APSF Webinar 18 February 2025 – transcipt

Introduction

The topic and question for tonight’s webinar is, Does China threaten Australia’s future peace and security?

It’s an important question that has dominated Australia’s national security discourse for almost a decade now – if not longer – and I’m grateful to be given the opportunity tonight to address it and share my own thoughts with you.

However, I’d like to begin with a caveat, because I think a part of the problem in the national discourse about the potential threat posed by China is the very way that the question is formulated in binary terms.

Does China threaten Australia’s future peace and security presupposes a yes or no answer – either China is a threat, or it isn’t.

It precludes the possibility that China could be threatening in some ways and benign in others; it may present security challenges for Australia, but not necessarily security threats; and it may in some ways even contribute to Australia’s security.

To my mind, all those things are in fact the case.

The same problematic framing is often utilised with respect to Australia’s alliance with the United States.

Where China either is or isn’t our greatest security challenge, the United States either can or can’t be relied upon as our ultimate security guarantor.

The question about whether we can rely on the United States to come to our aid in a moment of crisis has greater prominence in the national discourse today due to the return of Donald Trump and his administration’s shake-up of the global US alliance system.

In any case, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least to me, to frame either of these relationships in these binary terms for several reasons.

Climate change

First, while China’s growing military power and coercive behaviour in the South China Sea present a challenge for Australia in terms regional peace and security – and I’ll return to this point in a moment – it’s also true that China has played a key role in helping to address or mitigate other global security threats.

Take, for example, what is a key – if not the greatest – threat to Australian and global security: climate change.

China is, without question and by far, the greatest producer of green energy in the world. The leading role it has played in the production and export of cheap renewable sources of energy – particularly solar panels – has been a boon for the (very slow and woefully  inadequate) transition to a green global economy.

China, of course, is also a big part of the problem as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter – although not per capita and not in cumulative terms. But it at least appears to be headed in the right direction, and it’s certainly playing a more positive role than our so-called key security guarantor – the United States.

What does it mean to call the United States our primary security ally when the Trump administration’s key energy policy is explicit about dramatically expanding fossil fuel production and keeping the world hooked on fossil fuels for as long as possible; which, if successful, would all but guarantee a global climate catastrophe?

Nuclear war

It’s not just on the issue of climate change where the China threat/US saviour dichotomy doesn’t make much sense.

The existence of nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons policies that increase the likelihood of accidental or deliberate nuclear war, is another urgent and existential threat to Australian security.

All the existing great nuclear powers are expanding or modernising their nuclear arsenals. And Australia should certainly be troubled by the fact that China’s nuclear arsenal is the fastest-growing in the world, having significantly expanded the number of its nuclear warheads to approximately 600 as of 2024.

But then, shouldn’t we also be deeply troubled by the fact that the United States is spending a staggering 1.7 trillion dollars over 30 years to modernise its far larger and superior nuclear forces; that the United States has, in recent years, torn up critical aspects of the global nuclear arms control regime; and that it is the United States, not China, that refuses to adopt a ‘no first use’ policy and continues to dangerously maintain its nuclear forces on ‘high-alert’?

And might China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal have something to do with the threat that it perceives from America’s far superior nuclear forces?

It is misleading at best, if not entirely contradictory, to frame China’s investment in its nuclear arsenal as threatening to regional peace and security, but America’s much larger investment in its nuclear arsenal as critical to the so-called nuclear umbrella that protects Australia from nuclear threats.

If China’s nuclear arsenal is targeting Australia primarily because we are becoming increasingly implicated in America’s nuclear warfighting plans, including forward-basing US nuclear-capable bombers on Australian territory, is it China or the United States that threatens our security?

China’s military build-up

What about the conventional threat China might pose to the region and to Australia’s security directly?

It seems entirely reasonable that Australia, and other countries in the region, would want to take steps to respond to China’s extraordinary growth in military capabilities; along with the deployment of its military and economic power to bully other nations – particularly over sovereignty disputes with its neighbours – and of more direct concern to Australia, the dangerous harassment by the PLA of Australian warships and military planes as they lawfully traverse the South China Sea.

Most troubling of all, of course, is China’s increasingly aggressive posture with respect to Taiwan.

The pertinent question, however, is do all these issues amount to a security threat to Australia that requires an aggressive military build-up in the form of long-range power projection capabilities, deeper US-Australia defence integration, nuclear-powered submarines, and so on?

Or does China’s reemergence as a great regional power present a complex set of security challenges that are best managed through a combination of hedging, adept diplomacy and strategic accommodation?

The Australian government and the national security establishment has opted in no uncertain terms to characterise China’s rise as a serious security threat to Australia.

According to Defence Minister, Richard Marles, Australia’s military build-up, initiated by the Morrison government but continued under the Albanese government, is a direct response to China’s growing military power, which he has labelled ‘the largest and most ambitious we have seen by any country since the end of the Second World War’.

Furthermore, according to Marles, China’s military build-up requires a countervailing military response by Australia because it lacks ‘transparency’ and fails to be accompanied by ‘reassuring statecraft’, indicated especially by China’s coercive actions in the South China Sea that violate the so-called ‘rules-based order’.

In short, Australia’s miliary build up is justified an effort to deter China from further coercive behaviour.

The flip side of deterrence is that you must optimise for war in case it fails. Deterrence equals escalation, and perhaps even provocation.

China: a security threat or challenge?

There are several points to make in response to this characterisation of the China threat and Australia’s militarist response.

First, in point of fact, China’s military build-up is not the largest and most ambitious since the end of the Second World War as Marles claims – it actually pales in comparison to the build up by both the Soviet Union and the United States during the early decades of the Cold War.

Second, while China’s military growth is undoubtedly impressive, it more or less tracks with its extraordinary economic growth.

In other words, China’s military spending as a percentage of GDP has remained fairly flat, and to this day is still less than India or Vietnam or even Australia, and certainly much less than that of the United States.

I’m not trying minimise China’s formidable military capabilities, but rather to correct the exaggeration of China’s military spending to erroneously depict China as hellbent on becoming the regional or even global hegemon.

China in fact has extremely limited capabilities to project power outside of its immediate region: few aircraft carriers, few attack submarines, few amphibious attack ships, few transports/refuelling aircraft, and little combat experience.

With the exception of Taiwan, China’s forces are not configured for foreign adventurism, but rather to keep the United States as far away from its shores as possible – a perfectly understandable defence interest.

Indeed, is entirely conceivable that China’s military build-up and assertive behaviour are, at least in part, due to China feeling threatened by the United States, which is increasingly encircling China with military bases and forces.

If Richard Marles thinks that China’s extraordinary military spending (estimated at $471 billion), and its accompanying coercive statecraft, are sufficient to engender fear and concern for us, how do we expect China to respond to the gargantuan $1.3 trillion US military budget?

To illustrate the absurdity of singling out China’s ‘most ambitious’ military build-up as an aberration, one only has to make the comparison to America’s defence expenditure in cumulative terms.

Taking the end of the Cold War as a departure point, the US has spent approximately US$19 trillion on building up its military capabilities, some $16 trillion more than China.

And while China’s coercive actions and assertive behaviour are certainly cause for concern, it has plainly been the least belligerent of the great powers since at least the end of the Cold War, including in comparison to Russia, NATO and the United States.

The United States in particular has hardly reflected in its behaviour the kind of ‘reassuring statecraft’ that Marles demands of China today, having laid waste to multiple countries in controversial wars and in gross violation of international law.

Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza, critically enabled by the Biden administration, exemplify the United States’ disregard for a ‘rules-based order’ and its willingness to sanction extreme violence and risk the destabilisation of an entire region in pursuit of its foreign policy objectives.

As the Brookings Institution has noted, ‘By the standards of the history of rising powers, China’s military buildup and its recent record on the use of force are both relatively restrained.’

To reiterate, none of this is to downplay the significance of China’s growing military power, its coercive and illegal actions in the South China Sea, and the security challenges China poses for Australia and the region as a whole.

The point is that China’s behaviour can and should be understood as falling within the realm of a normal great power, with strong prospects for addressing its more concerning actions through diplomacy and accommodation, and perhaps even a degree of military hedging.

Securing dominance in Asia

I want to turn now to looking more closely at what Australian defence and foreign policy objectives are with respect to China.

And to do so, one must first understand America’s defence and foreign policy objectives with respect to China.

Although there are important differences, Australia and the US share a similar strategic outlook for the Indo-Pacific that is bi-partisan and that exists both broadly and deeply within both national security communities. The US alliance also forms the cornerstone of Australia’s defence policy.

At the broadest level, American defence and foreign policy in Asia is based on the objective of securing dominance. This is sometimes referred euphemistically as leadership, or primacy, or hegemony. But they more or less refer to the same thing: a hierarchical international order with the US at the apex.

This objective is framed in so-called ‘realist’ security terms as necessary for preventing another potentially hostile power from achieving dominance in Asia and could then marshal the resources required to threaten the security of the United States.

In other words, if we don’t dominate Asia, some other hostile power may.

Unless you believe in US exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is unique among empires past and present because it possesses benevolent intentions – then the objective to dominate Asia was and remains motivated not solely, or even primarily, by realist security concerns, but the familiar desire expressed throughout the ages for power, control and wealth.

There’s not nearly enough time to run through the entire history, so I’ll begin from a major turning point and deterioration in US-China relations from around 2017, coinciding with the first Trump administration.

It was at this time that the Washington decisively shifted American policy towards China to one of strategic and economic containment; justified on the basis that China was now a rival of the United States intent on displacing American hegemony.

While it has been a long-standing plank of Australian defence policy to support and facilitate American primacy in Asia, openly aligning with the United States to contain Australia’s largest trading partner presented unique challenges for Australian statecraft.

In short, these challenges were overcome by a concerted domestic propaganda campaign, initiated by Australian security agencies, in collaboration with the then Turnbull government, that grossly exaggerated the danger of Chinese Communist Party interference in Australia to coordinate and mobilise wider political and public support for a more confrontational approach to China.

The details of this domestic propaganda campaign are dealt with in the scholarly work of the Chinese politics and international relations expert – Andrew Chubb from Lancaster University.

The successful manufacture of the China ‘threat’ discourse helped to lay the foundation for the subsequent Morrison government to portray China’s military rise as a direct security threat to the nation requiring a radical shift in Australian defence policy, including the extraordinary decision to acquire nuclear-powered submarines via the AUKUS partnership.

It for this reason that AUKUS was viewed in Washington as ‘getting the Australians off the fence’ so that we are ‘locked in now for the next forty years’; in the words of then US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.

AUKUS is symbolic of a shift in Australian defence policy from a more independent policy of hedging against China’s rise to a fully-US aligned policy of containment.  

I stress symbolic, because AUKUS is merely the most visible element of a tectonic shift underway in Australian defence policy and the Australia-US alliance.

At the same time Morrison was negotiating AUKUS, a new set of US Force Posture Initiatives were announced at AUSMIN in June 2021 to enhance military cooperation across multiple domains.

Building on earlier developments, these initiatives are ‘propelling the U.S.-Australia alliance into uncharted terrain’, directly integrating Australian bases into US war plans and rapidly establishing Australia as a major hub for multiple forms of US power projection, including expeditionary US Marines, strategic air bombers and maritime surface and submarine forces.

These initiatives have also expanded joint military exercises and enhanced interoperability and interchangeability, positioning elements of ADF, such as the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), with the latent capability to provide full spectrum support to US forces operating out of Australia.

With all these developments, the Australian government has been reluctant to say out loud what is hiding in plain sight: that it has committed Australia to upholding US regional military dominance through its decision to retrain, retool and restructure the ADF for high-end joint combat operations in the Indo-Pacific, and position Australia as a critical node for supplying, maintaining, enabling and protecting US forward-based forces—including nuclear-capable forces—as part of a collective strategy to contain China.

The ‘China threat’ discourse undermines potential diplomatic solutions

I’m going to conclude by examining the Australian reaction to the recent three-ship Chinese naval task group that conducted live fire drills in the Tasman Sea last month.

The media reaction, and the Coalition’s attempt to portray the event as a security crisis, and Labor’s response as weak in the face of Chinese intimidation, was predictably sensationalist and alarmist.

What is noteworthy is that the Albanese government was at pains to point out that the Chinese vessels were in international waters and acted consistently with international law, despite expressing criticism of the short notice provided regarding the live fire drills.

Richard Marles urged Australians to take a ‘deep breath’ because ‘there is actually a greater frequency of Australian naval vessels closer to China than there are Chinese vessels close to Australia.’

In fact, that grossly understates the issue.

When a Chinese naval vessel turns up around Australia – for example, a Chinese intelligence ship monitoring US-Australia joint military exercises, which does occur from time to time – there has been an attempt to equate such actions with our own efforts, and that of the US, in conducting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions around China.

In other words, the impression given is that; we do it and they do it so there’s nothing to see here.

Such comparisons, however, are very misleading.

Australian ISR activities in the South China Sea include dropping sonobuoys from maritime surveillance aircraft to detect the acoustic signature of Chinese submarines, and then sharing this information with the United States to enable their hunter-killer submarines to trail and sink Chinese vessels at the outbreak of hostilities.

More significantly, Australia’s ISR activities contribute to what is a huge and bewildering array of American ISR capabilities that conduct hundreds of missions every year along China’s coast – a vastly superior force to anything China has.

And it’s not just about quantity. It is likely that Chinese capabilities are so substantially inferior to those of the US as to be in a separate, much lower category.

China argues that these activities violate peaceful provisions contained in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and that the United States is ‘preparing the battlefield’ in violation of the UN Charter.

These allegations may or may not be valid – it’s a contested area of international law.

The point is that China clearly feels threatened by these military activities near its coast – and understandably so.

Meanwhile, persisting with these operations raises the risk of a clash between American and Chinese, or even Australian and Chinese, ships and aircraft – which could be a trigger that spirals into a disastrous war.

There are, it would seem, good prospects for addressing these issues diplomatically.

This would require the will on the part of the United States to pull back from its more provocative military activities near China, and more broadly, greater accommodation for China’s defence interests in the South China Sea.

In return China would need to exercise greater restraint and a commitment to the peaceful resolution of sovereignty disputes it has with its neighbours.

We can’t be sure that there exists the will on China’s part to do so. But why don’t we try and find out?

Until and unless Australia disabuses itself of the ‘China threat’ discourse the possibilities for diplomacy will continue to be severely circumscribed.