Securing Australia’s “Special Intersection”

Since Federation Australian defence policy has oscillated between two contradictory schools of thought: continental defence (the security of home territory) and expeditionary defence (the security of vital interests). The intellectual architects of these two strategic schools were the leading Federation-era strategic thinkers, Captain (later Admiral) Sir William Creswell and Colonel (later Brigadier General) Hubert John Foster. In 1908, Creswell, the founding father of the Australian Navy, advocated an Australian defence policy based on continental naval defence with a subsidiary territorial role for the army. In contrast, Foster, a leading military writer of the time who became Chief of the Australian General Staff in the First World War, called for the adoption of an expeditionary strategy with a major role for the army.

Thus was born the Creswell–Foster divide between continental and expeditionary defence and between region and globe—a divide that came to dominate Australian defence strategy throughout the twentieth century—and which continues to influence the Australian strategic policy debate in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Creswell and Foster outlined enduring questions about Australian defence and security: is Australia’s security best-served when policy seeks to exploit regional Asian geography by pursuing a strategy of continental defence with only limited responsibilities assumed offshore? Or is Australian security best upheld when military forces operate forward in an expeditionary mode in order to uphold the nation’s liberal democratic values, so helping to sustain a favourable balance of global power? Or to put it another way: is it defence of Asian geographical position or defence of European historical culture that should predominate in Australia’s security?

The significance of John Howard in Australian defence and security policy is that he was the first prime minister to consciously attempt to synthesise the twentieth-century Creswell–Foster divide by fashioning a twenty-first-century global-regional calculus in defence and security policy. Howard sought to develop a strategy that would straddle what he memorably called the nation’s “special intersection”—the divide between European history and Asian geography and between the American alliance and Asian engagement. Howard called his approach the “intersection theory” of Australian statecraft in which the dialectics between geography and history became additives, not alternatives, in underpinning national security. As he put it in 2001:

“We’re not an Asian nation. We are a modern Australian nation, in many ways a projection of Western civilisation in our part of the world but with a real difference. We are at a special intersection of history, geography and culture that gives us enormous assets.”

In his endeavour to span the “special intersection”, Howard was never a revolutionary in national security affairs; rather he was a seeker of balance, a reformer who sought to integrate defence and diplomacy and to develop a synthesis between Australia’s growing regional and global responsibilities. As Prime Minister, Howard was an exemplar of what Peter Loveday has called the Australian political tradition of “ideas embedded in practice”. As a strategic policy practitioner, Howard was not guided by any master plan but by a set of deeply-held cultural values and conservative principles that, over the course of a decade, interacted with events to decisively shape a series of incremental, but nonetheless profound, changes to Australia’s defence and security policy. On leaving office in November 2007, Howard bequeathed to Australia a record of considerable success in national security affairs, but it is also a legacy whose political intricacies and strategic complexities are likely to demand great skill on behalf of his successors.

This article examines the Howard era in defence and security from four perspectives. First, it argues that Howard’s approach to defence matters was firmly grounded in the conservative tradition of Australian foreign policy in which bilateralism and alliances remain vital instruments of statecraft. Second, it examines the process of continuity and change in strategic policy during the Howard era. It suggests that the Howard government undertook a steady shift away from the narrow geostrategic Defence of Australia orthodoxy of the 1980s and 1990s in favour of a broader and global-regional strategy that reflected twenty-first-century security conditions. Third, Howard’s reform of the Australian Army is considered, and it is postulated that the restoration of this great national institution represents one of the most significant accomplishments of his leadership. Finally, the essay considers the detailed record of Howard’s blending of globalism and regionalism, focusing on such areas as strategic outlook and policy achievements, progress in creating Australian national security architecture and the re-equipment of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) for twenty-first-century challenges.

Defence and the Conservative Tradition

In his attitude to defence matters, John Howard belonged firmly to the Menzies–Spender realist tradition of power politics and interests-based bilateralism in which military power is viewed as a component of foreign policy. This is an approach which the Australian political scientist F.A. Mediansky has defined as representing “the conservative style in Australian foreign policy”. It is a style in which spokesmen for the Coalition parties “have constantly argued that a nation’s role in international affairs is basically determined by its military strength”.

The importance of the conservative style is fundamental to any understanding of the manner in which defence and security policy operated during the Howard years. This importance can best be illuminated by contrasting the Australian conservative style in statecraft with what historians David Lee and Christopher Waters have called “the Labor tradition in Australian foreign policy”. The Australian Labor Party tradition in statecraft is associated with such figures as H.V. Evatt and Gareth Evans and is characterised by a preference for theories of continental defence and a focus on the United Nations and multilateral diplomacy. When the Coalition came to office in March 1996, Labor had governed for two-thirds of the previous quarter of a century and had developed an approach to defence that reflected the “long peace” of the late Cold War era—from the mid-1970s onwards.

During this period of relative bipolar stability, international security was largely about the nuclear weapons balance and significant Australian military deployments were exceedingly rare. As a result, the previous close relationship between Australia’s foreign and defence policies came to be viewed by many in the ALP as a retrograde marriage of contending imperatives.

In 1991, Gareth Evans and Bruce Grant in their influential book, Australia’s Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s, argued that the historical influence of defence considerations in Australian foreign policy had contributed to a sense of Australian dependency. In a revisionist argument, they claimed that Australia possessed a martial tradition of expeditionary valour in “other people’s wars”. Such a tradition excluded any conception of national self-defence beyond fighting in alliances and relying upon strategic support from Menzies’ “great and powerful friends”. For Evans and Grant, the Hawke government’s articulation of a Defence of Australia doctrine based on the defence of the continental geography of the “sea-air gap” approaches in the 1987 Defence White Paper represented “a conceptual watershed in Australian foreign policy”. The new defence doctrine, they argued, conferred self-reliance and eliminated foreign policy’s restrictive dependency on strategic factors. As they put it, conceiving Australian defence in terms of “the unchanging nature of our geographical circumstances” was progressive in that it “liberated Australian foreign policy” from the tyranny of bilateral security issues and permitted diplomacy to flower and to pursue a broader multilateralism.

Yet the ALP’s attempt to “liberate” defence from foreign policy was flawed for five reasons. First, the Defence of Australia sea-air gap doctrine was not new; it was simply a refinement of the continental navalist strategy outlined by Creswell eighty years earlier. In this sense, the modern ALP theorists, far from being intellectual revolutionaries, were simply unconscious neo-Creswellians.

Second, in conceptual terms, a geographically-determinist defence policy was the antithesis of Western historical practice as derived from Machiavelli and Clausewitz in which military power is primarily a diplomatic instrument and a tool of policy. In the famous words of the American strategist Edward Mead Earle, “diplomacy and strategy, political commitments and military power are inseparable; unless this be recognised, foreign policy will be bankrupt”.

Third, the ALP failed to understand that the Defence of Australia geostrategic doctrine was both too narrow and too related to the peculiar conditions of the Cold War to serve the full range of Australia’s future national interests. Indeed, as events were later to demonstrate, conceiving the Defence of Australia in terms of a narrow geostrategy, far from being a tool of liberation risked, in different political circumstances, becoming a straitjacket.

Fourth, the ALP’s international outlook largely ignored the way in which successive governments from Deakin to Fraser had held foreign policy ideas based on a distinctive view of Australia’s position in the world—“a Pacific-centred world”—in which Australian national interests prevailed in the South-West Pacific, requiring a capability for force projection. In this world, as Menzies noted in 1939, Australia had “primary responsibilities and primary risks” which it could not shirk.

Finally, the Evans–Grant worldview overlooked Australia’s impressive record of foreign policy achievements from the 1940s to the 1960s, which included support for Indonesian independence, the 1951 ANZUS Pact, the 1950 Colombo Plan, the 1957 Australian Japanese Treaty of Commerce and the skilful handling of the Indonesian Konfrontasi in the early 1960s.

When John Howard assumed office in March 1996 he set about restoring the conservative tradition in statecraft by seeking to end the divorce of military power from diplomacy in the strategic calculus of Australian foreign policy. His aim was to seek a “rebalance” between Australia’s regional and global imperatives. Whilst there is no evidence to suggest that Howard was consciously aware of the historical details of the Creswell–Foster divide in Australian defence policy, he sought from the outset of his time in office to amend the continental defence doctrine inherited from the Hawke–Keating governments. The Coalition government attempted to articulate a broader formula, one that was based on a global-regional integration of national interests in Australia’s security and that reflected the emerging realities of the post-Cold War world.

Much of Howard’s approach towards rebalancing defence and security was driven by the conjunction of his political convictions and by the nature of events. As a Burkean conservative schooled in the canon of Western liberal democratic values, Howard regarded the Australian-US alliance as the sheet anchor of national security. He felt that the alliance had been neglected under Labor in favour of Asian engagement and that Australia’s most important bilateral relationship required reinvigoration for the post-Cold War era.

When it came to Asian engagement, Howard was untroubled by what he regarded as abstract questions concerning Australia’s national identity. He viewed Australia’s Anglo-Celtic democratic heritage of individual freedom, social cohesion, free speech and the rule of law as an asset in dealings with Asia. Similarly, in his view of the Australian military, Howard was a Fosterite traditionalist who upheld the Anzac legend and viewed the iconic Digger as a symbol of all that was best in the Australian character. He never saw Australia’s military history of expeditionary deployments as an expression of an “unliberated” foreign policy or as participation in “other people’s wars”, but rather as part of the essential task of upholding a Western liberal democratic order that was fundamental to Australia’s survival and prosperity as a modern state. In the words of the political commentator Paul Kelly, Howard believed “that Australia’s tradition of overseas military deployment reflected a timeless appreciation of its national interest”.

Howard’s espousal of the conservative style in Australian foreign policy and his cultural values were shared by his key ally, Alexander Downer. As Foreign Minister, Downer was a firm believer in the Liberal tradition of integrating defence and diplomacy in order to construct a coherent and effective foreign policy. As he remarked to an Institute of Public Affairs audience in May 2006, “defence is part of foreign policy; that is its core logic; defence cannot be an element upon its own”. Intellectually, Downer shared the 1964 view of one of his predecessors, Garfield Barwick that, “a foreign policy depends on three things: effective and available military power, remembered military prowess and sheer diplomatic skill”. In philosophical and policy terms then, the Coalition era of 1996–2007 was marked by a rebalancing of regional and global imperatives and by the re-integration of defence calculations into foreign policy through the agency of an enduring political partnership between Howard and Downer.

In his more than eleven years in office, Howard had five defence ministers: Ian McLachlan, John Moore, Peter Reith, Robert Hill and Brendan Nelson. Of these five figures, Hill was the most able and Reith the least effective. However, all Coalition defence ministers were subordinate to the Howard–Downer view on defence and diplomacy as forming integral components of foreign policy. In this way, the intellectual and policy architecture surrounding decision-making in defence and security policy in the Howard era was informed by continuity in high office and by a philosophical consensus on policy imperatives between a prime minister and a foreign minister that was unprecedented for its longevity and effectiveness in Australian political history.

Fashioning a Global-Regional Strategic Nexus

As Prime Minister, John Howard faced the most serious defence and security challenges of any Australian political leader since Robert Menzies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Menzies confronted the onset of the new phenomenon of the Cold War with its strategic expressions of limited war in Korea, revolutionary war in Malaya, the Konfrontasi with Indonesia over Borneo and, later, the Vietnam commitment. Similarly, the Howard government confronted the evolving phenomenon of a globalisation of security that led directly, or indirectly, to the security crisis in East Timor, the corrosion of governance and stability in the South Pacific, and the rise of Islamist extremism and the September 2001 attacks on the United States followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In order to respond to the new and multifaceted security challenges of an age of globalisation, Howard sought to submerge Australia’s continental defence doctrine into a broader and more effective global-regional security strategy, In the decade between 1997 and 2007, the Howard government published five major documents on defence policy: a 1997 Strategic Policy Review, a Defence White Paper in 2000 and three significant Australian National Security Defence Updates in 2003, 2005 and 2007. Collectively these documents were all concerned with a process of rebalancing security imperatives, of moving Australian defence policy away from its inward geographical focus towards a more outward-looking purpose. This process of strategic policy change did not occur in a neat linear continuity, but rather through the influence of unforeseen events and major discontinuities.

In particular, the development of defence policy between 1997 and 2007 was decisively shaped by the two major foreign policy crises of the Howard era—East Timorese independence and the terrorist attacks by the al Qaeda movement on the United States. Taken together, these two events starkly illuminated the regional-global intersection inherent in the practice of contemporary Australian statecraft. For instance, the 1999 crisis over East Timor demonstrated the need for Australia to possess a regional defence capacity based on joint expeditionary forces that went well beyond the prescriptions of the Defence of Australia geostrategy inherited from the Hawke–Keating years.

Similarly, the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington reinforced the Howard government’s belief that, in an era of strategic unpredictability, the nature of threat and risk were changing because of the networked conjunction of an “old security agenda” based on traditional state-centric threats with a “new security agenda” based on novel multi-centric challenges. On a state visit to Washington on the very day of the 9/11 attacks, Howard witnessed at first-hand the trauma of a non-state “new security” attack on the United States and immediately sensed that Australia, as a liberal democracy allied to America, had entered a new era in which participation in US-led efforts to uphold global stability would be vital to the national interest.

However, even before the outbreak of the regional and global crises of 1999 and 2001, the Howard government had initiated measures to broaden Australia’s defence policy options. This process commenced in December 1997 with the publication of Australia’s Strategic Policy, a review that introduced a joint force maritime concept of strategy into Australia’s defence posture. The new review was preceded by a series of statements by Howard’s first Defence Minister, Ian McLachlan, outlining the need for deeper linkages between defence strategy and foreign policy to meet the demands of the emerging post-Cold War global order. In December 2000, in the wake of the difficult experience of deploying 5500 Australian troops to enforce peace in East Timor, Howard released its first, and only, Defence White Paper, entitled Defence 2000. Like the 1997 review, the White Paper sought to meet the needs of creating a greater military capability for missions beyond Australia’s shores. The new document focused mainly on the region by articulating a new “neighbourhood role” for the ADF including developing land forces that would be capable of enhanced readiness and greater deployment.

The 2000 White Paper did not seek to jettison the Defence of Australia geographic doctrine codified during the Hawke–Keating years; rather it sought significant reform and modification of its deterministic features. Like most Western statesmen, Howard viewed strategic geography as the grammar, not the logic, of defence policy. Thus in the 2000 White Paper, the Howard government’s aim was mainly to redress the geographical narrowness in Australian strategic planning. The aim was to provide military capabilities that were sufficiently flexible and versatile to provide the government with a range of military options across a spectrum of credible strategic situations. As Defence 2000 put it: “Our armed forces need to be able to do more than simply defend our coastline. We have strategic interests and objectives at the global and regional levels. Australia is an outward-looking country.”

As Paul Kelly has noted in his 2006 analysis of Coalition foreign policy, Howard’s Decade, the 2000 Defence White Paper represented a “strategic synthesis” between the 1980s Defence of Australia geographical doctrine and the Coalition’s recognition that Australia needed a significant capability for offshore force projection. Doctrinally, the document was, in Kelly’s words, “the defence expression of Howard’s evolving belief that faced by growing strategic unpredictability Australia must integrate its continental, regional and global defence responsibilities”.

If the crisis in East Timor was responsible for modifying continental defence doctrine in favour of a greater regional perspective, then the 9/11 attacks on the United States performed the same function in terms of a global perspective in Australian defence policy. From the outset of his 1996 election victory, Howard set out to deepen and strengthen the Australian-American alliance as “a deliberate act of policy”. The 9/11 attacks proved to be his great opportunity. In the immediate wake of the attacks, the Prime Minister invoked Article IV of the 1951 ANZUS Treaty—the single most important measure that revitalised the Australian-American alliance—and which set in train a close political partnership between himself and US President George W. Bush. By providing strong support for Bush in the “war on terror” involving invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Howard became in American eyes—as Bush put it in May 2003—“a man of steel … an ally, friend and a good strategic thinker”.

Yet, even as Howard succeeded in re-balancing and reinvigorating the Australian-American alliance, the complexity of managing the increasingly interrelated global-regional demands of Australian defence and security policy grew exponentially after 2001. For instance, the rise of Islamist extremism in the Middle East had regional ramifications because of its ideological linkages to the politics of Indonesia and the Philippines. Australia faced the real danger of a “global arc of terrorism” intersecting with a regional “sea of instability” in the form of failed and weak states in the Asia-Pacific. These linkages were starkly demonstrated by the rise of Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, by the 2002 Bali and 2004 Jakarta bombing attacks and by the interlocking of global and regional terrorist networks in the southern Philippines.

Moreover, alongside global military commitments to the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq and concerns about the spread of political Islamism into South-East Asia, Australia faced a series of governance crises throughout the South Pacific from Papua New Guinea through to Fiji and Tonga. In 2003, the Howard government unveiled a policy of “co-operative intervention” in the Pacific—a policy that was symbolised by the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). The doctrine of co-operative intervention also underpinned Australia’s second military mission to stabilise a fragile East Timor which began in May 2006.

The pace of change and the unpredictability and fluidity of the new security environment from the late 1990s onwards meant that the Howard government’s post-2001 defence policy documents were often more descriptive than prescriptive in tone. Indeed, the Defence Updates of 2003, 2005 and 2007 were less detailed policy documents than meditative papers concerned with tracking the rapid “strategic shocks” of the new millennium. Collectively, all three publications were concerned with explaining the need for balancing multiple regional and global commitments and sought to describe for Australians how the “new security agenda” of non-state threats interacted with “the old security agenda” of traditional inter-state conflict. Thus, the 2003 Defence Update, issued in the wake of the October 2002 Bali attacks that killed eighty-eight Australians, concentrated upon warning that Australia’s national geography no longer offered protection from attack. The December 2005 Defence Update warned that global-regional threats were increasingly interrelated with “the risk of convergence between failing states, terrorism and the proliferation of WMDs remain[ing] a major and continuing threat to international security”.

In July 2007, the Howard government’s final Defence Update declared that Australia had since 2001 developed a “wide strategic outlook”—albeit one tempered by “discretionary commitments” of military force guided by a calculus of vital national interests. Reflecting Howard’s view of a special regional-global intersection, the 2007 Defence Update defined Australia as a “security leader” in its own region and as “a security contributor” to global stability. It warned that there was a need to focus on both the “near” of the Asia-Pacific and the “far” of the Middle East and stated that, in terms of applying military power, “it is becoming harder to separate the global, regional and local dimensions of security threats. Australia’s strategic interests can often be affected by events geographically far away.”

Fundamental to Howard’s attempt to replace a narrow geographical approach to security with a “wide strategic outlook” that integrated Australia’s continental, regional and global defence commitments was the need for usable Australian military power. After 1999, a mobile and versatile ADF proved to be essential in order to meet the intersecting demands of globalised security. Indeed, between 1999 and 2007, the Howard government deployed 68,000 ADF personnel in ten major overseas missions. Most of these personnel were soldiers and it is true to say that Australian commitments in East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout the South Pacific area were largely defined by the role of the Australian Army in joint force projection. The prominent role that ground forces played in fulfilling Australian strategic policy goals after 1999 highlights one of Howard’s major successes as Prime Minister—the rebalancing of the joint capability of the ADF through a policy of transforming the Australian Army into a credible expeditionary land force.

The Restoration of the Australian Army

In his 1976 memoir, A Soldier Reports, the American commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, reflected on the Australian Army in South-East Asia between 1965 and 1972. Westmoreland described an expert Australian task force led by a succession of “gifted field commanders”. He went on to write:

“Aside from American soldiers, the Australians were the most thoroughly professional foreign force serving in Vietnam. Small in numbers and well trained, particularly in anti-guerrilla warfare, the Australian Army was much like the post-Versailles German Army in which even men in the ranks might have been leaders in some less capable force.”

Yet, in the wake of Vietnam, the splendid Australian Army of the 1960s was subjected to the geographical strategy of Defence of Australia, a defence policy that, over time, dramatically reduced the Army’s military effectiveness. As a result, by the early 1990s, Australia’s land forces came to look less like Westmoreland’s antipodean Reichswehr and more like a hollow version of the 1930s French Army deployed behind a coastal version of the Maginot Line stretching from Cairns to Carnarvon. The strength of the Army fell from a high of 45,000 in 1972 to less than 24,000 in 1996 and became, in terms of expenditure and strategic influence, the Cinderella service.

With respect to ground forces, the intellectual difficulty with the Defence of Australia geostrategic policy was its utter lack of historical appreciation. A geographical defence strategy ignored the reality that Australia’s “way of war” since Federation had been dominated by offshore military deployments in support of foreign policy interests. It was not for nothing that Menzies, the architect of the modern Australian Army, called developing land forces for the defence of Australian territory “the equivalent of a wooden gun”. Yet, in the late Cold War era of “the long peace” from 1972 to 1999 when Australian military deployments were rare, it was the “wooden gun” approach that dominated.

As a result, when the Howard government assumed office it confronted an ADF whose Army had endured, in the words of one general, “the big sleep in the shackles of geography”. The Army lacked a credible land force expeditionary capacity for any large and lengthy offshore operations—a situation that was starkly exposed during the East Timor crisis of 1999. As the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Peter Leahy, recalled in February 2003: