Australia shrugs off unprecedented Chinese circumnavigation

But the 'lucky country' faces some difficult questions

There was nothing unlawful about it, the Australian government has been at pains to point out. Three Chinese vessels spent the best part of a month circumnavigating the Australian mainland, sailing in and out of the country’s exclusive economic zone and initiating unprecedented live fire drills in the Tasman Sea that separates Australia and New Zealand. Nothing unlawful, but certainly unusual.

And while it is the case that Australian warships have participated in multiple freedom of navigation exercises and sanctions enforcement in the Yellow Sea and South China Sea, these are both busy shipping lanes surrounded by multiple countries with often divergent interests. The same cannot be said for the waters around Sydney, Hobart and Perth.

The three-week voyage has also raised concerns around Australia’s defences, something unlikely to be assuaged by the revelation that the Australian Defence Force was first alerted to the live fire drills by a Virgin Australia pilot. Some 49 flights had to be diverted on a single day. Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, said the country had lodged an official protest over the narrow point that “more notice should have been given”.

Great focus has been directed on Europe since the re-election of Donald Trump, and for good reason. There is currently a war of aggression taking place on the continent, started by Russia in 2014 and expanded in February 2022. European leaders have been further jolted into action by US vice president J.D. Vance’s extraordinary speech at the Munich Security Conference and the Oval Office clash between presidents Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

All of a sudden, there is talk of the end of the Nato alliance, Germany’s Christian Democrats want to reform the debt brake to fund defence spending, while France contemplates offering its nuclear deterrent as an umbrella for Europe. The pace of change is both overdue and breakneck. But the response Down Under has been far more reserved.

Of course, the situation in Europe is quite different to that of Australia. The former is a continent of more than 700 million people with a nominal GDP of $28 trillion. The latter’s great strategic advantage is not population size or economic might, but distance. Sydney is situated nearly 4,500 miles from Hainan Island, the headquarters of China’s southern fleet. Yet that very same geographical isolation also poses a potentially existential risk.

Australia has benefitted enormously from the post-war, rules-based order, and in 1951 signed the Security Treaty between Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America (ANZUS). In recent years, the country has pursued a policy of strategic equilibrium. That is, in the words of foreign minister Penny Wong, an order where “countries are not forced to choose but can make their own sovereign choices, including about their alignments and partnerships.”

Such an objective is in recognition of the fact that, like many Indo-Pacific nations, China is Australia’s largest trading partner by far, while the US is its core security partner. To be blunt, can this hold?¹ US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that Trump is "very aware, supportive of AUKUS”, yet when the president himself was asked about it, he replied: “What does that mean?”²

Much hinges on whether the Trump administration will seek to maintain something akin to primacy in Asia, or instead embrace spheres of influence, in which the US ‘gets’ the Americas, China Asia and Russia Europe. In such a world, might is right and smaller nations are left exposed.

Though Europe and Australia’s challenges are different, their anxieties largely stem from the same troubling question: what if America decides to disengage? We have already witnessed in recent weeks a Trump administration not only unwilling to defend allies, but actively prepared to extort them. Not since the fall of Singapore to Imperial Japan in February 1942 has Australia felt quite so isolated.

1. For more on this, I’d recommend the always excellent Australia in the World podcast, hosted by Darren Lim

2. *Imagine* the reaction of the media if Joe Biden had displayed such stupendous ignorance