ANU Strategic & Defence Studies Centre's Golden Anniversary Conference Proceed

264 Pages·2017·1.15 MB·English

New Directions in
Strategic Thinking 2.0
ANU STRATEGIC & DEFENCE STUDIES CENTRE’S
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

New Directions in
Strategic Thinking 2.0
ANU STRATEGIC & DEFENCE STUDIES CENTRE’S
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
EDITED BY DR RUSSELL W. GLENN
Published by ANU Press
The Australian National University
Acton ACT 2601, Australia
Email: [email protected]
Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au
ISBN (print): 9781760462222
ISBN (online): 9781760462239
WorldCat (print): 1042559418
WorldCat (online): 1042559355
DOI: 10.22459/NDST.07.2018
This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
The full licence terms are available at
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Cover design and layout by ANU Press
This edition © 2018 ANU Press
Contents
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Acronyms and abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
1 . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Russell W . Glenn
2 . The decline of the classical model of military strategy . . . . . . . . . . 9
Lawrence Freedman
3 . Economics and security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Amy King
4 . A bias for action? The military as an element of national power . . . 37
John J . Frewen
5 . The prospects for a Great Power ‘grand bargain’ in East Asia . . . 51
Evelyn Goh
6 . Old wine in new bottles? The continued relevance
of Cold War strategic concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Robert Ayson
7 . Beyond ‘hangovers’: The new parameters of post–Cold War
nuclear strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Nicola Leveringhaus
8 . The return of geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Paul Dibb
9 . Strategic studies in practice: An Australian perspective . . . . . . . 105
Hugh White
10 . Strategic studies in practice: A South-East Asian perspective . . 117
Peter Ho
11 . American grand strategy in the post–Cold War era . . . . . . . . . . 133
Hal Brands
12 . The future of strategic studies: Lessons from the last
‘golden age’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Hew Strachan
13 . An Asian school of strategic studies? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Amitav Acharya
14 . The future of strategic studies: The next golden age . . . . . . . . . 179
Robert O’Neill
15 . Conclusion: What is the future of strategic studies? . . . . . . . . . . 193
Paul Dibb
Appendix 1: Strategic & Defence Studies Centre
50th anniversary celebratory dinner keynote speech:
‘To see what is worth seeing’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Brendan Sargeant
Appendix 2: Conference program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Foreword
The 50th anniversary conference of the Strategic & Defence Studies
Centre (SDSC), from which the essays in this volume are drawn, drew its
inspiration from a similar event that Professors Robert O’Neill and David
Horner hosted at The Australian National University in July 1980 under
the theme ‘New Directions in Strategic Thinking’.
There are some striking parallels between the period in which O’Neill and
Horner held that conference—at the onset of the so-called second Cold
War—and the world in which we find ourselves today. As Hedley Bull
noted in his remarks to that earlier gathering:
In the late 1960s and the first few years of the 1970s, it was widely held
in the Western world that the role of force in international relations had
gone into decline … A school of writers about international politics began
to argue that the strategic factor in international power relationships
was giving place to an economic factor … Today, rightly or wrongly,
[those ideas] are in large part rejected. In the Western world there is now
a widespread expectation that the role of force will not diminish but
increase—an expectation that is borne out by the evidence of mounting
arms and arms expenditures in the Soviet bloc, the Third World and the
West itself.1
Fifty years after SDSC’s founding, geopolitics is making a comeback.
The January 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America,
for instance, boldly asserts that ‘interstate strategic competition, not
terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security’.2 Talk of an
1 Hedley Bull, ‘Force in international relations: The experience of the 1970s and prospects for the
1980s’, in New Directions in Strategic Thinking, ed. Robert O’Neill and D.M. Horner, George Allen
& Unwin, London, 1981, p. 19.
2 US Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United
States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge, Washington, DC, 2018, p. 1,
www.defense.gov/ Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf (retrieved
28 January 2018).
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NEW DIRECTIONS IN STRATEGIC THINKING 2 .0
emergent Asian arms race, spurred by North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear
and missile capabilities, is becoming increasingly prevalent, and respected
commentators regard the chances of war breaking out on the Korean
Peninsula as being as high as 50 per cent.
Scholars and practitioners alike, such as Harvard Professor Graham
Allison and Chinese President Xi Jinping, have cautioned repeatedly on
the dangers of China and the United States falling into a ‘Thucydides
trap’ in a historical allusion to the strategic competition between Athens
and Sparta 2,500 years ago, which tragically brought to an end a golden
age in ancient Greece. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull,
who is equally fond of this historical analogy, has warned against taking
the so-called Asian peace of recent decades for granted. As Turnbull
observed in his keynote address to the June 2017 Shangri-La Dialogue in
Singapore, ‘the gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability are signals
for all of us to play more active roles in protecting and shaping the future
of this region’.3
The need for high-quality strategic thinking is becoming increasingly
urgent and apparent in the emerging landscape of international politics.
Yet the world at large, and the Asia-Pacific region where much of this new
era in strategic competition will be played out, is unfortunately starting
from a lower-than-optimal base.
That is because the fate of strategic studies is intimately and inevitably tied
to its international political and security milieu. For instance, the first two
decades following its birth as a formal field of study in the late 1940s have
been characterised as a ‘golden age’ of strategic studies. The primary focus
of scholars during this period was with a set of dilemmas associated with
the onset of the nuclear era, including how use of these devastating new
weapons could be avoided, or at least controlled and limited should war
involving their use ever break out.
In the radical political milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however,
strategic studies quickly fell out of fashion. The emergence of a strong
anti-war sentiment in the United States rendered the study of such issues
unfashionable and even distasteful. The so-called oil shocks of the 1970s
shifted international focus more towards the potential use of economic
3 Malcolm Turnbull, ‘IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2017 Keynote Address’, Singapore, 2 June 2017,
p. 3.
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FOREWORD
weapons and saw greater emphasis given to the economic dimensions of
security. A period of détente between the United States and the Soviet
Union, coupled with the normalisation of US–China relations, rendered
the prospects for interstate conflict even more remote.
As Bull’s remarks to the July 1980 SDSC conference suggest, the renewal
of US–Soviet tensions in the 1980s challenged these assumptions for
a time. Within a decade, however, the Cold War was over, and by the early
1990s the Soviet Union had evaporated. A swathe of articles appeared that
questioned whether strategic studies should even survive in an era that
the prominent international relations scholar Francis Fukuyama famously
characterised as marking the ‘end of history’.
Fifty years following SDSC’s founding, the question of whether strategic
studies has any future is increasingly being answered resoundingly in the
affirmative. Indeed, a strong case can be made that a new ‘golden age’ in
the history of strategic studies is upon us. This is not only reflected in
the significant expansion of the Centre that has occurred over the past
half decade or so. It is also evident in the fact that new strategic studies
programs are beginning to emerge throughout an Asia-Pacific region that
in many respects has traditionally displayed an aversion towards studying
use of force issues in any formal sense.
Some might see this more crowded landscape as posing a threat to the
future of SDSC. Instead, it should be regarded as presenting an enormous
opportunity. Some SDSC scholars, such as the late Desmond Ball, played
an important advisory role in the establishment of Singapore’s Institute
of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS). IDSS is now, of course, part
of the world-leading S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
and continues to enjoy a close and productive relationship with the
Centre. To be sure, as Amitav Acharya observes in his contribution to
this volume, the provision of similar intellectual leadership, particularly
regionally, during this next ‘golden age’ will need to be undertaken with
a considerable degree of sensitivity. That said, it is an aspiration that
SDSC should not shy away from. The excellent set of essays in this volume
provide an impressive foundation from which to begin.
Brendan Taylor
Former Head of Centre (2011–16)
Canberra, January 2018
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