China ’s growing military has spurred the Royal Australian Navy to focus on buttressing “the rules-based order” in the Indo-Pacific, Australia ’s top defense official said following a milestone meeting with U.S. officials.
“We are all deeply engaged in asserting the rules-based order within our region. That is principally what the Royal Australian Navy is doing,” Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That's the main job that it is doing today … the core business for us is about using our navy to assert the rules-based order within our region and that's what we're doing.”
That statement coincided with the announcement of a joint naval exercise involving Australia, the United States, Canada, and the Philippines. Those drills continue a pattern of multinational shows of force in vital waterways that Beijing seeks to claim for itself at the expense of U.S. allies, an ambition backed by a surge in Chinese military investments that have startled governments across the Indo-Pacific.
“Their navy is the largest navy in the world, and they're not just putting out ships [at a pace of] one a year, but several ships a year; in Chinese terms, it's like dropping dumplings in the water, cooking dumplings,” Taiwan’s top envoy in the U.S., Alexander Yui, observed to Marles during the Q&A session. “What's your opinion about the readiness and the preparation that like-minded countries such as Australia, [the] United States, and others are doing? Is it enough?”
Marles averred that “the answer to that question is yes,” not only because of Australia’s operations, but also due to Washington’s effort to change the “defense footprint” of the U.S. military in the region. Those efforts were a top priority for Marles and other U.S. and Australian officials who met this week in Annapolis for the annual strategic dialogue, in which the two governments unveiled plans to enlarge the U.S. military presence in Australia and expand the production of key weapons in the country.
“All this will mean more maritime patrol aircraft and reconnaissance aircraft operating from bases across northern Australia,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday evening in a press conference alongside Marles, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “It will also mean more frequent rotational bomber deployments."
The quartet also protested “China’s dangerous and escalatory behavior toward Philippine vessels lawfully operating within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone” and warned against Beijing’s ominous pressure on Taiwan in a joint statement published after their meetings.
“They expressed strong concern regarding China’s military and Coast Guard activity around Taiwan,” they said. “They highlighted Taiwan’s important role as a critical partner for both countries and a leading Indo-Pacific economy and democracy, and reiterated their commitment to work together to support Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations.”
U.S. and Australian officials emphasize that Australian forces have fought alongside the U.S. “in every major conflict” involving American forces since World War I. Marles, in the moment, was cagey about the role Australian forces could or would play in the event of a military crisis around Taiwan.
“We are the biggest supplier of energy to Taiwan and, really, that is the single-most significant equity we have in place, in terms of contributing to Taiwan's resilience,” he said. “I think I'm not going to go into more detail about that.”
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More broadly, Marles suggested that U.S. and Australian cooperation is “as significant as we have ever had it,” not least because of the growing military rotation and the AUKUS agreement — a major pact designed not only to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, but also to harness the defense industries of both countries for the development and production of emerging technologies.
We are a high-tech country, and we can make a contribution here as well, and so, there is an upside for America in being able to access the technology that we're doing,” he said. “There are some significant technologies which do come out of Australia, which America is keen to use.”
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