Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

As the United States urges Australia to lift its military spending dramatically, a former U.S. defence secretary is proposing a Pacific defence pact to counter Beijing’s increasing belligerence across the Asia-Pacific region. The proposal echoes B.A. Santamaria’s proposal 60 years ago for a Pacific Community defence and economic arrangement.

Recently arguing the case for a new defence pact in Foreign Affairs journal was Ely Ratner, Assistant Secretary of Defence for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs under former U.S. President Joe Biden. Ratner repeated the warning of former CIA Director William Burns, that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.

However, Beijing harbours doubts about the ability of its powerful but inexperienced military to invade Taiwan’s very difficult terrain. Thus, the strategy of the U.S. and its allies should be to magnify Beijing’s doubts.

Ratner says that, while many regional nations are boosting their defence forces, they require a formalised “robust commitment to collective defence”, or else “the Indo-Pacific is on a path to instability and conflict”.

Widening Conflicts

Beijing is provoking conflicts and seeking influence across a wide arc from Japan to the South Pacific and across the Indian Ocean.

Its forces are engaged in confrontations with regional nations over territorial boundaries in the South China Sea, where it has built military bases on artificially created islands to reinforce its territorial claims. The PLA is provoking ongoing encounters with the navies and air forces of Japan, the Philippines and other regional nations, and makes almost daily incursions into Taiwan’s maritime zone and airspace.

Beijing is making intense efforts to gain economic and security inroads in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and other Pacific-island states.

In response, both Tokyo (which has reinterpreted its post-World War II pacifist constitution) and Manila have massively increased defence expenditures.

At the same time, the QUAD, the Five Eyes arrangement, networks of bilateral arrangements, and an array of joint military exercises increasingly resemble defence pact arrangements.

However, Ratner says there are significant shortcomings:

• No mutual obligations between the U.S. and its allies, only obligations on the U.S.
• No central military headquarters.
• Planning and coordination between the various militaries is intermittent.

After World War II, the United States forged many networks of separate security arrangements across the Asia-Pacific to counter the Soviet Union and Communist China, but due to legacies of conflicts and distrust among neighbours, these never evolved beyond being bilateral arrangements.

Today is different.

Growing threats hasten the need for a new “collective defence pact”, starting with “the fastest growing and most robust combined military cooperation: Australia, Japan, and the Philippines.”

Ratner says that operationally, “collective defence could build on existing cooperative projects, including in the areas of intelligence sharing, maritime domain awareness, combined training and exercises, and command and control…”

“Together, they could more readily pre-position weapons to ensure sufficient stockpiles in the event of conflict, further strengthening deterrence.”

Such a pact would require these nations to carry their “fair share” of the defence burden, which Australia could augment with supplies of critical minerals to the U.S. for the electronics and defence industries.

Stating the obvious, Ratner argues that the pact would be most successful if reinforced with a “robust regional trade agenda, active diplomatic efforts, and effective foreign assistance programs”.

He says that the defence pact should be promoted as ensuring a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, a goal shared by nearly every country in the region.

Ratner notes that, while the Trump Administration has publicly downplayed the importance of many U.S. alliances, partly to goad freeloading allies into boosting their military budgets, there is deepening military cooperation across the Indo-Pacific region. To date, it has been a case of “far more continuity than disruption”.

Lost Opportunities

In his 1964 book, The Price of Freedom, B.A. Santamaria called for the establishment of a Pacific Community, a military pact with “an integrated military command” to counter communist expansion by Communist China and the Soviet Union. This Community needed an economic foundation – “a series of preferential trade agreements”.

Although his proposal received the support of then Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda and former U.S. Assistance Secretary of State Roger Hilsman, it fell on deaf ears in Australia.

When a 2003 Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee recommended a localised Pacific Community embracing 16 regional states, again the concept was ignored.

Instead, in 2015, Australia contributed $US738 million to China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and became the banks sixth largest shareholder.

Given today’s growing strategic threats, bipartisan support is urgently needed for Australia to give the lead in establishing a Pacific Community defence pact.

___

Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Originally titled “A NATO of Our Own: Time is Ripe for a Pacific Community Defence Pact”. Image via Australian Navy.