The Echidna Strategy
Australia's Search for Power and Peace
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In the wake of a shift in the global power balance, how can Australia best protect itself?
The Echidna Strategy overturns the conventional wisdom about Australia's security. Australia will need to defend itself without American help, but this doesn't need to cost more.
The truth, which no Australian political leader is willing to confront, is that America's security is not threatened by China's rise. Once we accept that conclusion, the entire edifice on which our security has been built crumbles, and we need to start afresh.
Yet, despite the rapid growth of China's military, defending Australia need not be particularly difficult. Our leaders insist on making it expensive and hard. Even worse, in the name of the US alliance, they expose our country to more danger.
The Echidna Strategy sheds new light on the contest for leadership in Asia and the strategy Australia needs to thrive. This includes a radically different approach to defence. Above all, it means a bolder Australian foreign policy, with three goals: leadership in the Pacific; a much stronger relationship with Indonesia; and a regional order centred on a gathering of its great powers.
'Essential reading for anyone interested in our nation's security in an uncertain world where the enduring supremacy of the United States cannot be assumed or assured.' ––Malcolm Turnbull
'Here is a voice, bold in its conclusions and forensic in its logic, which defies the echo chamber of current strategic policy.' ––Peter Varghese
Customer Reviews
Who needs subs when you’ve got monotremes?
The author is Australian and currently director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute*, where he has worked for >15 years. Prior to that, he was a senior analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Australia’s peak intelligence agency.
The book is a contrarian take on the defence of Australia. We don’t need AUKUS and a gaggle of nuclear powered submarines because:
1. America has big oceans on either side, and friendly nations to the north and south. Its national security is not threatened by what happens in East Asia. Trump was the first President to say so, but he won’t be the last. When push comes to shove, will they have our backs?
2. If we weren’t tied to the US, we’re immaterial to China’s foreign policy and too far away to consider invading in the foreseeable future. Why would they when they can get whatever they want from us on the open market at a fraction of the cost of military invasion.
According to Mr R, we’d be better served by a version of Taiwan’s so called porcupine strategy. When faced by a larger predator, curl up and make yourself prickly to invade: “resist the enemy on the opposite shore, attack it at sea, destroy it in the littoral area, and annihilate it on the beachhead”.
We could do this by maintaining close quarter defences, including missiles, pushing our leadership in the Pacific, and developing much closer ties with Indonesia, which will be the world’s 4th largest economy by mid-century. We don’t have strong cultural or military links with them, and relations have been strained at various times, but we share an interest in limiting Chinese infiltration of the waters of south east Asia.
While the author makes his points logically, concisely and coherently, he bases his arguments on thought experiments and readings of the tea leaves. Incomplete data is the bane of defence analysts’ existence, I suppose. (Weapons of mass destruction, anyone?) Mr Roggeveen also remains conspicuously silent on climate change, the greatest security threat we face currently according the director of ASIO.
*The Lowy Institute in an independent foreign policy think tank in Sydney.