Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
It is said that the Devil's greatest trick was to convince the world he didn't exist.
If true, ol' Beelzebub knew a thing or two about the human capacity for self-delusion.
Like that people are alarmed about immediate threats but complacent about long-term contingencies, even as they worsen.
An imminent storm provokes diligent preparations but warnings of more frequent tempests into the future bring apathy and for some, resentful denial.
Defence preparedness can be like this. It requires nations to allocate scarce resources to the task of repelling an enemy that is not on our shores and may never arrive.
In periods of sustained peace, the mental projection required to secure both materiel and recruitment, pails against what Barack Obama once called "the fierce urgency of now".
Advocates of higher defence spending maintain this short-termism is a failure to recognise that dangers over the horizon are always changing.
Worse, it assumes that governments, mired in election-cycle politics, know what they're doing.
"Since we've come to power", boasted Defence Minister Richard Marles earlier this month, "relative to what we inherited from the former government, we have increased defence spending by $70 billion over the decade".
Australia's $59 billion annual defence spend equates to just over 2 per cent of GDP. Though slated to increase to 2.4 per cent by 2033-34, it remains well short of the 6 per cent Donald Trump demanded from allies in January.
Defence hawks say Australia's gradual increase toward a modest target ignores a global picture of accelerating entropy.
And, that it naively assumes the broad global order overseen by the United Nations and underwritten by the United States since the Second World War will continue.
Russia's blatantly illegal invasion of Ukraine has challenged this thinking yet still it is treated as an aberration rather than evidence that the post-war settlement has ended.
The West's moral confusion over the use of starvation in Gaza shredded its authority to uphold international law.
Force is the new black.
Australians hear talk of the Chinese absorption of Taiwan but assume it is decades away and in any event, not a matter for Australia.
Questions abound. What would a Chinese move on the island mean? Would Trumpist America intervene militarily thus going to war with China?? And if so, would it press for Australia's participation also? If it did, could we resist without surrendering the US alliance?
Australian strategic and foreign policy since WWII has relied on multilateralism, the observance of international law and on the prevailing logic of durable security alliances.
This is what Penny Wong calls "amplified middle-power diplomacy," and it has seen, she says, the strengthening of "every relationship Australia has in this region".
She cites "groundbreaking treaties with four countries, upgraded or enhanced partnerships with six and ... progress on agreements with another four."
The deepest of our partnerships (US, UK, Europe) are underpinned by what political leaders like to describe as shared values. This is more than a basis for friendship.
It provides what we assess to be a reliable guide for future behaviour.
We know the direction of Western foreign policy, we believe, because of longstanding commonalities over the rule of law, human rights, democratic freedoms, and politico-economic stability. The watchwords for this comforting mentality are sovereignty, consistency, institutionalism and continuity.
We cling to these understandings even as successive elections suggest the Americans, Brits and Europeans are losing faith in their own project and walking away from universalism.
Brexit was unthinkable to most educated Britons until it happened. Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton that same year was similarly implausible.
Both democratic outcomes presaged deeper shifts in the global security outlook. Their common significance lay in what they told us about the rise of nationalist sentiment among the citizenry of our chief security partners.
Not merely upsets, each was a symptom of a larger global trend that has since lifted the far-right AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, and potentially the Reform Party in Britain to become the main opposition parties.
Simultaneously, America's appetite for foreign engagements - especially after Iraq and Afghanistan - has evaporated under the nativist MAGA movement led by Trump.
If US-aligned partners such as Australia, Japan and South Korea have not clocked this shift among their once dependable security guarantors, it has not been lost among the West's strategic competitors such as Russia, China and North Korea.
The current crisis in bilateral relations between Beijing and Tokyo - after Japan's hawkish new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi described an invasion of Taiwan as a threat to Japan's "survival" - offers a glimpse into how a long-term risk can quickly become an immediate- term disaster.
"Survival", as Craig Singleton wrote in the New York Times this month is "a term that, under Japanese law, would permit the country to deploy its military overseas".
"Her comments were among the clearest public signals yet that Tokyo could help defend Taiwan from potential Chinese aggression," wrote Singleton who is senior director of the China Program at the DC-based think tank, Foundation for Defence of Democracies.
Australia's strategic positioning is made doubly complex because its defence is inextricably linked to America and its economy, dependent on China.
The implications of war across the Taiwan Strait tend to be viewed through the lens of our US alliance. But the economic shock alone would likely be ruinous.
While the colossal expense and practical implications of the giant AUKUS pact have produced strong advocates and trenchant critics, there is a growing realisation that for an Australia caught between a resident super-power and a potentially waning one, the short-term value of AUKUS is in keeping the US engaged and invested in the region.
This is crucial to Australia's hopes of maintaining an Indo-Pacific equilibrium where there is, as Wong puts it regularly, "a favourable balance, so no country dominates, and no country is dominated".
This emphasis on regional symmetry is among the more under-appreciated priorities being pursued by Australia. It recognises that even though most see the competition between Washington and Beijing as laden with risk, a US retreat to its own hemisphere, could lead to even more unpredictable outcomes in Asia if the sole remaining super-power faced no regional counterweight.
Meanwhile, the Albanese government also knows that public confidence in defence spending turns on its effectiveness and its cost.
The creation of the new Defence Delivery Agency from three existing groups recognises that cost and time blowouts are the norm alongside something even worse, under-performing kit that fails its capability claims and may already be obsolete at time of delivery.
As always, the Devil will be in the detail.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.