The Australian government’s decision to rebuff a US request to send a warship to the Red Sea has been greeted in some quarters as a seismic event, but it’s not really a bolt from the blue.
Australia is facing “an increasingly challenging strategic environment which is placing greater demand on ADF resources closer to home”, a senior Australian political figure said.
“As a result, the Australian Defence Force will reduce its naval presence in the Middle East to enable more resources to be deployed in our region.”
Who was it who proclaimed this shift in Australia’s military priorities?
Not the Albanese government, which has been accused by the Coalition of presiding over an “international embarrassment” by not sending a warship. Instead it was Linda Reynolds, the then defence minister in the Morrison government, who announced the shift in Australia’s military priorities in October 2020.
This is not to suggest the Coalition, if still in power, would have actually declined the US’s latest request. The new context, of course, is the increase in attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen against commercial ships passing through the Red Sea in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Advocates of a deployment point out that disruptions to trade do affect Australia’s economic interest.
But recent history does reflect bipartisan acknowledgment that Australia must focus on the Indo-Pacific at a time when China is playing an increasingly muscular role in the South and East China seas.
On 1 July 2020, Scott Morrison launched a defence strategic update with the declaration that Australia may still be “prepared to make military contributions outside our immediate region where it is in our national interest to do so, including in support of US-led coalitions”, but our top ally should not take it as a given.
After years of focus on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Morrison reasoned that it was in the Indo-Pacific, which he said was fast becoming “the focus of the dominant global contest of our age”, that Australia was best placed to contribute.
“It is in our region that we must be most capable in the military contributions we make to partnerships, and to our ever-closer alliance with the United States,” Morrison said then.
Let’s fast-forward to Anthony Albanese’s confirmation on Wednesday that Australia – for the time being at least – will not send a navy ship to the Red Sea, despite a range of other US allies joining the mission to protect commercial shipping.
The overarching strategic rationale will now sound familiar.
“Our resources have been prioritised in our region, the Indo-Pacific,” Albanese told reporters in Sydney.
“We’ve played an important role in freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and the operations that we’re conducting as well with the Philippines.”
In particular, Canberra has been alarmed at the increasing confrontations between Chinese and Philippine vessels in the South China Sea. Australia this year deepened its ties with the Philippines and began joint naval patrols in the region.
The Australian government has also complained about an “unsafe and unprofessional interaction” with a Chinese navy destroyer when HMAS Toowoomba was in Japan’s exclusive economic zone in November.
This all comes at a time when the government has been trying to “stabilise” its relationship with China without stepping back from any key policies such as Aukus or the need to deter Beijing from seizing Taiwan – all very weighty problems to manage.
Of course, Australia doesn’t have the luxury of being exclusively focused on its own region and the ADF must be prepared to respond anywhere around the world when the government deems it in the national interest.
Beyond the shipping issue, Australia must also grapple with how to respond to the pressing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where the death toll is nearing 20,000.
The government has appeared slow to announce a clear decision on the US warship request, ever since the Australian newspaper last week reported the proposal in a front-page print story under the bracing headline “Uncle Sam wants you”. But anyone reading the government’s comments closely would understand its inclination was to sit this one out.
Since last week, Albanese and the defence minister, Richard Marles, have emphasised Australia’s focus on its own region. It’s not every day that Australia says no to Uncle Sam, so it’s not hard to understand why the government would want to couch its public statements in diplomatic language. Officials say the request was a broad one from the US to a range of countries and allies, not just to Australia.
But the lack of a definitive answer left a void that was quickly criticised from the Coalition and some commentators.
In the Australian newspaper, Cameron Stewart denounced the likely decision as “an embarrassment for Australia” and a sign that Australia was “no longer the reliable contributor to global security, the loyal ally or the consistent defender of the so-called rules-based order it once claimed to be”.
Over in the Daily Telegraph, James Morrow asked: “Is the Albanese government now fully committed to an undergraduate foreign policy that makes cheesing off the US the mark of its success?”
The acting opposition leader, Sussan Ley, said allies “deserve us to be honest, upfront and responsive” while the Coalition’s defence spokesperson, Andrew Hastie, claimed Australia risked “becoming the blunt end of the Aukus partnership”.
But should it really be compulsory for Australia to say yes to the US every single time?
Albanese also signalled on Wednesday that, despite not sending a warship right now, Australia will keep monitoring the situation.
Australia is likely to increase its staffing of the US-led Combined Maritime Force in Bahrain, where the ADF already has about five of its personnel embedded to keep an eye on conditions in the Red Sea.
Apart from the alliance management questions, a more substantive point of concern has been raised in the past few days about the ADF’s readiness – and whether it has the capabilities needed to combat drone attacks. The government should be upfront on those questions.
