PETER TESCH

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship JS Sazanami sails behind Royal New Zealand Navy ship HMNZS Aotearoa while conducting a dual-replenishment at sea with HMAS Sydney (left) and USS Howard (right) during a Multilateral Maritime Cooperative Activity (MCA)in the South China Sea. Picture: Department of Defence

10 hours ago

In his inaugural address on January 20 this year, US President Donald Trump declared that “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before”, adding “America will be respected again and ­admired again”.

Nine months on, at least one of those promises, with its characteristic hyperbole, is being fulfilled.

America certainly is “far more exceptional” in its rhetoric and ­behaviour. What’s troubling, though, is that Washington directs this at allies as much as, if not more than, at adversaries.

Despite avowing China to be the biggest strategic threat to US interests, the Trump administration is hitting its Indo-Pacific partners with punitive tariffs; gutting aid programs throughout the region; sowing doubt about its ­commitment to Taiwan’s security; making nice with authoritarians from Pyongyang to Moscow; and pressuring allies, including Australia, to lift defence spending, preferably on American weapons and platforms.

The President’s speech to the UN General Assembly on September 23 was a litany of unsubstantiated boasts and grievances. His claim that America was “blessed with … the strongest friendships” sat awkwardly with his lambasting of Europe, the UN itself, and the retribution he pursues against those who criticise him or oppose his policies.

This aggravated American exceptionalism has long-term ramifications for Australia’s national security interests.

Through whim and volatility, and without obviously extracting any quid pro quo, America is ­surrendering the collective Western strategic bridgehead which, supported by staunch allies like Australia, it had fought hard and paid dearly to win and sustain for many decades.

This is the backdrop to Anthony Albanese’s first formal meeting with Mr Trump, on October 20. It underscores the need to switch from Australia’s traditional “gotcha politics” to more of a ­domestic “unity ticket” on defence and national security. This is ­logical, given the largely shared ­assessment of our deteriorating strategic circumstances that informed both the Coalition’s Defence Strategic Update 2020 and Labor’s inaugural National Defence Strategy 2024. The first biennial update of the latter is due by min-2026.

US expectations of us are the least of many compelling reasons to exert greater national effort to build sovereign defence capabilities and enhance our self-reliance, mindul that we cannot aspire to autarky. A genuinely bipartisan approach would give industry, investors, and our education and training sectors confidence to make the long-term commitments necessary to increase our industrial depth and sustain the workforce which our military and its related ­industrial ecosystem require.

We don’t have sufficiently sober and honest public conversations about the strategic threats we face and their implications for our national security and resilience. This is the prerequisite for the social licence government requires to spend what we must to ensure proper military and industrial preparedness, commensurate with the tasks we expect the Australian Defence Force to perform now, as well as in an ever more uncertain future. For some, the dissonance emanating from Washington is just the “outrage machine” of performative US domestic politics in overdrive, with America again bluntly exercising the economic and security leverage it has had, but not always applied, since the end of the Cold War.

But our adversaries are emboldened, reassured in their conviction that the West is in terminal decline and democratic governments are too timid to take hard and costly decisions that provoke short-term public discontent.

Even as they try to avoid disfavour in DC, governments across the region feel driven to hedge the risk of future US unreliability by increasing their economic and political engagement with China.

Among those attending last month’s Victory Day parade in Beijing – where the Chinese Communist Party distorted history by appropriating the nationalist Kuomintang-led struggle against Imperial Japan – were the presidents or prime ministers of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and India.

Hefty US tariffs on India have cast doubt upon plans for a meeting of Quad leaders from Japan, India, Australia and the US this year. Meanwhile, a quartet of leaders from Russia, China, India and North Korea shared a platform as Chinese offensive ­military capabilities were ostentatiously on show in Beijing.

The US brand is tarnished. Exhorting anti-wokers of the world to unite, Washington is quitting forums and defunding programs that have helped project American global soft power since the end of World War II. Where American and allied voices once shaped the strategic narrative, there is a growing void, which Moscow and Beijing are filling with their hypocritical accusations of Western double standards and neo-imperialist ­ambitions.

In Australia, raucous AUKUS antagonism, spurred and blurred by anti-Trumpism, risks becoming a dishonest ideological pretext to jettison our most important and enduring security partnership. Those who assert that we are investing in a soon-to-be redundant capability seem to know better than the combined navies of 40 countries that operate sub­marines, including the six with ­nuclear-powered vessels (five of which are permanent members of the UN Security Council).

Pillar Two of AUKUS will expand the combined industrial base of the three nations, with benefits of scale, cost, more resilient and trustworthy supply chains, and ­increased interchangeability of common platforms and weapons systems. Even leading US defence companies acknowledge the constraints of their national manufacturing capabilities and are calling for swifter and less-encumbered sharing of technologies.

Although not as showy as nuclear submarines, this work is making progress and is vital to enhancing both the ­lethality and survivability of our respective forces and their ­industrial bases. However, while our militaries remain deeply intertwined, we cannot assume the old verities that have underpinned the alliance for seven decades will endure and suffice in future.

The political dalliance with “100 years of mateship” has run its course. Americans have always been hard-headed about their national security; we must adopt a similar attitude, reinforced by faith in our ability to bolster self-reliance and reinforce political and industrial partnerships with other accountable governments that share our strategic world view.

These partnerships are harder to build in the Indo-Pacific, which lacks the relative homogeneity of Europe and the longstanding ­unifying bonds that NATO and the European Union have provided for almost 70 years.

Nonetheless, Australia is forging stronger military-industrial ties with key regional players, including through the selection of Japan’s Mogami-class frigates and South Korea’s Huntsman self-­propelled howitzers and ammunition carriers. This builds on our deepening political collaboration and joint military activities, in particular our combined naval transits in the South China Sea with a diverse array of allied navies, including Canada, The Philippines, Japan and France.

As we contend with Trumpian transactionalism, we must remind Americans and ourselves that Australia reliably has carried its weight in this relationship through multiple wars and conflicts.

Solid bonds of trust, forged in shared adversity and endurance, underpin the intensity and intimacy of our military interoperability, which rivals that of any of America’s allies.

Joint military facilities like Pine Gap served the vital security interests of both nations – and the collective West – throughout the Cold War. Even as the nature of conflict and contemporary security challenges evolves, they remain a strategic asset for the Alliance.

Our geography helps to disperse US forces and maintain a more persistent regional presence, with reliable access to repair, maintenance and overhaul facilities for their militaries for both the US and other allies.

This shared commitment to common strategic goals has enabled successive Australian governments, at comparatively modest cost to our GDP over many decades, to create a sophisticated and highly capable, if relatively small, professional military.

Consequently, all Australians have benefited from proportionally more spending on health, ­education and other priorities.

The government’s recent announcements of a $12bn investment in the HMAS Stirling naval base and Henderson naval precinct near Perth, as well as the $1.7bn for the Ghost Shark uncrewed underwater vehicle, are welcome and not before time. They should not be downplayed in the febrile fulminating which passes for public commentary about our defence. Even so, we are far from where we should be by the measures we have set ourselves.

Our biggest challenge is that of scale. A nation of 27 million people, with a professional military of roughly 60,000 people and a manufacturing base accounting for just 5 per cent of GDP, must think ­realistically about what can be achieved and how quickly, and at what sustainable cost.

The task of enhancing and protecting Australian sovereignty, national resilience and social cohesion increasingly must fall upon our own shoulders and wallets.

Better integrating our defence industry into regional and global networks is vital if we are to build and sustain greater self-reliance and contribute proportionally to the collective AUKUS industrial effort.

As British analyst Keir Giles wrote, having “hit the snooze button for a decade”, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe finally has woken up and is scrambling to bulk up its defence industrial base. The signals and rhetoric are encouraging, but the pace is slower than the urgency of the times demands.

Conclusion of the Australia-EU Security and Defence Partnership, possibly this year, will enable Australian business to bid in part­nership with European companies for access to the new €150bn ($267bn) Security Action for Europe (SAFE) loan instrument for joint procurement.

European firms like Thales, Rheinmetall, Kongsberg, and SAAB are Australian defence primes, whose products are meeting not only Australia’s military needs, but are being exported to other countries. The EU became a strategic partner of ASEAN in 2020 and launched its EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-­Pacific in 2021. It signed security and defence partnerships with Japan and the ROK in 2024.

A new tier of innovative and resilient European nations, notably Poland and the Nordic and Baltic countries (the “NB8”), has crystallised. Deeply integrated into the Ukraine defence innovation ecosystem and, like Australia, having strong connections to the US ­defence base, they are outward-looking, activist, and clear-eyed on China and Russia.

We have much to gain from greater collaboration with them in military technologies like drones and other autonomous systems. We also can benefit from comparing our experience of authoritairans’ increasing efforts to subvert and suborn democracies and sabotage critical infrastructue.

The Partnership for Indo-­Pacific Industrial Resilience, which was launched as an American initiative in 2024, supports greater collaboration between Europe and Australia. It aims to create a trusted ecosystem among industry, capital providers, and defence customers to foster information exchange, technical co-operation, supply chain resilience, and co-production and co-sustainment. Its 14 members span the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions and include key European countries and Australian partners like Japan and the ROK.

Regardless of the outcomes of the 2026 US congressional midterm and 2028 presidential elections, we should not expect the status quo ante to be restored. The task of enhancing and protecting Australian sovereignty, national resilience and social cohesion increasingly must fall upon our own shoulders and wallets.

So, as the Oval Office beckons for the PM, the question is whether we can rise above partisan politicking and unite society, investors, and industry in a properly funded, truly whole-of-nation effort to this end. If we can, allies and adversaries alike will take heed, and Australia will be the beneficiary.

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Peter Tesch is a former deputy secretary of Defence and Australian ambassador to Russia and Germany. He is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU Centre for European Studies and holds similar positions at the ANU National Security College and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.