Australia is a 21st century power. Why hide behind the sham comfort of ‘punching above our weight'?

The Guardian

16-03-2025

The second Trump presidency has ushered in a world where bluster and capriciousness combine to generate retaliation and uncertainty. Many think that, during his first presidency, Trump normalised the dog-eat-dog behaviours that generate human suffering and economic adversity, legitimising autocrats and authorising the kleptocratic tendencies of the small band of the world's super-rich. Many fear that his second term is making the world an even more dangerous place.
To avoid the consequences of impetuous self-interest and transactional chaos, we need constantly to return to first principles: what helps us control the forces of instability?
Not quite 80 years ago, Hans Morgenthau published his magisterial Politics Among Nations. A groundbreaking analysis of what constitutes national power, Morgenthau explained America's rise to global dominance. But he also described the template that enabled the nations smashed by the horrors of the second world war – victors and vanquished alike – to rebuild. Britain was bankrupt. France was deeply divided and about to embark on disastrous post-colonial wars. Germany was divided and had effectively ceased to exist as a state, as had Japan. China was reeling from nearly two decades of civil war, and the Soviet Union's victory in eastern Europe had come at vast social and economic cost.
Only America emerged from the second world war with its national power enhanced, thereby affording it the agency to build a postwar world in its own image.
Fast forward to the present and a very different power distribution is in play. The US remains top dog, largely by virtue of its military power, though it finds it difficult to come to terms with the fact that 'power' is not univocal. Power takes many forms, and the immense cultural power that largely defines China and Russia is something that America finds difficult to contemplate, much less accommodate. The countries in the G20 have established their identities through the myriad elements of national power, which in turn determine how they relate to other nation states.
Australia is no exception.
By any measure, Australia enjoys considerable national power. The constant retreat into the sham comfort of 'middle power' (as though we were an southern hemisphere version of the Baltic states) and 'punching above our weight' represents a serious failure of confidence, imagination and political leadership. We occupy a continent. Our resource base is practically limitless. Our economy currently ranks 12th, perhaps just in front of Russia in current circumstances. On some calculations, four of our capital cities are in the top hundred in terms of amenity and habitability. On other measures, eight of our universities are in the top hundred global tertiary institutions – a remarkable achievement for a population of 26 million.
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Even in terms of military spending, Australia ranks 13th in the world – albeit a long way behind the US and China. On Morgenthau's reckoning, we are a well educated society demonstrating high levels of acceptance and inclusion, though always capable of improvement of course, as the failure of the voice referendum demonstrated only too starkly. Australia also boasts a robust health and social security system with strong safety nets across the entire population. This is what 21st-century power looks like.
Yet when it comes to the exercise of national power – performing as a constructive and independent actor on the global stage, Australia is defensive, uncertain and timid. On what we like to describe as 'strategic' matters (though we do not seem to have much of an idea of what a strategic issue really is), we fall in behind America and, amazingly, Great Britain, and take comfort from fictions like the Quad where India's and Japan's roles are ambiguous, to say the least. We are constantly embarrassed in our dealings with our Asian neighbours, at once condescending and culturally uncomprehending. For all our fear of the so-called threat from China in the Pacific, we retreat behind platitudes like 'our Pacific family' but remain tight-fisted when it comes to constructive economic development.
To take just one example: the paucity of health services in the Pacific, especially for women and children, is nothing short of a national disgrace for a wealthy country that claims to care about its neighbours. Papua New Guinea's health system is on the verge of collapse, and instead of offering financial and medical support, we lecture PNG on governance. Really?
There are some deep pathologies that constrain Australia's agency. For all our protestations to the contrary, we are widely seen in Asia and the Pacific as deeply racist, and we are. Again, just contemplate the voice referendum. We are a structurally misogynistic society, with male entitlement continuing to dominate business and the professions. We are insecure, afraid of abandonment and constantly in search of reassurance from a great and powerful protector. And we are diffident in our ability to self-affirm, always looking for American or British approval.
There is, however, a remedy to these constraints on our national agency, and the remedy is well within our grasp if only we were to draw on our considerable national power. And what is the key to mobilising the elements of national power and creating agency? As Morgenthau pointed out, agency comes into its own when the quality of a nation's diplomacy combines the elements of national power into an integrated whole, giving them direction and weight.
Australia conducts its foreign policy in fits and starts, alternating initial enthusiasm with a reluctance to sustain delivery. Foreign ministers such as Doc Evatt, Percy Spender, Gough Whitlam, Andrew Peacock, Gareth Evans and more recently Penny Wong have shown what can be done when there is clarity of purpose and drive. Yet a successful and sustained diplomacy takes more than ambition and imagination. It takes resources, which we are simply unwilling to allocate. There is bipartisan support for a defence budget of just under $60bn per annum, while the Dfat allocation on diplomacy is just over $1.8bn – less than half the allocation to official development assistance at $4.2bn.
Notwithstanding its fatuous and oft-repeated claim to 'punch above its weight', Australia ranks 26th on the Global Diplomacy Index and within the G20 it fields the second smallest diplomatic network. And as the global south expands in power and influence, Australia is barely visible in Africa, the Americas, the Middle East and Central Asia. Complacency is a sure track to irrelevance.
Successive governments have talked about disruption and uncertainty, mostly in response to China's economic growth. Yet our response to that disruption and uncertainty is not to increase our diplomatic effort but to acquire long-range nuclear-powered submarines that may never materialise, while we hunker down behind nervous disengagement. If we are serious about the need for a global rules-based order that it is not just an artefact of the Pax Americana but a genuinely inclusive approach to human wellbeing and global prosperity, we need to practise our advocacy everywhere, not just where we feel comfortable.
We have the national power to do this, just as we have the key elements of diplomatic agency. But we need the policies and funding to perform a more active and engaged internationalist role.
* This is an adapted extract of his essay National Power, Agency, and a Foreign Policy that Delivers in What's the Big Idea? 34 Ideas for a Better Australia (Australia Institute Press)