This article by Professor Rory Medcalf first appeared in The Australian Financial Review on 25 March 2022.

This is a strange kind of national security election – marked by furious consensus that business as usual will not save Australia from rising international risks.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flounders horrifically on. In Australia’s Indo-Pacific region, China’s neo-colonial bid for dominance intensifies, underscored by extraordinary reports of an attempted deal to place armed forces in the Solomon Islands.

On the eve of the election campaign proper, the government is marshalling serried security announcements.

And both major parties are accentuating the diplomacy the nation will need to navigate this new era of indefinite crisis, where brute power is again centre stage in the international system.

Diplomacy featured prominently in the contending speeches earlier this month by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese.

It is easy (and proper) to bemoan the long relative decline of our diplomatic budget, or the all-too-steady pace of our military modernisation.

But here we should not assume that Australian diplomacy is only just waking up to the challenge of this far more contested era.

It’s not hard to identify the contours of a strategy to our international efforts in recent years: building a ‘web of alignments’, the PM has termed it, in the Indo-Pacific, with a focus on the Quad of Australia, Japan, India and the United States.

Significantly, the Quad now draws bipartisan support in this country, just as it is embedded in the policy communities of the three larger partner nations. It will outlast any political champion.

This rests on a convergence of many factors in the strategic currents of the four participating democracies.

There’s a compelling overlap of interests: none of the four want to see China control the vast Indo-Pacific, a region central to global prosperity, resources, connectivity, population and security.

Moreover, all four countries have serious capabilities to bring to bear. None is a free rider. In military power, technology, human capital, economic weight, soft power and strategic geography, their aggregate is formidable.

The Quad and the other core groups that typify effective international action – such as AUKUS and the Australia-US-Japan trilateral – are bound neither by interests nor capabilities nor shared values nor political will alone. It is the combination that counts.

Critics of the Quad voice alarm about India’s unwillingness to join condemnation of Russia over its Ukraine aggression. They have a point.

As a long-time champion of a greater role for India in the world, I am concerned that India is undermining its own long-term interests through its reliance on Russia for energy and, above all, weapons.

There’s a glaring mismatch between India’s expressed principles of support for the UN Charter, sovereignty and non-coercion, and its serial abstentions from the UN resolutions against Putin’s crimes.
It’s a tightening circle of risk that must vex New Delhi’s security leaders. To deter China, India is reliant on weapons from a Russia that is increasingly reliant on that same China.

No wonder some of India’s most hard-nosed strategic commentators lament this as a failure to live up to the vision of ‘strategic autonomy’.

True independence – in the autarchic sense of providing internally for all national security needs – may be an illusion for most countries, but India will now redouble efforts to diversify its international dependencies: armaments, energy, technology, resources and knowledge.

Australia and other Quad countries are thus part of the answer to helping India break with the Cold War legacy of its bond with a declining and self-destructive Russia.

This week Prime Minister Morrison held a virtual summit dialogue with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and launched major projects to strengthen the Australia-India relationship.

The burning backdrop of Ukraine made this timing less than ideal, even if Morrison at least used the dialogue to emphasise Australia’s position.

But the realities of India reinforce the logic of our ambitious engagement: a civilisational mega-state in Indo-Pacific Asia, on the cusp of overtaking China as the world’s most populous nation, and with about as many people under 25 as the entire population of Europe or Southeast Asia.

There’s proximity in the Indian Ocean, and an economy projected to be the world’s third largest, and opening to ours, however fitfully. A limited free trade agreement is not quite finalised.

Whatever its flaws, and the hard nationalism of recent years, India is a democracy, and thus open to peaceful change. And, unlike authoritarian China, it does not fundamentally challenge our interests, let alone threaten them.

The ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ advanced by Morrison and Modi builds on many years of effort by officials and bipartisan championing, going back to the Howard and Gillard governments.

The new package helps impel the economic relationship closer to the level of the security one, which has advanced dramatically in areas like maritime security and cyber. Australia is investing in new centres to advance critical technology research and understanding India’s complexity as a nation – where our business community needs all the guidance and nuance it can get. A new consulate will open in Bangalore, India’s space and tech city.

No wonder Albanese has likewise identified India as a diplomatic priority.

All security and diplomacy involves interests but principles too; the rules-based order has always been at least as much about power and wealth.

Getting India right will be one of Australia’s biggest opportunities - and tests - in the difficult decades ahead.