“Interlocking alliances” between nations is the best way to counteract Beijing’s military build-up in the Indo-Pacific region, says former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Morrison, now able to speak more freely after stepping down from office, delivered a gloomy outlook on potential conflict in the region.
He warned that “no country on their own” could resist the military strength of Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army.
“There’s no country, I would argue, almost on Earth that could, other than the United States. I mean, that’s just the reality.
“We’re a country of just over 25 million people, their defence budget is multiple, multiple, multiple times that of Australia’s,” the parliamentarian told Sky News Australia on March 6.
“Being prepared isn’t just having your own capability; it’s having the interlocking alignments and alliances that actually provide the counterbalance to the threat,” he added. “The best outcome is there is no such conflict.”
He further added that “strategic ambiguity” around which countries would come to Taiwan’s defence—if an invasion occurred—could serve as a deterrence and complicate the situation for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership.
The former prime minister played an integral role in setting up the AUKUS deal between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
AUKUS formalised several existing partnerships between the nations and aims to streamline collaboration in fields like quantum computing, undersea capabilities, hypersonic weapons, and cyber technology.
However, the centrepiece of the trilateral arrangement is the sharing of U.S. nuclear propulsion technology with Australia, something that had happened only once before, in 1958, when the United States shared the tech with the UK.
The successful arming of Australia will effectively tip the power balance of the Indo-Pacific.
Beijing Aims to Be ‘Controlling Power’ Over Indo-Pacific
Morrison also said the CCP was seeking to establish a “hegemony” and to be the “controlling power” across the Indo-Pacific.“Whether that’s in the South China Sea or even further south, it’s to be the dominating and controlling influence over the economic, strategic environment in that part of the world,” he said.
He argued that it was silence from the then-Obama administration that opened the door to the beginnings of the hegemony.
“If you go back to when China was turning island atolls into airports … there was no one saying ‘no,’” Morrison said.
AUKUS Priming Australia for Conflict
The former prime minister said it was ridiculous to think that a conflict over Taiwan would have no “direct negative consequences for Australia’s national interest.”He also said that while his government did prepare contingencies around conflict, it was difficult to predict how an actual war would play out.
“The Russians thought they could take Kiev in two days,” Morrison said, while also referencing former Major General Jim Molan, who stated that “no strategy survives contact with the enemy.”
He said, “once things are going down, everything changes. So, you take [assessments] with a grain of salt.”
Morrison did, however, call on the current Labor government to raise defence spending to 2.5 percent of GDP instead of the near-2 percent level it is currently at.
He also revealed that AUKUS was originally designed around the acquisition of a British nuclear-powered submarine fitted with U.S. weapons systems.
His former cabinet minister, now-opposition leader Peter Dutton, has been vocal in his support for the U.S. Virginia-class submarine, arguing it was a tried-and-true model.
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