QUARTERLY ESSAY 86 Sleepwalk to War

 

Correspondence

Malcolm Turnbull

SLEEPWALK TO WAR

Correspondence


Malcolm Turnbull

For many years Hugh White has argued that Australia should not assume the continued presence of superior American power in our region, but rather accommodate ourselves to the reality that China will become the hegemon in this hemisphere as the United States is in its own.

Whether you agree with White or not, these regular doses of realpolitik are invigorating but in this latest Quarterly Essay, White has strayed into sweeping generalisations and, frankly, “alternative facts” to embellish his argument. I was disappointed that a scholar of his standing would do so.

White’s description of Australian foreign policy is simply wrong – in his view we have been passive clients of the United States, always looking to our great and powerful friend in Washington to solve all our China problems. Thus he suggests decisions taken by my government to enact laws on foreign interference and the 5G network were inspired by the Trump administration. He adds that by 2017, “Turnbull had repositioned Australia as the most stridently anti-Chinese country in the region, and indeed globally.” He then goes on to say that in August 2018, I “tried to back-pedal with a major ‘reset’ speech at the University of New South Wales.”

Nowhere in this description does White consider whether the extent of foreign (mostly Chinese) espionage and other influence in Australia warranted new legislation, any more than he considers whether the ban on Huawei and ZTE from the 5G network was justified on security grounds. The reader is left to assume that White believes it would have been more prudent for Australia not to bother about these security threats.

The truth is that both the foreign interference legislation and 5G decisions were carefully considered, calibrated responses to real threats. Great care was taken, especially with the 5G decision, not to arouse unnecessary resentment, and our announcement was deliberately very low-key. We went to great lengths, without success, to find a way to mitigate the risks so that we would not have to ban Huawei. The decisions were taken by the Australian government in Australia’s national interest and were not dictated or encouraged by any other government, including that of the United States. Indeed, as I have described in my memoir, A Bigger Picture, we were ahead of the United States in our assessment of the risks posed by the very different architecture of 5G wireless technologies.

As for the “back-pedal” – the background to that was quite the reverse of White’s description. The foreign interference and influence legislation was introduced at the end of 2017. The Labor Opposition had not agreed to support its passage through the Senate and there was considerable pressure from China to encourage the government to drop it and for Labor not to support it.

Once Labor had agreed to support the legislation and it was passed, we needed to create an opportunity for China to elegantly discontinue its pressure campaign. So I gave a speech at the UNSW in August 2018 which did not take a backward step on any matter of policy, but was warm in its tone and context, pointing to the considerable achievements from Sino–Australian cooperation in science and research. This was designed as an opportunity for China to reset and was not a “back-pedal” in any respect.

While China’s strategy of becoming the dominant power in our hemisphere is unchanging, its tactics are thoroughly flexible and when one line of pressure or coercion fails to achieve its objective, China will switch to another approach but generally needs the appearance of a catalyst to provide the exit ramp. The recent change of government is a good example of this.

Where White is on firmer ground is in his criticism of the gratuitously belligerent bluster about China from Scott Morrison and, especially, Peter Dutton. The absurdity of some of Dutton’s comments about Taiwan was underlined for me in November 2021 at the Halifax Security Conference, when one American four-star after another wryly observed, “Your defence minister is more forward-leaning on Taiwan than our president.”

And White is correct in saying that this belligerent rhetoric was designed to pander to a political and media constituency in Australia, undermining Australian security and prosperity in return for some favourable headlines in the Murdoch media.

White makes the mistake of swallowing whole the rhetoric around AUKUS. He describes it as “a major shift in our strategic positioning.” It suited all of the signatories to AUKUS to exaggerate its importance. For Morrison and Dutton it created the appearance of doing something on national security, for Boris Johnson it was evidence that after Brexit “global Britain” was back, and for Joe Biden it was a counterpoint to the debacle in Kabul.

Shorn of the bravado, apart from the submarines AUKUS does not add up to much more than a continuation of the already intimate collaboration between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States on security matters, especially signals intelligence. It does not create an obligation in any of the parties to defend the others and is not, as White asserts, “a complete identification of our interests with Washington in dealing with China.”

Chinese propaganda has been ready to condemn AUKUS as (yet another) attempt to contain China, but in truth its net effect is more of an own goal. So far AUKUS has:

done little more than evolve the already close cooperation between the US, UK and Australia;

seriously undermined the trust France had reposed in both Australia and, more consequentially, the United States;

humiliated France’s “Atlanticists,” who support closer ties with the United States, and vindicated those, on the extreme left and right, who contend the “Anglo-Saxons” are utterly untrustworthy;

ensured Australia’s new submarine capabilities will be delayed for at least an additional decade – into the 2040s;

set back the prospects of closer cooperation between Australia, the United States and France in the Pacific; and, if that wasn’t enough,

created a precedent of transferring weapons-grade uranium to non-nuclear weapons states for the purpose of “naval nuclear propulsion,” which is not prohibited under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This has not only caused considerable concern among our ASEAN neighbours, but will also be used by Iran and other would-be nuclear-weapon states as a precedent to allow them to continue enrichment to weapons-grade levels. (There is a wealth of literature on this issue now: see James Acton’s “Why the AUKUS Submarine Deal Is Bad for Nonproliferation – And What to Do About It” and multiple speeches, interviews and papers by University of Texas professor Alan Kuperman, including his May 2022 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.)

Plenty there to celebrate in Beijing, and a reminder that just because you label something #standinguptoChina doesn’t mean you aren’t shooting yourself in the foot. Equally, just because Beijing is loudly protesting about AUKUS does not mean that it isn’t delighted with the chaotic outcome.

However, when it comes to the history of the acquisition of submarines, White is at his most unreliable. It is true that Tony Abbott was intent on buying submarines from Japan, although he did not share the full extent of his commitments to Japan with all his ministers, let alone the Australian public. However, it was Abbott in February 2015, following the “empty chair” spill, who announced there would be a competitive evaluation process to determine which country we would partner with to build the “future submarine.” The countries invited to tender were Japan, France and Germany.

I became prime minister in September 2015 and by April 2016 the unequivocal recommendation from our defence department and expert advisory panel was that we should proceed with the proposal from France’s Naval Group (then known as DCNS). This was based on the design of its latest nuclear attack submarine, the Barracuda, now known as the Suffren class. White says, “Their bid was extremely expensive – perhaps double the price of the competitors.” That is untrue. The costs of all three proposals were comparable. More importantly, the French proposal was head and shoulders above the others and the only one which offered a regionally superior submarine.

France also offered the prospect of transitioning to nuclear propulsion over time, but with low-enriched uranium reactors that do not present the proliferation risks that the weapons-grade uranium used by the US and UK navies does.

White goes on to assert that what really drove the AUKUS submarine move was “the growing awareness that the French project was a debacle, and the ever-increasing desire to align ever closer with Washington.”

I cannot speak for Morrison and Dutton’s motivations, but it is utterly false to describe the French project (more accurately described as an Australian–French–American collaboration) as a debacle. In fact, as was stated by defence department secretary Greg Moriarty in Senate Estimates, the program was not over-budget and, as revealed in defence department correspondence released under FOI requests, it was progressing well and the proposal from Naval Group for the next phase of work was regarded as “affordable and acceptable.” Moriarty assured Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, the CEO of the program, that this good news would be passed on to the French and Australian ministers when they met on 30 August – just two weeks before the Australian government terminated the contract.

White is scathing about the decision by Morrison to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from either the United States or the United Kingdom. I described my own reservations at length in a speech to the National Press Club in September 2021.

As Australia has no nuclear industry, let alone any ability to maintain or sustain a naval nuclear propulsion system, the submarines could not be safely operated other than under the supervision of the US Navy. This means an abandonment of Australian sovereignty.

The singular reason my government, and its predecessors, did not seek to procure nuclear-powered submarines was because it recognised that in the absence of a domestic nuclear industry, we would not be able to exercise sovereign control of such submarines. That was precisely the explanation I gave President Trump when he asked me why we were not acquiring US (as opposed to French) submarines.

The likely candidate is a US Virginia-class submarine, which is more than twice the size and with more than twice the ship’s company of the Attack-class (or Collins-class) submarines. It is very questionable whether Australia could afford these submarines, let alone recruit and retain the much larger crews required.

Naval nuclear propulsion does offer greater speed and endurance under water, but the vessels are not as stealthy while submerged as a modern diesel/electric boat. The ideal configuration for our navy would be diesel/electric boats for the shallower waters closer to Australia (such as in the archipelagic regions to our north and east) and nuclear-powered boats for longer transits in the Indian and Pacific oceans.

The upshot of proceeding with the acquisition of Virginia-class submarines from the United States will be that we will not be able to deploy our most expensive and lethal military capability without the active involvement of the United States.

So AUKUS as an agreement, absent the submarines, is not of great strategic significance. The engagement of “global Britain” in the Pacific, whatever that means, may well not survive the prime ministership of Boris Johnson. If you want a European, nuclear-weapons state that is a permanent UN Security Council member to partner with in the Pacific, it would make more sense to pick the one that is actually in the Pacific, not the one that withdrew its substantive military forces “east of Suez” more than fifty years ago. And it certainly made no sense at all to choose Britain as a new partner in the Indo-Pacific if the price of doing so was shattering the relationship with France.

At this stage, it may well be too late to restart the Attack-class program. While all the intellectual property has been retained, the workforce has been dispersed and would take many months to reassemble. Morrison has likely scuttled that option. The proposition that we could buy an “off-the-shelf” submarine from somebody else overlooks the fact that there is no such thing.

The best option at this stage is to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from France. Its production of six Suffren-class boats for the French Navy will be complete by 2030 and it would be feasible for that production line to continue to build six or eight boats for Australia, with one becoming available every two years. The submarines would be a more manageable size and cost. Their reactors would use low-enriched uranium – enriched to about 6 per cent, around the same level used in a civil nuclear reactor to generate electricity but far below the 90 per cent level needed to make a weapon. This would reduce the proliferation issues, and the Lockheed Martin combat management system could be readily integrated – much of that design work had been done for the Attack-class. In time, the front half of the boat could be built in Australia, with the back half containing the nuclear propulsion system built in France. This would give us nuclear-powered submarines from the early 2030s – a full decade before the Virginia-class.

From a strategic point of view, this would cement a partnership with France, a substantial power in the Indo-Pacific, with nearly two million citizens and extensive territories across both oceans. This strategic partnership, and the trust established between myself and President Macron, was seen as the foundation of France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, launched in Sydney at Garden Island on 2 May 2018 – an “Indo-Pacific axis,” in his words. It would not diminish our alliance with the United States – the submarines would be interoperable with the US Navy. The only barrier to this course of action would be politics in Washington and Canberra.

White is very critical of the “small target” strategy of the Labor Opposition in the lead-up to the May 2022 election. On the AUKUS issue he makes a fair point. Morrison gave Labor only twenty-four hours’ notice of the deal – despite having undertaken to the White House that the Opposition would be fully briefed and supportive. Labor, recognising the risk of a wedge and being framed by Morrison and his friends in the media as “anti-American” or “Manchurian candidates,” chose to go with the flow – sign up to the deal but without any time to receive, let alone consider, a fully detailed briefing. It wasn’t edifying, but I can understand the political calculation behind it.

The small target may well have helped Albanese and Labor win the election but it does create a challenge for the new government, which must first and foremost set out all the facts surrounding the submarine issue, including the way in which the decision was taken to terminate the Attack-class program, the options that remain available, their cost and timing. It must tell the truth about the consequences of operating submarines with weapons grade uranium–fuelled reactors and explain whether the US Navy will allow those submarines to be operated without any US involvement or supervision.

One of the leading figures in the US administration intimately involved in the AUKUS negotiations has been reported in Europe as having justified the deal as “getting the Australians off the fence. We have them locked in now for the next forty years.” Now, knowing the individual involved, I can, just, imagine him saying that in an ebullient way. But of course, Australia was never “on the fence” in the sense of being about to move away from the ANZUS alliance to a non-aligned status which was more accommodating to China. But it is significant that this report is widely believed in Europe, and that the AUKUS submarine deal is seen as an abandonment of Australian sovereignty.

It is noteworthy to recall that in President Macron’s speech at Garden Island on 2 May 2018 he spoke of how Australia, through its partnership with France, was developing a wider range of allies, pursuing a policy of sovereign autonomy and not simply relying on the United States. He was quite right; that was precisely my thinking, and my government’s strategy.

That is why I often talked about our seeing our region as not simply a series of spokes leading into the imperial capitals of Washington and Beijing, but rather as a mesh where we found our security, as Keating used to say, not from Asia but in Asia, by building closer ties with our neighbours, whether it be Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India or, indeed, France with its vast Indo-Pacific territories.

Hugh White’s bleak realism is as usefully challenging as it is dangerously mistaken, although his warning about not putting all our strategic eggs in one basket is a fair one. However, he is just wrong in saying that Australian foreign policy has been monotonously obedient to, and enthralled by, Washington.

During my own time, I displeased President Obama by not falling into line with his wishes on the treatment of pharmaceuticals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. With President Trump, of course, we went toe to toe on a refugee deal, as we did on steel tariffs. In both cases our officials would have been happier if I had taken a path of less resistance. Similarly we did not agree to our navy conducting freedom-of-navigation operations within 12 nautical miles of claimed Chinese “islands” in the South China Sea. And perhaps most significantly, when Trump pulled out of the TPP and everyone thought the deal was dead, we persuaded other countries, especially Japan, to stick with the deal and as a result it was revived and concluded without the United States.

Similarly, White complains that Australia has neglected the Pacific and says we must do more than simply tell our Pacific islands neighbours not to deal with China. Well, leaving aside Morrison’s shameful diplomatic failure in Solomon Islands over the past few years, our diplomacy in the Pacific has been very active. In my own time we persuaded Solomon Islands not to do a deal with Huawei for an international cable network, not by lecturing them on the evils of communism but by building a cable network ourselves and funding it almost entirely out of our aid budget. We did similar things in PNG and Fiji.

White urges Australia to “stop telling our Southeast Asian neighbours that US primacy is the only path to regional order and start listening to them about how they see China’s and India’s rises and how they are dealing with them.”

In numerous discussions with ASEAN leaders I have never spoken to them in those terms and always sought and listened to their views. Many of my predecessors have done so as well, as have most of our foreign ministers. During my time we stepped up our engagement with ASEAN with new agreements with Singapore, Indonesia and particularly important security assistance in the Philippines. In my experience most ASEAN leaders welcomed a continued American security presence in the region, recognised that China would seek to exert more influence as it became stronger, and saw the United States as a vital counterweight. Hugh White’s prediction that America will depart this region and leave it to China would fill almost every nation in ASEAN with dread.

For my own part, I believe the United States will remain engaged in this region for many years to come. The United States is as much a Pacific nation as Australia; it can never responsibly or rationally cede this hemisphere to an unchallenged hegemony of China.

White recommends that Taiwan be abandoned by the United States to Xi Jinping, and that Australia should have nothing whatsoever to do with helping America defend it. But on that basis Ukraine would have been swallowed by Russia, which would now be moving on the Baltic states and on its way to restore the Soviet empire. And if Taiwan were to be overcome, how does that buy peace in our region? One nation after another would acquire nuclear weapons to make itself unassailable. If the risks of nuclear conflict are high today, the withdrawal of the United States in the manner White contemplates would send them sky-high.

The truth is we are living in a time when the pace and scale of change are without precedent. We have to expect, as Margaret Thatcher said, the unexpected. And that means that Australia must have a thoroughly independent foreign policy. The more independent it is, the more influence we have around the world, in our region and indeed in Washington and Beijing. As an ASEAN foreign minister once said to me “If we see you as a rubber stamp for Washington, why would we waste time talking to you? Easier just to talk to head office.”

As far as the defence of Australia is concerned, we must be able to defend ourselves and that means that all of our defence capabilities must be sovereign Australian ones, able to be maintained, sustained and deployed by Australia without the approval or supervision of any other nation.

Of course we look to our allies to support us in times of need, as we will support them, but we cannot look out across the decades to come and assume those allies will always be there.

Malcolm Turnbull

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This correspondence discusses Quarterly Essay 86, Sleepwalk to War. To read the full essay, subscribe or buy the book.

This correspondence featured in Quarterly Essay 87, Uncivil Wars.


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