Donald Trump is pressuring Australia to lift its military presence in East Asia and the Pacific as Washington turns the screws on China and North Korea. But some are questioning how much more Canberra can offer.
Trump made clear during a weekend summit with Australian leader Malcolm Turnbull at the White House that he expects America’s allies to shoulder a bigger share of the region’s defense, echoing his complaint of America’s disproportionate contributions to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato).
Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Australia are in America’s crosshairs in Asia. It is unlikely the Japanese will want to take on a more bullish security role, even if constitutional blocks are removed; Singapore has the will but not the capability; South Korea already has enough on its hands with it nuclear neighbor.
That leaves Australia, which is already walking a tightrope in its relations with China.
The Pentagon has made three key demands on Australia’s small but relatively powerful armed forces: support the escalation of US forces in the Western Pacific; help enforce tougher sanctions against North Korea, including new sanctions targeting North Korean shipping; and mount freedom-of-navigation operations in the territorial zones that China claims in the South China Sea after militarizing a string of islands and features.
It is already a done deal that the number of US Marines rotated through a base in Darwin will increase by 250 to 1,500 this year, thus accelerating a schedule that will eventually take their strength to 2,500. They will be supported by 10 Osprey planes and — perhaps more controversially — F-22 Raptor jet-fighters that some speculate could soon follow.
At this point the agreement is that Raptors will be sent only to exercise with Australia’s air force. But the most potent aircraft in the US’ defense arsenal is seen as a fulcrum of the power that Washington wants to project as it moves to reassert its hegemony over the Asia-Pacific. The question now is whether Canberra is willing to risk the wrath of Beijing.
More of the same can be expected from China if Australia sends ships to stop commodities reaching North Korea and then diverts them to the South China Sea. But it may all be academic: over-stretched and midway through a shake-up, Australia’s navy probably lacks the ability to respond.
Ranked the fifth-biggest naval force in the world at the end of the Vietnam War, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) was downsized in the 1970s as military planners grappled with how to defend a coastline of 36,735 kilometers on an island continent then with only 12 million people.
“Australia’s strategic thinking has long been polarized between continentalist and expeditionary schools of thought. According to these contrasting views, Australia’s defense strategy should be built around either protecting the Australian continent and the nation’s air-sea gap or contributing to multilateral missions abroad,” Captain Michael McArthur, director of RAN’s sea power research center, wrote last year.
“The first strategy would reorganize the RAN to … focus its assets on defense of Australia’s maritime approaches, while the second would redesign the RAN to supplement US-led international coalitions and would force Australia to piggyback off US capabilities for its own defense.”
With continentalists holding sway, the RAN was reshaped as a self-defense force based around coastal patrol boats. Only about a dozen large surface ships were kept; the RAN’s last aircraft carrier was scrapped in the 1990s.
However, changing political realities have forced a new mindset, and the RAN is belatedly being restructured as a two oceans fleet — Indian and Pacific — with a forward deployment capacity.
The biggest recapitalization since World War II will add nine frigates with an anti-submarine capability, 12 diesel submarines (doubling the current strength) and 12 offshore patrol boats. Three more destroyers have also been commissioned.
Two Landing Helicopter Dock ships have come into service since 2015. They can be used by vertical/short takeoff jets, but have been designed to deploy Marines, light landing craft, armored vehicles and a range of helicopters. Their potential won’t have escaped the US Pentagon’s attention.
By the time the last ships are delivered in the 2040s, the RAN will be one of the most modern and best-equipped fleets in the region, though its strength will be roughly the same: most vessels will only be replacement stock, so the navy will remain strongly dependent on US support.
Already heavily committed to coastal and offshore operations, the RAN will struggle to meet Trump’s demands unless the blue-water component of frigates and destroyers is greatly enhanced. Ships are now deployed to the Middle East and Afghanistan as part of NATO contingents and play a key role in Australia’s coastal surveillance operations, mostly in the north.
Australia provides naval cover in much of New Zealand’s thinly-secured maritime waters and is responsible for monitoring 10% of the world’s ocean surface under search and rescue covenants. It also has periodic naval patrols in the North Indian Ocean and South China Sea as part of Operation Gateway, a defense agreement with Southeast Asian nations.
Turnbull has backed sanctions against North Korea and appears to be taking a harder line on China’s militarized ambitions in the South China Sea. Yet his own National Security Committee can’t decide whether the country should pin its flag to Washington’s new Cold War mast or play the role of regional moderator.
While Defense Minister Marise Payne is staunchly pro-American, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop advocates a more independent stance that reflects Australia’s strong economic reliance on China. Turnbull has been talking tough, but is not known for taking big decisions on security, or anything else for that matter.
Peter Seo: you are so right. Eventually, our policy makers, I believe, will be forced to do just that. If Australian governments have lent elements of our armed forces over the years to assist the United States in its various military misadventures including Vietnam and Iraq, do not take that as indicitave that this country is any kind of vassal to the US. The US would defend Canada or Mexico regardelss om whetherm either wanted to be defended by it or not. But my country is of more obscure utility so Australian governments of the past have felt the need to "make Australia useful" for the purpose of "chalking up credits" with the US establishment that one day we might need to call upon in our own unforseen time of peril. The PRC is currently crucial to this country in economic terms whereas the USA is not. Just as the USA is crucial to our defence whereas the PRC is not.
Trump wants Rare Earths from Australia… He can’t start a trade war with China until he finds an alternative source like Oz’s Lynas Corp. China controls 85% of the world’s rare earths, Oz about 10%…
i couldn’t have described you any better. thanks
James Greaves
I agree with you but not for the same reasons. A petulant President can be replaced but not the hold the Jews have over America. With 8% of Congress Jewish and 6% holding dual citizenship, with almost all our Federal agencies and departments either headed by a Jew or has a strong Jewish presence. With a good deal of our banking system, media, to our University Professors under Jewish sway we no longer are that Christian based nation who promotes a sense of trust, we are a Jewish oriented nation whose focus is the wellbeing and preservation of Israel.
China is a big customer of Australia. If China didn’t defy international law regarding south china sea then it wouldn’t be such a big concern. Australia spruikes rule of law but isn’t backing it up.
Trump just wants stupid Turnbull to buy more American weaponry, like what he told the NATO countries to do last year. Trump is a shrewd business man, he knows Australia has made a lot of money from selling iron ore, natrual gas and other materials to China.
James Greaves
*We have reliiede upon the United States to be the guarantuer of our defence security and soverign independence ever since 1942 *
Are you hallucinating, or is that what they teach you in Aussie unis, ?
Back to reality,
Ever since 1942, the ‘world cop’ [sic] has dragged Oz into hundreds of
wars of aggressions, trampling on the sovereinty of 3/4 of the world communities.
http://www.us-uk-interventions.org/
* Our prosperity has been to a large measure enabled by the presence of the US Navy keeping the sea lanes open to ships of all nations*
Jeeze, now I know you’r hallucinating,
There’s one and only one country who’s been indicted by the ICJ for
fragnant violation os FON,
1984 mining of Nicaragua harbor.
1993, just one year before the Wasington sponsored UNCLOS came into effect, the hijack of Chinese freighter Yinhe on open sea,
Numerous incidents of ‘interdicting’ ships on international water to check for ‘contraband cargoes’, under the fraudulant mantra of WOT,
etc etc
*China is bent on avenging the 100 years humiliation by the West*
No doubt about it now,
You need professonal counselling , mate.
Man Lee: Donald Trump literally handed those disputed shoals and islands in the South China Sea into PRC soverignty on a silver platter when he publically made it clear to Rodrigo Duteree, Philippines president and (some say) aspirant dictator of his country, that the US would not fight a war with China over them. That signal that the leading Weatern power has become risk averse will surely embolden the PRC to further its great power ambitions. Oh sure! They all say that their intentions are peaceful but China, with a millenia long history of being the unchallenghed hegemon and dominant power of eastern Asia, now aspires to have its glory days of old back again (and to put its "century of humuliation" which memory still rankles Chinese, firmly behind it).
Michael: your observation is quite right. We have reliiede upon the United States to be the guarantuer of our defence security and soverign independence ever since 1942 – this country’s year of reconning. Our prosperity has been to a large measure enabled by the presence of the US Navy keeping the sea lanes open to ships of all nations bent on peaceful intercourse like free trade. In that sense America has been a good steward over the waters of the western Pacific. Unfortunately, with American power on the wane and that country now being led by an overaged juvenile with no interest in foreign policy (and precious little in domestic policy either) we no longer have reason to feel secure in the US embrace.
Stuart Budgen
No the West will not. Both Christian Europe and Christian based America are now under the stranglehold of Jews. That world which you speak of was created by and large by Christians and Christianity, not by Jews and Judaism.
Now that they control the Western world. They more than any other force will be the instrument of the decline of the West.
"The question now is whether Canberra is willing to risk the wrath of Beijing."
Why should it? Not only is China no threat, as Julie Bishop confirmed, but strong economic ties with China protected it against economic chaos during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Its GDP growth was not negative, but increased by 1.8%. This was true of the countries of ASEAN as well. China provides free economic chaos insurance available nowhere else. The next capitalist crisis, sure to come, will confirm this assessment.
"thirsting for revenge"
Where are you seeing this?
It seems America’s regional alllies are not as willing to take on China as Trump. Both Australia and India have a lukewarm response in committing to take on China the way Trump wants it.
I can see two reasons, possibly three. China and Iran. America is taking on China over the South China sea and sanctioning Iran because Israel wants that. Then there is North Korea.
US expect cousin Austrália to be its regional frontman to contain China…. Washington doesn’t really trust its Asian "allies " unless with massive military presence.
China seeks peace and prosperity through trade you say and in the same sentence you threaten Australia with World War 3 for standing by its allies and kinsmen.
So tired of people blaming America for everything..its an over simplistic attempt to reduce our integrity while disavowing our achievements.
Australia should never have allowed so much Chinese money into its economy and the rest of the western world is well aware of the price of owing to the Chinese enough to not get tangled in its web of influence.
The west will stand strong and maintain the world order that it created.
Australia would be unwise to incur the wrath of the dragon. The South China Sea is China’s pond, and no amount of American ‘freedom of navigation’ operations is going to change the facts on the ground- unless the USA is ready for WW3. Absent the fake news that is generated feverishly these days by the Western media, China seeks peace and prosperity via trade, and through the OBOR project. It is not in the Chinese DNA to dominate and be a hegemon. The USA has been the bad hegemon for half a century, and assumes a powerful new China will be as bad as how the USA has been.
Australia would do very well by being just not taking side, have its own independent foreign policy. No power is threatening Australia. Only Japan in the past saw actions in Australia.
Australia is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock in the ambition of the US to shore up its crumbling hold on the western Pacific. The hard place is a resurgent Peoples Republic of China; burgeoning, jingoistic and thirsting for revenge on the Western powers they blame for their "century of humuliation". We cannot rely on the United States but may God spare us from lapsing into thrall to the Peoples Republic.
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