From Deft Diplomacy to Rebalancing Hard Power: Australia and Indian Ocean Strategic Futures

Australia is in a strategic age that is unprecedented in its history. Since the end of World War II, Australia has largely lived in an Indo-Pacific dominated by uncontested U.S. hegemony. This reality is no more. Before this period, Australian security was largely achieved through its participation in the British Empire that provided maritime dominance in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Since European colonization in 1788, Australia has been faced with only two major power shifts in the region that threatened British or U.S. maritime supremacy. The first was fleeting. In 1914, at the start of World War I, the German Navy's East Asia Squadron roamed the Pacific for a short time before being destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. The second, and more significant shift, was from the 1930s to 1945 with the rise of imperialist Japan and World War II.

Australia is now in a third such era of a changing balance of power. However, this time it looks fundamentally different. Once a strategic backwater in the Cold War, Australia now finds that its so-called tyranny of distance from the global centers of power and competition in Europe and the Middle East has been replaced by the power of proximity to the global geoeconomic center of gravity in the Indo-Pacific. Faced with a rising China and India, a United States in relative decline, and a rapidly evolving geostrategic landscape, Australia is having to readjust how it views and engages with the region while also dealing with its own relative decline.

Australia's response to the scenarios presented in the futures analysis presented here by Arzan Tarapore and David Brewster can be broken down into two types. The first type considers the need for deft diplomacy in response to a more illiberal India, whereas the second highlights the more strategically significant impacts of an Indian or U.S. retrenchment or withdrawal from the region.

An Illiberal India Challenging the Rules-Based Order

The emergence of a more illiberal India in the Indian Ocean is in many ways the less problematic scenario for Australia. This assessment is based on Australia's focus on preserving a balance of power in the Indian Ocean and its desire to ensure that the region is not dominated by an aggressive authoritarian China. This scenario, which is not predicated on a diminished role for the United States in the region, poses the challenge of balancing values and interests. To what extent does Australia conceive its relationship with India around support for the rules-based global order, and how much Indian presence in the Indian Ocean would be necessary to balance rising Chinese power? In this scenario, India's strong response to China conflicts with Australia's strong support for a rules-based global order.

This is not new territory for Australia. The country has always had to balance its support for the rules-based global order and its relationships with the great powers, especially its major alliance partners Great Britain and then the United States. This was evident in Australia's support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, undertaken without a UN mandate and on the basis of dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that proved to be false. This diplomatic balancing act between values and interests has been a core element of Australia's strategic diplomacy since the end of World War II, particularly during the Cold War. Ultimately, Australia has maintained its support for the rules-based global order, including calling out the illiberal behavior of its friends and allies, while taking a longer-term, pragmatic approach to bilateral relations and the regional balance of power.

A future scenario involving an illiberal India would thus present challenges to Australia's values and regional outlook. Although India-Australia relations and India's reputation internationally would be damaged, Australian pragmatism about the regional order and balance of power would ultimately prevail. As a result, such a scenario would not necessarily require Australian policymakers to radically reconsider their current assumptions as long as...