On 16-17 October 1987 the ANI held the fourth, and what would prove to be its final, Seapower Conference. It was held at the Australian National University with around 200 attendees. At the time in Defence policy there was a particular emphasis on self reliance, as such the ANI President, Captain Allan Brecht, and his Council selected “The Maritime Challenge to Industry Beyond the Year 2000″ as the conference theme.
While there were no international speakers this time around, the event drew a distinguished panel of speakers including His Excellency Air Marshal Sir James Rowland, the Administrator of the Commonwealth of Australia, Dr Coral Bell from Australian National University, Vice Admiral Mike Hudson, the Chief of Naval Staff and an array of speakers from Defence industry.
Three conference papers will be reprinted over the next three weeks. The first, this week Dr Bell’s assessment of the “Strategic Setting” will be reproduced. Next week Vice Admiral Hudson’s address on “The Maritime Defence Requirement” will be reprinted. Finally Mr G.D. John Director Australian Chamber of Manufactures paper on “The Challenge To Industry”. Some of the content of these papers will show how much has changed since 1987 and also how some of the issues appear perennial.
The Strategic Setting
It is of course a bold venture, not to say a rash one, to attempt to look 20 years into the future of so shifting and ambivalent a set of relationships as those of international politics. The crystal ball grows cloudy, just in the areas for which one needs clarity. Nevertheless, the lead time for major weapon systems is ten years and much longer for radically new systems like the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). So policy planners need and must play prophet, though not usually for a point so far in the future as I am contemplating in this paper.
For its purposes I am attempting to assume myself in the position of a medium senior official in the Department of Foreign Affairs, in the first decade of the 21st Century, putting together a preliminary draft of what will eventually go to Cabinet as the strategic basis of Australia’s Defence Policy 2010.
I will know of course that, before the volume is ready for Cabinet, there will be many revisions and large inputs from assorted analysis in the Defence Department and the Intelligence Community.
So, though this first approximation can incorporate a personal vision of the world, the final version must and will represent a consensus of sorts – the highest common factor or the lowest common denominator of a varied range of expert and not so expert opinion.
My assumption is that the kind of exercise I am now embarking on will in due course be undertaken by the Canberra bureaucracy, and the volume will in due course reach the Prime Minister of that day, perhaps Mr Kim Beazley, and the Defence Minister of that time, much the same as it does at the present.
That assumption of course rules out some worst case possibilities, which pessimists would assume to be probabilities. It rules out the likelihood of global nuclear war, within the 20 years time span that we are leaping over, and it rules out a transformation for the worse for the current bureaucratic political system in Australia.
It also, in effect, rules out a best case analysis, since if the worst case would be nuclear war, the best case would be a situation of so much international peace, harmony and security that strategic assessments would become irrelevant and unnecessary.
In view of the present state of the world, that strikes me as so wildly improbable that there is no need for providing a justification for neglecting it. And, as for the first case, there doesn’t seem much point in forecasting for the horribly transformed, despairing wreckage of a world that would be left after nuclear war.
Thus, we are left with a middle range of probabilities – a world diplomatically and strategically much like the contemporary one, but with considerable demographic, economic, political, sociological and technical changes, most of which are already in the pipeline.
That may seem an unduly conservative approach, but I think one can show its justification simply by transposing the whole exercise back into the past. If in 1967 one had been obliged to offer a prediction for the world of 1987, the current reality could have been approximated reasonably well by extrapolating the tendencies becoming visible in the middle sixties. So in effect I am assuming a rate of change not less than in the past 20 years, but not necessarily much greater.
There have of course been 20 year patches of diplomatic history, which have seen total transformations of the society of states, for instance, as between 1913 and 1933, or between 1938 and 1958. But the centre pieces of those transformations, the great explosions generating such rapid change, were of course World Wars. As I said earlier, I’m ruling out that worst case possibility as rather pointless as far as practical planning is concerned.
But I also regard it as genuinely unlikely. The reasons for that optimism have to do with the contemporary world system, that Canberra policy planners have to see as the overall context for Australia’s security problems – that is the global balance of power. The local context, which is the regional balance of power, will be looked at presently.
First, the central balance. Well, despite the pessimists, on the historical evidence of the past four decades, the global balance of power which defined itself during the years 1946-43, has been more stable than any time since the 19th Century, certainly much more stable than the wretched inter-war balance, such as it was, which lasted 20 years from 191910 1939.
Relative stability is evidenced by the fact that the central balance powers, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, have avoided serious hostilities with each other through a 40 year time span. There have, of course, been many wars in those four decades and, according to the UN, more than 20 million dead, in or as a result of military action. So they have certainly not been years of peace.
Moreover, there have also been many, many crises during that time, and both the super powers have had to take defeats and set backs to their respective spheres of interest and influence – the United States over Cuba, Vietnam and Iran – the Soviet Union over Yugoslavia, China. Indonesia and Egypt.
Furthermore great changes have occurred in the society of states as a whole with the dismantling of the Western colonial empires and the multiplication of new sovereignties, so the society of states now runs to three times the numbers it did in 1945.
All that means is that the system has been subjected to enough batterings and adjustments for us to say that its survival must betoken an intrinsic sturdiness. If the world had lived mostly uneventful years in the four decades of the present balance, one might argue that the balance might be loo fragile to survive the probable tensions and frictions of the next 20 years and therefore one ought not to assume that it will be working as much as at present.
I would concede the visible emergence of many current tensions and frictions. My argument is that they are, however, less serious than those which the system has already survived, and that they will not necessarily undermine the basic elements which have sustained it to date.
Now, those elements in my view are three in number, reasonably prudent crisis management, in a situation of alliance stability and overall mutual nuclear deterrence. All three are undergoing changes, it’s true, but not on the whole, in my view, in damaging directions.
In fact the first of them, the current technique of central balance crisis management, has evolved quite steadily through the last four decades, though more rapidly in the period since 1962. And, to the surprise of many people, it has been not only maintained but developed during the Reagan years. It will continue to require reasonable prudence in the chief decision makers thrown up by the American and Soviet political processes and obviously nothing can guarantee that. But to my mind a system which has survived a decision maker with so short an attention span as Mr Reagan, and had earlier survived as incautious or erratic a one as Kruschev, and so paranoid a one as Stalin, must have something going for it. Looking at the way the two political systems are at present evolving there seems little reason to assume that either will throw up future decision makers more dangerous or unpredictable than some of those we have survived in the past. And even if it does, the growth of mechanisms like the nuclear risk reduction centres, which have just been agreed upon by Washington and Moscow, the improved “hot line”, the “confidence building measures” in Europe, and some of the arms control measures at present being contemplated, ought to help maintain restraint and induce prudence.
It might seem easier to make the case of the second element of the theme I mentioned, the central-balance alliance relationship, in undergoing changes which will reduce the level of stability it has maintained since the late 1940s. That stability has depended, as far as the Western side of the balance is concerned, essentially on the close diplomatic and strategic connection between the United States and Western Europe, a connection formalised in the North Atlantic Treaty, and consciously and steadily signalled to the adversary ever since the treaty was negotiated in 1948 and signed in 1949. In the jargon of the strategists, those decisions of the late 1940s meant that the security of Western Europe has been closely and deliberately coupled with that of the United States, both at the nuclear level and that of conventional forces, for the subsequent four decades. But by this year 1987, both “couplings” seem to be weakening, though there are still about 330,000 troops in Europe, and about 4,000 US short range or battlefield nuclear weapons there, as well as the intermediate range whose phasing out is being negotiated currently.
The original system meant that, for almost four decades, the US would be in any European war from the first day, instead of after two or three years, as during the first two World Wars. And to my mind it was that consideration, rather than the mere existence of nuclear weapons, which precluded the use of Soviet armed force in Western Europe, in the many tense crises of the early cold war, over, for instance, Berlin.
We have, however, to face the fact that Western Europe and the United States will almost certainly become to some extent decoupled during the twenty years of historical mist we are trying to peer through. The change is already beginning to happen, and the kind of technological, diplomatic and political developments one can foresee appear likely to speed it up. The US/Soviet agreement on the phasing out of intermediate-range nuclear forces is one symptom of that process. The rationale of those missiles was from the first diplomatic rather than strictly military. Essentially they were visible signals to show that a nuclear war could not be fought out only on European soil with US and Soviet territory tacitly exempted, through an unspoken mutual agreement between the super powers. (The missiles made that point obvious by the fact that Soviet territory was within their range.) That strong diplomatic signal has now yielded to the drive for an arms control treaty, and it seems not altogether improbable that the short range battlefield and tactical US nuclear weapons in Europe will go the same way in what is currently being called the “Triple Zero” solution.
I do not, however, believe that any such agreement will necessarily mean an era of instability in the central balance, or weakness on its western side. What it will mean is the Europeans needing to take a greater degree of responsibility for their own defence. That will be incumbent on them both at a nuclear and a conventional level. For the urge in Congress to reduce the level of American troop deployments in Europe is, if anything, stronger than the pressure for reducing nuclear weapons. But it will not be so impossible a task to make up the deficiency as it is sometimes assumed. The Europeans already provide 90% of the land forces deployed by NATO, and that’s without counting the French. It would be more difficult to make up a gap in air and naval forces if the Americans opted out from those arenas, but even there the Europeans provide 75% and 50% respectively, and in any case I would not expect Congressional pressure to cut naval and air forces to reach the level that it has at present with regard to land forces.
Changes of this kind must affect the underlying balance of power (or correlation of forces as the Russians would say), but such change is the law of life in international politics. The objective of policy makers must be to manage the changes, so that they do not disrupt the system, or increase the overall level of risk. And that ought to be possible. The Europeans are very experienced players of this sort of game: in fact they invented it. So, to sum up, even though I would argue the alliance relationship is changing on the Western side, in the direction of “decoupling” between the European and American security, I do not believe that we need conclude that a major degree of instability will thereby develop within our twenty year time-span, though it is a danger that must be watched.
Finally, we come to the third element, overall mutual deterrence. Will it work as well under the more multi-lateral balance of power I have been envisaging as it has done up to now? And here we have to ask ourselves also if the SDI will prove just an illusion, a mirage personal to Mr Reagan and swiftly forgotten after his time in office, or will it actually come to something? Well, being never one to sidestep controversy. I will postulate that it will, by 2010, have come to something fairly considerable, though not to as much as Mr Reagan predicted when he talked in 1983 of making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”. Or that it will, as he put it, protect the American people from missiles “as a roof protects a family from the rain”. The true strategic and diplomatic role of the SDI, at least for the twenty years we are contemplating, seems to me quite different. What appears now in process might be called an “SDI-driven” sequence of changes in arms control and diplomatic/strategic relationships. It only affects the central balance powers as yet, but anything that changes the central balance must in due course affect the context in which the peripheral powers, like Australia, have to make their policies.
Paradoxically enough, the changes that I see developing depend on the Soviet interpretation of the function of SDI, not the official American rationale for its possible deployment. That is, the Russians and many of the Western critics of SDI, especially on the left, hold that the system would enhance American offensive capacity, rather than provide the sort of population defence that Mr Reagan keeps talking about. The analogy used is that of the sword and shield. The strategic function of the shield is held to be primarily to enable you to use the sword more effectively. In nuclear terms, that is translated as meaning that while the SDI weaponry under contemplation or development could not do much to mitigate the devastation of America from a full scale Soviet nuclear strike, it could have a useful damage limiting function in meeting what’s called a “ragged” Soviet retaliatory strike; that is, one after an American first strike, or pre-emptive strike during a situation of high crisis. Under the present situation of “mutual assured destruction”, a pre-emptive or first strike strategy cannot be ventured, because it would be suicidal for either of the super powers. But a reasonably effective SDI would, it is argued, free Washington to contemplate a first strike strategy.
Now, to my mind, that interpretation is mistaken, since the whole history of the last four decades, especially the period before 1970, when the United States was not as yet very vulnerable to Soviet nuclear strike, indicates that the inhibitions against Washington decision makers adopting any variety of pre-emptive strategy are very powerful. But Soviet policy planners like Western ones have to look at “worst case” possibilities, so I think we should assume they are wedded to that particular interpretation.
Now what follows? Theoretically the Russians have several options. They can try what’s called an “emulating” response. That is, building a strategic defence of their own, and they are certainly working on one. In my view we should hope (for reasons to be developed presently) that they would be reasonably successful, but it will be very expensive for them. They could try alternatively what is called an “offsetting” response, that is building up their offensive strike capacity to a level geared to saturate any American system That would be a bit less expensive than an “emulating response”, but if what they really fear is pre-emptive strike, then it does not guarantee them against that danger: in tact it might increase the American incentive to attempt such a strike. On the evidence of the arms control proposals which the Russians agreed at Reykjavik, and the negotiations which followed and which seemed to be about to culminate in a summit meeting, the Russians are not inclined to try that road, at least while Mr Gorbachev is in control. For what is now “on the table”, and apparently under serious discussion, is a very marked reduction in numbers of warheads on ballistic missiles: reduction from about 12,000 to 5,000 warheads on each side for long range delivery systems, entire elimination of intermediate range delivery systems and, if the “triple zero” idea catches on as well, possibly even the elimination also of battlefield and tactical systems (under 500 kilometres) in Europe. Now that in my view is a very encouraging direction for the arms control proposals to have taken, since ballistic missiles are the obvious, logical delivery system for pre-emptive strike, and multi-independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV)ed fixed sites, land based ballistic missiles are the obvious target for pre-emptive strike. Since the temptation to effect a first or pre-emptive strike during a situation of high crisis is the most deadly single danger of the nuclear age, any change in weapons systems which reduces its probability must improve the stability of the central balance.
My reason for calling the set of arms control proposals that have emerged in the final Reagan years “SDI driven”, is that the Russians themselves originally made such a point to tying them to abandonment or restriction of SDI. Russian policy in that sphere has changed very much in just the last few months. There are of course her factors involved: Mr Gorbachev obviously wants to make large reforms in the Soviet economic system, and to do that he needs to be able to cut the arms budget, which absorbs as much as 12% to 14% of Soviet GNP already. But that also involves SDI, since if he had to make an emulating or offsetting response to it, he would not only be unable to cut the arms budget, he might actually have to increase funding, which would undermine his plans for reform. So he has every incentive to try whatever diplomatic and strategic measures that he can to avoid such a drain on resources. That provides a very good reason for the current Russian arms control proposals. If the Americans (on the interpretation of Soviet strategic analysts) appear to be acquiring a capacity for pre-emptive strike and the Soviet economy cannot afford the drain of resources for offsetting it, the most logical answer is to phase out as soon as possible the weapons systems which are the obvious ‘time urgent’ targets tor any pre-emptive strike: that is the Soviet fixed site MIRVed missiles. Soviet offensive strike capacity would thus have to be based instead on SLBMs and land-mobile missiles. Such a change would not only allow for a large number of warheads to be sacrificed as is envisaged in the present arms control proposals, but also greatly reduce the possibility and hence the fear of pre-emptive strike.
That’s why I would argue that the remarkably sudden arms control progress of the past year or so may be regarded as “SDI-driven”. That concept thus appears to have proved the most effective negotiating lever the West has ever invented, even though it is as yet just a research project and may never be much more. So, in an optimistic moment. I would expect by 2010 deterrence will rest on a mix of offensive and defensive systems, substantially “symmetrical” on the two sides. That is, both super powers would have an offensive strike capacity at considerably lower levels than at present (6,000 warheads or less), probably largely submarine based on both sides to reduce vulnerability. (And since some Soviet submarines are rapidly getting better, partly by reason of purloined technology, the decision makers in Moscow should be less reluctant than they used to be to follow this path.) The most invulnerable SDI systems would also be submarine based (the technique which has been called the pop up system), and I would hope, as I mentioned earlier, that the Russians would be well along in this area of technology, since to my mind deterrent systems which are quite “symmetrical” on the two sides are likely to prove much the most stable, and the most conducive to regular reduction towards the “minimal deterrent” level, which is normally interpreted as less than 2,000 warheads on offensive systems. A deterrent system in that mode will obviously provide a very large role for naval forces, especially submarines and ASW. I believe that it would prove eventually far more stable than what the super powers have at present deployed, but of course the transit from the present system to what might be in place by 2010 will undoubtedly have dangers of its own.
Strategic changes of this magnitude will bring others in their wake, and the most important of them, the “decoupling” between the United States and Europe, as I mentioned before, will raise the strategic importance of the two European nuclear forces. British and French, as well as the importance of conventional forces in Europe. Probably by the early 21st Century Europe will be enjoying its best days since the late 19th Century, the largest single high prosperity market, with most of its internal, political and economic problems sorted out, and militarily very formidable, both at the conventional and the nuclear level. If the arms control talks continue along the pathway they have so surprisingly taken during the Reagan years, the tendency will be in due course an evolution from “extended deterrence” as at present, by the two super powers, towards four “minimal deterrence” (that is about 2,000 warheads) forces – American, Soviet. European and Chinese – plus what have been called “basement stockpiles” of nuclear weapons in perhaps Israel, South Africa, India and Pakistan, as last ditch resorts against local threats. Now that will actually provide a further rationale for SDI to reassure Washington and Moscow against “cheating” (that is the concealment of weapons) because, as numbers fall, concealment becomes a much more important danger – and also against the risk, however unlikely, of attack by a minor nuclear power. Within the time span we are contemplating, no SDI system is likely to be more than 50% effective against incoming missiles, so it would not devalue the minor nuclear forces, but even a 50% success rate is enough to discourage any impulse to pre-emptive strike in crisis.
To sum up these reflections on the way the central balance seems likely to move over the next 20 years, though quite large changes seem to be impending, I do not believe they need to be destructive to the three essential elements I have mentioned: reasonably prudent crisis management, a reasonably stable set of alliance relationships, and a situation of overall mutual deterrence.
Having said so much about the global power balance, I want now to turn to the regional balance immediately relevant to Australia’s security, that is the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the island fringes of South East Asia. Here we must, I think, recognise at once what might be considered a long term and ineluctable worsening of Australia’s security in one respect. The whole of the first century-plus of existence of the present Australian community was in the context of Western ascendency over the non-Western world. In the first half of this century that ascendency was gradually ended by the rise (at first militarily and then economically) of Japan, and subsequently of other non-Western powers. The influence of the West is still enormously pervasive, of course, but if may be diminishing as local traditions are reasserted. Australia must live the third and subsequent centuries of existence near the fringes of an Asian world which is already becoming a society of giants. China, despite its serious efforts at population control, will be moving towards the one and a half billion mark by our assumed data. India will be ready to match or exceed that figure not long afterwards. Indonesians will number well over 200 million and the Vietnamese will be approaching a hundred million at a time when Australian population will have peaked at 20 plus million, and Western populations as a whole will be noticeably shrinking, since their fertility is below replacement level. With luck world population will stabilise at about the 10 billion mark (twice the present level) around the middle of the century, but 90% of that figure will be in the Third World, especially Asia; only about 10% will be Westerners.
Demographic change brings many other changes in its wake, it governs, obviously, the numbers of young men and women of military age, and that in turn must influence strategic choices about weapons systems, for instance. We must also, I fear, concede that Australia on present indications is not much more likely to match its neighbours in economic growth-rates than in demographic ones. We might in an optimistic moment assume a growth rate averaging about 3% per annum over the next 20 years, and that will see us comfortable enough as far as living standards are concerned. But some of our Asian neighbours will, on past form, do much better. South Korea, for instance, had a growth rate of about 15% this year after about a decade or so of about 8%. Others among the “Neo-Confucian” societies have achieved equally spectacular levels: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and earlier, of course, Japan. The point to note about these societies is that they all, including Japan, extend essentially from the Chinese civilisation area, which raises the question whether China itself, now that the strait jacket of Maoism has been loosened, might not some day follow the same pathway. Rapid economic growth, in a society of China’s enormous size, whose development at present is not much beyond the stage of Western societies in the early 19th Century, raises some quite uncomfortably formidable possibilities.
I said earlier that I expected the central balance of power to be more multi-lateral by 2010 than it has been in the last four decades. And that of course raises the question of Japan in the Pacific. Ought one to assume that Japan, like Western Europe, will be less closely coupled with the United States than at present, more inclined to play for its own hand? That is probably the most momentous single question for Australia’s strategic future at the period we are contemplating, and a very difficult one to assess. On present indications it would certainly appear likely that the alliance may become looser: there are already many frictions. Japan is (and is likely to remain) intensely vulnerable as a very rich non-nuclear power, situated in a zone where the spheres of interest of three nuclear powers – United States. Soviet Union and China – overlap or rub up against each other, and there are quite a few flash points like Korea and Taiwan. If Japan decided to spend on its defence even the same proportion of its vast GNP as Australian sometimes does, that is about 3%, it would set alarm bells ringing all over the Pacific, including undoubtedly Australia. Japan already has production lines for advanced aircraft and naval ships whose output could be rapidly stepped up. Once the political decision is taken there would obviously be no economic impediments. A great deal of Australia’s security these past 40 years has depended on the strength of the alliance bonds which have kept Japan closely tied to policies chosen in Washington. We need not assume those bonds will be broken but should, I think, assume they should be looser, and this may produce rather unpredictable changes in Japan’s relationships with the Soviet Union and China, changes in which both Taiwan and the two Koreas might be involved.
Australia’s own closest alliance seems to me likely to remain that with the United States, though a strong, well armed, independent, technologically-skilled Western Europe will become again a very useful friend to cultivate. The economic frictions which at present somewhat bedevil Australia’s relations with both Europe and the United States ought surely, if there is any commonsense left in the world, to have disappeared during the 20 years we are leaping over. They are essentially the problems of overproduction and the struggle for markets. The rise in world population which has to be envisaged may end some of them, though the alternative answer to over-production, which is the organisation of a cartel by diplomatic agreement, would operate, could operate much earlier. In my view the social and political pressures to grow basic foodstuffs at home, in whatever country, are not likely to diminish and science and technology will continue (at a price) to produce almost anything anywhere, as for instance at the moment, wheat and dairy products in Saudi Arabia. The main cost in such experiments is energy, to distill water or create artificial climates, and energy by the mid 21st Century might be as cheap as water is in most countries nowadays. That would be from the combined effect of super conductors, to distribute it almost without loss, and probably nuclear fusion reactors to generate it. though they may not be “on stream” until later in the century.
A world of cheap energy will by no means be an unmitigated good for Australia. It will obviously reduce the value of coal, our main export earner at present, and probably the value of uranium as well, since fusion energy is derived from lighter elements.
In fact the world of the 21st Century does not seem particularly promising for those who seek to live, as Australia has done so far, by the sale of commodities. One of the main by-products of scientific discovery at the moment seems to be the replacement of traditional commodities by “knowledge based substitutes” like carbon fibres and silicon chips and plastics of various sorts, whose essential constituents are almost universally available. No doubt Australia will have commodities to sell to the world: apparently we are well endowed with yttrium which is used in superconductors, and gold, diamonds and wool seem likely to retain or even increase their value, especially if there’s a lot of trouble by 2010 in South Africa, which seems a near certainty. But I would not be inclined to bet on a sudden recovery. Of Australia’s terms of trade or its exchange rate vis-a-vis the major currencies. That of course means that sophisticated weapons systems priced in foreign currencies will look very expensive in Australian budgetary terms, and the Minister of Defence of the day is not going to be allowed to buy many of them. Short of an absolute threat to our survival, it does not seem probable that Defence is likely to be allocated more than 3% of GNP. In fact, Ministers during the 20 year period we are contemplating will have to work very hard to keep it at that level. So whatever can be done to promote or maintain locally based production of defence goods, at anything approximating competitive costs, would clearly be a prudent measure, likewise promotion of defence oriented scientific and technological research, such as that, for instance, which produced the “Jindalee” over the horizon radar. Australia ought to have a future in “knowledge based” technologies of both civilian and defence-oriented kinds, but if it is actually to do so, within our 20 year conspectus, then young Australians will have to work almost as hard at school mathematics and science as young Japanese do.
One point that should be noted in regard to relations between Canberra and Washington is that technological change may by 2010 have cut Washington’s need for two of the three major US installations in Australia. That is North West Cape and Nurrungar, though perhaps not the need for Pine Gap. Such changes must diminish our diplomatic leverage in Washington, though other factors may compensate strategically, for instance, the increased general American focus on the Pacific and possibly increased US interest in the “south about” route around Australia (as against the route through the Indonesian Straits) for US naval ships. The question of participation in Star Wars technology might also be important there.
The second great uncertainty in Australia’s strategic future at the period we are contemplating is uncertainty about the political and diplomatic orientation of Indonesia, and its relations with PNG and Australia. Demographically we know Indonesia will be a substantial neighbour, and economically, although its progress has been somewhat erratic, it has at times been quite impressive. Politically I think we ought probably assume that the decision makers in Djakarta will be the chosen successors of the present Junta and may in fact include some of its present numbers, since many of them are quite young and could remain politically active for the next 20 years. I think that we must also assume that Melanesian ethnic feeling which has already shown itself in the coup in Fiji and the reactions in PNG and elsewhere in the Pacific is not likely to vanish. In fact in 20 years it might be quite a dominant factor in the politics of the Pacific. That will not be propitious for relations between Indonesia and PNG. since Irian Jaya is seen by most Melanesians as a Melanesian area subjected to a process of “Javanisation”. We must expect some friction along the PNG / Irian Jaya border and Australia has, of course, defence commitments to PNG. So I do not think we can be optimistic about smooth relations between Canberra and Djakarta. Prudent crisis management and a convincing defensive stance will be required there. Since the coup in Fiji, both the Indonesians and the Fijians have shown some interest in the closer relationship. Perhaps military takeover chaps think alike and so Indonesian interest in the Pacific in general may increase and I would rather think that may also produce a few complications for Australia.
If we shift our gaze from the north to the west, to Australia’s Indian Ocean Coastline and sea lanes of communication, the situation seems not much less ambivalent. We must, I think, see India as the paramount power in the Indian Ocean, as it already is in the Indian subcontinent. With a population increasing more rapidly than that of China, and probably at least a small stockpile of atomic weapons and adequate means of delivery by 2010 (that is MIG aircraft probably and possibly missiles) it will be a formidable neighbour to China and Iran, as well as to Pakistan. The whole area of the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean seems even more likely to be a focus of serious trouble 20 years hence than it is now. Will Iran still be sponsoring Islamic fundamentalism, and might its siren calls have been heard in the Gulf Slates, or in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Indonesia or among the (by then) 100 million or so Moslems in India itself. The Government in Delhi could be feeling rather beleaguered and in need of allies. On the other hand, it will undoubtedly, on present plans, be able to exercise its growing naval strength in the Indian Ocean, even as far down as South Africa, whose substantial Indian population will no doubt be involved in whatever phase the racial troubles will have reached by that date.
We must probably assume that the Soviet Union will continue to regard India as its most useful ally in South Asia and Vietnam as its most useful ally in South East Asia, and that it will still be more interested than at present in Pacific and Indian Ocean ports, and will have still more naval assets in the Pacific than now. Moreover, I think we can expect the war in Afghanistan and even perhaps the Iran/Iraq war to have been wound up with compromise settlements which allowed perhaps some slight forward movement of Soviet power, though not of a decisive sort. I am more inclined to believe that Soviet forces will still be in Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam than that US forces will still be in Clarke Field and Subic Bay.
I would assume that Australia will have maintained some effort at a “Two Ocean” Navy and such naval ships and submarines that we have managed to accumulate will be based about equally between Jervis Bay and Cockburn Sound. However, I would also assume that numbers will not be exactly substantial. Probably the Americans will still be visiting Diego Garcia in some strength, and possibly the Royal Navy will have a presence there and the French a presence at Reunion. Could the new Iran ever revive the Shah’s dreams of being a naval as well as a military power in that part of the world? Odder things have happened to revolutionary regimes. On the other hand, if Saudi Arabia and Iraq increase their programs of building oil pipelines to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and the small exporting states of the area come to an arrangement to use those pipelines as they probably could, the Persian Gulf could become a much less important shipping-lane tor any country except Iran. That would greatly reduce the capacity of that part of the world to generate crises, so perhaps we should do anything we can to promote developments of that sort within our 20 year conspectus. So, certainly, should the Japanese, since most of their oil comes from there. However, within 20 years, the oil search in China and the China seas might have come to something and a variant of the North Seas oil boom might be playing itself out around Hong Kong. That would increase still more the reason for close diplomatic and strategic, as well as economic relations between Japan and China -with Japan finding a market for its vast output of capital and consumer goods in China, and China paying for them primarily in oil. China and Japan in combination do of course offer some very formidable possibilities, not only economically but strategically. And not only for the regional balance in the Pacific but also for the central balance of power. In fact when there does arrive, as there must, a transformation of the present central balance. I would expect it to be from that source though 20 years seems too short a time span for that to happen; 50 might be more likely.
Australians have long been accustomed to think of the international environment of their country as relatively benign, and so it has been in the past by comparison with most other countries.
After all there has only been six months of “clear and present danger”, that is early 1942, in our 200 years of history to date, and if you compare that with the histories of Israel or Poland, or in the remoter past many of the countries of Western Europe, it does seem to entitle us to an assumption of good fortune. But that streak of historical luck may well be about to run out. The Pacific and Indian Oceans do not seem likely to prove particularly benign environments during the 21st Century. The North Pacific is the “interface” zone of three existing nuclear powers, the United States, the Soviet Union and China, who all have interests to promote and strategies to promote them by. The Pacific rim has most of the fastest growing societies of the world, economically and demographically, with a variety of flash points. Southern Asia is also growing very fast demographically. and it may develop a nuclear balance of triangular form (China-India-Pakistan). Moreover, it is the focus of Iran, of a fundamentalist religious doctrine, which may be at only the beginning of its capacity to cause trouble. And in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean a focus for a different sort of trouble: a long running racial conflict, one of the parties involved probably being capable, within the time span we have in mind, of making nuclear weapons – that is South Africa of course. All in all, a context that doesn’t seem to promote a quiet time for the decision makers in Canberra 20 years hence. We will need adequate defences to combat local threats from our own resources, useful allies to deter threats larger than those, and an adroit diplomacy to keep us from treading unnecessarily on the toes of our neighbours.
About the Author
Dr Coral Bell AO was born in Sydney in 1923. She was first a diplomat and then most notably an academic of international standing.
In 1944 she joined the Department of External Affairs and at one point was reportedly approached to become a Soviet spy. She resigned from the department in 1951 after working on the ANZUS treaty and was present at its signing.
In her academic career Coral Bell studied and/or taught at the University of Sydney, Manchester University, the University of Sussex, John Hopkins University (Rockefeller Fellowship), the London School of Economics and the Australian National University.
Coral Bell wrote extensively on international affairs and Australian foreign policy. She was described as a ‘classical realist’ and Henry Kissinger admired what he thought was her brilliant analysis of the US’s foreign policy challenges. From 1977 until her death in 2012 she was first a Senior Research Fellow and then Visiting Fellow at ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. In 2015 the Research School for Pacific Studies was renamed the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Studies in her honour.
