Stop talking, start punching

Australia must stop talking about being a middle power that punches above its weight. Talking about it is far less interesting to the rest of the world than Australia actually doing it.

The occasion for Australia to drop this habit will be the 15–17 June meeting of the G7 major economies. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will represent Australia among the small number of non-G7 invitees that are together known as the ‘plus network’.

There’s a reason why Australia is invited to meetings of such groups as the G7 and NATO: it does have some regional power and is expected to use it.

The time to use it has certainly arrived.

Future historians may be tempted to date the liberal democratic order as lasting from 1945 to 2015. It was in 2016 that the West woke up to China having a well-resourced plan to supplant the post-1945 order with a Sino-centric one that better suited its authoritarian instincts and ambition.

The 10 years since has demonstrated the worst of authoritarian regimes, especially Beijing and Moscow. It has also highlighted the vulnerabilities and frailty of democracies. Unless urgent action is taken, the period in which the world order was led by democratic principles could be defined as 1945 to 2025. This year may be seen as when the US, with its allies watching neglectfully, abandoned its role as primary architect, advocate and guarantor of the western liberal democratic order.

President Donald Trump’s actions are his own responsibility, but America’s allies cannot limit themselves to being mere onlookers, carrying on with the post-1945 expectation that the US should carry the burden of securing the international order.

This consequential geostrategic development must weigh heavily on Albanese’s mind as he prepares for a possible meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit. Albanese must not play a small target but instead seek a full meeting with Trump. In it he should tackle head-on the US review of AUKUS, revealed on 11 June, and say Australia recognises that American allies must step up. A flow-on benefit is that this will more likely keep the US in the game and on the right side.

Trump’s sees allies as a burden. Defense Secretary Hegseth’s exhorts them and other partners to spend more on their own defence. Both men are expressing long-held frustrations with mendicant friends.

Europe rightly bears the brunt of criticism for decreasing defence spending while it increased economic dependence on Russia, all the while expecting the US would carry the security burden. Most of the democratic world is guilty of that same dual track approach with China. Worse, we’ve all promulgated the falsely equivalent term ‘great power competition’ into political lexicon, as though the only international security problem was the rivalry between the US and China. While Russia and China have overtly sought to disrupt and change the global order, US fatigue with its allies and international freeloaders has deepened.

An illustrative example of this from my time as a diplomat embedded in the US defence system from 2009-11 is the Australian government’s campaign in 2011 for international intervention in Libya based on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept. Throughout that period, my office was flooded with comments from our US colleagues arguing for Australia to back off its campaign. They feared that the US would have to bear the burden for yet another Middle East intervention.

These comments reached fever pitch when the administration of Barack Obama eventually agreed to intervene and the Australian government declined to support—an act seen by many of my interlocutors as the height of betrayal. Canberra had dragged the US into another entanglement then ran out the back door.

Thankfully, I had to contend with this anger for only a few days. The air force of the NATO ally that the US had pressed to lead in Libyan airspace control proved incapable. Anger at Australia’s perfidiousness was replaced by anger at NATO’s incompetence. The manifestation of US frustration under Trump may be ugly, but it isn’t without cause. Nor is it new.

Albanese should seek to avoid at all costs in this new, less forgiving environment telling Trump that Australia is punching above its weight. This phrase has been used by Australian ministers and senior officials with a recklessness that would make a MAGA zealot blush. Almost always, US interlocutors’ polite reception of this statement was accepted on face value. In fact, this was just forbearance of a super power adroit at managing the many egos of a multi-spoked and diverse alliance management system.

After such meetings, senior US officials would tell me that US soldiers—dying by the dozen per day in Afghanistan as Australia’s soldiers operated in a carefully negotiated, safer zone—would be glad to hear that Australia was punching above its weight. Some said they’d be happy if Australia just punched at its weight. These comments were often friendly in tone, but always unmistakable in intent: they didn’t buy our spruik as much as we did.

And judging by Hegseth’s recent public call for Australia to lift its defence spending to 3.5 percent, Washington’s view hasn’t changed. After all, if think tanks and commentators can analyse the gaps in Australian defence capabilities based on the government’s own budget statements, its safe to assume the US government can, too.

In responding to this public challenge, Albanese has spoken about doing things the Australian way. But the Australian way since May 2022 has been keeping a low profile with respect to China, including by ceding our former global leadership in resisting its foreign interference and cyber espionage. This doesn’t align with the US’s more forthright calling out of China’s threat, most recently expressed by Hegseth at the Shangri-la Dialogue.

This incongruence could more effectively be dealt with in private if the Trump Administration could see that Australia was taking the threats we apparently agree on seriously. A commitment to higher defence spending would help address this problem and satisfy the US’s legitimate demands of laggard allies. Australia needs to spend more on defence for its own safety, anyway.

And for those who argue that the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the post-war international system, the answer is not to naively expect that we can secure it by spending the same on defence. Rather, an Australian commitment to increased defence and security spending would be the first step in acknowledging the need to get closer to many countries’ historically normal levels. The days when the US taxpayer would subsidise our security while we spent on better health, education and social security are over. We can no longer expect to be subsidised by a benign hegemon.

Albanese can easily say we will lift defence spending in our own interests, not as the result of lobbying by any external actor. This of course would be supported by a clearer discussion with the Australian electorate about threats and the measures we must take in response.

In doing so, there is a clear case Albanese and Australia can make that the security of the liberal democratic system is a key contributor to US security.

A meeting with Trump is not without risk, but an Australia that is risk averse isn’t managing the realities of the current state of international disorder nor the national security threats we face.

This article was published by The Strategist.