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Between 2016 and 2018, Australia’s perceptions of China underwent a significant reality check, with global implications. Australia has been a first mover in pushing back against Chinese foreign int...

In the process of bringing together this special issue of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, we were struck by how frequently the term ‘national security’ is used and abused, by both ...

India’s power and interests continue to grow in the Indo-Pacific region and globally, yet its national security policymaking approaches have not kept pace. These may have been barely adequate for India’s twentieth-century experience as a regional power tending towards strategic restraint, but currently constrain India from being able to harness its considerable national capabilities to protect larger and more complex interests. This article identifies five key obstacles to a more coherent and effective approach to national security: lack of staffing depth in policy and intelligence; weak structures for ensuring inclusive consultation in policymaking; a disempowered military when it comes to strategic decisions; a lack of security expertise among civilian officials and politicians; and an absence of whole-of-government guidance in making and expressing policy. Many reforms are necessary, but two enabling early steps are identified and recommended: the creation of a Chief of Defence Staff position t...

Australia’s Cocos Islands and Christmas Island are remote islands with potentially great significance for Australia’s strategic role in the eastern Indian Ocean region and the wider Indo-Pacific. This paper explores the growing militarization of islands throughout the Indian Ocean in the context of growing strategic competition in the region. It then considers the strategic value of Australia’s Indian Ocean territories and makes recommendations about the further development of defense infrastructure to potentially support Australian air operations in Southeast Asia and the eastern Indian Ocean. Upgraded facilities on both Cocos and Christmas would provide Australia with valuable leverage in its relationships with regional defense partners and the United States.

Malcolm Fraser's book Dangerous Allies (Fraser with Roberts 2014) has rightly been taken to task, even by broadly sympathetic readers, for the way it caricatures US foreign policy (White 2014). It ...

The 2013 Australian Defence White Paper categorically termed Australia's zone of strategic interest the Indo-Pacific, the first time any government has defined its region this way. This raises questions about what the Indo-Pacific means, whether it is a coherent strategic system, the provenance of the concept and its implications for Asian security as well as Australian policy. Indo-Pacific Asia can best be understood as an expansive definition of a maritime super-region centred on South-East Asia, arising principally from the emergence of China and India as outward-looking trading states and strategic actors. It is a strategic system insofar as it involves the intersecting interests of key powers such as China, India and the USA, although the Indo-Pacific subregions will retain their own dynamics too. It suits Australia's two-ocean geography and expanding links with Asia, including India. The concept is, however, not limited to an Australian perspective and increasingly reflects US, Indian, Japanese and ...

Ever since Robert Kaplan's 2009 essay in Foreign Affairs, it has been fashionable in foreign policy circles to trumpet the importance of the Indian Ocean to the global strategic and economic order....

With fast-growing economies, defence capabilities and international interests, China and India are becoming increasingly active as contributors of public goods in international security, such as anti-piracy operations, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, capacity-building, stabilisation and peacekeeping. This article examines the drivers and characteristics of China's and India's growing roles in contributing to security public goods. It also considers the extent to which modernisation of these rising Asian powers' conventional military capabilities is suited for these roles; the conditions under which China and India might expand such activities; and some of the possible consequences of enhanced Chinese and Indian roles in protecting the commons using military means. Those effects include potential impacts on the management of transnational security problems, the extension of Chinese or Indian geopolitical influence, the worsening of Sino-Indian strategic competition, and the ways other powers migh...