Apr 3, 2025 Episodes Australian policy series International relations

Sam Roggeveen — Why the US Won't Fight China for Dominance (and What it Means for Australia) [Aus. Policy Series]

63 min read

This episode is the sixth instalment of my Australian policy series, recorded live in Sydney on February 26, 2025.

I speak with Sam Roggeveen—Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program, and a former senior analyst at the Office of National Assessments—about why the United States won’t fight China for dominance in Asia, and what that means for an Australia long reliant on American protection.

We explore the limits of America’s resolve in Asia, why an alliance with Indonesia should be the top priority of Australian statecraft, whether new technologies like drones are reversing the long-held advantage of the defender, the possibility that Australia might one day acquire nuclear weapons, and how Sam’s “echidna strategy” could let us defend ourselves from a major Asian power without substantially boosting defence spending.

Video

Transcript

JOSEPH WALKER: Thank you all for coming. Allow me to provide some context before we start the conversation.

So history is moving again.

For more than a century, the United States has never had to face an adversary or even a coalition of adversaries whose GDP exceeded 60% of US GDP. Not even the combined might of Japan and Germany during World War II crossed that threshold. Nor did the Soviet Union at its peak.

China crossed that threshold in 2014. And on a purchasing power parity basis, it surpassed US GDP entirely in 2017 and is now more than 20% larger.

Inevitably, that economic power is being converted into military might. And the question is: will the United States have the resolve to fight China for dominance in Asia?

Our guest this evening believes that it won't, simply because the US lacks any vital interests in the region. And that means that for the first time in our history, Australia will be without the protection of a great power. Which is a problem because we've long believed, probably correctly, that we can't independently defend our continent from attack by a major Asian power.

Or can we? Our guest this evening argues that Australia can defend itself—and without significantly increasing defence spending as a percentage of GDP.

He calls this the echidna strategy, meaning that Australia should aim to become spiky but not threatening, and should exploit the geographic distance between us and China.

Sam Roggeveen is the director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program. Prior to that, he was a senior analyst at Australia's peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments. And he's written a book which I thoroughly enjoyed, called The Echidna Strategy. Sam, welcome to the podcast.

SAM ROGGEVEEN: Thank you, Joe. And thank you to everyone for being here.

WALKER: So this isn't going to be a substitute for the book. I have a bunch of questions and things I want to do my best to push and challenge you on. We'll chat for the next 60 or so minutes and then we'll hear all of your [audience] questions at the end.

The first question I wanted to ask you: so at the Office of National Assessments, you focused on North Asian nuclear strategy and military forces, and I don't know really much of anything about how the ONA, or I guess the ONI [Office of National Intelligence] as it's now called, works. And I don't think I've seen you discuss your time there before. So my first question is, what's something that well-informed Australians, people like the members of this audience, wouldn't know about the kinds of intelligence sources you were privy to, or how you assess them?

ROGGEVEEN: Okay, well, maybe the first thing to say about that subject is what it's like to be in the Office of National Assessments—the Office of National Intelligence, as it's now called—or any of the other intelligence agencies in Canberra, like ASIO, for instance. And for an audience like this one, and for the people listening—many of whom would be white-collar professionals—the surprising thing would be how familiar it all looks and how frankly, how mundane it all is. So the physical environment would be entirely familiar if you've worked in a white-collar job in an Australian office. Open-plan desks, a few small offices for middle managers. There's a conference room. There'll be sort of an online booking system for the conference room, that probably doesn't work. There's a little kitchenette where someone's selling those charity chocolates for their kids’ school. You know, someone will be heating up last night's bolognese in the microwave. It's all very normal.

Probably the most strange thing about the environment is how hard it is to get in. So in order to get a job in one of these places, you need to go through a security vetting process that takes, minimum, six months and probably more like 12. Some there are cases where it takes more than two years.

And they look into everything, right? So they want to make sure you're not a security risk. So if Joe is getting a job in ONI, you will be asked to tell us, to tell them, where you've travelled in the world, who you've met overseas. Give us some of your best friends, names of your best friends and your family. They'll be asked: Does Joe drink a lot? Does he gamble? You know, does he have a complicated romantic history? Et cetera, et cetera. All to make sure that you're not a security risk for the government, and you're not capable of being blackmailed, right? So that's probably the actual environment that you're in, I think, is perhaps the aspect that would surprise people in this room.

As for the actual work that you do as an analyst, look, the biggest conclusion that I came away with—and this applies not just to my time in ONI, but I also worked before that as analyst in the Defence Intelligence Organisation … The big conclusion I come away with from having had access to the very highest levels of classified intelligence from the Five Eyes community—so not just Australian sources, but American, Canadian, British and Kiwi as well—[is this]. When you're talking about or thinking about the kind of long-term international issues that we're going to discuss tonight—American decline, China's rise and so on—I would say that having access to classified intelligence is of negligible value. It's almost zero. It makes no difference.

And so the quality of the analysis that you all read in the open sources that you all trust are no worse than what is being produced inside the system. They don't have a huge advantage in that regard.

Where the intelligence agencies have a huge advantage is in short-term assessments. So if I'm writing a brief, for instance, for a minister who's going to a big international conference or a bilateral negotiation next week, then there's probably stuff in the intelligence feed that I can put into my briefing for the minister that's going to help him or her to get an advantage over their interlocutor. So it can help in that regard.

Now, it's important to stress that my experience of the intelligence world is now over 16 years old. I would say that that problem, of the value of intelligence versus open sources, has gotten markedly worse since then for the intelligence agencies. We were still, 16 years ago, in the very early stages of the information revolution. The Internet is only 30-odd years old. 16 years ago, I don't know, did Facebook exist yet, 16 years ago? Maybe barely …

WALKER: Barely.

ROGGEVEEN: Twitter certainly didn't exist, and AI definitely didn't exist. So the reason I think this is such a huge problem—actually an existential problem for the intelligence world—is that the information environment is now so vast. Espionage, I would argue, is a rational response to an information deficit. Governments need to make informed decisions about international questions. And if they can't make well-informed decisions, they look to find more information. And if the foreign governments they're dealing with aren't prepared to give them that information, they need to steal it, effectively. That's espionage. That's the root motivation for espionage.

Now governments still maintain a lot of secrets, so there's still motivation to do espionage. But we no longer live in a world of information scarcity. We live in a world of information superabundance. We are overwhelmed with information. The one universal complaint that everyone has about the Internet is that it's too big. There's just too much coming at us. And it's growing all the time.

And in that environment, I would say the primary challenge for people who are trying to understand the world, how world politics is moving, big questions of war and peace, is just coming to grips with that firehose of information—not trying to unveil new secrets, but understanding what you've already got. So I think really the business case, the business model of the intelligence world is under unprecedented threat. And at the moment, I don't see much evidence that that world is responding sufficiently.

WALKER: Oh, interesting. Okay, so the information isn't their edge; it's the analysis. But the analysis is getting more difficult because there's so much information. Is that how I should think about this?

ROGGEVEEN: Not that the analysis is getting more difficult. It's just as difficult as it's always been. And in some senses, AI, for instance, is going to make it a lot easier, or it promises to make it a lot easier. It's simply that, like I said, there's always a place for trying to reveal the other side's secrets. There will always be secrets that we need to uncover. But I think the weight of effort has to shift. It's simply that when there's so much out there in the open source world that could be exploited and then it goes unexploited, then the comparative advantage of focusing on unveiling secrets starts to degrade.

WALKER: I see.

ROGGEVEEN: I think [there are] maybe two reasons why there's so much focus on secret intelligence.

– One is because intelligence agencies have a vested interest, right? This is their business; this is their model. No bureaucrat wants to see the decline of the agencies and the institutions that they work in. So that's one reason why they continue to emphasise secret intelligence.

– I think the other reason they do it is because, in a sense, it's the easier problem to solve, right? So trying to uncover someone's secrets, it's kind of a … There's a classic distinction between puzzles and mysteries. So a puzzle is: “how many nuclear weapons does North Korea have?” So that's knowable; we just don't know it at the moment. But it is knowable. A mystery would be: “what does North Korea want to do with its nuclear weapons?” So that's not knowable, because even the North Koreans may not know what they want to do. And I think the intelligence world is … well placed to look for puzzles and to solve puzzles, but finds it much harder to solve mysteries. And so they focus on puzzles.

WALKER: Right. Okay. So speaking of mysteries, let's talk about America's strategic future in Asia. Three options here:

Number one is that America fights China for dominance.
Number two, America enters a power-sharing relationship with China.
Number three, America leaves the region entirely.

We'll come to the second and third options momentarily. But first, what do you think is the most convincing reason for why America might actually stay and try to fight China for dominance?

ROGGEVEEN: I think the most convincing reason is status and an American self-image of being the leading power in Asia, and that that is simply something that America's sense of itself cannot afford to surrender. This is essentially Peter Varghese's argument. The former head of the Office of National Intelligence, my boss at the time, and the former head of DFAT [the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade]. This is his view, that essentially America's sense of itself is so deeply embedded that it cannot allow for the rise of a competitor and eventually a successor to leadership in Asia.

WALKER: Right. So American defence spending as a percentage of GDP has been trending downwards since about 2011. It's currently between 3.4% and 3.5%. What level do you think it would need to reach in order for the Americans to convince the Chinese that they were serious about fighting for dominance?

ROGGEVEEN: How many angels fit on the head of a pin? That's a tough one.

WALKER: So during the Cold War it got up to like 8%, right. Would they need to go back to that?

ROGGEVEEN: I think even during the Vietnam War it reached, I think, 6% or 7%. So that's a good place to start, at least. I find that very hard to answer because economic conditions are so different. I mean, America's a much wealthier country, all told, than it was in the Cold War. So you have to account for that as well.

But you'd want to be seeing a lot of signals on top of that, many of which I discuss in the book. Defence spending is only one of them. It's an incredibly important one. But there's so much that America could be doing short of that that it simply hasn't done yet. An obvious one is that … since China's rise as a great power really began in the early post-Cold-War years, no American president has stood before the American people and said that “this is now our national mission, this is now the thing we devote the entire country to.”

And that's what it would take, right? In your introduction you pointed to the fact that no other power or constellation of powers has ever approached 60% of American GDP. China's well past that figure. So this is a much bigger challenge than the Cold War in most respects and economically already a bigger challenge than Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. So it would take a whole-of-nation effort—not just whole-of-government, whole-of-nation, bigger than the Cold War. And you can't do that on the quiet. You can't just sort of slip that in. It can't be just a Beltway project. It has to be a whole-of-nation effort.

And that starts with the American president saying to the public: “Listen, we've got to put our shoulders to the wheel and do this now.” And none of them have done that so far.

[There is] one other sort of straw in the wind that I would point to, that's not in the book, but so it's worth actually adding. I wish I'd thought of it at the time, but it came to me much later. The intellectual environment in the US, to me, does not indicate that the United States is primed for a contest like this. It's not there in the popular culture ...

Just as one indicator, I don't see popular commentators like Joe Rogan obsessed with China. And the intellectual heft is not there either. My bookshelf's grown under the weight of American scholars, think-tankers, political advisers, military analysts, writing books about China. And Foreign Affairs, which is the sort of in-house journal of the American foreign policy establishment, is chock full of articles about “the China challenge” and “the China threat”. But I don't see it coming from beyond that Beltway crowd. I don't see [New York Times columnists] David Brooks and Ross Douthat, just to name two, writing books about the China challenge. It doesn't resemble the Cold War in that respect, where Cold War liberalism was an entire school of thought, an entire genre that developed in the Cold War. Samuel Moyn wrote a book about it recently. It doesn't even compare to the war on terrorism, where you had figures like Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, the New York Times editorial page, all obsessed with this question of: “How do you maintain a liberal democracy in the face of the radical Islamist threat?” I don't see anything like that in the United States at the moment. So the intellectual ferment is just not there to support the scale of the challenge that the governing class in America claims to be embarking upon.

WALKER: So as I understand it, the main point of difference between you and Hugh White [Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre] is that Hugh thinks that America will leave Asia entirely. You think that it will enter a power-sharing relationship with China.

And as you note in the book, in some sense, America is already withdrawing from Asia, and it's withdrawing in a relative sense. So if you look at America's forward deployment in countries like Japan and South Korea, compared with what it was at the very end of the Cold War, it’s roughly the same. So I think US troops in Japan in 1991 amounted to about 45,000. By 2020, it was about 55,000. In South Korea, [in] 1991, it was about 40,000. [In] 2020, it was about 26,000. And so the US posture hasn't really changed. Meanwhile, China has been massively expanding its military capabilities, and so the US has been declining relative to China. Isn't that fact more consistent with Hugh’s view that the US is going to be leaving Asia entirely?

ROGGEVEEN: This gives me an opportunity to plug the little primer that you wrote today on your website, which is effectively not only a nice little summary of some of the main arguments in my book, but a very good comparison of my argument with Hughes. So I'd recommend that to all the listeners, and thank you for doing it.

I don't think the distinction that you draw is quite as sharp as that, and I blame myself for not making it clearer in my book. But essentially what I'm arguing for is a long interregnum, a period between the first scenario, of American primacy, and the third scenario, of Hugh's withdrawal.

What I'm saying is that that middle period, that middle scenario of a balance of power between China and the United States, will actually last quite a long time before we get to Hugh's full withdrawal.

So I admit openly that the last four weeks have caused me to think that that withdrawal may happen a lot more rapidly than I may previously have imagined.

But the sinews of American power in Asia run very deep. So what I describe in the book is a situation where the bureaucratic barriers to withdrawal are very high and the incentives for withdrawal are very low.

WALKER: Right.

ROGGEVEEN: But equally, the incentives for rapidly increasing American force in Asia are also extremely high.

Therefore, it'll stay roughly where it is for the indefinite future. And that means, in comparative terms, America goes into decline. Because China's still on this massive tear of defence spending, which we haven't seen the back of yet: it's still going on, hasn't stabilised, and won't for many, many years.

So, yes, I have to admit that that interim stage, where I settled, I predicted that to last indefinitely. But Trump definitely looks like someone who is an accelerant of that trend, and it could happen much more quickly.

But it hasn't happened yet, and it didn't happen in the first Trump administration. There simply wasn't enough … Trump himself wasn't talented enough, and frankly was too lazy, I think, in policy terms, to actually enact his vision. He's been consistently hostile to the idea of American troops in Korea and in Japan (also Europe, of course). But in his first administration, there simply wasn't the bureaucratic backing for it. And in fact, there was lots of evidence that his bureaucrats actively frustrated his ambitions in that regard.

Now, you could argue, of course, that the bureaucratic barriers in this administration are far lower. I think that's true. One thing that perhaps I have underestimated in my own analysis in the lead-up to this administration taking office, but which I also put a bit more weight on now, is that while the barriers to that kind of change have lowered, the competency levels of the administration have also lowered. So there aren't that many adults in the room in the high reaches of the Trump administration. They know how to break things. It's not clear to me that they know how to build anything.

WALKER: Right. So let me push you on this concept of the long in-between, and then I'll get your quick reaction. So if the main thing holding US forces in place in Asia is this political and bureaucratic inertia, then if the US is able to overcome that, its decline is going to be even steeper. And two factors would lead us to think that it will overcome that inertia. One is the one you've raised, which is Trump. And we're kind of learning new things every day about what Washington is capable of. And if there was ever an example of policy inertia, it would be America's approach to NATO—and now Trump's thrown even that into doubt. So that's the first thing. You've already addressed that.

But the second thing would be: China has agency in this situation. And I think this might be Hugh White's view. So China is going to raise the costs to that American inertia and actively try to force the US out of Asia. Your reaction?

ROGGEVEEN: First of all, I should have mentioned, when you first mentioned Hugh's work, that I owe him a huge debt. And I hope it's clear in the book that intellectually I owe him a massive debt. And my work is in part a conversation with his, but is also derivative of his. You know, I couldn't have done what I've done without Hugh's work.

It's not clear to me how that pushing-out works. First of all, the allies desperately want the United States to stay, because the alternative to America staying is, first of all, that Japan and Korea in particular need to dramatically increase their defence spending. And secondly, and even more difficult, they will need their own nuclear weapons. Politically, that's a very difficult bridge to cross. I mean, it may—we could get into this later—it may be that both of those countries will have to get nuclear weapons anyway, even with the United States still in place. But certainly if the United States pulled out, those countries would need to develop an independent nuclear deterrent. It's also the other reason why I think the United States will stay, and why China would not push them out, is that for China the difference between having the US stay in a reduced capacity and having it leave entirely is not great enough to risk a confrontation over America leaving.

WALKER: I see.

ROGGEVEEN: So the cost of forcing America to leave, the risk of doing that, is pretty high. You could start a war, a disastrous war. But the cost and the risk of just watching, slowly, America shrink in place—of [watching the US] effectively going from primacy to power-sharing—that's a very low-risk option. And that's where America has been moving for 30 years anyway. And for China, it doesn't pose much risk to simply wait for America to shrink in place.

WALKER: Right, yeah, makes sense.

Okay, so I just want to quickly clarify something with you to make sure I understand the flow of your argument. So ultimately, whether you or Hugh is right, whether America is going to leave Asia entirely or enter a power-sharing relationship with China, is sort of a moot point for the echidna strategy, right? Because your defensive policy assumes we should be self-reliant. So whatever happens with America doesn't affect how you want to structure your echidna defence. Is that the right way to think about it?

ROGGEVEEN: What you're saying is that I needn't have written the first half of the book. Shit.

WALKER: You can put it that way if you want. I chose other words.

ROGGEVEEN: The difference is that an America that remains in a power-sharing capacity preoccupies China much more than if it's not there at all. It means that China has to devote many more resources to its relationship with the United States than it would have to if the US was absent altogether.

WALKER: At the expense of what it could devote to, say, Australia?

ROGGEVEEN: That's right, yeah. And it would also be a world in which, as already discussed, proliferation would occur, nuclear proliferation would occur. And that simply complicates China's life. So there are advantages to having the US in place. And although ultimately I would land on the side that China would prefer to have the US absent altogether than to have it remain … as I say, the benefits are not that large that it would take major risks to achieve that. So [with the] United States there, in a balancing capacity … China would still have to devote a great many resources to an America in that posture.

WALKER: So let's talk about The Echidna Strategy. So your echidna strategy makes sense to me in operational terms. I can see why the most cost-effective thing to do would be to try to structure our defence policy such that we focused on defending Australia's northern maritime approaches.

But I couldn't really understand the strategic justification for an echidna strategy. And the reason for that is it just feels implausible to me that Australia could ever pose a threat to a country like China short of, you know, acquiring our own nuclear weapons. So I don't know what we could do to seem provocative. Can you just tell me how you think about that?

ROGGEVEEN: Well, I hope I didn't place too much weight on the argument that Australia is provoking China. I certainly think that AUKUS is provocative to China. And actually I wouldn't downplay too far the scale of what we are proposing to do. I mean, chances are we'll never get the eight nuclear-powered submarines that we're proposing to buy.

But let's suppose for a moment we live in a world where we have eight. By the time we get them, the United States is planning to have something in the order of, I think 66 nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear-powered attack submarines, in the middle of the century. Adding eight is, you know, that's a significant effort by a middle power to America's seaborne deterrent—especially when you consider that even in a war against China, the US wouldn't devote all 66 of its nuclear-powered submarines to China. It's got global responsibilities. So that would increase the proportion of Australian forces still further. So that's a far bigger contribution than Australia has ever made to an American military effort in our lifetimes, with the global war on terrorism being front and centre where we've made token contributions, effectively. So I wouldn't downplay that. And of course each of those submarines is going to carry something in the order of 18 to 24 cruise missiles that could be fired against land targets on the Chinese landmass.

The other thing that nuclear-powered submarines are very good for is finding, chasing and destroying ballistic missile submarines. So Australia would be joining that club as well, where we would become an additional threat to China's nuclear deterrent. That's a very serious upgrade in Australian capability as well, which threatens, you know, really the core capability that China has to prevent a catastrophic loss to the United States in any war.

WALKER: I just want to quickly digress and ask you a question on that and then also come back to the echidna strategy.

So as general context, one of the big technological developments of the Cold War were these ballistic missile submarines, SSBNs. And the reason for that is that if your nuclear arsenal is kept primarily on land, in sort of different missile silos, then it's vulnerable to a nuclear first strike …

ROGGEVEEN: A surprise attack.

WALKER: … a surprise attack, which would deprive you of the opportunity to launch a retaliatory strike and sort of reduce the deterrent value of your nuclear arsenal to begin with. And so the ability for nuclear-weapons states to put their arsenal in these submarines, which are nuclear-powered, and then, you know, if you have a minimal deterrence posture like France or Britain, you have at least one of these submarines constantly patrolling the oceans around the world 24/7, 365 days a year, means that you can always launch that retaliatory attack if you need to. At the moment, America has about 50% of its thermonuclear arsenal in its ballistic missile submarines.

And so why AUKUS is significant is … assuming we do get those attack submarines, which are optimised for chasing down these ballistic missile submarines, it will mean that we can target China's second-strike capability … Say a war between the US and China breaks out. What would prevent the US from calling on us to do that, to hunt down China's SSBNs?

ROGGEVEEN: So the mission of hunting those SSBNs, those ballistic missile submarines, is what's known in the game as strategic ASW, strategic anti-submarine warfare. So that's different to workaday anti-submarine warfare. When you put the word strategic in front of it, that means nuclear weapons. And generally that's a mission of such sensitivity and such stature that the Americans don't subcontract it to allies.

WALKER: I see.

ROGGEVEEN: That is at least my understanding of it. These things are tightly held. I talk to retired submariners and that's the impression I get. I do think that the UK and France have taken on those missions in the past. But it would be surprising if it were to be subcontracted to a country that is not itself a nuclear power. But that may be a distinction without a difference, because if Australia has eight nuclear-powered submarines doing other missions, that frees up the Americans to be doing more of that strategic ASW.

WALKER: I see.

ROGGEVEEN: So it may not matter all that much if Australia's not doing it directly.

WALKER: Right. So back to the echidna strategy. The echidna strategy draws comfort from the fact that according to military strategists, we're in an era of defensive dominance, where the costs of defensive military technologies are so much lower than the costs of offensive technologies, on net.

I worry that we are leaving this era. And the thing that gives me pause is drone warfare. It's not quite clear whether drone warfare, on net, is better for offence than defence, but we've seen a couple of examples where now, in Ukraine, the Ukrainians have been using drones for offensive strikes against Russian assets and warships. In the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijanis overcame the Armenian defenders using the Turkish-made drones. So how much do you worry about whether technology is going to tilt the balance back towards offence rather than defence?

ROGGEVEEN: Well, I think actually that the Ukrainian case supports my argument pretty strongly. [In], the Russia-Ukraine war, I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the naval war is being won by the side that doesn't have a navy. It's being won by Ukraine being able to sink large Russian surface combatants using, as you mentioned, drones, but also anti-shipping missiles. Very early—in the first, I think six months of the war—the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, was sunk by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles fired from the land. And more recently the Ukrainians have used drones to hit ships in dock in Russian naval bases in the Crimea. But to me it all supports the argument that large surface ships are becoming increasingly vulnerable.

And really the only plausible way to project a lot of military power against Australia is by sending ships our way or sending lots of aircraft our way. So short of that, it is impossible—or at least extremely expensive—to project significant amounts of military power against Australia. And that's why I land on the very simple solution that in order to defend Australia we need to have the capability to sink lots of ships and shoot down lots of planes. That's not a particularly complicated mission. It doesn't have to be a very expensive one. And that's well within Australia's capability and well within Australia's means to do that.

Now what could possibly change that picture? To me it's not drones. The one thing that could change that picture radically to me is if it became much cheaper and easier to shoot down missiles and to stop drones.

[In the Falklands War] the Argentinians were within a couple of Exocet missiles of winning the campaign. You know, but for a few inert bombs that they dropped on British frigates and a couple of … They were a couple of Exocet missiles short. If they'd been able to sink a British carrier, the war would have gone completely in the other direction.

So ever since then, and even before then, in several Israeli campaigns, we've known that big surface ships are incredibly vulnerable to missiles.

And that problem is only getting worse, because missiles are incredibly cheap. And the warships have had to become more expensive to account for the cheap missiles. So warships are getting bigger. The engines have to get bigger because the ships have to go faster. And they have to run more electronics to cope with all these fast missile threats. And they have to carry more defensive systems just to stay alive, just to stay in the battle.

So the only thing that could change that is: how do you make it radically cheaper to shoot down drones and missiles? Well, maybe laser is that solution, but we're still a long way away from that. It's still relatively expensive to shoot down lots of drones.

And actually drones … are much more expensive in themselves over long range. So in the Pacific, you know, the distances are vast. This flotilla that everyone's talking about, the Chinese flotilla that's now in the Tasman Sea, that's had to come over 7,000 kilometres from China's southern fleet headquarters. And those distances are vast. And sending drones over those distances—nobody's figured out how to do that yet. So, yeah, when it becomes much easier to shoot down missiles, then I'll start to worry about the offensive/defensive balance shifting.

WALKER: So I just want to clarify one specific thing with you quickly on your force structure, and then I'll ask you some questions about Indonesia.

So at the moment we have six conventionally powered submarines, the Collins class submarines. If all goes according to plan with AUKUS, we'll have eight nuclear-powered submarines. How many submarines should we have under an echidna strategy?

ROGGEVEEN: Again, I'll refer back to the note you wrote today. When I was reading it and you went into some detail about this question, I said to myself: “Yeah, I kind of squibbed that one.” You know, I didn't go into exactly how many submarines Australia would need.

WALKER: Can you give a range or a rough first approximation?

ROGGEVEEN: I mean, the bottom line is certainly six. And it's interesting in this regard that a few years ago, Kim Beazley, who was Defence Minister when the Collins class submarine project was conceived, he told his interviewer that one of his regrets about that period was that he didn't go for eight at the time. Because he thought eight would mean that you could get at least three at sea at any one time. And that covers the main archipelagic thoroughfares between Australia and Indonesia. So the bottom line is 8, but it's probably 12 and maybe even higher than that.

One reason that I didn't do the work of specifying the number is that I kind of feel like the question obscures something more important. We shouldn't care about submarines because of submarines, because of what submarines are. We should care about submarines because of what they do. And what do submarines do? Well, submarines are very good at sinking ships and sinking other submarines.

In peacetime they have jobs as well. They do a bit of surveillance. You can land a few special forces on shore surreptitiously.

But submarines are wartime weapons. They're not constabulary weapons in the way that surface ships are. They're certainly not diplomatic tools in the way that surface ships are. You know, you can't fly a flag off a submarine. I mean, you can, it'll just get wet. So submarines are really wartime weapons. And they're very potent and very good, even the diesel powered ones. However, the job that submarines do, sinking ships, sinking other submarines, can also be done in other ways.

And so the job for Australian defence policy force structure is not to figure out how many submarines do we need; it's to figure out what jobs do we want to do, how many ships will we need to sink, and what's the most efficient and effective way of achieving that goal.

And to me, the answer to that is not necessarily more submarines. It's some submarines, but also a lot of maritime patrol aircraft, a lot of fast jets, some surface ships, but also—and this is a new area that Australia is now getting into—land-based anti-ship weapons. So it's a whole potpourri; it's a mix of weapons systems. And I think the preoccupation with submarines has skewed the national debate somewhat.

WALKER: Okay. Let's talk about Indonesia. So you argue convincingly that the top priority of Australian statecraft should be an alliance with Indonesia, even if it is not an alliance in formal terms. Could you just take … 30 seconds is plenty. Could you just explain why that should be the top priority? And then I'll ask you some questions.

ROGGEVEEN: Well, we worry a lot about China as a major strategic military power and what it means for Australia's security. But as I've already said, distance is a huge buffer for Australia. The line I use in the book is that distance is Australia's single biggest defence asset. We don't have that advantage with Indonesia.

Now at the moment and for … the whole period since Indonesian independence, we have benefited in Australia from the fact that Indonesia has been relatively poor and also that it's been primarily a land power, not a maritime or air power. We can't rely on that continuing indefinitely. Indonesia won't remain poor. It's sure to become much wealthier.

And in fact, there's a respectable case that by the middle of this century we will be able to call Indonesia a great power. It'll be up there with Japan and India and France and Britain, in terms of its economic weight and maybe in terms of its strategic weight.

It is certainly the natural leader in ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations], in South-East Asia. It's important to note that there is no resident great power in South-East Asia at the moment. And that makes South-East Asia a much more natural outlet for Chinese ambition than any other part of Asia. Everywhere else that China looks in Asia, there are other great powers that are going to frustrate its ambitions. Not yet in South-East Asia, where there's no resident great power. So it's very much in Australia's interest for Indonesia to be that country. And I realise I'm well over 30 seconds.

WALKER: No, that's okay. It's a good explanation.

ROGGEVEEN: It's very much in Australia's interest for Indonesia to be that country. And it's very much in Australia's interest to be on Indonesia's side when it becomes that country.

WALKER: Right.

ROGGEVEEN: Because although a poor Indonesia and an Indonesia that's disorganised and unable to defend itself against a rising China is a bad outcome, I think an even worse outcome for Australia is an Indonesia that is wealthy and hostile to us, right? That is the worst outcome. As I say in the book: if Indonesia was both wealthy and hostile to us, we would suddenly join South Korea, Israel, Poland as one of the least secure countries in the world. We would be facing a major security threat on our, you know, close to our shores, right on our borders, if you will, in the way that those countries do. So it is massively in Australia's interest and a huge priority for Australia to make sure that never happens.

WALKER: I have some questions about what the world looks like for us with Indonesia as a great power. But before I get to those, I wonder whether you've considered a contradiction between your two goals of an echidna strategy and an alliance with Indonesia. So allow me to explain.

For Indonesia to want an alliance with us, we'd need to be able to offer them power projection into South-East Asia. Otherwise it probably wouldn't be that valuable for them. And if I think about what it would take to project power into South-East Asia, the answer seems to be a large fleet of submarines. And in his book How to Defend Australia, Hugh White did some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic where he worked out if we had a fleet of diesel electric subs, we'd need about, I think, 24 to 32 in order to defend Australia's northern maritime approaches around the archipelago. The reason for that number is to defend the main choke points. You would want at minimum six to eight. And if you assume that only 25% of the fleet is going to be on station at any one time, you need a total fleet of 24 to 32.

And now the next step in my sort of argument here is: I'm just going to assume that same number is what would be helpful to Indonesia to help them with their defence—24 to 32 conventionally powered subs.

So if that's what we're talking, that's starting to look quantitatively if not qualitatively different to an echidna posture projecting power all the way into South-East Asia like.

ROGGEVEEN: I'll address that. But in the interest of self-criticism, let me offer another argument for why you might criticise my case, a counterargument—which is that the whole point of the echidna strategy, as I've been trying to explain, is to exploit distance, right? We're far away from China. Distance is our biggest asset. If I'm suggesting that we ally with Indonesia and we position forces in Indonesia, aren't I myself undermining that advantage of distance by moving us closer to Indonesia? There's something to be said for that point. So what has to compensate for that is the composition of those forces and the nature of the alliance that I'm proposing with Indonesia. And this is what I think addresses your argument as well.

So I'm at pains to stress in the book that the case for the alliance with Indonesia should be based on purely and narrowly defensive ambitions that are only, solely maritime. So you use the phrase “power projection”. Now that has a very specific meaning in the defence literature. And what it tends to refer to is forces that can range over many thousands of kilometres onto the land mass of an adversary. I don't propose power projection forces of that kind. In fact, what I propose is that the alliance between Australia and Indonesia be explicitly based on the premise that there would be no capability to project power onto the landmass of any country, let alone China—and even including any Chinese base that might appear in the region. It would not have that capability. I think it would be a non-starter if it did.

But nevertheless, even for the kind of limited mission that I'm talking about—which is purely designed, as I said earlier, to shoot down aircraft and sink ships—you need to be able to project power. I mean, the distances involved here are long. So we're talking thousands of kilometres.

So what you have to do in those circumstances is always, through your military diplomacy and through your force structure, communicate to potential adversaries that your intent is only defensive: “We will only use this in the extreme circumstances and we will only do it if you come at us.” I mean, that's the echidna motif right there. Okay. Echidnas are benign creatures. They have no … they can't hurt you unless you come at them. And that's what I would seek to communicate.

WALKER: I see. Okay, so Indonesia's GDP is currently about three-quarters of Australia's. It's projected to become the fourth-largest economy in the world by about 2045. At that point, what's your sort of base case? At that point, is it just going to start acting like a great power?

ROGGEVEEN: We don't know, because Indonesia—even though the Cold War is now 30-plus years behind us—Indonesia really hasn't developed a post-Cold-War strategic identity.

WALKER: It’s still nonaligned.

ROGGEVEEN: It's still nonaligned, which is a phrase and a position that suits the Cold War, was conceived during the Cold War. And although it is, as I said earlier, the natural leader of ASEAN, and in some sense behaves like that, it hasn't sought to really grasp leadership. And none of its democratic-era presidents have really sought to define Indonesia as the region's great power, which will grasp leadership.

So we don't know. And there really aren't any straws in the wind. I mean, the strategic community in Jakarta is very small. I wrote a paper for Australian Foreign Affairs last year where I laid out the case for the alliance, this quasi-alliance, in much more detail. And it didn't get much response from Jakarta. I didn't hear a great deal from there. I was hoping for more criticism actually, but in the end heard nothing very much. So really, there is just not much to go on about how Indonesia would perform as ASEAN's leader.

Now, Indonesia may not want leadership, but leadership may be thrust upon it at some point. So I think if China's ambitions are as great as I suspect that they are, then those ambitions are going to at some point clash much more directly with Indonesia's interests. And Indonesia will need to make some hard choices at that point.

WALKER: So say you're able to convince both sides of politics that this alliance should be the top priority of Australian statecraft. But it turns out in 10 to 15 years that those efforts have just foundered. What do you think the most likely reason for that would be? So in other words, the problem isn't Australian politics; it's something else.

ROGGEVEEN: Yeah, there are some in what used to be called the Indonesia lobby in Australia who argue that, you know, our South-East Asia literacy is very poor and Australia is simply not mentally ready to place itself in that South-East Asian firmament. You know, we still behave like a white post-colonial power that talks to Indonesia and talks to South-East Asia either as an aid donor or as a country that needs to address bilateral problems in the relationship. But we don't talk to South-East Asia as an equal. We are far away, mentally, from thinking about Indonesia as being a great power to which Australia would be subordinate. We mentally haven't worked our way into that territory yet. We're still a long way from it.

But even with all of that said, I think the problems would mainly be on the Indonesian side. I think at the elite level there is a real readiness in Australia for much closer ties with Indonesia. But one problem is, as I said before, the Indonesian strategic community is very small and there's maybe a lack of imagination to think about something like that. The other reason, I think probably a much more basic one, is that when Indonesia thinks about its security, it looks north; it doesn't look south. Australia's just not a problem that it needs to deal with. So there may simply not be the bandwidth to think about Australia in those grand terms.

And of course, the other reason that it might be stopped—and actually here I'm going to contradict myself, because this is an Australia-centric point—another reason why Indonesia might think it's very difficult is because of AUKUS and because of our relationship with the United States. Now, in the future that I'm sketching, it's possible that AUKUS and the US partnership becomes less important to Australia, which would make such a partnership more likely. But in a future in which the alliance with the United States becomes ever closer, I can't see the Indonesians being terribly enthusiastic about the kind of quasi-alliance that I've sketched.

WALKER: So one of the big assets we have going for us at the moment is our military capabilities and our technological edge. Indonesia spends less than 1% of its GDP on defence. And to utterly transform its defence forces, it would only need to raise that to a relatively modest 2%, which is roughly what we currently spend. So at the moment we can offer them something valuable and that's important for the prospects of an alliance. Can you help me understand just what's the sort of window of opportunity here? How long before they close that gap and then we suddenly can't really offer that value to them? Is it 10 years, 15 years?

ROGGEVEEN: I kind of wish that window was 10 to 15 years, because it would mean that the Indonesians are on a clear path towards that modernisation. But I'm afraid the indicators of that are partial at best. So first of all, Indonesian state capacity generally is still very low. We'll get to the defence part of it in a moment. But just Indonesia as a state—I mean, it doesn't tax enough, it can't educate its citizens in a way that a middle income country should be. It can't keep them as healthy as they should be, can't build enough of the infrastructure that it needs. It's improving on all these metrics, but it's been on a steady path of improvement really since the Suharto period—5% economic growth with comparable growth in state capacity. But still, it's not even Thailand or Malaysia in terms of its state capacity. It's still below that.

And that's clear in the defence realm as well. And you know, in recent years, when Prabowo [Subianto]—who's now president—when he was Defence Minister, responsible for procurement projects that at face value look weird. So [Indonesia was] acquiring fighter aircraft from three different countries, for instance, in very small batches. And then [it was] not even clear that they're actually going to follow through on these contracts—one with France, one with the United States. They bought a small batch of aircraft from the US. They had a tragedy with their submarines where they lost a submarine with all crew aboard, I think last year or maybe the year before.

WALKER: Oh, wow.

ROGGEVEEN: So, you know, traditionally the Indonesian military, TNI, has been very internally focused on internal security. That's still the case. There are pockets of improvement in its capacity to become what we would think of as a more traditional-style, western-style military. But it's very early days and progress is halting.

WALKER: So let's talk about nuclear weapons to finish with. By the way, I was quite surprised the Lowy Institute did this poll in 2022 that showed that about 36% of Australians either support or strongly support us acquiring nuclear weapons. That surprised me. Did that surprise you?

ROGGEVEEN: Yes.

WALKER: How do you interpret that?

ROGGEVEEN: Actually, it would have surprised me more in the absence of AUKUS. So after AUKUS was announced in August 2021, to me one of the dogs that didn't bark politically was nuclear power. So I'm old enough, and a handful of people in this room are old enough, to remember the anti-nuclear campaigns in Australia in the 1980s. Peter Garrett, the campaign against nuclear power, the Greens Party [were] very active against nuclear power at the time.

And when AUKUS was announced by the Morrison government in September 2021, I expected that campaign to ramp up. And it just never happened. There's been plenty of opposition to AUKUS, including from people like me. But there hasn't been any popular reaction to the idea of Australia, you know, berthing nuclear reactors in Sydney Harbour, potentially HMAS Stirling in Western Australia, and a new facility that we're proposing to build on the east coast. So that just didn't happen.

So all of a sudden I thought: “Okay, Australians are more relaxed about nuclear power than I thought they were.” In fact, [it was] a pretty good sign for the [federal] Opposition, I think, played a role in their decision to announce civilian nuclear power as an election promise. I'm sure it played a role.

So in the absence of that, I think I would have been more surprised by that result. How do I account for it? I really can't, except on the level that, you know, poll questions are generally presented without counterfactuals.

ROGGEVEEN: So, for instance, when you ask Australians “do you want nuclear weapons?” they're not asked, you know, “do you want nuclear weapons if it costs this or if it means getting less of that?” They're just asked, “do you like nuclear weapons?” So maybe the simple answer is they just haven't thought it through.

WALKER: Yeah. So, well, let's try and think it through now. So what basic preconditions would you want to see met before you thought Australia was justified in considering acquiring nuclear weapons of its own.

ROGGEVEEN: I can't see why Australia would do this if there wasn't proliferation first. So for all the reasons we've already discussed—Japan's security dilemma with China, South Korea's security dilemma with China, Taiwan's, needless to say, Taiwan's security dilemma with China—is much more acute than Australia's is. We are just further away. It's harder to project military power against faraway targets than against nearby targets. So we have less to worry about than those countries. And so I find it impossible to imagine a world in which Australia goes nuclear before they do.

So the first condition that needs to be met is that Japan and probably Korea go nuclear before us. Taiwan won't because … it's impossible for any country, even a closed society like Iran, to keep a nuclear weapons program secret. And Taiwan is not a closed society. It's a very open society. And actually it's quite deeply penetrated by Chinese intelligence services. So it would be absolutely impossible for them to hide a nuclear weapons program. And as soon as the Chinese got wind of it, the invasion would be on.

WALKER: Right.

ROGGEVEEN: So that's why Taiwan will never go nuclear.

South Korea and Japan are in a different boat. So if American withdrawal was imminent, or they simply lost faith in the alliance, in the extended nuclear deterrent that they enjoy, then I think they might take that option of going nuclear. So they would need to go first.

The other threshold that needs to be met is that Indonesia would need to be okay with it. And this is, I think, a very important one, because in the absence of Indonesian acquiescence, or preferably Indonesian cooperation, then any problem that we will be trying to solve by going nuclear would actually be totally undercut by the problems we would create with Indonesia by going nuclear. In fact, the problems we create with Indonesia would be much worse than any problem we'd be trying to solve with China by going nuclear because it would immediately trigger a reaction from Indonesia. And Indonesia would then become the enemy that we, you know, we so desperately want to avoid it being. So we would need to get Indonesian cooperation, and as I say, even better still would be that we do it cooperatively with Indonesia. That seems unlikely to me. It would be a huge step for Indonesia as well as Australia.

WALKER: For sure. So remind me: you think that America's extended nuclear deterrence—the nuclear umbrella that protects countries like Australia, allies of America like Australia—you think that extended nuclear deterrence is not going to remain credible into the future, right?

ROGGEVEEN: Yeah. Well, let's put Australia to one side.

WALKER: Okay.

ROGGEVEEN: The Korean case is actually a good way to illustrate this problem.

WALKER: Yeah.

ROGGEVEEN: The United States has an agreement, has an alliance with South Korea, as it does with all its Asian allies and its European allies, the ones that don't have nuclear weapons of their own. It has this basic agreement which in its essentials says to that ally: “If you are ever threatened with nuclear weapons, we will use our nuclear weapons in your defence.” That's called extended nuclear deterrence, right? So that's the bargain that the US has struck with its allies. And because we, America, are choosing to let you effectively borrow our nuclear weapons, you will never need to develop nuclear weapons of your own.

In the Korean case, that bargain started to change a few years ago, because about five or six years ago, I think, we started to see evidence emerging from North Korea that it was building what's called an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile. Which means that North Korea now, we have to assume, has the ability to put a nuclear warhead, probably several, on an American city. East coast, west coast, New York, Los Angeles, you name it, all of them.

So now suddenly the bargain with South Korea changes. Because what it now implies is that we, America, will use nuclear weapons on your behalf if you're attacked, even if that means one or more of our cities gets destroyed with nuclear weapons.

WALKER: We'll trade Seattle or Los Angeles for Seoul.

ROGGEVEEN: Exactly.

WALKER: Not credible.

ROGGEVEEN: Not credible. That is an impossible thing to ask of the Americans.

And you know, I think sometimes when I talk about America and its waning resolve, it might carry an implication that I'm making a judgement about American moral character, about its courage. But not at all. I'm making a cold-blooded assessment about its vital interests.

And actually, if there's a moral judgement to be made, it is against us as America's allies. It is about the South Koreans, in this case. Because what we, as America's allies are asking the Americans to do on our behalf is ridiculous. It's impossible. What could possibly justify the United States losing Seattle or Los Angeles or Washington on behalf of South Korea? That is not a credible or reasonable thing to ask the Americans to do on our behalf.

ROGGEVEEN: And so inevitably, I think the South Koreans have drawn the conclusion that actually we shouldn't be asking the Americans to do this on our behalf. It's not credible. We have to do it ourselves. And there is good evidence now that the South Koreans are doing that. They are developing more independent capabilities to counter the North Korean threat.

Australia and Japan up to this point have taken the opposite view. They have decided that the way to address this problem is to tie the Americans down even further. That's what AUKUS is partly about. Japan is doubling its defence spending, but also tying itself much more closely to the United States. I think the South Korean approach is more credible than the Australian and Japanese approach.

WALKER: So if you think that, does that mean you think that Australian governments will decide that they can no longer rely on extended nuclear deterrence over the next few decades?

ROGGEVEEN: I mean, that's going to require a huge cultural shift in Australia, which the two major parties may not be capable of.

The everyday workings of the US-Australia alliance is embedded in bureaucracies. We started our conversation by talking about the intelligence world. The Five Eyes arrangement is at the very core of the security relationship with the United States. And then beyond that, you've got the broader security and defence relationship between our defence departments. You've got Australians embedded in IndoPacom in Hawaii, for instance. I mean, this goes very deep. This is in the marrow of both systems.

But I would argue over and above that, that the alliance is held together by the political culture in our two major parties. The best illustration of that is that both of our major parties claim the alliance as their progeny. Labor says that, okay, we turned to the alliance during the Second World War. The Liberals say, well, yeah, but it was Menzies who started ANZUS. They're both kind of right. But what it illustrates is that it's there. It's deep in the bones.

And actually, one further point about Australian history and the way the alliance operates: it's not coincidental to me that over the course of the Cold War, the Labor Party only had an extended period of government when it fully reconciled itself to the relationship with the United States, to the alliance with the United States, and its relationship, its opposition to communism. Even in the Whitlam period, there were some doubts, within the party, about its relationship to communism and its partnership to the United States. Hawke put all of that to bed. And that was the only time that the Labor Party had an extended period in power.

So the relationship with the United States, I would argue, is so deeply embedded that I doubt that they are capable of those kind of, you know, fundamental reassessments of the alliance relationship.

WALKER: Okay. Putting aside what political leaders might decide, do you, Sam Roggeveen, think that we can continue to rely on extended nuclear deterrence?

ROGGEVEEN: I think we can rely on the vestiges of it for a long time, because extended nuclear deterrence actually doesn't do a great deal for Australia. One point where I think you and I might disagree is that I find it very difficult to imagine a security crisis where Australia could plausibly be threatened with the use of nuclear weapons. I think Australia would have a very good case if there was ever a security dispute with China, and China were to do what Russia is doing right now to NATO and to Ukraine … I think Australia would have a plausible case for saying: “We don't believe you. You may say you're ready to use nuclear weapons against us, but we're calling your bluff. We don't think you will do that.”

WALKER: Oh, that's a big bluff to call.

ROGGEVEEN: Well, it's a big bluff to call, but the culture against nuclear use is incredibly high. And that's a difficult taboo to break. And Australia, little Australia, in relative terms, would not be the country that I'd pick to break that taboo against.

WALKER: Yeah. So we'll go to audience questions in a moment, but I just want to push you on this final point a tiny bit more. This is the move you make in the book. I think the way your argument works is that even if we can't continue to rely on extended nuclear deterrence, we're kind of rescued by this taboo argument. It would just be so unthinkable that any kind of threat isn't going to be credible. Now, obviously, as you know, the most likely way nuclear weapons would be used against Australia isn't a mushroom cloud forming over Canberra; it's nuclear blackmail—so a country like China threatening to use nuclear weapons, and then us acquiescing and not engaging China in sort of conventional warfare, or letting them get their way.

So my worry is that so much of nuclear strategy is just drawn from, like, one big case study, which is the Cold War. And we just don't really have a clear sense of how these things might play out.

So you mentioned the Ukraine example. That's a very clear example of a country post-Cold-War using nuclear weapons in this sense. Putin almost every day threatens nuclear blackmail to keep the US and its NATO allies out of directly intervening in Ukraine.

There's another really interesting historical example here, which is [that] China itself has experience with nuclear blackmail, on the receiving end. So in the 1950s, the US kept China from invading Taiwan by threatening to use nuclear weapons. And that threat worked.

So I guess I don't feel confident that we could rely on China not to use nuclear blackmail against us if conflict broke out. And, yeah, my worry would be that this taboo just won't restrain a country like China.

ROGGEVEEN: So you're. You're drawing a distinction between nuclear blackmail and nuclear use—use in the sense of actually detonating a nuclear device.

WALKER: So then … if you bought that argument, the logic of Australia acquiring nuclear weapons would, as you know, would be that it would neutralise that threat. And now we're just back to fighting China on conventional terms.

ROGGEVEEN: But my counterargument would be that the distinction between nuclear blackmail and nuclear use is a distinction without a difference.

WALKER: I agree with that.

ROGGEVEEN: Nuclear blackmail only works if the person being blackmailed believes the threat.

WALKER: Right, I agree.

ROGGEVEEN: So I don't see how you get out of that. The reason I'm saying that Australia can call the bluff is because I don't think China would ever use nuclear weapons. So the threats that it makes would simply not be credible.

WALKER: Isn't the problem that the consequences are so large that even if there's just a small probability, it's still going to affect your decision-making?

ROGGEVEEN: Yeah, that's a risk we're running. Yeah, absolutely.

WALKER: Okay.

ROGGEVEEN: It's only that the other way of approaching this problem also imposes huge costs on Australia. So Australia becoming a nuclear weapons power … that also has huge costs. So it's simply a matter of weighing the costs of my approach against the other one, of proliferating.

WALKER: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And for the record, I'm not urging Australia to acquire weapons …

ROGGEVEEN: No, I think you are [audience laughter]

WALKER: … but it's interesting to play with these arguments, right?

ROGGEVEEN: Yeah.

WALKER: Okay, so final question, then we'll do some audience questions. So Allan Gyngell has argued that the kind of narrative that defined Australian defence and foreign policy for pretty much its entire history has been a fear of abandonment. It seems like we're on a trajectory to being abandoned, whether we like it or not. In a few words, what do you think the new narrative should be, that replaces fear of abandonment?

ROGGEVEEN: I don't have a slogan for you, but I would offer you some optimism. Because in a way you could argue that our defence policy, and in particular the AUKUS arrangement, is kind of against the grain and against the trend of Australian foreign policy and of how it's shaped its place in the world. Immigration: we're being utterly transformed by Asian immigration. Our economy is now Asia-focused from, you know, the European- and US-focused economy of generations past. Our foreign policy is now thoroughly Asia-focused. You mentioned Alan Gingell at the start of his book. He refers to the fact that when he joined the Ministry of—I think it was still called the Ministry of External affairs back then—relations with the UK were not the responsibility of the Department of External Affairs. It still sat in the Prime Minister's department.

So in so many ways, Australia has transformed its relationship with its Anglo-Saxon partners and directed itself more towards Asia. In a sense, defence policy is the holdout. And AUKUS, I would argue, goes very much against that postwar trend of Australia's place in the world.

So that's the optimism I would offer. And I think, much like many of those changes, where Australia didn't go voluntarily, we had to kind of be forced to be free. You know, when the Brits joined the Common Market, we were forced to be free. When Nixon announced the Guam Doctrine, we were forced to be a bit more free. I think the steady decline, relative decline of American power in Asia, and shocks such as the one we're suffering right now under the Trump administration, are going to force Australia to be more free.

WALKER: Thanks, Sam. Alright, let's hear some questions. So please raise your hand if you have a question. Just a reminder: if you can kind of think of the best way of articulating your question and then just say that rather than cycling through a few different versions of the same question, that would be great. So let's go to Jonno here. We'll get a mic to you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Thank you both. The echidna strategy, is it a parochial … This is a parochial question, but is the echidna strategy playing to the tall poppy syndrome of Australia, and we're just building off your last point there, breaking from that fear of abandonment? Is there room for a megafauna echidna strategy where Australia plays a bigger role in the world? And is AUKUS a manifestation of wanting to play a bigger role in the world, whereas the echidna strategy, it's benign, spiky? Can we go bigger?

ROGGEVEEN: Well, it's really boring when authors take every opportunity to promote their work. But let me quote a line from my book. I want Australia to be an ambitious nation, but defence policy is the wrong thing to be ambitious about. And actually, for reasons that I think I just alluded to in my previous answer, although AUKUS, on an operational level and certainly on a sort of program level, is incredibly ambitious—vaultingly ambitious—as a statement about Australia's place in the world, it is the very opposite of ambitious. It is a running-home-to-mum kind of moment. I would much rather Australia took its place in the world as a confident, independent nation, US-aligned, certainly, but not US-dependent.

So, yeah, as a manifestation of Australian ambition, an Australian attempting to achieve status in the world, I think it's kind of jaundiced, and it's a misplaced gesture. I want to see Australia become an ambitious nation in the sense of a kind of beacon to the world, really, in a period where postwar liberal democracy is increasingly under pressure, where I think more illiberal forms of democracy are in vogue. And that's the direction that the United States and Europe is heading towards. Australia, you know, we may have to get, you know, to kind of borrow an old 20th century expression, liberalism in one country. Australia may be the last best hope, the last best example of liberal democracy. And that's a legacy that I think we need to protect and build on and grow. There's a case for a much bigger Australia in population terms and in economic terms. And that's where I would like our sense of direction, our sense of ambition to be directed.

WALKER: Let's go to Aidan, just in the middle there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: It's been discussed about Taiwan at various points that China may not have to invade to get a lot of effective control and leverage over Taiwan. Is any element of that somewhat true of Australia as an island nation, given our dependence on the sea for foreign trade? Could our trade routes be threatened or lead to us being coerced? And what does that mean for the echidna strategy?

ROGGEVEEN: So what this question hits on is … What's become really a source of strong debate among defence analysts in Australia is the question of the vulnerability of what strategists call the “sea lines of communication”, the SLOCs. “Trade routes” effectively is what that means. And there are a group of defence analysts—strategists, if you like—who are navalists, who argue that Australia is highly dependent on these sea lines of communication and we need the capability to protect them. I'm not in that school. I think that the role of these trade routes, the importance of these trade routes has been overstated to Australia. And more to the point, to the extent that our trade routes are, that Australia's economy is vulnerable to the breaching or the interruption of these trade routes, it is very difficult to do in Australia's case. Again, geography protects us not only because we're far away, but because the land mass is so huge.

So, for instance, the idea of blockading Australia's ports ... Well, there's a reasonably large Australian port in every capital city. Do you want to picket every one of those ports with several warships and maybe a couple of submarines? That's a huge effort for any navy. What could possibly justify something like that?

And by the way, how long would that take to have any effect on Australia? Give me some historical examples, outside of wartime, full-scale war, where a trade blockade has had major effects on a nation's foreign policy, where it's forced major concessions.

I don't think the argument for that case is very strong. There aren't a great many historical examples, so it's very difficult to do.

The other point I'd make is that we should never underestimate societal resilience. So, you know, strategists will often say: “Look, you know, if we interrupt the flow of oil and gas for a month, Australians won't know what to do with themselves. We won't be able to fill up our cars.” To a point, that's a reasonable argument. And it's an argument for storing more oil onshore and having more refinery capacity onshore. It's also, by the way, a really good argument for Australia to electrify its transportation fleet as quickly as possible.

But also, economists will tell you that people know how to diversify. Economies diversify. We learn how to work around these problems. The German economy is in a bit of trouble now, but [in] the early phases of the Ukraine war, when the Russians cut off gas supplies, Germany didn't even go into recession. They found alternatives. They suffered a cold winter, but they worked their way around it. Australia would do the same.

And it's very hard for me to imagine that any kind of economic campaign against Australia would force us into major concessions.

WALKER: Okay, more questions. Okay, yep.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Thanks. I'm keen to get your view on what it is that China would be seeking to achieve in relation to any sort of conflict with Australia. What's a realistic assessment of what China might be trying to achieve in that situation?

ROGGEVEEN: Well, I think the most obvious reason for China to project military force against Australia is to target the American military facilities that are soon to be on our shores. So Australia has come to an agreement with the United States to station strategic bombers at RAAF Tindal, which is an air base several hundred kilometres south of Darwin. We've also agreed to rotate American nuclear-powered submarines through HMAS Stirling in Perth. So for the first time since the Second World War, we will have operational American forces on Australian soil. We won't just have US forces and US troops coming to Australia to exercise and to train. They will be here in order to conduct military operations and if necessary, wartime operations from Australian soil.

Now, with those arrangements in place, probably starting in 2027, China has a clear incentive to attack those facilities in wartime. So, you know, the dark joke that I've heard going around is that AUKUS is designed to solve the security problems created by AUKUS. And that's effectively true in this case, right? If we didn't have these American bases onshore, then the clearest, most obvious pretext for China to attack us would disappear. So to me, that's a pretty good argument for not going ahead with that project.

Other than that, I don't see [a] strong reason. The other reason that China might attack Australia is if we become, in China's eyes, a rogue state in the same way that Iraq was a rogue state to America. And how do we do that? Going nuclear?

So, to me, that is an obvious pretext for China to project military power against Australia, is if they find out that Australia is developing nuclear weapons.

WALKER: Okay, we've got a few … Maybe we'll just go to the back there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: Thanks. That was great. How much of the impetus behind AUKUS is because of a lack of cultural imagination, and especially a lack of cultural imagination about alternatives?

ROGGEVEEN: Well, I think I partly addressed that point in response to the earlier question about how deeply embedded the alliance is in the culture of the major parties. I mean, I find it hard to fault the Australian public in this regard. In fact, I find it hard to fault the major parties, too, because it should be said that the US alliance has served Australia incredibly well since it was … you know, since it began in the Second World War, informally, and then formally in 1951. It's served Australia incredibly well. And it's hard to leave that behind, leave that legacy and that performance behind.

It's going to perform less well in the future, for all the reasons we've talked about. But that's still in the future. And so absent some major shock—and maybe, you know, we're in the middle of such a strategic shock now with the advent of the Trump administration—it's hard to fault the Australian public, and even our major parties, for not thinking from first principles in the way that you're suggesting, and for not changing an entire cultural outlook that's been deeply embedded since the Second World War.

So, yeah, I think it would require some kind of external shock for that to happen. As I said, maybe we're at the beginnings of one of those shocks right now.

WALKER: Okay, Clare.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: First of all, thank you both. That was fantastic. So, as Joe knows, I circulate mostly in tech circles, and in tech circles, the dominant narrative around US-China tensions focuses on [semiconductor] production, and in particular, Taiwanese strength in that area, TSMC [the world's largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry] . I'm wondering why, or … I'm curious as to why that doesn't seem to factor into your analysis, or—it's a little bit of an aggressive stance to take—I'm curious about your opinion on that and whether that's an important factor in tensions between the US and China.

ROGGEVEEN: By the way, I'm Dutch and we are known for being blunt, so you don't have to apologise for being direct. I don't take it personally at all. So, first of all, I note that the United States is already responding to the possibility of having to, in a sense, surrender Taiwanese semiconductor capacity by building more capacity onshore. And that, to me, is a perfectly rational result—excuse me, a rational response.

Fighting World War three is not a rational response to the semiconductor problem, because the potential risks, the downside of fighting a war on that scale are so clear that it would easily put into the shade the economic costs of losing Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing.

I'd also point out that should China win a war, it doesn't necessarily inherit Taiwanese semiconductor capacity.

First of all, there's a decent chance that a good chunk of the workforce at TSMC jumps ship when or before a war starts.

But even if that doesn't happen, there's a pretty good chance that the major facilities would be flattened during such a campaign by the Americans, maybe even by the Chinese. So whichever side is losing would probably bomb—would flatten—those facilities such that they had to be reconstituted.

And third point, even if they could somehow be protected from bombardment, the parts that are required to maintain those facilities come from the Netherlands as well as other places, and there would be an immediate embargo placed on those.

So the scenario for TSMC in the case of a war is lose-lose. The US would lose them, but so would China. And so the global economy altogether would slow down as a result. But there'd be no winners out of that.

WALKER: Next question. Yeah, let's just go into the front row here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: Mike Linfield. I'm an economist. I'm going to kind of take you up, try to dig down a little bit more on the economic side of your grayscale aggression side of things. How would the echidna strategy look at China's activities in terms of economic coercion, in terms of countering the BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] in the near abroad, looking at the United Work Front's activities with the diaspora [the United Front Work Department is a Chinese Communist Party group aiming to influence people and organisations outside China]? I mean, before we get to the economic community of the Pacific, which is great … in the immediate term, what are the kind of economic issues that you think that an echidna strategy should be looking at? Yeah, thank you.

ROGGEVEEN: Well, first of all, on the domestic political question, I think actually Australia's policy and its behaviour over the last three or so years—when China put all sorts of coercive economic measures in place against Australia in protest to various positions that Australia had taken under the Morrison government—the position that Australia has taken both under Morrison and then under Albanese is a great advertisement for the echidna strategy, and actually a great credit to both of those governments.

So the first thing to note about that response to Chinese economic coercion is that Australia never seriously contemplated the idea of retaliating to Chinese economic coercion. In fact, I could only find one example of an Australian politician saying that in response to these measures, Australia should place tariffs on our iron ore exports to China. One politician said that and he was laughed off the stage. Matt Canavan, it was, the National [Party] politician. Nobody else seriously contemplated retaliation

So we never escalated. We never escalated. But we never gave in. So I think that's actually a pretty good model of an echidna strategy. We didn't retaliate, but at the same time we absorbed pressure. But we never gave up our core foreign policy interests and we never gave in. And at a certain point when the government changed, the Chinese, I think, concluded: “Guys, this isn't working; we'll try a different tack now that there's a new government in place.”

That's a pretty good echidna-type model.

The tragedy is that our defence strategy has learnt not at all from that example. So we're buying a whole suite of weapons that are expressly designed to offer us retaliatory capabilities that are expressly designed to hit the Chinese landmass.

WALKER: These are the cruise missiles?

ROGGEVEEN: These are the cruise missiles, yeah, that we're putting on board our surface ships and in future we will put on board our submarines.

So my argument has been that we should apply the successful formula that we developed against economic coercion to our defence policy.

As for the Pacific side of it: again I think, actually Australian policy has been notably successful. And again, this is bipartisan. The Pacific Step up program started under the Morrison, actually under the Turnbull government, continued under Morrison, has continued under Albanese and has actually been extended now. There's now several, in recent times, defence agreements with small Pacific island states—the latest is PNG—all designed essentially to align these Pacific island countries with Australia, and ensure that China has a much harder time imposing its priorities and its interests in the Pacific Islands region. We've been pretty successful.

Of course China won't give up. But our aid effort, for instance, is much larger than that of China. We are much closer geographically, we are much closer culturally and politically, to the Pacific Islands region. Diplomatically, we're a member of the Pacific Islands Forum; they are not. And I would argue there's an imbalance of resolve. The Pacific just matters more to Australia than it does to China. It will always be a third-order priority for China, first-order for us. It's our sphere of influence.

That's very cold realist language. And the Pacific Islands countries themselves hate to hear that. But I don't think we can escape that reality or that responsibility.

So, yeah, it's an ongoing challenge. But you know, economically, I think we've got a good story to tell at the moment.

WALKER: Great. More questions? Yep.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: Cyber warfare as a distance-agnostic force projection strategy. Any thoughts, comments?

ROGGEVEEN: Yes. Cyber warfare and space warfare are basically distance-agnostic. So, yes, those are exceptions to the formula that distance is Australia's greatest strategic asset.

The problem is that I don't think … there's not much evidence at the moment that cyber warfare alone is militarily decisive. Ultimately, warfare is an act of violence designed to extract political goals from an adversary. And violence means that the enemy has to suffer and it's difficult to make an enemy suffer using cyber means. It's possible, of course. And we've all heard, I think, slightly lurid stories of infrastructure networks being shut down by cyber attacks. I think the progress of the Ukraine War ought to, I think, sober us up a little bit about that.

Before the war started, the Russians were purported to have a great many of those capabilities. The Ukrainians prepared really well for those contingencies, thanks in part to the efforts of Microsoft and others to effectively put the Ukrainian state apparatus in the cloud, beyond reach of Russian cyber attacks. And in the end, those cyber attacks ended up being far less effective than they threatened to be. And, you know, slightly … “poignant” is the wrong word. But it's notable that when the cyber attacks failed to affect Ukrainian infrastructure, the Russians resorted to much more direct methods. They used high explosives. So they've used high explosives against the Ukrainian electricity grid and other parts of its critical infrastructure. Still hasn't worked particularly well, but it certainly worked better than the cyber attacks.

WALKER: Ambrose, at the very back.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #8: Thank you very much. I know Dutch; I'm French, as my accent will tip you. So I take your point about, it's a second belt of people talking about China being a danger in the US. I will possibly challenge, saying Admiral [Samuel] Pepparo of INDOPACOM [the US Indo-Pacific Command] recently mentioned again—and there's many instances of that—you know, China’s rehearsing for war. But possibly more importantly, I just want to quote J.D. Vance—so the [US] VP—at the Munich conference. And I just want to get your take on what you think he's referring to in that sentence when he says, essentially, “we're getting out of NATO.” He doesn't say that exactly, but let's assume he says that Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger. So don't you think he's actually referring to China? And how do you put that into your analysis that America is divesting from [the] Pacific?

ROGGEVEEN: Thank you very much. And I'd point out that listening to a Frenchman speak English is much more pleasant than listening to a Dutchman speak English [audience laughter].

WALKER: Or an Australian.

ROGGEVEEN: Yes, I think J.D. Vance was referring to China. And so before the administration took office, there was a very, I think, smart analysis that came out of the European Council on Foreign Relations, where the Trump administration … the principles, the likely principles in the national security and foreign policy teams were divided into three schools: the primacists; the prioritisers; and the restrainers.

The primacists were people like the Secretary of State in the first Trump administration—help me out, Joe—Mike Pompeo. These are people who basically [take a] more traditional Republican stance, who say that the United States needs to become the single greatest power in the globe. “We have unique … global security responsibilities, and we need to … remain powerful around the world, but particularly in Europe and the Middle East as well as Asia.”

The prioritisers, the second school … J.D. Vance is one of those. I think Pete Hegseth, the Defence Secretary, is another. These are people who said: “No, sorry, primacists, we can't afford to do that anymore; we need to focus on the most important threat, and that's China. So we need to prioritise to China, to the Asia-Pacific region.”

The third group are the restrainers. And those are the people who say … These are kind of neo-isolationists who say: “Of course America's still got a global role, and of course China remains an adversary, but we're mainly interested in China as an economic adversary. We are not interested in China as a strategic threat to America. We have no vital security interests in Asia, and we are going to become a much more traditional great power which has a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, but doesn't extend itself too far into the rest of the world.”

Now, the interesting thing is, I'd say the leading proponent of that [restrainers] school is Donald Trump.

So who is up and who is down in that school? That is the way that … That is the lens through which I view the first four weeks of the Trump administration. And my conclusion thus far is that the first school, the primacists, are totally out. So Mike Pompeo didn't get a guernsey in the Trump administration and nor did any of the supporters of that primacist worldview.

So it's a contest now between the prioritisers and the restrainers. And because Vance belongs in that prioritiser school, that's why I think he said what he said. The question is, can he convince Trump of that worldview? I doubt that he can. I think Trump is a pretty die-hard restrainer. And someone—I can't remember who said it—someone mentioned in a podcast the other day that, you know, Trump's history is that he appoints really tough lawyers in the legal cases that he's involved in. So you could say, in a similar mood, that he appoints incredibly hawkish advisers on China. But those tough lawyers and those hawkish advisers never actually stop his instinct for doing deals.

So I think maybe his own instinct is that he wants to do a deal with China, a grand bargain that I think fundamentally reshapes America's place in Asia. But in case that's not achievable, or in case he loses interest, which he often does, then, you know, those bulldog attack-dog lawyers, those hawkish advisers, are still there in his administration.

WALKER: Okay, let's do a couple more questions. Yep, just in the middle there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #9: Thinking of Indonesia, how necessary do you think a strong economic relationship is for this sort of close military working relationship you're thinking of? And I guess, projecting that into the future, if that economic relationship existed between Australia and Indonesia, how well do those economic ties keep Indonesia in our sphere of influence?

ROGGEVEEN:Well, it'd certainly be nice if there was a much more substantial economic relationship between Australia and Indonesia. At the moment, the economic relationship with New Zealand is larger than the one we have with Indonesia. And yet Indonesia's population is roughly 55 times that of New Zealand. Economists tell me that the problem is that there aren't many obvious complementarities between Australia and Indonesia, which are both large resource exporters, export economies. And Australia, despite having a free trade agreement with Indonesia, still suffers from a lot of behind-the-border trade restrictions in Indonesia. Corruption is one, red tape is another. So many companies have tried to get involved in the Indonesian services sector—for instance, banking—but they've always found it very difficult.

So it would be nice. But in the absence of that, in the absence of obvious complementarities, I would argue that we may need to look elsewhere to develop those sinews of the relationship. And one obvious starting place is immigration, which again is sort of puzzlingly anaemic, especially when you compare it to other South-East Asians. In population terms, it's all out of whack. [There are] many more Vietnamese and Thais in Australia than there are Indonesians. And it can't because Indonesians don't immigrate. I mean, there are literally, I think, half a million Indonesians in Taiwan alone. It's a huge number. So why not more Indonesians in Australia?

Australia has in the past used immigration as a tool of foreign policy. We could do it again. We could open up a special visa category to encourage an Indonesian diaspora here. That would help. It's at the margins. I don't think it's absolutely essential. But it would definitely help.

So, yeah, like I say, a closer economic partnership, great. But how? I don't think there's an obvious answer.

WALKER: Ok, last question just in the front row here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #10: Thanks so much, guys. Really enjoyed it. How might Australia walk itself back out of AUKUS? And is there any serious political conversation about that occurring and indeed starting to put into place some of the components of your strategy?

ROGGEVEEN: Well, the odds are against anything happening in the next four to five years because those aren't the big spending years in Australia. So the big bills don't actually come due for about another five years on AUKUS. So politically, [for] any government that's in power, you can imagine a scenario where they're sitting around the cabinet room and all of a sudden various ministers see money getting sucked out of their portfolios because the big AUKUS bills are coming due at that point. You might see some political action in Australia. But that's a long way away. Still, the other sort of, I guess, weak point in the Australian political system is the crossbench.

If we get a minority government after, I guess, May this year when we hold an election—and it's very likely we will get a minority government—then all of a sudden the crossbench has a much bigger say. And although, you know, AUKUS is very deeply embedded in the major parties, for reasons that we've discussed, I don't think that's true on the crossbench. So there may be some more room, certainly much more room for dissent within the Parliament at that point. There'd be much more debate. Whether that can have any material effect on government is another question.

There are certain weak points on the Trump side as well. It's worth saying that the Trump administration won't actually have to make a final decision on the transfer of submarines to Australia. We're due to get the first submarine in 2032. So Trump will be over by then. It'll be up to the successor administration. However, there's a whole slew of smaller preliminary decisions that have to be made in the lead-up to that transfer. And I can imagine a scenario where at some point the president is briefed on AUKUS and it's put to him in the following terms: “Mr President, for us to transfer these submarines to Australia—three and possibly up to five Virginia class submarines to Australia—we, the United States, will have to have three to five fewer submarines.” If the case is made to Trump on those terms, I think he'll say no. That is simply a cost in American prestige and American strength that he will not abide. But other than that, you know, those are kind of weak straws that I'm drawing on.

But I think the much more likely case is that nothing much happens for the next four to five years.

WALKER: If America hands over those subs, then we'll know they're really turning their back on Asia.

ROGGEVEEN: Yeah, well, perhaps, Indeed. Yeah, yeah.

WALKER: Well, that's all we have time for.

Just three quick things before we wrap. Firstly, we'll have some more food coming out, so if you can still stick around and have a chat, we'd love to talk with you. Secondly, if any of you happen to be in Melbourne next Thursday, we're doing our final salon with Judith Brett. You can use the discount code Melbourne Pass to get a discount on tickets for that event.

And last but not least, it was a great pleasure meeting you last year and discovering your work. It's always exciting when you can find a thinker who can write so cogently but independently. And for me, The Echidna Strategy was a real exemplar in that genre. And very grateful for your time and the conversation tonight.

ROGGEVEEN: Well, thank you very much. I'm one of those people who's very uncomfortable with compliments. So can I deflect by offering you one, and just say that, look, I get the feeling that the Joe Walker ascent has still got a long way to go, and I'm pleased to be able to sort of hitch myself to that star for a little while before it's out of reach. So thank you very much, Joe, for giving me the opportunity.

WALKER: Equally uncomfortable with compliments, but that's very kind. But, yeah, please join me in showing Sam some appreciation.

Sam Roggeveen — Why the US Won't Fight China for Dominance (and What it Means for Australia) [Aus. Policy Series]

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