Michael's post about the importance of great power politics in Afghanistan for wider stability is compelling, and I pay him the sincerest of compliments for his lovely phrase, 'the fog of proxy war'.

But I'm still not persuaded that Afghanistan is important to the management of major-power strategic competition. His argument works perfectly for the premise on which it is based:

Great power competition in the twenty-first century will be different because of the depth and extent of the dependence of national economies on the global economy.

But my view of the matter is based on the fear that this may prove to be wrong. Michael's premise embodies a prediction that the global economy will keep working much as it does today, which in turn assumes that strategic competition between major powers over coming decades will be kept within limits which ensure that it does not disturb the free, open international order that evolved in the late 20th century.

I think there is a serious risk that it will become much more intense than that; intense enough to disrupt the current global order and reverse the globalisation of the last few decades. That would be much worse for everyone, including Australia, than the genteel strategic competition Michael envisages. 

Managing Afghanistan would be a priority in Michael's benign world, but it is a sideshow in addressing the deeper risks I am talking about. The main source of those larger risks is the inability of the current order to accommodate China's growing power, and the reluctance of others, especially the US, to make the changes needed to fix that. 

One might ask whether we can't manage both risks. I fear that at present we are not managing either.

Photo by Flickr user ajburgess, used under a Creative Commons license.

Sam and Crispin have each put a finger on a delicate spot. First to Sam, whose question is one I often ask myself. The answer of course is, 'Yes, it can be wise, and good policy as well, to try to save the US from starting a dumb war rather than following them blindly into it.' 

But that is not the choice we face today in Afghanistan. Today we are already in a war which I believe is pointless, but we no longer have the choice about whether to get involved or not. The question we do have to answer is: now we are involved, do we press on?

I find this a very hard question, with strong arguments on both sides. I take the alliance with the US very seriously, and I believe that our standing as an ally has, for the last few decades, depended a lot on our willingness to support the US in small wars in the Middle East. This has worked for us in the past, and I think if we pulled out of Afghanistan now it would have a disproportionately damaging effect on our standing in Washington. 

I like Michael's suggestion that Coalition strategic objectives in Afghanistan should address what we want to avoid rather than on what we want to achieve. People are often uncomfortable about negative statements of purpose, but in strategic policy they are often the simplest and most direct way to say what we mean. For example, I think Australia's core strategic interests in our own region are best expressed in terms of what we want to prevent.

I also like his argument that the most important thing we want to avoid in Afghanistan is for it to become a focus of strategic competition between major powers in the new Asian strategic order. 

Several major powers will shape Asia's order in coming decades, but lets focus on China and India, which seem the most important to Afghanistan. The argument then runs like this: as India and China grow, their strategic relationship will become critical to the Asian strategic order. A weak Afghanistan could destabilise that relationship by offering a focus for strategic competition between them. We want to avoid this, and we therefore have a strong interest in helping Afghanistan become the kind of robust state that does not invite strategic interference from big neighbours. 

This is my kind of argument. The reasons usually given for why Afghanistan matters strategically to Australia are pretty unconvincing. In contrast, stable relations between Asia's major powers matters to us a great deal, and will matter more as they grow. But I'm not sure it follows that avoiding problems in the emerging Asian order provides a compelling reason for Australia or its coalition partners to commit the resources required to make Afghanistan a robust and interference-proof state.

Two reasons. 

I agree with Jim Molan about the 'near-constant' mistakes made in Western military interventions to stabilise weak and failing states. Yes, governments almost always commit fewer forces than needed, and yes they almost never commit the non-military elements needed for a comprehensive solution to instability. 

But I do not accept Jim's implied conclusion, that we should simply be willing to commit enough forces — whatever it takes — to succeed.

It's a matter of balancing ends and means, and I think the balance seldom works out in favour of interventions. We have little or no reason to expect that Western countries like Australia have interests engaged in places like Afghanistan which are big enough to justify committing sufficient resources for long enough to offer any serious likelihood of success. 

That reflects two judgements. First, to offer a reasonable chance of success would require an effort, military and civilian, much larger than we have been willing to make, and for much longer. Second, our interests in places like Afghanistan are not important enough to our overall security to justify that kind of effort. 

I like Graeme's description of China as 'status quo-tidal', but I'd like to offer an alternative way of looking at the question of whether China is a status quo or a revisionist power. I think it all depends which 'status quo' we mean. If we mean the stable, open international order that Asia has enjoyed for the past forty years and that has been so essential to China's economic transformation, then yes, China is absolutely a status quo power – it wants to see all that preserved and strengthened. 

But if the status quo we mean is US primacy in Asia, then China is quite clearly a revisionist power. I have no doubt China seeks an end to US primacy in Asia.

Of course, for the past forty years, the two conceptions of status quo I've mentioned here have been synonymous: stability in Asia has depended on US primacy, and no one has been able to imagine any other way to keep Asia peaceful. That view is still widely held, especially in America. On this view, any challenge to US primacy is a challenge to peace and order – revisionist, in other words.

But in Beijing they see things quite differently. They see the linkage between Asian order and US primacy as contingent, and transitory. They find it easy to imagine a future stable Asian order underwritten not by US primacy but by their own, or perhaps by some other arrangement to share power among Asia's major countries. 

One reliable way to get things wrong is to argue that people will not do something because it would be dumb. I spent most of 2002 blithely predicting the US would not invade Iraq for exactly that reason. So I'm about to take a big risk and say that, notwithstanding Naval War College Review piece that Sam draws our attention to, I’m still sceptical that China will build serious aircraft carriers.

My reason is simple: it would be dumb for them to do so. Carriers cost a lot, and I don't see what use they would be to China. In any conflict with a submarine-capable adversary, the risks of losing a carrier would outweigh the benefits of deploying it. And almost every potential adversary has or will soon have submarines capable of doing the job — the US, Japan, India, Australia, Singapore, even Indonesia, maybe Vietnam. 

We know the Chinese probably have a pretty good idea how potent subs can be against carriers, because they have put a big effort into improving their own ability to deny their approaches to US carriers that way. And China can be under no illusions about the potency of America's submarines. 

For some time now I have argued that we are heading into an era in which many Western Pacific states will have a formidable capacity for sea denial – the ability to stop an adversary operating surface ships effectively – and none will have sea control – the ability to operate surface ships in the face of a determined enemy. 

I think the Chinese understand this, and will not waste money on capabilities that can't be used without sea control. Much smarter for them to bolster their own sea-denial capabilities — more submarines, in other words. The corollary of this argument is that those who worry about China's naval build-up should pray they build carriers, which would be so easy to deal with.

Photo by Flickr user Breff, used under a Creative Commons license.

Ed. note: This is one of two end-of-year posts we didn't get time for in December.

The highlights of my professional reading in 2009 have been two excellent books on the history of Australian strategic policy, a bit of classic strategy and some contemporary history.

My book of the year is Neville Meaney's Australia and World Crisis 1914-1923, which explains in detail the strategic rationale for Australia's involvement in our greatest and deadliest war. It offers a powerful antidote to the common assumption that Australia's strategic history is nothing but a series of naïve and craven commitments to other people's wars, by explaining how policymakers of the day saw Australia's interests. It's a great book. 

My second find was David Bird's J.A.Lyons, the tame Tasmanian: Appeasement and Rearmament in Australia 1932-39. I've always been interested in the 1930s because it is such a caution: Australian strategic policy has never been worse than it was then – at least so far – and it's important to see what went wrong. Bird's book explores Lyons' approach to the great strategic questions of his time and convincingly argues the case for Lyons to be seen as a serious policymaker with a good grip on the issues of his day. Much of it resonates today.

I agree with Sam and Michael that there were some fine passages in Obama’s Nobel Prize speech. The 'somewhere today' peroration worked especially well. But unlike them, I found the speech unimpressive overall, for two reasons.

First, Obama's argument for the necessity of armed force in an imperfect world was preferable to the kind of naïve pacifism that one most often hears at such occasions. But it sets the bar too low to praise a president for not talking rubbish. And some of what he did say was pretty flaccid:

Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.

This is idle rhetoric that directly undermines the acknowledgment of human imperfectability that Sam likes best about the speech. But it’s worse than goopy. As I've observed here before, the tragedy of international affairs is that we do need to make choices between justice and order. Immodest attempts to build a perfectly just, perfectly orderly world inevitably lead to less justice and more disorder. This is the reality that Realism is all about. 

At the start of the year I thought Rudd would face real, public pressure from Obama to send a lot more soldiers to Afghanistan, and allow them to do more dangerous tasks there. But it has not happened. No one seriously believes that Australia is making a significant military contribution in Afghanistan, and yet Obama has not pushed us to do more.

I don't understand why.

My reasons for thinking Obama would press Rudd were simple. This was now Obama's war, and he could not withdraw from it. To sustain a credible effort he would need to send a lot more troops of his own, and Americans would not like that. They would dislike it less if he pushed allies to carry more of the load too. And one of Obama's strengths was that, with all his charm, he was meant to be better at getting allies to help then Bush had been. 

I was pleased to get an invite to last week's Asia-Pacific community (APc) conference (co-sponsored by Lowy), but a bit surprised too, because I am a registered sceptic about the whole idea. And I am bound to say that I came away after a day-and-a-half's discussion no less sceptical.

It is not that the proposal cannot fly. On the contrary, it seems quite plausible that at some stage the leaders of Asia's major and middle powers, including the US, will meet without the Latin Americans who have crept into APEC, and without the smaller Asian states. This, after all, is the core of the APc concept, and everyone who thinks they will be included in the APc can see at least some merit in it. We all like to be part of an exclusive group. It's just a matter of working out who to exclude.

The harder question, however, is what this group of leaders will do when it meets. On this issue the conference was instructive, but not reassuring. The essential argument that a new forum is needed — advanced by Kevin Rudd, among others — runs like this:

Asia faces many new, more complex and more pressing problems today than ever before. Current regional institutions are inadequate to deal with them. They are all interconnected so they must be managed by national leaders who can take the wide view, and (unstated but implicit) a smaller group of leaders of more powerful states would manage these problems better than a bigger group.

Propositions like this are easy to agree with at first glance, but do not stand up so well to scrutiny. Does Asia face graver problems today than it has in the past? Are current institutions unable to deal with them? Are leaders' summits really an effective way to galvanise action on complex questions? And are smaller, exclusive groups always the best way to make progress? 

The Joint Strike fighter (JSF) is a hard project to love. But let me admit to Sam that I am one of those who, without financial incentives, remains persuaded that the JSF is probably the right combat aircraft for Australia, simply because, for all its faults, I'm not sure there will be anything better. 

First, the faults. The JSF will be more expensive, less capable and slower to arrive than promised and planned. This was always entirely predictable. The JSF project set targets for cost and schedule which defied long-term trends in combat aircraft development, trends now so well established over so many projects over so many decades that they resemble laws of nature. 

1. Asia got there first. The Cold War ended in Asia between 1972, when Nixon went to China, and 1975, with the fall of Saigon. That meant the Soviets had lost China to the US, and their gains elsewhere in Asia were limited to Vietnam. The rest of Asia, once so promising, would now be drawn rapidly into the Western-led globalised economy, and Russia would be left behind. 

The sole Soviet effort to retain a strategic foothold in Asia beyond its own territory – Camh Ranh Bay – was a strategic and operational liability that became a demonstration of weakness, not of strength. Moreover, the immense resources required to hold their Chinese front added to the economic and military strain on Moscow, and no doubt hastened the Soviet collapse in Europe. 

2. The Soviets missed their chance. They could have settled with America in the mid 1970s. After Vietnam and Watergate, with something like nuclear parity and the US eager for détente, had Brezhnev called it quits and attempted to consolidate the status quo, America would have done the same happily enough, in which case the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall might still be in place today. 

But instead, he pushed his luck in strategically marginal places like the Indian Ocean and even Central America, backed Gorshkov's foolish attempt to challenge the US at sea, and then went into Afghanistan, which was too close to real US interests in the Gulf for the US to ignore. 

Sam has responded with characteristic sobriety to my suggestions about how to make the nuclear abolition agenda look like real policy rather than political posturing.

His reservations would be correct if what was needed here was a methodical step-by-step approach. Step-by-step is just the thing for getting the details right, but sometimes you need to start by establishing the principle – the broad objective towards which the detailed step-by-step routine is supposed to be taking us. 

Something of the difference between principles and details is captured by the old story about glamorous socialite and George Bernard Shaw, which came to me again via the Jerusalem Post.

As anecdote has it, George Bernard Shaw once asked an attractive socialite whether she'd sleep with him for a million pounds. After she answered in the affirmative, he offered her a mere 10 shillings. Outraged, she railed: "What do you take me for? A prostitute?" Shaw reputedly replied: "We've already determined that. We're just haggling over the price."

Is anyone serious about nuclear abolition? Maybe we can devise a test to find out. In his John Gee Memorial Lecture this week (sponsored jointly each year by Lowy and ANU), Malcolm Fraser made some intriguing suggestions about how the movement to abolish nuclear weapons could gain real political and policy momentum. One idea he threw out especially caught my attention, because it seemed to offer the scrap of litmus paper we need to tell posturing from policy.

I have been sceptical that Obama is seriously committed to nuclear abolition because he has not yet confronted his own electorate on the issue in detail, as he must if he is to move beyond pious platitudes. Fraser noted that Obama has a golden opportunity to do just this through the Nuclear Posture Review, now being prepared. In particular, he could use the Nuclear Posture Review to commit the US to a 'No First Use' (NFU) policy.

American arguments about NFU go back almost as far as nuclear weapons themselves, and are very much on the table again today (the latest issue of Survival has a good forum on the issue, though it's for subscribers only). But I hadn't reflected before on how powerful an NFU declaration by the President would be in moving off first base on the road to abolition, and what leaders' willingness to take this first essential step can tell us about their real intentions.

Sam's excellent op-ed over the weekend reminds us that Europe has more going for it than most Australians are inclined to admit.

I suspect that's thanks to a little bit of English heritage we find hard to shake off. We underestimate Europe because we still tend to look at it from across the English Channel, unthinkingly adopting Britain's inability to come to terms with the political and strategic miracle on their doorstep. 'Miracle' too strong a word, you think? Not when you consider how Europe today would look to those who watched the coming of war only 70 years ago last month.

But I think I'd go a bit further than Sam in some ways in appraising Europe's strategic position. Europe's military weakness is seriously exaggerated. Taken together, the Europeans have vast forces, many of them very sophisticated by world standards. Of course, they have never operated together as a single force, but in NATO they have the basis to do so. Moreover, Europe has in abundance the deeper foundations of strategic power: economic, demographic and technological. If Europe chose, it could be a global military power of the first rank.

Of course Europe has so far chosen not to behave as a strategic power. Some see this as a reflection of inherent weakness in its political institutions or inherent pacifism among its people. I think it is much more likely to be simple absence of need. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been willing, even determined, to uphold the global order on terms quite congenial to the Europeans, and has shown itself quite unwilling to allow the Europeans any independent say in how the world runs. 

The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

- From the Nobel Committee's citation for this year's Peace Prize.

Apparently the Nobel Prize Committee takes President Obama's claims to want to rid the world of nuclear weapons seriously. I think they are wrong to do so. Of course he has given a speech about it, in Prague. But was that serious policy, or political posturing? The difference is critical. Serious policy comes with a price tag, carefully explained and justified to those who will have to pay it. Political posturing promotes the agreeable illusion that we can all get something for nothing.

Barack Obama's vision of and work for a world free of nuclear weapons falls into the later category.

Is this unfair? Well, imagine for a moment that he was really serious about abolishing nuclear weapons. What would he do first? I think the answer is plain; he would set out to convince his own people that they would be, on balance, more secure without nuclear weapons than with them. No American president can lead world opinion on this issue unless he can lead American opinion.

Persuading Americans of this would be hard. No one knows how we could transition to a nuclear-free world. Those who advocate total disarmament tend to imply that we could find a way to do it without risk. That is utopian. In reality, any process of disarmament would carry significant risks. Moreover America, like other nuclear powers, would lose the global weight and influence that nuclear weapons now provide. It would be perfectly possible to argue that the benefits of disarmament to Americans would outweigh those costs and risks, but they have to be acknowledged and quantified first.

So we should only take Obama seriously on this when he stands up in Washington and explains to his own voters the costs and risks of nuclear disarmament, and how they can be managed. Don't hold your breath.

Photo by Flickr user zionsiva, used under a Creative commons license.

Graeme Dobell’s post on the Balibo Five makes the perfectly valid point that journalists covering wars must take risks, and they are justified in doing so because they perform an important function. For that reason he rejects the idea that the Balibo Five were wrong to be where they were and that they therefore in some sense deserve what happened to them. I completely agree. 

But that does not quite exhaust the question of what approach we should now take to these deaths. One can regard them as a tragedy and a crime, and still have doubts about how far we should sacrifice wider national interests in bringing those responsible to justice.

The main debate over the AFP's decision to investigate and presumably prosecute those responsible for killing the Balibo Five has pitted those who think it will damage Australia's relations with Indonesia against those who argue that securing justice takes precedence over maintaining good relations with Indonesia. 

Like Sam, I admired Paul Monk's essay on Phillip Bobbitt, but I was less convinced than Sam by Paul's claims for the value of Bobbitt's concept of the market state in understanding the world today.  I must confess that I find Bobbitt not so much hard to come to grips with, as Sam does, but hard to read at all. There are many reasons for that, but most fundamentally I have doubts about the very nature of his enterprise. Those doubts are both ontological and epistemological. 

Bobbitt is making a big claim. He proposes that the move from nation state to market state is a big, abrupt change in the basic construct of the international order, which has clear and momentous implications for the way international affairs will unfold over coming decades and even centuries, and for the policies governments should be adopting now. That is, he claims predictive and normative power for his theory.

Let's start with the ontology. Everyone agrees that globalization changes the way states perceive their interests and the consequent balance of costs and risks of different kinds of behavior. But this is not new. The nation state has never been the autonomous actor of international relations theory. States' conduct has always been framed by the consequences of their actions for relations with others, and the factors that shape their judgments of cost, benefit and risk are always shifting.

Bobbitt argues that this particular set of shifts is epochal. The structure of the argument goes like this: for the past twenty years most states (the most powerful ones anyway) have not engaged in old-style strategic competition or conflict. The explanation of this fact is the emergence of a completely new kind of national entity, and the disappearance of an old one. We can therefore be sure that this is not a transitory but an enduring change, and predict the future, and reshape our policies, accordingly.

Defence White Papers are complex documents, and alongside the big issues there are often smaller nuggets to be gleaned. Here are a few that caught my eye.

1) The paper contains a strong assertion of the enduring importance of nuclear weapons to American power and the global order (paragraphs 4.16 and 4.59), which seems somewhat at odds with the Prime Minister’s high-profile drive for nuclear disarmament through the international commission headed by Gareth Evans.

2) There is a curiously pungent statement on national missile defence systems (paragraph 9.103) which appears on any plain reading to commit the government to oppose America’s current National Missile Defence program. I wonder how this will go down in Washington? It implies that the US should accept a mutual nuclear deterrence balance with China — something that I agree with, but which US policy remains rather ambivalent about.

3) A new twist to the way Australia describes China’s future international role. Hitherto Rudd has echoed the US in using the ‘responsible stakeholder’ formula, which has always seemed too weak to me, because it does not recognize that China is not just one of the gang but one of the leaders. The White Paper (paragraph 4.25) uses a much better phrase — ‘Leading Stakeholder’ — which I have not seen before. I think it is rather neat, but again I am not sure how Washington will react.

4) Much less neat is the odd language in the paper which suggests that Australia would use armed force to support internal stability in Indonesia. More...

To me the most important feature of the Defence White Paper is a pervasive ambivalence about how quickly Australia’s strategic circumstances are changing and how fast we might want to change our defence capabilities in response. I explore this ambivalence in an oped in the Oz today, but there only touch on what is one of the most interesting and potentially important ideas in the new White Paper — the revival of warning time.

One major strand of argument in the White Paper is that we can defer consideration of more substantial changes to our force posture in response to Asia’s transformation until the nature and consequences of that transformation are clear. It suggests in several places (for example paragraphs 3.17–3.19) that if circumstances deteriorate Australia would build additional forces, specifically mentioning the possibility of buying more submarines beyond the 12 proposed (paragraph 9.9).

In fact when we get to the bottom lines, the key difference between the Government’s policy as set out in the White Paper and the policy I proposed in A Focused Force is that they believe that Australia can and should defer big changes to its defence posture until the need becomes clearer than it is today, and I do not.              

We touched on this topic in our defence debate last week, where I said that I am very attracted to the idea of deferring decisions as long as one can, but that I’m not sure we have the luxury of assuming that we will get clearer signs than we have today of strategic change in time to build the forces we would need to respond. 

This is not a new question in our defence policy. The concept of warning time was critical to the defence policies of the 1970s and 1980s, when we argued that we could expect a decade’s warning of the development of threats which went beyond the relatively low level contingencies that we planned against back then. I sense in the new White Paper (especially in paragraph 3.14, though where they say ‘preferably’ I’m sure they meant ‘probably’) a willingness to assume that a concept that worked back then remains valid today.

I think that assumption is invalid, because circumstances have changed. More...

Here are parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten on our defence debate.   

Peter's post on hedging and Crispin's on asymmetry and stability both make interesting and important points. Let’s start with Peter, who suggests that we should build a force structure today that hedges against future uncertainty by covering a wider range of capabilities in less depth than I suggest in A Focused Force.

He argues that a more diverse force would allow us to deal with the substate problems we know we have today, and provide a basis to expand our capacity to manage interstate conflicts if it turns out we need them in future.

This is a very important idea, and one I should have addressed more explicitly in my paper, so I’m very grateful to Peter for raising it. As he knows, it is not a new idea: it’s the old concept of Warning Time and Core Force that did such sterling service in the 1970s and 1980s, but is none the worse for that.

In essence he argues that we do not need to decide yet whether to build forces on the scale I suggest to meet the risk of conventional conflict in a more contested Asia. Asia’s future is not yet clear, and so the need for these forces is not yet clear either, and we can wait until they are clear (or clearer) before spending big dollars. In the meantime we can spend smaller amounts to reduce lead-times, and leave more money for the forces we need to meet current tasks.

To start, I absolutely agree we need to address the needs of stabilisation operations, and I suggested in ‘A Focused Force’ that if we want to meet the objectives we now proclaim through such operations then the Army needs to grow four more battalions. So, Your Honour, I’d plead ‘not guilty’ to the charge that my force focuses only on one kind of risk. More...

Here are parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine on our defence debate.        

As promised, this post picks up on some of the other very stimulating responses to my Focused Force paper that I could not cover in Tuesday’s effort. I might start with Raoul’s kind but also insightful piece. He focuses on the centrality of the elusive concept of self-reliance in the argument I am making about Australia’s defence choices in the Asian century. This is of course absolutely correct, but I’d like to suggest a change of terminology.

I personally shy away from the expression ‘self-reliance’ in looking at our future strategic choices, because I think the expression is best preserved to describe the special and distinct degree and mode of dependence on the US that evolved in the decades after Vietnam as apart of what we’d now call the Defence of Australia (DoA) era.

Self-reliance was integral to the DoA construct, and the concept was absolutely embedded in our confidence in sustained and uncontested US primacy in Asia. The policy we may wish or need to adopt as US primacy fades will have little resemblance to that, and I think we risk understating the differences if we use the same expression to cover the very different demands of the Asian century.

So I prefer to talk of ‘independent strategic weight’, by which I mean our capacity to achieve strategic results by the actual conduct of military operations (as opposed to the symbolic use of armed forces and military operations as diplomatic symbols). 

The challenge of building forces with the independent strategic weight to support a range of interests extending beyond the defence of Australia in a more fluid and contested Asia is very different from the task of achieving self-reliance in the defence of Australia within the framework set by US primacy. So it’s better to use a different expression for it.

This brings me to Graeme’s wise and pithy observations. Two points here. First, I’d just like to restate my dissent from the widely-held view (that Graeme shares) that I am a China Hawk. As I wrote on Tuesday, it is no part of my argument that I expect China to threaten Australia directly as it grows stronger.

Australia’s security hitherto has not depended on China’s weakness but on Asia’s order, and if we become less secure in future it will not be because of China’s strength but because of growing disorder in Asia. China will shape our future security because its growing power is driving a change in Asia’s order which may or may not produce more instability, but if it does that will not necessarily be China’s fault. I cannot stress too strongly how important this point is to my analysis, and how different it is from the ‘China threat’ argument.

My second point relates to Graeme’s wry suggestion that I am making a deliberately overstated ambit claim when I say we would need 18 submarines, 200 JSF and 12 infantry battalions to achieve our current strategic objectives in a more contested Asian future.

He hints that in the grand tradition of Defence budget bids, I am calculating that an argument for 18 might deliver a decision for 12, which is what I really intend. As an observation about ERC tactics Graeme is perceptive as always, but I need to assure him that there is no hint of exaggeration in my numbers. More...

Since Hugh White launched his Lowy Institute Paper A Focused Force last Wednesday we have hosted a debate on Australia's defence policy. Here are parts one, two, three, four, five, six and seven.    

Many thanks for the many excellent and stimulating comments on my paper over the last few days from many old friends and colleagues. Here I want to respond especially to elements of those from Peter Leahy, Paul Monk, Jim Molan and Rory. I hope Fergus will indulge me to respond to some of the others in a few days.

I’d like to start though with a general point.  The key message of my paper is that China’s rise has big implications for Australia’s defence needs. Many people have assumed this means that I think China’s rise poses a military threat to Australia. Actually the paper quite specifically repudiates that idea, on page 2: ‘The prime concern is not whether China poses a direct military threat to Australia as its power grows.’ Those italics are in the original. 

So let me clear up any misunderstanding. I simply do not know whether China will pose a direct military threat to Australia over coming decades or not. I certainly do not assume it will. But more importantly, I do not believe there is any way of knowing whether it will or not. And I do not think we need to know that in order to consider Australia’s future defence needs.

This misunderstanding is important. Like many others, I find the ‘China threat’ hypothesis unconvincing, and if it was the basis of my argument then it too would be unconvincing. But the misunderstanding is also instructive, because the tendency to assume that I must believe China to pose a threat reflects deep-seated and deeply-mistaken intuitions about the nature of strategic risk and the way our judgements of strategic risk should inform defence decisions.  

The intuitive view is that strategic risk arises from the existence of a potential adversary who has the capability to attack us and may form the intention to do so. On this view, defence planning must pay attention to capability because intention can change quickly. Any conceivable adversary whose capability grows must be seen as a growing threat. That is the logic behind the ‘China threat’ hypothesis.

This way of seeing strategic risk is beloved by many defence planners, but it is at best incomplete, because it overlooks the importance of the wider international setting (what I call ‘order’), which does a lot to shape the conduct of states and the likelihood of armed conflict.

The international order helps to determine whether intentions to use force will emerge. Individual intentions can change quickly, but international orders are often — not always — pretty robust and enduring. So our view of potential threats can and should be based on the nature and durability of the international order which frames countries’ actions, as well as on their military capabilities and specific intentions.

Strategic risk is primarily shaped by regional orders. Some regions — like the Middle East — have very unstable orders in which the use of force is quite probable, and in which capability therefore translates pretty directly into threat. Others, like Western Europe, have very robust orders in which the use of force between states is virtually unthinkable. 

Now Asia is an interesting case. More...

Like Sam, I think the current problems in Pakistan provide some important perspectives on Australia’s current choices about Afghanistan (which are also neatly explored by Graeme). But unlike Sam, I am deeply sceptical that there is anything much we outsiders can do to help. The West has found it hard to do anything much to help 30 million Iraqis or 32 million Afghans. Why should we expect to be able to do much in a country of 170 million?

It’s a big country. How exactly could we help? Certainly not by applying force; we can dismiss out of hand the idea that a Western coalition could apply sufficient force to compel a settlement of Pakistan’s endemic problems and impose peace and stability. Nor by applying money: there is no evidence that peace and stability is there to be bought. That leaves ideas: the seductive suggestion that the West can offer expertise which, if learned and applied by the Pakistanis, would allow them to sort the mess out themselves.

I think this is an illusion. Outsiders have nothing to teach Pakistanis about Pakistan’s politics and the best way to manage the endless balancing between ethnic, regional and socio-economic groupings. Nor do I believe we have anything to teach Pakistanis about how to conduct tribal warfare. What exactly do we think we know that they do not?

Well-meaning people say we must do something. But that is not true: we should not do anything that does not have at least a modest chance of success. There is no law that says there has to be a solution to every problem. I suspect that our only option for Pakistan is to find ways to manage the consequences of a breakdown which we are in all probability powerless to avert. That means, first and foremost, keeping an eye on those nuclear weapons.

So unlike Sam, when I look at Pakistan I do not think that maybe we should be sending troops there rather than to Afghanistan. Instead it reinforces my doubts about what we are trying to do in Afghanistan as well. Even if we were to succeed in Afghanistan (which I do not for a moment expect), it would make little difference to our long-term security, because Afghanistan is not the real problem. The hard reality is that there is in all probability nothing we can do to prevent dire problems in either place.  So we need to learn to live with them.

Photo by Flickr user takebackPakistan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Sam mentioned to me last week that he, like Jim Molan, was surprised that I see Iran as a key factor shaping US strategy in Iraq. So perhaps I should explain, because on my reading, Iran is central to American policy, and because the key to understanding any strategic question is to make sure we understand the political purposes that military operations are intended to serve.

My starting point is the simple observation that American policy in the Gulf has deep roots that go back long before 9/11. I would trace them to the end of the Second World War, when the collapse of the European protectorates and the rise of US investment in and dependence on Gulf oil supplies combined to give Washington big interests in the Gulf for the first time. 

It protected those interests through cultivation of a pro-US Iran. As the natural regional major power, Iran was well-placed to play this role – until the Shah fell. Since then, the primary aim of US policy in the Gulf has been to protect its interest there from the threat it perceives from Iranian regional hegemony.

Iraq was always been central to this goal, because it was the only Gulf power with the strategic weight to contain Iran. That meant that after Iraq was destroyed as a functioning state in 2003, the US had two reasons to stay and look after the mess. More...

I will always defer to my old friend and colleague Jim Molan on operational and tactical questions, but I think the key strategic question about the surge still remains to be answered. How precisely did the increase in US forces and the change in operational concepts contribute to the political changes we have seen? 

It is easy to assume that because the political changes followed the surge they were caused by it. They may well have been, but until we can see what the mechanism was, and really understand the causation, we should not jump to that conclusion. Such caution is important not just to people like me who don’t want to be proved wrong in our scepticism about the surge. 

It is important because many sensible people – including I gather Jim himself – are now keen to extrapolate from Iraq to Afghanistan, and say that if the surge worked in one it will work in the other. Well, we’d need to be very clear about whether, and if so how and why, the surge worked in Iraq before taking that step. And yes Jim, I am a sceptic about Afghanistan.

Well, thanks to Edward for coming to the defence of we amoral realists.  Actually, I have a little sympathy with Scott’s views of realism, if by realism one means – as most IR types do – the strange cold conceptions of Morganthau. 

For me, such stuff is very much a product of its time: in the aftermath of the Second World War and under the shadow of the Cold War, these guys wanted to correct the excessive, and in the end catastrophic, idealism of the inter-war era, and provide a more ‘realistic’ basis for managing relations between states. But they went way too far the other way, and produced an account of the way the world works which is not only amoral, but itself highly unrealistic.

So let’s skip labels for a minute and look at cases. Scott cites Australia’s decision to acquiesce in Indonesia’s incorporation of East Timor after 1975 as an example of amoral decision-making. It’s a telling example. But let me use it to demonstrate Edwards’s point - that ‘realists’ may simply be making different moral judgements than non-realists. 

Those who argue that acquiescence was wrong point to the terrible injustices done to the East Timorese by Indonesia. These cannot and should not be denied. But those who argued in favour of acquiescence had moral considerations of their own. They placed a moral value on preventing the development of a hostile relationship with Indonesia, because such a relationship could have led to war between us.  More...

An excellent op-ed from Tom Switzer in The Australian yesterday does a nice job of exploring the Iraq sceptic’s response to the progress seen in Iraq since the surge. As one of those who, like Tom, argued the surge would be unlikely to succeed, I appreciate his thoughtful acknowledgment that we were wrong. But perhaps I’m not yet quite ready to be as gracious as he is:

• It’s not clear to me what difference the surge itself – the insertion of another 30,000 troops — made to the situation. No doubt it was part of the picture, but many other factors have been at work to ease Iraq’s security situation and energise its political evolution, including important changes in the political calculations of the Sunni tribes in Anbar and elsewhere, and of the various Shia groups.
• It’s not clear that the progress of recent months has done much to ensure Iraq’s progress towards stable, just and effective government. There are many more ways yet for Iraqi politics to go bad. So, welcome as the developments of the past few months have been, it’s too early to proclaim success.
• Even if recent political progress is consolidated, I’m still far from sure America can withdraw forces from Iraq as swiftly as Obama has promised. Since 2003, there have always been two reasons why the US had to keep large forces in Iraq. The need to contain internal violence was only one. The other is the need to contain Iran. That remains a key US strategic objective, and it cannot be achieved with a few thousand troops confined to a handful of bases.

My hunch is that America’s Iraq story has a long way to go yet.

Like Sam, I’ve been struck by Kevin Rudd’s use of warlike metaphors to describe our economic problems, and like him I suspect there is more political artifice than policy analysis in the choice of imagery. International Relations scholars in recent years have amazed themselves by discovering what the rest of us knew all along: if leaders can indentify an issue in the public mind as a national security crisis, it changes the public’s attitudes both to the actions the leaders take and to the leaders themselves.

Ask John Howard. His later prime ministership perfectly displays both processes at work. First, calling something a ‘national security issue’ delegitimizes debate about the government’s policies. Second, it transforms images of the leader from mundane politician to national hero, and shifts the qualities the public looks for from diligence and competence to strength and decisiveness. Look at the way Americans voted for Bush in 2004.

Most importantly, what the IR scholars call ‘securitisation’ (not to be confused with the financial manoeuvre of the same name that seems to have landed us in this mess) encourages bad policy, because evidence, analysis and contestability go out the window in favour of instant action. 

Securitisation may begin as a deliberate political ploy, but political leaders are temperamentally predisposed to believe their own rhetoric, and they easily begin to believe that the crises they are managing are so important that doing something is more important than doing something sensible. Hence the 'Get out of my way, this is too important to think carefully about' tone of the last few days.

I often think of my work as an attempt to infuse into defence and strategic policy some of the orderly, evidence-based policy discipline most often found in economics.  So it’s a bit depressing watching the influence flow the other way. I’ve written about the perils of ‘national security leadership’ at greater length here.

Photo by Flickr user JulianBleecker, used under a Creative Commons license.

Rodger’s excellent post on Israel’s deterrence after Gaza prompts two linked thoughts, one about deterrence, the other about Hamas and Gaza.

Deterrence first. In explaining what he sees as Israel’s failure against Hamas, Rodger made the interesting point that deterrence against non-state actors is difficult ‘because their calculus of rationality differs markedly from that of state actors’. I’m not sure about that. I think the reason non-state actors are harder to deter has more to do with target sets than psychology.

Physically, states have a lot to loose, whereas non-state actors do not. I’m pretty sure that Iran can be deterred from using any nuclear weapons it acquires, whereas I’m equally sure that al Qaeda cannot, because it’s very easy to imagine the target set for retaliation against Iran, and very hard for al Qaeda.

On the psychological side, the differences are much more elusive: More...