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In this podcast, Dr Paul Monk and Nick Fabbri discuss Sam Roggeveen’s new book The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace, Australia's geopolitical and security context, the rise of China and its increasing militarisation, what the Australian Defence Force force posture would look like under an ‘Echidna Strategy’, what the economic, political, diplomatic, bureaucratic, and social demands of such a transition would be on Australia, the ongoing role of the United States in the Indo-Pacific, and what the Echidna Strategy might teach us about the need to bolster our defensive or ‘spiny’ capabilities while maintaining attacking capabilities through AUKUS and our current alliance systems.

Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilisation in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.

Full transcript below

Reflections on the Defence of Australia – Dr Paul Monk
13 September 2023
Queenscliff, Victoria

Nick: Welcome back to Bloom, a conversations podcast. I'm your host Nick Fabbri, and it's a delight to be joined again today by Dr Paul Monk, an Australian writer, poet and public intellectual and longtime friend of the podcast.

To recap for listeners, Bloom started producing episodes in mid-2018, making us just over five years old, which is a bit of a scary thought. In the three years before going on hiatus in late 2021 due to work and study demands, Bloom produced nearly 30 episodes with interesting and thoughtful guests on topics as diverse as arts and culture, history, politics, international relations, mental health, science and much more.

I've recently moved overseas for a master's degree and I'm hoping to get back into a regular routine of producing these episodes as it's something I really love doing and missed a lot over the last two years. So, without further ado, welcome back to the show, Dr Paul Monk and to Bloom 2.0.

Paul: Thanks very much, Nick. I look forward to the conversation. It has been a while and for each of us, there's been a lot of water under the bridge in those two years. So, it's a - you know, it's a very rich world for both of us and there's so much to talk about and today's topic is one of mutual concern and one of widespread public interest, I think.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely and to come to the topic and substance of the interview, which I don't think we've actually mentioned yet, today we'll be speaking about Australian security in the Indo Pacific in the wake of the rise of China, and this has been prompted by recent travels of mine from Sydney to Melbourne, where I was struck by the ubiquity of Sam Roggeveen’s new book called The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace, which was prominently displayed in airport bookstores, in addition to discussions about it being everywhere on Australian news and politics podcasts.

For those who may not know him, Sam Roggeveen is the director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program and was founding editor of both Lowy's highly regarded online publication, The Interpreter, and is the editor of The Lowy Papers, following a career in the Australian intelligence community.

Sam's new book seeks to overturn conventional wisdom about Australian security in the Indo-Pacific, in the wake of a rising and militant China, and ultimately re-examines our traditional alliances with the US and other Western liberal democracies, advocating that Australia should adopt a more independent national security and defence posture.

Paul Monk has written a critical review of The Echidna Strategy in Rationale and also for The Australian, and so I thought it would be great to hear from him today. Paul, can you set the scene for us and tell us a little bit about what's going on and what your response to Roggeveen 's new work has been?

Paul: Yeah, the book you're referring to, of course, is The Echidna Strategy and it is written by Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute, someone that I've known for a long time and for whom I have a high regard, and he has been getting a lot of publicity, almost all favourable, as far as I can tell, but it's clear that he's taken a stance, and he knows this, that most of the professionals in the field will disagree with, and so he's challenging people to a debate.

He sent me a copy of the book or arranged for his publisher to do so, in the hope that I would read and review it, and when it arrived in the post, I texted him saying, you know, I've got a copy of your book at last, and he replied, ‘I look forward to being defenestrated’, which I can just see him saying that with a smile on his face.

You know, he is an open minded man, and he's aware that I might well be very critical of his book, and I am critical of his book, but I do think that it's a good book and I think that people should be reading it, but reading it closely and thinking very hard about what he's saying, because this is a debate we need to have and I believe that he has put a challenge to those of us who think we more or less know what Australia needs to do, to keep thinking, and so that's what I think this conversation is about.

Nick: So, could you describe what Sam Roggeveen sees as that geopolitical security context that Australia faces itself in and why we need a radical change in our national security systems and structures.

Paul: That can be encapsulated really quite simply. You might almost call it the Hugh White premise, because Sam is in many ways a protege of Hugh White. For those of your listeners who are not aware of who Hugh is, he was many years ago the Deputy Secretary of Defence for Strategy and Intelligence. He then became the founding director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and has since been at the Strategic and Defence Study Centre at the Australian National University, where he's an emeritus professor now of Strategic Studies. He has for many years now, I would say at least 15 years, he's been making the case that the rise of China is world changing and that it will require of us that we change our grand strategy, and the core of this, as he himself has often said, and Sam picks this up and uses it as a point of departure, is that China's very rapid and sustained economic growth, and more recently, the emergence of its military capabilities as a peer, competitive United States, are game changing.

Now, where Sam goes with that, and he's very open about where that comes from in terms of his data and he's being a protege of Hugh, is that not only is China becoming much more powerful, but crucially, the United States will not have the motivation and possibly not have the resources to withstand the China challenge, that it will end up withdrawing from the premier position, the dominant position it has enjoyed in East Asia since 1945, and that this completely changes our security outlook and we need to fundamentally rethink our national security in the light of that change.

Nick: So, who is Sam Roggeveen exactly? You've known him for a number of years. Who is he and how precisely does he fit in this debate, given his background in the intelligence service but also at the Lowy Institute?

Paul: That's an interesting sort of a personal story, in a way. Sam and I first met in 1998, so that's 25 years ago now. He was then tutoring in politics, at Trinity College at University of Melbourne, and I was introduced to him by a mutual friend and Sam's question to me was, ‘Do you think I would be able to get a job in the intelligence community. I'd like to work at ONA or maybe DIO and you've worked in DIO.’ You know, as your audience may not know, I was head of the China desk in the last couple of years I was there. Anyway, we had this conversation and I said to him, ‘We need good analysts. The intelligence community, to be brutally frank, is a bit of a shambles. I don't find it all that impressive in a lot of ways, but that's not a reason to not go into it. In some ways, it's precisely why we need good people to go into it.’

So he did, and he worked for a number of years at ONA, then he worked at DIO, and then he got a job at the Lowy Institute, which was then, 15 years ago, relatively new and he has been active there as the editor of their online blog, The Interpreter, and now the head of their international security program. During those years, as he says very plainly in his book, he has seen, he's watched and discussed with other professionals the rise of China and he says very plainly, ‘I don't want to be misunderstood, I am calling for radical changes in our defence policy, but I'm not a China dove, I'm not anti-American, and I don't see myself as left wing, I see myself as a conservative in a tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott.’

So, that's the author we're talking about and what I can say is I've known him through those 25 years. I've followed his career. I've stayed in touch. I've read his book very closely and my first reaction to the book is, this is really well written, it's very thoughtful, it's very bold, but not in a feckless way. He's not making, on the whole, rash statements. He's making a clear argument from first principles and what he believes to be fundamental geopolitical realities, and then he's saying it won't do to just assume that a patch-up of the old alliances will work, because he thinks it won't. I would add of Sam, he has to be seen by those who, unlike me, don't know him as a highly intelligent, honest and very decent human being. You know, he's the best kind of Australian and he says in his book, ‘I have a great respect for the profession of arms.’ He's not an anti-war pacifist. You know, he's not a surrender monkey, you might say. So, we should, it seems to me, be doing him and ourselves the favour of reading his book with an open mind and then engage in a considered response. That's certainly what I've attempted to do.

Nick: What exactly does Sam propose as the remedy for what he sees as Australia's unpreparedness with the increasingly complex and challenging security situation we find ourselves in, such that it's been called revolutionary or an overturning of conventional wisdom?

Paul: Well, let me say two things off the bat in response to that. So the first thing, the most fundamental answer to your question is he suggests that we completely abandon the idea of forward defence and alliance with the US and its system of alliances and the US bases, and pull our heads in, in the sense of into our foxhole and make Australia singularly difficult for China to directly attack, but otherwise not provoke China in any way, and operate on the assumption that China will be, for more or less, the indefinite future, the dominant power in Asia. We're just going to have to live with that, he says. The second thing he says is that we shouldn't go it completely alone. We cannot depend and should not depend on the United States for all the things that it's provided for our security since the Second World War, but we should make Indonesia our new great and powerful friend, and he acknowledges that would require a lot of work. He acknowledges that we would have to rethink our policies regarding immigration, foreign policy, security policy, strategy, et cetera, and cultivate Indonesia.

Why? Well, because it's a kind of huge archipelagic screen to our north and has what might at least be seen as a common interest with us in keeping China honest, as it were, and keeping it from being aggressive south of the South China Sea.

So, you'd have to say those two are overarching statements and then one could explore, well, exactly how would that work, but let's just step back slightly from that to hammer home that what he anticipates is that China's capabilities, which have grown very deliberately and rapidly from a very low base, are linked to an explicit ambition on a part of China to exclude the United States from the East Asian littoral and the Western Pacific and to be the dominant power, certainly in Asia and possibly the world. These are soaring ambitions in China and...

Nick: Where are they grounded in, in terms of direct political rhetoric or is this like policy statements or...?

Paul: Absolutely, yeah. If one takes the trouble to read into this, one can see that over decades now, the Chinese Communist Party has had this ambition. It sees China as naturally and historically the single greatest power in the world, and it sees the last 200 years of Western dominance, or last 500 years, if you like, but it's 200 years since China was, you know, humbled by the Western powers in the Opium Wars - it sees this as a blip on the screen and this is the view that many people in the West have bought into. They say this is the end of the Vasco de Gama era, the era that began with the Western explorers coming out and finding that they had better navigation, better guns.

Nick: China is resuming its natural place at the head of the world order.

Paul: The head of the world order. That's the narrative and what Deng Xiaoping used to say in the 1990s is we need to hide our ambitions and strengths and bide our time, and that was something adhered to by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, his successors. Xi Jinping is not hiding and he's not biting. He's come right out, and he's said, we're going to be it, and anybody who gets in the way will suffer the consequences. It's very bold rhetoric and it's very militaristic rhetoric, and it's distinctly anti-American, and at the same time, and this is something that Sam, of course, dwells upon and many of us have been aware of, the United States has stumbled a few times in the 21st century.

From its unipolar moment, it appears, many would say, to have fumbled the ball, not only in terms of international security policy, with the difficulties it ran into when it invaded Iraq, with its decision finally to give up in Afghanistan, but domestically with deepening political divisions, a kind of legislative deadlock and, of course, the phenomenon of Donald Trump, which is immensely controversial and beyond the personality of Donald Trump, the challenges to the constitutional order and a growing sense of isolationism that the US is overcommitted, that its allies are free riders, that it should pull back and look after itself, heal its domestic wounds, etc, pretty much as it did after the First World War.

All of that, Sam says we need to understand very clearly and think very coolly about where that leaves us, because it does leave us in a precarious position.

Nick: Indeed, and to sort of step back at a meta level, why has Australia in particular, but also other Western allies under the sort of the ANZUS arrangements, so the US as well - but why have the liberal Western democracies been kind of so slow to wake up to this real threat of China? It seems to me to be the main game in terms of geopolitics and I suppose the broader realignment of those tectonic plates, if you want to think about it in that way? We've kind of been distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan - regional frontier historic conflicts really, and I suppose why have we been so slow to wake up and I guess what is the broad landscape of debate? You've got the Sam Roggeveens, but has there been other thinking going on in Australia more broadly?

Paul: There absolutely has. I mean, the AUKUS agreement is evidence that mainstream opinion is very different to Sam's. He's quite conscious of that, and he directly challenges that opinion quite fearlessly, and it seems to me quite lucidly. But let's go back to the fundamental question you're asking there: the question about liberal democracies and the rise of China.

The simplest way to put this is that two things have been happening simultaneously. One is that since the end of the Cold War, the Western democracies, led by the United States, developed the opinion that, in the words of Frank Fukuyama, back in the early 90s, history, in the sense of conflict between ideologies and contentions about how human society should be run, was essentially over. Liberal democracy and capitalism had won, and they would prevail. It was just a matter of time before everybody bought into that.

In China, something very different was taking place and Rush Doshi, in his path breaking book on China's grand strategy, The Long Game, makes the point that at the end of the Long War, 1989 through 1991, there was a trifecta of what, from the Communist Party's point of view, were deeply disturbing, if not catastrophic events. The first was the democracy movement in China, which threatened the Communist Party's hold on power and directly called for its removal from power and the democratisation of China.

They crushed that in Tiananmen Square, and their point of view was ‘Never again! We're not going down that path!’ The Western democracies, on the other hand, looked at that with dismay, but thought that's a road bump, they will democratize because they don't really have an option to the extent that they prosper, which they manifestly want to do and have started to do, a middle class will develop, and it will demand greater accountability of its government, greater political representation, more civic rights.

The same had happened as other countries developed. That's South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, you know, and so the assumption set in the West that, that's the path China was on, and therefore, let's cultivate that, let's allow China enrich itself, let's admit it to the World Trade Organisation, let's invest in China, and as Bill Clinton said in the 1990s, democratisation will follow as night follows day. But from the Communist Party's point of view, not only had it suffered that setback, the next setback was the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which caught them by surprise, as indeed it did many people in the West, but whereas in the West, we thought, this is wonderful, this is history heading in the right direction, the Communist Party of China took it exactly the other way: That this was a disaster. How can this have happened? Gorbachev was a fool, he was a traitor to the cause and that was deeply ingrained in the Communist Party, and we didn't in the West take sufficient notice of that.

The third thing that occurred, and this is crucial to the military scenario, is that Chinese military observers watched closely what the US did in the Gulf War where Saddam Hussein said, you're facing the mother of all battles, if you're going to get me out of Kuwait. He had a veteran, large army with Soviet equipment that had just beaten Iran to its corner in an eight-year war, and the expectation that Saddam plainly had - that the Chinese Communist Party had - is the US is getting in for a real fight here.

The US swept Saddam's army off the table like children's toys in a couple of days. It was awe inspiring and the Chinese were deeply alarmed by this because they said, we've got the same military equipment Saddam had, but we haven't even fought a war in anger in many years, we would get swept off the table the same way. That's terrifying. So they said, we have to modernise our military and they set about doing it and they've continued doing it.

They began by developing their capacity to deny the US to the best of their ability, access to their littoral seas, right, and a capacity to just sail up and down the Taiwan Strait and deter any move to retake Taiwan. As that succeeded, their economy continued to grow, they got more ambitious and they've invested in every aspect now of high technology, 21st century military capability to the point where they're very close now to being a direct peer competitor of the United States in military as well as economic terms. That's what's changed and it's not gone the way we expected.

Nick: And our thinking about it from a policy and alliance diplomatic sense has been slow to sort of wake up to that, but obviously necessarily the lag, I suppose, in force posture and force structure and also procurement, increasing acquisition of defence capabilities, capacities as well, not just here in Australia, but as a web of alliances, of liberal democracies who support the status quo of the US as being the security guarantor of the region as it has been since World War II.

So, to come back to the status quo, the fact that we're sort of slow on the march here to sort of rise to meet the threat, it seems to me we're heading into a bit of an acute danger zone where China, you know, might look to get a march on us, basically, if it were to seek to aggressively re-attack Taiwan, for instance. But coming back to Sam and what he proposes in a sort of a concrete, substantive sense, you mentioned, obviously, the total kind of reconceptualisation, restumping, rewiring, replumbing, for want of a better term, of the ADF's capabilities and capacities and sort of assuming more of an echidna defensive position.

Basically securing the homeland as I think Paul Keating and a lot of people in the Labour Caucus and Labour luminaries put it, but also secondarily in terms of forging that direct alliance with Indonesia, which is also a Keating prescription in terms of security guarantee. I think the formulation was their people, our guns or something, but to come back into a concrete sense on what Sam proposes, what would it actually look like to radically redesign the status quo of Australia's defence position?

Paul: Alright. So, the first thing is I remark that he says very pointedly that the US is unlikely to fight and if it did, is unlikely to win a war with China and if were its ally, we would get drawn into that war and we would be on the losing side, and we cannot afford that. That would be a disaster - so he argues. Therefore, we should not get the submarines, the nuclear submarines, they are the apex predator. You know, if our intention was to have forward defence, to be part of the US alliance, to have striking power, well we would certainly get those and that's why we are getting them, but we shouldn't. He says the thing about those submarines is they would enable - they're intended to enable us - to strike targets in China. But consider, if we strike targets in China, China is far better placed than we are to escalate and hit us back with long range missiles, etc. and we could suffer severe damage of a kind we've never suffered before.

So, we shouldn't go there, we should not get these submarines. We don't need long range submarines. What we need is close in defence and that means more missiles, more sea mines, we need cyber capabilities, we need air and sea denial capabilities. But he says - and here's the good news - if that's all we're trying to do, we don't need to spend a fortune on defence. If we reallocate our expenditure and prioritise what we need to deter the Chinese from actually attacking Australia, which he believes we could do, then we don't need to spend great sums of money. The key to his argument, which sounds counterintuitive, is that he says distance is our greatest ally.

You know, Geoffrey Blainey made famous the term ‘the tyranny of distance’, decades ago. He says the reality is that Sydney is further from Beijing than London is. We're a long way from China and in the worst case, it can't send more than a finger of its hand in our direction. We can deal with that and if we're clear enough that all we're seeking to do is to deter invasion, to deter direct attack, Beijing could get that message. Whereas if we're part of an alliance that's seeking to box China in, constrain its actions, prevent it from attacking Taiwan, etc, well, then we're provoking China, right, and the cost could be very high. So, that's the net picture…

Nick: That would look like perhaps getting rid of Pine Gap and a lot of the US defensive structures and technological arrangements on...

Paul: Absolutely.

Nick: ...Australian soil because we do kind of already fit into that web of alliances, but also, I guess, the security architecture of - you look at the Quad for instance, you know, I guess, you know, strategic lines of defence from the south, you know, to the east with Japan, to the west with India and so on. So, we are already in a way built into that and we rotate, you know, US defence personnel or security personnel through Australia. We have deep interlinkages. For Australia to withdraw into that, into its little spiky ball and down its burrow perhaps, would have serious ramifications, implications for US security more globally. It's not just like...

Paul: Absolutely, it would. If we did what Sam recommended - and he's conscious of this, he's not oblivious to it - it would totally uproot our role in the US alliance, and the US bases are crucial not simply to the defence of Australia, but to the US global system of order, stability and deterrence, right? He's saying we've got to abandon that because it's not going to work anymore, and this is where his prescription gets more and more alarming, because he's really saying that US system is going to crumble anyway and it's delusional to believe that it can be sustained. Probably I would say the first and most fundamental point of entry for my response to his prescriptions is if that was so, if the US really was looking unsustainable in East Asia and Western Pacific, then one would expect that the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese would all be talking very differently. They'd all be saying what Sam's saying: This is not going to last, we have to cut to the chase and change our security policy or kowtow to China or go nuclear or whatever. All of them are saying to the United States, ‘Don't go away, don't go away. Let's talk very seriously about how we constrain China to behave decently and moderately, because otherwise this is going to be a real mess.

Nick: It also rebukes that notion that Paul Keating and others have put forward that, you know, AUKUS and sort of the strengthening of the Australia, US, UK, New Zealand sometimes, alliance system or cooperation systems interoperability is a reversion to the sort of Anglo, you know, white European, you know, structures or histories that we've shared. It's actually a cosmopolitan, you know, thing...

Paul: It absolutely is. If I jump in, and I've made this point in challenging Keating directly in print, the idea that what we're doing is in his phrasing, seeking security from Asia rather than security in Asia is arrant nonsense. We're not seeking security from Asia. We're seeking security in Asia and we're doing it with the other allies of the United States who are Asian. You know, he went so far recently as to describe Japan, South Korea, Australia and India, which is Quad Plus as a bunch of US deputy sheriffs, and I commented in print, well some bunch of deputy sheriffs! You're talking about a group of the richest democratic states in Asia.

If they’re getting together and wanting to be partners of the US to keep China honest is security from Asia, what's Asia? What's Asia? China? I mean, this is nonsense, right? So, this is a fundamental difference of opinion that I hold, certainly with Keating and I believe with Sam. I think that it's an error and I think that if we run scared of China because of its ambitions and its sudden increase in power, we are going to aggravate the situation, not improve it. We need to hold our nerve. We need to be very clear headed. We need, if possible to avoid World War III. We don't want World War III. Precisely what we want to do is deter China from going down a path that could lead to world war.

Nick: It's interesting, to come back to Sam and The Echidna Strategy because he couches his text in his own personal, philosophical, political position as a conservative, but it seems to me that ultimately what he proposes is quite a radical policy: a diplomatic prescription of a kind that has never really occurred in Australia at all, because we've always have relied - you know, given our isolation and our comparative kind of smallness in terms of mass of population, lethality on, for want of a better term, big and powerful friends and strong alliances of likeminded democracies and other political structures, and to radically kind of do away with that would - well, this is radical, right?

Paul: Absolutely. It is extraordinarily so and to an extent that I think he hasn't really thought through. Let's take an analogy. Let's suppose that he was writing not in 2023, but in 1933, for argument's sake, right, and he was saying, Japan is on the rise. Japan has just annexed Manchuria. Japan will be the dominant power in Asia, and we have to accustom ourselves to that. The US is far away. It's isolationist, it's not going to intervene, and we don't want to provoke Japan. So, Japan will dominate Asia. We have to live with that. Let's try and, you know, get along with maybe the Dutch and the East Indies, you know, and hope that between us, we can at least keep Japan honest. Meanwhile, let's keep trading with Japan and so on.

If we were in 1933, how would we respond to that? That's an interesting question, but once you draw the analogy and you know how that ended, you would surely say, well, that didn't work, right? If Japan had overrun Asia and the US had not intervened, if there'd been no Pearl Harbour because the US had said, we're not getting into this, would Australia have been secure? Would we have been able to have an echidna strategy then by 1940/41 that would have deterred Japan from attacking Australia? I don't think so.

But let me add one more thing, and this is crucial. The world order that the US has held together economically, militarily, diplomatically, in terms of nuclear deterrence since 1945 has generated the greatest era of prosperity, peace and democratisation in human history, bar none, and China has been a beneficiary of that. China would not have had this explosive growth had it not been given entree to an already rich, highly developed open trading system, which the US created and presided over and welcomed China into, in the belief that would give China a stake in the system.

Now, Xi Jinping is saying, yeah, bugger that, we're going to make it our own, right. That's a problem and Sam's response is to say, we have to accept that China will govern the new order and in that order, he explicitly says there will be no room for liberal principles or human rights. That's the single most alarming statement in his book. What has modernisation been all about? What has development been all about if we do that and abandon liberal principles and human rights?

Nick: Would you wish to exist in an Asian Indo Pacific region in which we didn't want to fight for those things and seek to preserve them and uphold them and expand them where other countries wish to do so?

Paul: I mean, you know, liberal principles and human rights are what made South Korea vastly more attractive than North Korea. They've made Japan become a friendly, attractive place instead of a fascist state. It's what made Taiwan an open democracy and a thriving, peaceful place and a tourist destination instead of a dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek and he's saying there'll be no place for these. Indonesia has made some progress in those directions since the end of Suharto's regime, and in distinction also from the earlier Sukarno, and he's saying, forget about all that. That's a horrendous vision. That's dystopian.

Nick: This is the paradox, it seems to me, of the modern debate around Australia's role in the world, and the whole security geopolitical situation we find ourselves in. Really, it's China that whose resurgence and acquisition of new defence capabilities, increasing kind of aggressiveness towards its neighbours in the South China Sea and beyond, its broader designs in seeking regional hegemony, they're the radical ones.

They're the ones upsetting the applecart and too often the debate is cast in Australia being provocative, or the Western democracies, including, you know, the Asian democracies as well, South Korea, Japan, because we're seeking to acquire new capabilities, like you know, submarines or whatever it might be, or missiles or unmanned aerial vehicles, drones and things. But it's actually we're prudently cautiously, trying to meet the threat of a nation which is frankly, radically seeking to overturn the peace, security, stability relatively of the last 80 years.

Paul: Absolutely, and which in the way it operates internally and the way its rhetoric comes across, if you're paying close attention to Xi Jinping's personal rhetoric, deeply alarming. I mean, we need to remind ourselves that at every point in the last hundred years where the best educated people in China have been able to express themselves openly, they've called for modernisation and democracy in China, and by democracy they meant liberal principles and human rights, they didn't mean Leninism, which is what the party has imposed on China, and there's ample evidence that if it wasn't for the Communist Party being so repressive and so systematic in controlling thought, China probably would democratise.

The assumption in the West that it would democratise was hinged to the idea that well, it's happened elsewhere, other dictatorships, Franco's in Spain, Park Chung-hee's in South Korea, Chiang Kai-shek's in Taiwan. You know, they've given way to democracy peacefully, why would China not do it, and the answer is the Chinese Communist Party. That's the roadblock. It's not Western imperialism, right, it's not anything about traditional Chinese culture, it's the Chinese Communist Party and if we're not prepared to face it down, it'll keep going.

Nick: Sam, you know, talks about making a change or basically flicking a switch. to you know, we can radically or substantially change the way we do things in terms of defence, diplomacy, politics, in Australia, as if it was sort of like flicking a light bulb and he points to the example of Olaf Scholz in Germany after the Russian invasion of Ukraine quickly moving towards basically increasing Germany's defence capabilities. Is that actually possible to do in such a short amount of time and what is the actual - given the significant revolution basically, that I think Roggeveen is ultimately calling for, is Australia fit to make such a radical shift?

Paul: The shortest possible answer is No. But let's start with Olaf Scholz. So, he does, as you say, state very explicitly that rapid changes can be made, as witnessed what Olaf Scholz did in Germany, but he omits to mention several things. The first is that Olaf Scholz put Germany on the front foot at a time when, as a leading member of NATO, he was party to a discussion within NATO that was putting the whole of NATO on the front foot. He wasn't acting on his own.

Secondly, he was getting on the front foot, where Sam's saying we should get very much on the back foot.

Thirdly, Scholz knew in saying that Germany is a highly industrialised state, and it has the whole of the EU behind it. Australia is a largely de-industrialized state which doesn't have - particularly if it abandons the US alliance, it doesn't have - anything around it to buttress it, right. He also doesn't mention that Sweden and Finland, given Putin's invasion of Ukraine which had been neutral, you know, for the longest time - in Sweden's case, centuries, in Finland's case, since the Second World War - suddenly they're saying, we want to be part of NATO. Why? Well, look what Putin's doing. You know, we don't think we could withstand that on our own, we want to be able to deter him. NATO is a much better deterrent, right.

Sam doesn't even mention this. Yet what he's recommending is that we embrace neutralism at a point when Sweden and Finland, the most principled, prosperous, neutral states in the EU, are hammering on the door of NATO and being admitted. So, this is deeply counterintuitive and one has to say two other things. The first is if went down that path, if we suddenly did an Olaf Scholz in reverse, right, and said we're going neutral, I think, rather than the rest of Asian countries saying, oh, Australia's finally seeing good sense, seeking security in Asia, we would be a laughingstock. They would say, Australians, what are they smoking, they have lost the plot!

Finally, in order to make that change, even if it was to be welcomed by others, we would have to make the most fundamental structural and cultural changes in our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, our Department of Defence, our armed forces, our intelligence agencies, because everything that's made them function and been their orientation forever is suddenly out the window. That's just not practicable.

Nick: Before we go into the actual capabilities of the Australian economy and society in political structures to be able to actually render such a substantive massive change, as Roggeveen argues, in terms of its industrial base, its energy, you know, fuel security, etc., I'd love to come back to this idea of what do we actually mean by a forward - what do we mean by on the front foot or on the back foot, or a forward sort of defence structure or just this sort of defensive back foot? Like, what does that actually look like and what does it mean?

Paul: Yeah. That's it. I think this is where you want to go with that, that we'll define those terms and then consider that perhaps the benefit of reading and critiquing Sam's radical prescriptions is that there is something to be said for buttressing our spiny capabilities, right.

Nick: Indeed, like a middleweight.

Paul: But not by way of abandoning, which is his main premise, abandoning the US alliance and deterrence. But to go back to your primary question, when we talk about getting on the front foot or getting on the back foot, clearly what Scholz did is he said we will actively now - without directly declaring war on Russia - we will actively oppose its active aggression which we denounce in the strongest terms as unacceptable. We will arm the Ukrainians. We will stand with NATO in imposing sanctions on Russia. You know, we will increase our defence spending in order to demonstrate that, you know, if Russia is going to behave like this, it will face armed opposition ultimately.

That's getting on the front foot, right, and it has to be said that he declared those things within four days of the invasion of Ukraine. He's been slower, his government's been slower to enact those things, but it's moving in that direction. By getting on the back foot, Sam is essentially saying if we'd been Germany and we were doing what he's recommending, we would have said, you know, we’re not getting involved here. We're not arming Ukraine, we’re not increasing our defence spending. We're even withdrawing from NATO. You know, we won't countenance or support the admission of new members to NATO, right. We will defer to Russia. It's the dominant power in Eastern Europe and it's likely to remain so. That's what Olaf Scholz would have done if he was taking Sam's approach.

Nick: But I suppose the broader import or meaning of what Sam was saying is that whether it's going on the front foot or on the back foot or forward leaning defence or, you know, more defence of the homeland, the fact that those big policy shifts can occur rapidly is possible in Germany, it's why the parallel doesn't work really in my mind, because Germany is, you know, a heavily populated country, supported by the EU, NATO. It's deeply industrialised, one of the most advanced and sophisticated economies in the world. I actually don't think that parallel exists in Australia in terms of, you know...

Paul: It absolutely doesn't. It absolutely doesn't and if you take just one index of that, right - if we broke with the US alliance to go it alone, we would be - in terms of our intelligence system for example, we would be crippling ourselves, because we are deeply embedded in Five Eyes. We depend on the United States and its global intelligence system and to a lesser extent the British intelligence system, and have since the Second World War and in our conferences and exchanges with our English-speaking allies to actually understand what's going on in the world. If we abandon all of that, we've got, you know, do all of that for ourselves.

Now, Sam might respond, but we don't need to do all of that, we're not part of that alliance, all we need to do are the intelligence capabilities to monitor what's happening in our immediate region. Maybe, but do we want to do that? Do we want to basically withdraw into a cave and say we don't know what's going on? We don't care? I wouldn't have thought so, right.

If, as he says, we should get on the front foot in this respect, diplomatically, that is, that we should work very hard diplomatically to encourage the great powers to form some kind of concert so they can sort out their interests without going to war, then we would need even better intelligence and certainly a better diplomatic service than we have now. He doesn't even begin to describe how that would take place.

Nick: So, having done a general survey of the echidna strategy and Sam's overall thesis, could you outline the merits behind what he's actually saying with regards to the fact that we've just had a defence strategic review, which is - we have this every decade or so, you know, the defence white paper, I think, in 2009. We often do think about how our defence is structured and whether we can do things differently and I must say, when I heard about the overall thesis of the echidna strategy, some of it struck me as being seductive and compelling, like the idea of the fact we need sea mines, greater investment in drones and missiles, so this denial capability of our homeland, which as a defence service personnel person myself, I see as like sorely lacking. So, what would you say is the merit to what Sam's saying?

Paul: I think there's certainly merit. We've always had as a fundamental axiom of our defence policy that if it comes right down to it, we must be able to defend the continent of Australia. That's what a defence force is primarily for and if what Sam is saying is we currently are so committed to forward defence and possible operations in US wars that we haven't thought through how would we have defend Australia, that's worth visiting, right, and because of the way military technology has gone ahead by leaps and bounds in the 21st century, there's a very good case to be made that we should rethink and rebalance what we're doing in that regard, and that's a complex debate in itself.

My biggest misgiving about the Strategic Review and white papers over the years is that they appear to me to basically be papers written for a government where the test and understanding is, this is what we're prepared to spend on defence. Tell us what you can get within that budget. So, it's a political document rather than a rigorously strategic one. Whereas the question should be, what is it we really need to do, not in terms of wish lists, but in terms of sober scenario planning and capability, then we need to spend that amount, right, and it could be not one or 2% of GDP which our governments have tended to be content to spend. It might be five or 6% of GDP. South Korea used to spend 6% of its GDP.

So, the question is, given all of that background, what could we be doing? Well, we clearly could be developing area denial capabilities along the general lines that Sam has suggested, without prejudice to our alliance with the United States, because he could be saying, that's a scenario that could occur.

Suppose he's correct and a war took place in Taiwan, which we lost, and we would need to fall back on being able to deter attack on Australia, we'd want to have that in place. We wouldn't want to start trying to prepare at that point, right, and nobody within our alliance system could reasonably say, well we shouldn't have those capabilities. He himself says they wouldn't cost an arm and a leg. So, I think there's everything to be said for saying, let's do that. Let's have asymmetric capabilities that could be relied upon to deter a direct assault on Australia and its maritime territories by an aggressive China, right.

That's well worth thinking through, but that's quite independent of his major premise, and it's not his fundamental prescription which is the radical idea that we just pull in and look after number one and forget everything else - human rights, liberal principles, US alliance, US bases, Taiwan, democracy, whatever. Forget it, just hunker down and defend ourselves and believe or cross our fingers and hope that China won't get serious about attacking Australia because then we could deter it if it's not really serious. If it's really serious and we have no allies and no fundamental abilities other than a bit of area denial, we're cooked.

Nick: You can't even assume such a defensive posture without foregoing all the things that I think make Australia worthwhile, which is a free and open economy, trade, interpersonal connections and exchanges, and diplomatic cultural sharedness. I don't think we could maintain all those good things if we kind of don't pull our weight basically, in terms of looking after the peace and order of the region.

Paul: Being part of a global system of liberal principles and free trade, exactly so, and of democracies, and it seems to me if we did in fact embrace Sam's prescription - and I don't accuse him of foreseeing and accepting this, I think it's a blind spot in his path - I think if went down that path, we would suffer an attack of cultural despair. We would implode politically and socially, and that's not to be welcomed.

The benign way, which I suspect is what he imagines, is if we were adopting a kind of Finland stance, alright, and Finland was neutral through the Cold War, and it did have armed forces in the belief that it would defend itself if it really had to, and that what it had would at least deter the Soviet Union from having another crack at it, as it did in 1939 in the Winter War. But what that overlooks is that Finland was only able to do that because NATO was there keeping the Soviet Union at bay. Whereas what he's saying is the US is not going to be there, and in any case, we shouldn't encourage it to be there. Well, that's a wholly different world.

Nick: Yeah. It's a disturbing thought, but I think - I mean, to link this sort of debate with a lot of the arguments of the late Jim Molan, Senator Jim Molan, and also, I think, even Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in terms of, I think, a lot of the rhetoric that came out about national resilience across, you know, basically securing the independent side manufacturing base, food security, fuel security, you know, advanced manufacturing to be able to make missiles, drones, other things like that.

I think there's a big gap until the Australian economy is actually able - and society - is able to actually support either a mid-range, you know, change in our defence, as you've described, which is sort of importing a lot of the self-sufficient defence capabilities, but not sort of throwing away the US alliances and systems and nuclear subs and AUKUS basically. There's a huge way to go there, for us to actually meet that enhanced sovereign capability, I think is the expression.

But also, I think, a huge gap in the public's expectation about what might be required in terms of allocation of public resources, and maybe you are going to be spending 4%to 6% of GDP on defence. I just think we're so far away from any of those two kinds of conditions being met to actually, one, meet what Roggeveen is putting forward and two, maybe even meeting the, I think, sensible midpoint between the two positions that you are advocating, where I'm advocating here today.

Paul: Yeah. So, you know, Jim Molan, as you say, before he died, did argue this in danger on her doorstep. Ross Babbage, who is another veteran of the defence and intelligence system, has written or published a book recently called The Next Major War, in which he makes a similar case. That case pivots on the observation that Australia is so accustomed to security and so completely engaged in the international liberal order that the US has created and defended, that we have run down all our capacities for any serious national security resilience, and that's alarming in what appears to be an increasingly dangerous world.

It seems to me that what Sam is saying, well provided we got a bit of extra kit at the margin, we'll be fine. Well, I don't think so and I think that there's a very good point to be made that because of the liberal international order and because of the strong complementarities between our resource bases and China's development, we have allowed our manufacturing to wither away and we've profited - net - handsomely from China's growth, but that depends on China remaining open and part of an integrated order. If that starts to come apart as it has started to come apart, we're very vulnerable.

Nick: And I think we're more vulnerable than people think we are because it seems to me that sort of danger zone for a catastrophic war is going to come sooner than people think, and certainly sooner than all of our new defence equipment coming on stream like the Tomahawk missiles or the nuclear subs, which are decades away. Because China is facing some serious, you know, long term structural issues, whether they be economic or demographic, which might force it, and obviously the fact that the Western liberal defence capabilities will improve over the next 10 to 20 years, but it's almost like the time is ripe for them to do something if they were to, you know, seek to take Taiwan or radically reorder the South China Sea and so the danger is on our doorstep, as Molan said.

Paul: It is and it's worth emphasising this. There's a book which you're clearly aware of by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, published in the past twelve months, called Danger Zone. Their argument is that the Chinese Communist Party is well aware that it faces the looming challenges to which you referred, that beyond 2030 it's going to face a rapidly aging population, a decline in its productivity, very serious problems with environmental deterioration, and it doesn't have a welfare system to cope with the rapidly aging, population shrinking workforce, and it's refused to undertake the economic reforms that would liberalise the system and ease some of that pressure, and therefore is going to face growing challenges of a fiscal kind.

How does it allocate resources? Does it allow old people to just die on the vine without care? Does it ignore its environmental problems, serious as they are, massive pollution and so on? Or does it reallocate resources? If it reallocates resources, it will not have the same amount of resources to spend on the military and internal security, and if it doesn't cope well with the internal challenges, then it may need to double down on the internal security or face political crisis, perhaps regime implosion.

This has happened to China before, and why? Because of its fundamental and long-lasting governance model. The Communist Party is an exaggerated version of old Chinese autocracy, and while people talk about how China was supposedly really well governed historically, it wasn't. Dynasties kept failing and imploding, because past a certain point, corruption, brittleness, ignorance of what's really going on, frustration on a part of people, they can't get redress, they can't change the government, etc, leads to a system to implode. We could well see that they argue beyond 2030, and the Communist Party therefore may decide that this is peak China now. If they want Taiwan back, they better take it while the going is good.

So, our best bet is to be really clear about all of this and seek to make clear to China that the costs of going to war, win, lose or draw, would be very high and ongoing. Don't go there. Work this out intelligently. That can be done. We need to do that and Molan and Babbage, of course, like others and Brands and Beckley, emphasise the military deterrence and possibly war fighting aspects of this. I think that the economic and diplomatic are just as important.

Nick: I think that's true, and I think as well, one thing that worries me is the actual, perhaps the fragility of, I believe, the political consensus in Australian political media, civil society to actually see through what we need to see through in order to safeguard the nation. We had recent commentary in the media from Bob Carr saying that, you know, if the worst thing that happened to Taiwan was the imposition of the kind of civil restrictions and so on that's been experienced in Hong Kong since China sort of seized the legislature there and, you know, took it back essentially 20 odd years earlier than it was meant to, then Bob Carr could live with that new model on our doorstep in the South China Sea, in the Asian community of which we're a part. Then obviously you had Paul Keating saying that, you know, the whole Taiwan question, like Xi Jiang, like Hong Kong, like Tibet, was really a civil matter for China, and it was not.

Paul: And he referred to Taiwan as - and I quote - a so called democracy. So called.

Nick: Yeah, so these views do have roots, right, in the Australian policy, in the media. A lot of Roggeveen’s work has, I think, been reported on and sort know, lapped up, I would say quite uncritically. I mean, you're really the first person that I know of to have sort of substantially critiqued and engaged with the work. So, do you think there are - and obviously, I mean, that's in the Australian domestic setting. But then we've obviously got the spectre of Donald Trump haunting the Republican Party and the White House too, if he comes, what happens to the alliance system? So, it's not clear to me that there's one, a firm resolve here in Australia domestically and two, it's not clear that even internationally, in terms of relations with the States that we'll be able to see through the web of alliances.

Paul: Yeah, sure and, you know, the best part of what Sam's offering us is precisely that concern, alright, and so it's not as you indicated earlier, it's not all or nothing. We can read Sam conservatively, let's say, and say, well, we can adjust at the margin, we can do good scenario planning, we can prepare to, you know, have a fallback position if things really do deteriorate in the way that he suggests, but we shouldn't even contemplate doing this pre-emptively and quickly because that would be a mess, frankly, right, but to go back to your observation about Bob Carr.

It's disturbing enough and I said this in print in response to that remark of his, that a man who takes his own civil and political liberties entirely for granted would say, but he can live with it if another country with the same population, the same civil liberties, loses them, right - as Hong Kong has lost its. But it gets worse, because Sam has implied - Hugh White has even said at times, and Bob Carr appears to be of the same school of thought - that we ourselves would have to restrict the way in which we speak about China, criticise human rights abuses, etc, in order to live in such a world.

In other words, we would have to more or less impose on ourselves the kinds of restrictions that China is imposing in Hong Kong and says it will impose on Taiwan, and to quote Sam's phrase in the world in which we would be an echidna, there would be no room for liberal principles or human rights and we would at times, he says, in another phrase, have to be more ruthless - more ruthless in our approach. To what? To our neighbours? To our own censorship regime? He doesn't really spell that out, but it seems to me that's a really unpleasant future to look at and I would resist going there any way I could, but there are reasons to think very hard about our national security our integrated national security policy and our resilience.

Nick: And just to bring the interview to an end, I also, you know, am concerned - there's one thing to - it's good that we're thinking seriously about it and that the Defence Strategic Review has happened and I think AUKUS is underway, the status quo seems to be maintained despite, you know, a little bit of rattling at the political branches and within the caucuses and things, but it's not really clear to me that anything substantively has changed, whether they're actually spending the money, they're actually sort of rolling out these programs. You know, are we sort of going to actually deliver hat we've promised on the path that we're currently on, regardless of what Sam and you and others might come up with as alternative or middle ways - it's sort of like even the path we're on today doesn't seem to be like it's got traction.

Paul: I think that's true, and I think it's partly because whereas the Labour Party, when they came into office a year or so ago, made clear from day one that they were not going to break with the AUKUS agreement and with the national security settings that the Coalition had put in place. Nevertheless, as a party and as a matter of longstanding social policy, their preference is to spend more on social welfare, health and education than on defence, and that's in fact, what they're doing. So, they're talking the talk, it's not clear they're walking the walk, right, and that's why we can see - or one of the reasons why we can see - Beijing being more accommodating towards the Albanese government than they were towards, you know, the Morrison government.

Albanese is now set to visit Beijing. What will he say? Well, it seems clear that he will not even raise the question of Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei, Chinese Australian citizens in PRC jails who have never got anything that we would call procedural justice, who don't have the normal civil and legal rights granted them that any such person would be given in a Western democracy - to not even raise that question, that's appeasement of the Communist Party, pure and simple, alright, and it's not a good look, if what we're saying is we're standing up to China, it's compromising right up front on those very things we said that Sam would jettison, that is, liberal principles and human rights.

Nick: Well, thanks very much for your time today, Paul. We are beaten by the buzzer unfortunately but have lunch to get to, which will be delightful, but I'm sure we'll continue the conversation another time.

Paul: Absolutely. We've covered a lot of ground. It's been terrific.