Wednesday, 4 September 2024
85 years ago today, England and France declared war against Germany. What was to follow was both calamitous and fortunate; tragic yet heroic.
Freedom loving people owe everything to this generation of leaders and lifters, who carried the day in World War II against oppression and aggression.
Their victory, after two great wars within three decades, was followed by a determination to prevent such conflict happening again.
This gave birth to what we now, somewhat bureaucratically, refer to as the global rules based system. The United Nations charter of 1945 has subsequently been complemented by a maze of additional well intentioned agreements and organisations
But at its core, this new system of global cooperation was a plan to avoid a future world war or another global conflict. In the words of the UN Charter: “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.”
On one score, it had limited success. For decades the Cold War raged and nuclear weapons proliferated, with real wars like those in Vietnam, Korea or Afghanistan sacrificing many more lives, in addition to those also lost in various revolutions and uprisings.
Yet a world war was avoided, prosperity proliferated across open economies and, alongside the fall of communism, a burst of demilitarisation occurred and new cooperative ways of keeping the peace were pursued in trouble spots.
Blue beret wearing peacekeepers gave real meaning to the ambitions of those UN founders.
On September 11, 2001 terrorism burst the bubble of peaceful optimism that generations like mine had embraced. The end of history was in fact the start of something insidious.
Initially the global rules based system responded in ways that its founders perhaps envisaged, but the nature of another long war in Afghanistan and a more contested conflict in Iraq tested that resolve.
While support for these conflicts waned, and ideologically or religiously motivated terrorism expanded its network, new threats have grown aplenty.
A variety of non-nuclear weapons states have pursued nuclear capabilities, with ill intentioned regimes in North Korea and Iran showing scant respect for efforts to contain their ambitions.
Simultaneously a new mark of leadership has emerged in superpowers old and new, namely Russia and China.
Today we find a rising disregard for the peaceful ambitions and rules that followed the aftermath of World War II, with growing global consequences.
Russia has brought bloody state on state, land based territorial war back to European shores with its invasion of Ukraine. Firstly by creeping acquisition, which left unchecked or deliberately appeased, has only led to an attempted full scale invasion.
Iran sponsors terrorists waging war or attacks from bases including Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, prompting massive human suffering in a war with Israel, and major threats to global trade through the Red Sea.
North Korea and Iran enthusiastically sell arms to support Russia, while Chinese components and funds also help to sustain Russia’s war effort.
China has chosen to use its welcome economic growth, which has lifted millions out of poverty, to pursue the fastest military build up of our time. Under Xi Xinping China has crushed freedoms in Hong Kong, aggressively pursues territorial claims in the South China Sea, and sought to militarily intimidate Taiwan.
In a signal that can hardly be read as well intentioned, concurrent with this escalation of conflict these four countries have pursued joint military exercises or defence collaboration. Russia and China have declared a ‘no limits’ friendship.
Risks in the Euro-Atlantic are clearly joined to risks in the Indo-Pacific. While we should strive to understand their many nuances and differences, we should equally be alert to the more impactful risk they pose when joined together.
Elsewhere, civil wars continue to take a heavy toll on human life in places like Myanmar, the Maghreb region of North Africa, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, and the Congo. Effective peacemaking or peacekeeping initiatives seem to no longer enjoy international momentum.
The sum of all that we face today is a multilateral system that is as broken now as at any point in its history.
The paramount objective of preventing war is transparently failing. Conflicts are being waged and supported, actively or tacitly, with an aim of securing broader geopolitical advantage.
The actions or ambitions of some, accompanied by the understandable and growing distrust of others, now fuels a rapid rate of global military build up.
To avoid a repeat of 85 years ago, deterrence must be more effective today than appeasement was then.
We must deliver deterrence via example, via defence capabilities, and via effective diplomacy.
To deter future aggressive actions we must firstly demonstrate the will to prevail in today’s conflicts. Ukraine must win by securing a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.
While strong support has prevented Ukraine from falling, as so many initially predicted, excessive caution has potentially prevented it from prevailing.
The sliding doors moments in this war include debates about enforcing a no-fly zone, delivering longer range missiles, and providing air combat capabilities.
Now we have the ongoing debate about the limits imposed on Ukraine’s use of the weapons provided to it.
While nobody wishes to see a broadening of this war, nor is it acceptable to just let it drag out until the last Ukrainian.
Ukraine needs to be given the ability to effectively defend itself by striking at Russian military targets. This can only enhance Ukraine’s chances of victory.
The mere existence of current limits on Ukraine send a worrying signal to tyrants, which will only be compounded if those limits are maintained.
To help deter Russia and other global disruptors from future acts of aggression supporters of Ukraine must be strong, and be seen to be strong.
If Russia emerges with more Ukrainian territory or stronger restrictions on Ukrainian sovereignty, such as their right to join institutions like NATO, then Russia will have had a victory. Maybe not the scale of victory Putin desired, but a victory nonetheless.
To protect the world Ukraine, not Russia, needs to be the unequivocal victor.
Ukraine’s success will make us all a little safer; while any defeat would leave us all a little more vulnerable.
To be able to deter future aggression by setting an example today, Ukraine must be put in the strongest possible position.
Secondly, in addition to deterrence via example, we must also create deterrence via effective defence capabilities.
Such capabilities go to investment, innovation and cooperation.
Back in 2013 the then newly elected Liberal led government in Australia began delivering upon a very prescient election commitment: to restore defence investment to two per cent of GDP, after the previous Labor Government had allowed it to fall to the lowest level since World War II.
Our investment has made subsequent capability decisions possible, including being a sufficiently credible partner to convince the United States to agree to share their nuclear powered submarine technology with another nation for only the second time in history.
The birth of AUKUS in 2022 is built upon the trust established through 63 years of US – UK cooperation on submarine technologies, alongside the closest of alliance partnerships.
It is a recognition that we all need to invest in creating more effective deterrence. And that that investment needs to boost both our defence capability and our defence industrial capability.
AUKUS, alongside other immediate and longer term defence capability requirements, demands us to go beyond the two per cent budget investment.
It also demands us to think big about cooperation. Removing trade restrictions through ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) reforms is an early win for why AUKUS matters.
Industry and governments should be seeking to build upon this breakthrough in the exchange of equipment with subsequent breakthroughs in the exchange of people.
AUKUS partners also need more transferable security clearances, and specialist visas, so that our human capital is as well placed as possible to deliver our much needed security capabilities.
Within Pillar II of AUKUS, and beyond, we must ensure that amongst democratic nations we are at the cutting edge of defence capability and strategy.
Other nations are knocking on the door of AUKUS while the Indo-Pacific 4 nations of Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia knock on the door or NATO.
Where national values, capability interests and security confidence sufficiently align, we should welcome other partners to join specific projects within AUKUS.
And while we should neither expect nor seek for NATO itself to have a hard military presence in the Indo-Pacific, we should be looking to embed the best of strategic cooperation, interoperability and knowledge sharing between NATO and the IP4.
Liberal democratic market economies come together through the OECD to advance economic cooperation between like minded nations of common interests.
NATO is as close as it comes to us doing likewise in a security paradigm and, although we should be clear on the limits of any expanded NATO partnership, there is genuine value in a broader and more formalised partnership involving the IP4 and other likemindeds.
This can be especially beneficial in the new borderless defence domains of cyber and space, where neither attack nor defence are necessarily matters of territorial borders.
While such cooperation can, and should, strengthen the adequacy of our defence deterrence, it naturally overlaps into diplomatic deterrence too.
A key point of creating deterrence via example and via defence capability is to then give room for diplomacy to do its job.
Talks, in and of themselves, rarely produce peace when the conditions for conflict are already present. But talks from positions of shared strength, or shared potential loss, can avert conflict. Hence the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.
In addition to the cooperative opportunities that exist between NATO and the IP4, we should be building other pillars of diplomatic deterrence through overlapping networks of minilateralism.
AUKUS and the Quad are two examples of such Australian engagement.
This cannot just be amongst NATO or OECD nations. To the contrary, we must be further looking to strengthen diplomatic partnerships with all who share an interest in respect for sovereignty and stability.
The so-called Global South cannot be left to be disproportionately influenced or led by those who drive divisions based their own pursuit of power, or on the exploitation of perceived injustices, or use financial means to distort or coerce current decision making.
The agency and sovereignty of each nation, big and small, deserves respect, so long as they respect each other. This should be the guiding principle that binds us.
All nations should be brought together to stand against what is happening to Ukraine – or to The Philippines – lest the same ever occur to them.
Our diplomatic efforts, accompanied by the deterrence framework I have outlined, must aim to breath life back into the primary founding objective of the UN to avert global war.
Aggressor states or oppressor states cannot be tolerated and, unlike 85 years ago, they should not be appeased.
We must deter them from such aggression towards – or oppression of – their neighbours, or any other nations.
As King George VI said in this city, 85 years ago today, we must avoid “the primitive doctrine of might” and pursue “all hopes of peace and of the security of justice and liberty of nations.”
At great cost the great generation prevailed. Let us be willing to again pay the price, but be strategic enough to avoid ever having to do so.