Australia is making itself a bigger military target for China and risks being drawn into a war that “could end in nuclear catastrophe”, a leading defence analyst has argued.
Sam Roggeveen, the director of the Lowy Institute’s international security program and a former Australian intelligence analyst, issues the stark warning in an essay published on Monday.
“Australia has taken the decision to bring US combat forces, and its military strategy to fight China, on to our shores,” Roggeveen wrote in the latest edition of the Australian Foreign Affairs journal.
“We have also chosen to build military capabilities of our own that are designed expressly to contribute to American operations to defeat China. These fateful decisions threaten to draw Australia into a war that is not central to our security interests, and which could end in nuclear catastrophe.”
Roggeveen examined the combined effect of decisions, including plans to host up to six US B-52 bombers in the Northern Territory and to rotate US nuclear-powered submarines through HMAS Stirling in Western Australia from 2027.
He said US bombers operating from Australia could be assigned to strike China’s nuclear infrastructure, including missile silos, command and control facilities, early warning radars and air defence facilities.
Roggeveen said it was “hard to overstate the sensitivity involved in threatening another nation’s nuclear forces” and that meant American bombers flying out of the Tindal RAAF base “would be an important target for Chinese forces”.
He said the requirement for Australia’s planned nuclear-powered submarines, acquired under the Aukus deal, to carry Tomahawk cruise missiles “can only be interpreted one way: Australia wants the capability to strike targets on Chinese soil”.
In the event of war, Roggeveen said, the Australian submarines would probably be assigned to sink Chinese naval ships and submarines, blockade ports or strike targets in China with cruise missiles.
If Australia eventually acquired hypersonic weapons under the advanced defence technology pillar of the Aukus deal, Roggeveen said, that could further increase the country’s profile in the eyes of Chinese military planners.
He said Australia had previously taken risks “because we have concluded that, on balance, we are likely to be safer within the alliance, with all the obligations it imposes, than outside it”.
“But if China’s capabilities to strike Australia are set to increase, and if we are raising China’s incentives to do so, then the judgments we have previously made about whether the risks of the alliance outweigh the security benefits need to be re-evaluated.”
Roggeveen said whether the trade-offs were worth it depended on the value Australia placed on American military dominance in Asia, including its ability to defeat China in a war over the future of self-governed Taiwan.
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He said contrary to its rhetoric, the US had not increased the weight of military power it dedicated to Asia, even as it dispersed its forces to be outside China’s missile ranges, raising questions about its long-term commitment.
“In short, six bombers based in Tindal are a less potent military asset than the same number based in Guam, which means America’s deterrent against China is diminishing while the military threat to Australia increases.”
Roggeveen is not the first to raise such concerns, although his intervention is notable because of his past experience as a senior strategic analyst at the Office of National Assessments.
In the same edition of Australian Foreign Affairs, however, the former senior US official Michael Green argued his country remained “the indispensable power despite itself”.
Green, head of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, wrote that in a world without US leadership, Vladimir Putin “would today be ruling Ukraine through proxies in Kyiv” and Taiwan “might have succumbed to Chinese coercion”.
“There is no indication that Labor or the Coalition are going to choose neutrality or distancing from America – not with Chinese coercive pressure a new reality and other close partners such as Japan and South Korea choosing to reinforce the American alliance system rather than defect,” Green wrote.
The Australian government has repeatedly argued its Aukus plans are intended to contribute to regional peace and stability, and it has also said US bombers have visited Australia since the 1980s.