In an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific, the United States, Australia and their regional allies and partners face a myriad of strategic challenges that cut across every level of the competitive space. Driven by China’s use of multidimensional coercion in pursuit of its aim to displace the United States as the region’s dominant power, a new era of strategic competition is unfolding. At stake is the stability and character of the Indo-Pacific order, hitherto founded on American power and longstanding rules and norms, all of which are increasingly uncertain. The challenges that Beijing poses the region operate over multiple domains and are prosecuted by the Chinese Communist Party through a whole-of-nation strategy. In the grey zone between peace and war, tactics like economic coercion, foreign interference, the use of civil militias and other forms of political warfare have become Beijing’s tools of choice for pursuing incremental shifts to the geostrategic status quo. These efforts are compounded by China’s rapidly growing conventional military power and expanding footprint in the Western Pacific, which is raising the spectre of a limited war that America would find it difficult to deter or win. All of this is taking place under the lengthening shadow of Beijing’s nuclear modernisation and its bid for new competitive advantages in emerging strategic technologies. Strengthening regional deterrence and counter-coercion in light of these challenges will require the United States and Australia — working independently, together and with their likeminded partners — to develop more integrated strategies for the Indo-Pacific region and novel ways to operationalise the alliance in support of deterrence objectives. There is widespread support for this agenda in both Washington and Canberra. As the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy makes clear, allies provide an “asymmetric advantage” for helping the United States deter aggression and uphold favourable balances of power around the world. Australia’s Minister for Defence Linda Reynolds mirrored this sentiment in a major speech in Washington last November, observing that “deterrence is a joint responsibility for a shared purpose — one that no country, not even the United States, can undertake alone.” Forging greater coordination on deterrence strategy within the US-Australia alliance, however, is no easy task, particularly when this undertaking is focussed on China’s coercive behaviour in the Indo-Pacific. Although Canberra and Washington have overlapping strategic objectives, their interests and threat perceptions regarding China are by no means symmetrical. Each has very different capabilities, policy priorities and tolerance for accepting costs and risks. Efforts to operationalise deterrence must therefore proceed incrementally and on the basis of robust alliance dialogue. To advance this process of bilateral strategic policy debate, the United States Studies Centre and Pacific Forum hosted the second round of the Annual Track 1.5 US-Australia Deterrence Dialogue in Washington in November 2019, bringing together US and Australian experts from government and non-government organisations. The theme for this meeting was “Operationalising Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific,” with a focus on exploring tangible obstacles and opportunities for improving the alliance’s collective capacity to deter coercive changes to the regional order. Both institutions would like to thank the Australian Department of Defence Strategic Policy Grants Program and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency for their generous support of this engagement. The following analytical summary reflects the authors’ accounts of the dialogue’s proceedings and does not necessarily represent their own views. It endeavours to capture, examine and contextualise a wide range of perspectives and debates from the discussion; but does not purport to offer a comprehensive record. Nothing in the following pages represents the views of the Australian Department of Defence, the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency or any of the other officials or organisations that took part in the dialogue.

Key judgements 1. The Biden administration’s approach to the Indo-Pacific has so far lacked focus and urgency. Despite its deep regional expertise and the region’s high expectations, it has failed to articulate a comprehensive regional strategy or treat the Indo-Pacific as its decisive priority. 2. The Biden administration’s focus on bringing normalcy back to US regional policy has restored the status quo, but not advanced its standing in the Indo-Pacific. 3. The Biden administration’s approach to competition with China has focused on the domestic and global arenas, rather than on competing for influence within the Indo-Pacific. 4. The Biden administration’s focus on long-term systems competition with China overlooks the urgency of near-term competition in the Indo-Pacific. 5. The Biden administration has placed strategic competition with China at the top of its foreign and security policy agenda. It has sought to balance US-China rivalry with opportunities for cooperation and efforts to stabilise the regional order. 6. The Biden administration views its Indo-Pacific allies as regional and international “force multipliers.” It has largely trained these alliances on global order issues, with few new initiatives at the regional level and insufficient focus on empowering allies to meet their own security needs. 7. The Biden administration sees the United States as being in a “systems competition” between democracy and autocracy. By making ideological competition with China an organising principle for US foreign policy, Washington risks undermining its attractiveness as a partner for politically diverse Indo-Pacific countries. 8. The Biden administration cannot compete against China effectively in the Indo-Pacific without prioritising engagement with Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. It has recognised the need to do more in Southeast Asia, but its success may be limited by its approach to competition with China and lack of an economic strategy. 9. The Biden administration, like its predecessors, lacks an economic strategy for the Indo-Pacific region. This major weakness in regional policy is driven by US protectionist trade preferences at home. Proposed initiatives on digital trade and infrastructure cannot compensate for the absence of a comprehensive trade-based economic approach. 10. The Biden administration views China as a predominantly long-term military challenge. Its efforts to minimise spending on US forward posture in the region suggest it may be less committed to a strategy of deterrence by denial to prevent Chinese aggression. Recommendations for the Biden administration To compete for influence in the Indo-Pacific, the Biden administration should: 1. Clearly identify the Indo-Pacific region as its foreign and defence policy priority and marshal resources accordingly. 2. Articulate clear goals for its relationship with China and its strategic position in the Indo-Pacific region. 3. Avoid emphasising ideological competition with China and instead focus on maximising its influence by responding to regional needs. 4. Signal its commitment to a strategy of deterrence by denial to prevent Chinese aggression and bolster its investments in Western Pacific military posture to reinforce its credibility. 5. Empower its allies to assume greater responsibility for their own defence requirements by reducing legislative and political obstacles to allied self-strengthening. 6. Pay special attention to Southeast Asia as a region of strategic importance, given its geography, size and the fluidity of its alignment dynamics. 7. Clearly signal that it is committed to mutually beneficial economic engagement with the Indo-Pacific and adopt trade and investment strategies that reinforce its role as an indispensable resident economic power.

The 30th round of the Australia-United States Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) will soon take place amid immense global disruption and unprecedented domestic pressures accelerated by the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (also known as coronavirus or COVID-19). Our Indo-Pacific neighbourhood should be at the top of the agenda. It is hard to imagine a more urgent time for the Australia-United States alliance to provide strong and collaborative regional leadership — and to bolster the resilience of the Indo-Pacific across all of its dimensions: from health security and economic development to the balance of military power and strategic resilience. It is equally hard to imagine a more difficult environment for our alliance to concentrate its energies on regional policy. With the United States enduring a pandemic-fuelled health crisis, nationwide social unrest, escalating national debt and a general election in November, and with Australia still tentatively emerging from the first wave of the pandemic, both countries have pressing and politically-charged distractions at home. Nonetheless, our shared national interests in fostering a healthy, stable and resilient Indo-Pacific region cannot be postponed and must be wholeheartedly embraced at AUSMIN 2020. Three principles should guide this year’s deliberations. First, helping our Indo-Pacific neighbours to sustainably recover from the pandemic is the most urgent priority and is in all of our interests. With more than 600,000 cases of COVID-19 throughout the region — coupled with a rapidly deteriorating health, economic and developmental outlook that will see regional growth fall to near zero per cent while 24 million people remain in poverty — the scale of the crisis in our region vastly outstrips our current capacity to respond. This places a premium on the need to invest more alliance resources into human security challenges, both at present and preventatively, and to pursue innovative, high-quality solutions to developmental challenges, including through better industry partnerships. As our economic and security interests hinge on the health of stable, resilient and sovereign regional nations, supporting their post-pandemic recovery will assist our own. Second, strengthening the alliance’s contribution to deterring aggression and coercive statecraft in the Indo-Pacific must proceed in spite of the pandemic. In recent years, the strategic landscape has been rapidly deteriorating due to the United States’ declining capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power and China’s increasingly assertive use of coercive statecraft backed by its growing conventional military power. The pandemic is only exacerbating these trends. New economic burdens are limiting the capacity of regional nations to counterbalance Chinese power: putting downward pressure on defence budgets, placing the imperatives of domestic recovery ahead of geopolitical concerns and leaving some more vulnerable to Beijing’s strategic largesse than before. In the United States, the tumultuous health, economic and socio-political consequences of the pandemic are sharpening preferences for self-strengthening at home and will quicken the decline of resources for defence. Beijing, by contrast, is taking advantage of regional distractions to advance its expansive geopolitical agenda from Hong Kong and the Sino-Indian border to Northeast Asia, the South China Sea and the Pacific. This situation calls for the alliance to invest more heavily in supporting its regional partners through collective defence initiatives and to urgently prioritise the Indo-Pacific relative to outdated security concerns in the Middle East. Finally, signalling Australian and American policy preferences for how our respective Indo-Pacific strategies should evolve over the coming years is critical for domestic and regional audiences. This will entail a focus on differences as well as shared interests within the alliance. Although the United States and Australia have many common objectives in strengthening a stable, prosperous and rules-governed regional order, they have quietly diverged in recent years on multilateralism, global institutions, international trade, regional diplomacy and other issues. Differences over China policy are perhaps the most sensitive. Whereas Washington has adopted an increasingly strident public tone in casting China as an ideological threat, Canberra seeks a less politicised approach and has publicly supported engagement alongside a firming of China policy settings. These distinctions do not undermine our alliance solidarity. Indeed, as Australia’s internationalist outlook is more in keeping with regional preferences in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Canberra should lean into it during and after AUSMIN 2020 — using current points of difference with Washington as markers for how Australia would like to work with the United States in the future, and how it will continue to work with the region until then. With this forward-looking agenda in mind, the United States Studies Centre has assembled a list of ten policy recommendations for the upcoming AUSMIN meeting. Drawing on the expertise of our researchers, including from their published and ongoing research projects, these recommendations combine analytical judgements with new policy thinking in an effort to stimulate bilateral discussion around a mix of achievable and moon-shot initiatives. This collection does not purport to be a comprehensive agenda but aims to provide a useful contribution to the policy planning process around bolstering the resilience of our Indo-Pacific region at this critical juncture.

Drawing on Chinese military writings, this report finds that China’s strategic-deterrence concepts are evolving in response to Beijing’s changing assessment of its external security environment and a growing emphasis on protecting its emerging interests in space and cyberspace. China also is rapidly closing what was once a substantial gap between the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic weapons capabilities and its strategic-deterrence concepts.

In Lawfare, author Orde Kittrie's draws on his experiences as a lawfare practitioner, US State Department attorney, and international law scholar in analyzing the theory and practice of the strategic leveraging of law as an increasingly powerful and effective weapon in the current global security landscape. Lawfare incorporates case studies of recent offensive and defensive lawfare by the United States, Iran, China, and by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and includes dozens of examples of how lawfare has thus been waged and defended against. Kittrie notes that since private attorneys can play important and decisive roles in their nations' national security plans through their expertise in areas like financial law, maritime insurance law, cyber law, and telecommunications law, the full scope of lawfare's impact and possibilities are just starting to be understood.

This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of US foreign policy throughout the Indo-Pacific. Home to around 60 percent of the world’s population; most of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies; around half of the world’s states with full nuclear capabilities; and a complicated web of unresolved tensions, disputes, and conflicts, the Indo-Pacific is arguably the most diverse, dynamic, and contested region on Earth. US strategy there has evolved over centuries, with its physical presence going broadly unchallenged since at least the middle of the last century. However, the rapid development and expanding influence of China – alongside the growth of India, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and others – as well as political and economic crises and disruptions within the United States itself, mean that in recent times the US has come to occupy a newly uncertain position and perceive a range of highly unfamiliar challenges. To explore how the US has managed, and continues to manage, its regional history, and how it approaches the modern-day landscape of an Indo-Pacific only recently normalised within international political discourse, the book contains 33 newly commissioned chapters from leading experts in the field. It does so partly with help from the more traditional realms of International Relations theory as well as more critical realms. It also unpacks US policy and strategy as it pertains to regional governments, states, and multilateral institutions, as well as to pressing issues including inter-state security, human rights, trade, artificial intelligence, and cyber strategy. It does so in four parts: History of the US in the Indo-Pacific Theorising US Policy and Presence in the Indo-Pacific The US and Indo-Pacific States and Institutions The US and Indo-Pacific Issues The book is designed to be of interest to students and scholars of the US in the Indo-/Asia Pacific; the international relations of the Indo-/Asia Pacific; and US foreign policy.

This book explains why the idea of the Indo-Pacific is so strategically important and concludes with a strategy designed to help the West engage with Chinese power in the region in such a way as to avoid conflict.

In 2015, Congress tasked the Department of Defense to commission an independent assessment of U.S. military strategy and force posture in the Asia-Pacific, as well as that of U.S. allies and partners, over the next decade. This CSIS study fulfills that congressional requirement. The authors assess U.S. progress to date and recommend initiatives necessary to protect U.S. interests in the Pacific Command area of responsibility through 2025. Four lines of effort are highlighted: (1) Washington needs to continue aligning Asia strategy within the U.S. government and with allies and partners; (2) U.S. leaders should accelerate efforts to strengthen ally and partner capability, capacity, resilience, and interoperability; (3) the United States should sustain and expand U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region; and (4) the United States should accelerate development of innovative capabilities and concepts for U.S. forces.

On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump directed Secretary of Defense James Mattis to initiate a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The President made clear that his first priority is to protect the United States, allies, and partners. He also emphasized both the long-term goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and the requirement that the United States have modern, flexible, and resilient nuclear capabilities that are safe and secure until such a time as nuclear weapons can prudently be eliminated from the world.The United States remains committed to its efforts in support of the ultimate global elimination of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. It has reduced the nuclear stockpile by over 85 percent since the height of the Cold War and deployed no new nuclear capabilities for over two decades. Nevertheless, global threat conditions have worsened markedly since the most recent 2010 NPR, including increasingly explicit nuclear threats from potential adversaries. The United States now faces a more diverse and advanced nuclear-threat environment than ever before, with considerable dynamism in potential adversaries' development and deployment programs for nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Deterring the use of armed force and other forms of coercion is central to the maintenance of order in the Indo-Pacific. Yet from the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, to space, cyberspace, and the rules-based order itself, deterrence is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of major power competition, new grey zone challenges, emerging military technologies, and a rapidly shifting regional balance of power. The United States and Australia are determined to offset these trends by pursuing more integrated strategies for the Indo-Pacific. In recent months, the Trump administration has emphasised long-term strategic competition with China, placing renewed focus on technological dominance, geoeconomic statecraft, nuclear modernisation, and military readiness. In Australia, concerns over Chinese strategic policy, foreign interference, and the durability of American power and leadership have sharpened the focus on collective security and whole-of-government approaches to regional strategy. To advance a robust bilateral policy debate about the key role of deterrence in Indo-Pacific strategy, the United States Studies Centre and Pacific Forum hosted a Track 1.5 US-Australia Indo-Pacific Deterrence Dialogue in Canberra in December 2018. Both institutions thank the Australian Department of Defence and the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their generous support of this initiative. The following summary reflects the authors’ accounts of the dialogue proceedings and does not necessarily reflect their personal views. Nothing in the following pages represents the opinion of the Australian Department of Defence or any other officials or institutions that took part in the dialogue.