In February 2023, in remarks before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner stated that 2023 had already been ‘a ground-breaking year for US alliances and partnerships’ in terms of regional deterrence capabilities. At the 20th IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, convening on 2 June 2023, the various keynote and plenary speeches will likely further confirm Ratner’s point, given that additional defence agreements have since been struck between the US and its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific as they respond to China’s growing defence capabilities.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who will deliver the dialogue’s keynote address, will undoubtedly reference worsening regional-security conditions and how Canberra’s recent Defence Strategic Review will affect the country’s future defence posture. The review states that Australia should pursue cooperation with China where possible but also that it will ‘vigorously pursue’ the Australian national interest in the face of a ‘radically different’ security environment. This refers to the scale and ambition of the Chinese military build-up, which is unprecedented since the end of the Second World War. The review calls for forging a closer relationship with the US and also for strengthening undersea-warfare capabilities, long-range strike capabilities and integrated air and missile defences. This is all in addition to AUKUS, a defence partnership with the United Kingdom and the US that will see British and American nuclear-powered submarines enter rotational deployments from an Australian naval base as early as 2027, as the AUKUS submarine-development programme gets underway.
Japan, too, recently engaged in a fundamental review of its security and defence posture. In December 2022, Tokyo released an ambitious trio of documents: the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and Defense Buildup Program. The security strategy stated that ‘China’s current external stance, military activities, and other activities have become a matter of serious concern for Japan and the international community, and present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge in ensuring the peace and security of Japan’. In January 2023, Minister for Foreign Affairs Hayashi Yoshimasa reiterated this sentiment during the Japan–US Security Consultative meeting (or ‘2+2’), with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken highlighting the alignment between Tokyo and Washington in considering China to be the ‘greatest shared strategic challenge’ that they and their partners face. Like Australia’s review, Japan’s new strategies flag China’s ‘intensifying’ military activities around Taiwan in particular, which include the launch of ballistic missiles into waters around Japan.
The National Defense Strategy calls for Japan to reinforce fundamentally its defence capabilities, including by acquiring its own counterstrike capabilities. It will be expensive to achieve this goal, and the government of Prime Minister Kishida Fumio stated in the Defense Buildup Program that Japan plans to increase defence spending by about two-thirds by fiscal year 2027. It is aiming by then to spend 2% of GDP on both the defence budget and on other initiatives related to national security.
Japan played a major role in organising the G7 summit in May, which concluded with a joint communiqué featuring an unambiguous statement about members’ respective relations with China. Tokyo has also agreed to new forms of defence cooperation with the UK through their global strategic partnership, including a Reciprocal Access Agreement for conducting military exchanges and through a partnership including Italy to build a new fighter aircraft (the Global Combat Air Programme). It has also been reported that Japan is discussing NATO opening a liaison office in Tokyo.
Elsewhere, two agreements signed by the administration of US President Joe Biden earlier in 2023 with the Philippines and South Korea are intended to increase US extended-deterrence capabilities. Notably, the US will periodically dock nuclear-armed submarines in South Korea and will be given access to four new bases in the Philippines in order to expand its capabilities to respond to a conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea.
Southeast Asian officials, fearing that their countries will be worse off if the region becomes caught up in the competition between China and the US, are wary of moves taken by either side that raise tensions. Thus, even major defence-capability reforms and agreements that are plausibly stabilising, such as AUKUS, have caused concern in some regional capitals by contributing to the perception that blocs are forming.
China has amplified these sentiments by stating publicly that the region would not welcome a NATO liaison office in Tokyo. It has also referred to some of the measures announced by the US and its allies as aiming to form ‘military blocs’ and as ‘bloc confrontation’. New rhetorical formulations of this type – along with counter-formulations – may be launched from the dais of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue this weekend. Indeed, the event will serve as an important occasion for regional countries, perhaps most notably China on one side and Australia and Japan on the other, to make a persuasive case to those in the middle that they are seeking stability rather than escalation amid a rapidly changing security environment in the Indo-Pacific.
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