Insurgent Intellectual: Essays in Honour of Professor Desmond Ball

9. Rumblings in regional security architecture

9 Rumblings in Regional secuRity aRchitectuRe Pauline Kerr One of the many reasons why Des loved his mother Dot was that she had a knack for capturing complexity in a few sharp words and, even when it was unpopular or controversial, speaking her mind. Certainly the local lads in the dressing room of the Timboon football club could verify the latter, especially if they were losing the game to another country town. Des either inherited or learnt Dot’s knack because he applies it to his academic world of strategic studies. The title of his famous Adelphi Paper, Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?, captured a complicated and controversial question of the nuclear age.1 Likewise the title for his book A Suitable Piece of Real Estate2 made ordinary Australians aware that they had a dilemma in their security relationship with the United States: to support the joint United States-Australian intelligence and communications facilities in their country and risk being a target in a nuclear exchange; or play a potentially important role in deterring nuclear war by communicating early-warning information to the guardians of the United States arsenal. Getting to the essence of an issue and embracing the old adage of “speaking truth to power” seemed to be in the bones of the Ball family. 76 Pauline Kerr For Des, the essence of security in the Asia-Pacific region is still to be found in Dot’s view on the matter: that “good neighbours have strong fences”. Shifting the maxim across to the theoretical language of international relations, a move Des colourfully rejects when it came to esoteric abstractions of theory, he nonetheless understands himself as a “realist”, a believer in strong (de)fences. But he is, by his own admission, “a realist with a difference”. It is this depiction of Des’ thinking, activism and policy advice that I believe explains his significant contribution to the study of Asia-Pacific security and architecture over the last two or more decades.3 In the rest of this chapter I will do four things that substantiate this claim: first, explain in more detail the logic behind Des’ thinking about regional security and the resulting “realist with a difference” conceptual framework; second, demonstrate how this framework helps to explain his analytical and practical contributions over time; third, canvass some possible critiques of his approach; and finally, offer some concluding thoughts about what all of this tells us about Des’ contribution to the way we ought to think about the type of security architecture that will best enhance the security of regional states and peoples. conceptual contRibutions Des shares with the majority of his fellow strategic thinkers a profound pessimism about the behaviour of states in the international system: historically, contemporarily and in the future. The bottom line, putting aside abstract concepts such as self-help, relative and absolute gains, is that leaders of states pursue their definitions of their country’s “national interests” and engage in power politics to achieve them. If economic resources allow, and often if they don’t, political leaders will seek military forces to support their interests. States attempting to balance military power with others will often create action and reaction dynamics that can lead to competitive arms races, further insecurity and possibly war. Des also shares with most of his strategic colleagues the view that when countries perceive themselves to be insecure in the international system many of them will seek alliances. The basis of insecurity may be perceptions of military threat, but, and here he may part company with some strategic studies scholars, states also form alliances to support other interests that may not pertain to their own security. The North Atlantic Rumblings in Regional Security Architecture 77 Treaty Organisation (NATO), Des notes, is a military alliance of countries from NorthAmerica and Europe first established through the NorthAtlantic Treaty of 4 April 1949 to provide collective defence to those countries during the Cold War.4 NATO remains a military organisation with a military command but its 28 members have interests not just in protecting their own territory and population but in new types of operations, most recently the 2011 NATO ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Libya. Bilateral relationships, either in the form of alliances or outside of them, also remain fundamental to states’ security. The more members involved in security arrangements the weaker the arrangement. Where Des starts to part company with many of his strategic...