then I'll have to briefly talk about Eurasia. But then I'll also make a brief statement in regards to Australia as well. So with regards to Eurasia, we spoke a lot about the war and its impact. It's widely covered. I'd like to highlight one point that makes me think a lot, about China's quiet expansion into Eurasia, which we don't know much or don't talk much about because everyone is busy talking about the war.

Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva

Okay. When I remember when we discussed this topic with my students in my classes, who is winning the war, some of my students mentioned it's China who is winning the war because China is benefiting in so many ways.

Charles Edel

Sorry, which war are you referring to?

Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva

Or you can talk about the Middle East as well. You can take any war, in fact. So in this case, China is offering as a good platform for them to be a middle actor. They can help both sides to talk. That's what they did in terms of Russia's war in Ukraine. They're trying to do this for the Middle East, the US war in Iran as well. But what we see as quite a big shift is China's presence in Eurasia in general, with its economic programs, Belt and Road Initiative, with its bilateral different agreements, which are very helpful for these developing countries and the Global South, so in Eurasia in general. But then if you look at the context of former Soviet space, I'm referring particularly to Central Asian states, China in fact has replaced Russia as the most important trade partner for all these nation states. And we don't talk much about that. But then what does it mean with regards to the great power politics in the region? Obviously, the countries in the region have always been hedging, the US, Russia, China and Middle East, or Türkiye is another example. But I mean this is something I think for us to be aware of and to look at. One of the aspects of Chinese foreign policy is that they try to frame that they respect sovereignty and they don't really dictate anything about human rights, which they think that the West does actively in the Global South, in authoritarian countries. And that sounds very attractive to authoritarian countries because they are all authoritarian and we know the situation in China as well.

Sharryn Parker

Surely it isn’t all China, Dilnoza? These issues aren’t the start and the finish of Australian issues?

Dilnoza

The second point which I think a lot about these days is about social cohesion in Australia and overall, in many Western countries. Most of them are multicultural societies. I see to what extent we see a very big shift with regards to the rise of far-right thinking and how those far-right sentiments have been normalised today. In the context of Australia, I just see how, I mean, in a sense people say this is being mirrored elsewhere in the West, in the UK as well, far-right groups being popular among ordinary people, but also with regards to some sentiments we see and how bringing foreign wars to the context of multicultural societies can be very dangerous for social cohesion in the society. And this would be something that I would be very much observing because, I mean, as someone who lives in Australia, I'd be very much interested in the country having a strong national identity, but also having a very strong social cohesion, which I think with the rise of far-right sentiments is really being impacted today. Yeah.

Sharryn Parker

And Euan, how does all of that reflect into your area of expertise?

Euan Graham

Well, let me venture out of my comfort zone. We talked about Ukraine and Russia and the advances that Ukraine has made with its defence industrial base. But there have been some interesting developments on the battlefield very recently against all predictions, certainly those predictions from the Trump administration itself. Despite the cutting off of USAID to Ukraine, Ukraine has brought Russia's offensive to a grinding halt and is actually overturning those battlefield gains. Now the advantage, the momentum, if there is going to be a negotiation coming ahead, of course, the battlefield balance will do a lot to shape that and it's shaping in Ukraine's favour at the moment. There's a positive. If we can stitch together the two big ongoing conflicts, so Ukraine and US-Iran, what they do show in common is, again, the myth of the quick victory. And both those major powers, Russia and the United States, have had a hard lesson on that. And although Iran is not a positive model in any sense of how it displays its governance on the global stage, lessons are lessons at the military level. The fact that Iran has kept the US at bay could even have some positives for a country like Taiwan as it plans its own maritime defence against the odds.

Sharryn Parker

Should we be grateful that President’s Xi and Trump are engaged and talking?

Euan Graham

I'm much less sanguine about the possibility of a quick or favourable outcome from the US perspective in Iran. I think this conflict may be with us grinding out for the remainder of the Trump administration as the administration shifts to a strategy based on economic pressure with some military elements to that. That is going to continue the problem of overstretched distraction, depletion that Charles has already mentioned. Upcoming event, obviously in Washington, Xi's visit to meet President Trump. I don't expect that much from it. As we've already discussed, Trump has his eye on the midterm elections. And I think that short term there is more likely to be an accommodation of China than anything else, just given the fires that are having to be fought on other fronts. It will probably be a largely symbolic summit, in my view. You mentioned that Taiwan would be on the table. Taiwan's fear, of course, is that it will be on the menu rather than on the table. But on that front, I expect that while at the maximalist position China will push for the US to pull back on arms sales, I just think that that decision will likely be kicked the other side of the summit, probably the other side of the midterm elections. It's on my mind because I was in Taipei just last week and came back. They have their own small municipal election coming up, but looking ahead beyond the end of this year and even next, we've got big elections coming in 2028 in Taiwan when there is a possibility either of a fourth consecutive DPP-led administration or whether the Kuomintang will find a way back in. We've got a presidential election in the Philippines as well. I think China will have its eye on both of these. That's not a short fuse, but maybe a sort of medium fuse that could, depending on the result of those elections, change the geopolitical lie of the land. However, I don't think that things are going to get dramatically easier in this region. And for a country like Australia, despite the progress that Canberra has undeniably made in the Pacific, to a lesser extent in Southeast Asia, it needs to be looking up and out and have its eyes not just on the near region, but on the wider region and, for that matter, Ukraine, Russia too, because the interconnections between these are getting stronger, deeper and more concerning. I think that's maybe stating the obvious, but it is going to be up to these countries to make their connections between each other. Can't just route everything through Washington anymore. It will have to be done much more at the sort of cross-braced level between allies and partners. As I said before, the one that I'm looking at most closely is Japan-Australia.

Sharryn Parker

Fantastic. Thank you very much to all of you. 2028 feels almost too far away to comprehend, let alone start thinking about. But it's probably a great place to land, is look up, look out and stay active and involved. Thank you to the three of you for joining us today.

Charles Edel

Thanks.

Dilnoza Ubaydullaeva

Thank you for having me.