Evan Feigenbaum: Alliance Future – Rewiring Australia and the United States

Introduction

The United States and Australia face a turbulent world: geopolitical turbulence from war in Europe and especially the rise of Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific; economic turbulence from price shocks and a global economy that only recently emerged from a once-in-a-century pandemic; and technological turbulence from disruptive innovations that hold both promise and peril.

Such challenges are best faced together—and then faced jointly with other regional and global democracies. Canberra and Washington have an unparalleled opportunity to fashion broader, stronger, and multilayered partnerships.

But this, in turn, will require self-reflection, not just cheerleading. And that means undertaking an intellectually honest appraisal of the promises and challenges inherent to the alliance.

The inauguration of a new U.S. administration under President Donald J. Trump and an impending election in Australia in 2025 offer the opportunity to do so. Too many people in both capitals presume that the strategic challenge from China alone will make defense coordination easy. The reality is that it could sharpen contradictions around the kind of operational planning that will be needed to enhance deterrence. As Matthew Sussex and Peter Tesch argue in their chapter of this volume, Australian and American defense strategies, while closely aligned, are not identical. The two allies will need to align resources, build complementary regional relationships, and invest in resilience.

A Bipartisan Alliance

The good news is that the alliance enjoys broad public support in both countries and is wholly bipartisan.

In Australia, the Labor Party can claim ownership by looking back to prime minister John Curtin’s December 1941 declaration that Australia “looks to America,” which ushered in eighty years of shared history and deepening collaboration. For its part, Australia’s Liberals and Nationals can look to the ANZUS alliance, signed by prime minister Robert Menzies in September 1951.

American investment in the alliance is similarly bipartisan, reinforced by presidents of both parties since Franklin D. Roosevelt and reinvigorated in recent years through bipartisan Congressional support for the AUKUS security partnership, a host of force posture initiatives, including the Marine Rotational Force-Darwin and Submarine Rotational Force-West, and associated technology sharing agreements.

Operationalizing and Optimizing for High-Intensity Competition

But the bad news, from my perspective, is that Australian and American defense planners have yet to fully confront some thorny operational questions. This volume of papers is dedicated to that end.

For one, Washington and Canberra have a storied history of sending their forces into combat and then fighting shoulder to shoulder, beginning with the 1918 battle of Hamel where U.S. forces served under an Australian commander, General Sir John Monash. But they have very little history divvying up roles and missions in the manner that will be required for deterrence, defense, and ultimately warfighting in the context of high-intensity conflict in the Indo-Pacific. As my former Carnegie colleague Ashley Townshend once put it, the two sides are at risk of significant “expectation gaps.”

For Washington (and by extension, the Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii), a core issue is how to integrate both Australian and U.S. forces rotating through Australia into U.S. war plans and warfighting. But for Canberra, this whole question of integration poses a political problem: no matter which party leads the government, pre-commitment is both a sovereign and political challenge for Australia.

To be effective, therefore, both countries need to undertake difficult reforms, forge new modes of cooperation, harmonize outdated regulations, better align national strategies, address acute Australian sovereignty concerns and associated questions around risk thresholds, and develop accelerated solutions to enduring alliance management challenges.

And given the loss of strategic warning time, reforming the alliance is now an urgent priority. It has assumed added momentum following Australia’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review and 2024 National Defence Strategy.

Outline of the Volume

This volume is dedicated to that goal. The five papers that follow aim not just to admire the defense challenge that the alliance faces but to deliver innovative prescriptions in four key areas:

1.     Regional Defense Strategy.

The first is regional defense strategy. We asked two experienced Australian strategists, Matthew Sussex and Peter Tesch, to address how Canberra and Washington should align their regional defense strategies to advance shared military objectives effectively. What should be done to manage differently weighted strategic priorities and interests?

Sussex and Tesch note the flawed assumption that U.S. and Australian strategic preferences are somehow synonymous. They make clear that Australian decisionmakers do not outsource sovereign choices over where, how, and when military assets might be utilized. Their detailed prescriptions turn on “aligning for effect” by suggesting an array of practical steps to invest across resources, relationships, and resilience.