Linda Reynolds lives in a time warp, desperate to accelerate AUKUS to face an imaginary war

Linda Reynolds’ recent op-ed in The Australian paints a picture of a world on fire, with Australia being engulfed on all sides, while China’s “grand strategy” involves preparing to “turn Australia dark and destroy our military and intelligence capabilities”. And as if that isn’t alarming enough, she warns, with a rhetorical flourish, “Australians may be finished with war. But war is not finished with us.”

At a glance, it seems the former Morrison-era federal defence minister lives in some kind of time warp, or did The Australian accidentally republish something from six years ago? Why are they sounding The Sydney Morning Herald’s “Red Alert” siren from 2023, when the confident prediction of war by that paper’s five national security “experts” spectacularly failed to materialise and became the object of public derision?

Reynolds’ op-ed reproduces a speech she gave in Perth on Tuesday to the biannual Indian Ocean Defence & Strategy Conference, hosted by the government of Western Australia and AMDA Foundation Limited, in partnership with the Perth USAsia Centre. Echoing the China threat narrative, it is a familiar catalogue aiming to promote strategic anxiety. China is “strategically patient, multi-decade and explicit”; it is linked to Russia, Iran and North Korea in an “integrated authoritarian-industrial complex”; infrastructure projects from Djibouti to Hambantota are folded into a narrative of “encirclement across all four of our nation’s flanks”.

The result is a world in which things are getting worse, time is running out, and Australia is first in the firing line.

Impassioned as she appears to be, her speech invites a couple of awkward questions — the kind that would not be raised in the room in which this speech was delivered. For instance, Reynolds is clearly impatient with the lack of progress with AUKUS, which “is significantly behind investment and infrastructure schedules”. 

But hang on: the China threat may be the strategic justification for AUKUS in her argument, but if her central concern about AUKUS is the lack of urgency and speed, whose fault is that? Surely, the most important clock is not in Beijing; it’s what’s happening — or not happening — in American and British shipyards. 

But Reynolds is not complaining to or about the US or UK administrations, although she could be hoping to send a distress signal to the White House and Number 10. Instead, she is criticising the Labor government for playing nice with China: 

“The current government is highly reticent to use any of the harder diplomatic shaping tools that the rules-based order gives us.”

But how would using harder diplomatic tools against China help speed up AUKUS progress, or indeed stop China from wanting to invade Australia? Reynolds didn’t tell us. Besides, if anyone deserves her “appeasement” label, it is President Trump, who has just signed an agreement with Xi Jinping promising to build “a constructive relationship of strategic stability”. AUKUS has bipartisan support, and Labor is just as gung-ho as the opposition about it, despite its efforts to avoid offending China. Reynolds should give Labor credit where it’s due.

Another hole in Reynolds’ logic sits in the familiar phrase: Australia is “sleepwalking into war”. Granted, it is a powerful metaphor that has done a lot of heavy lifting in defence policy rhetoric. But the only problem is that it depends on a fairly specific assumption — namely, that Australia is drifting passively towards conflict, rather than making a series of deliberate, openly debated strategic choices.

As Hugh White, in his “Sleepwalk to War”, argues, the key strategic choice Australia needs to make is not whether China is a threat, but whether Australia chooses deep alignment with US military strategy in the Western Pacific. If it does, then the possibility of major-power conflict is not something Australia might accidentally stumble into. It becomes a foreseeable risk embedded in the decision itself.

But Australia has now clearly chosen to align itself with the US, so, if it is indeed “sleepwalking into war”, it is doing so with eyes wide open, through explicit, bipartisan alignment with the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy, formal participation in AUKUS, and sustained investment in force posture integration. That may be naïve and unwise, but it is certainly not unconscious.

Still, these logical holes don’t detract from the objective of projecting urgency by piling pressure upon pressure: China’s strategy, Russia’s war, Iran’s missile reach, North Korea’s arms transfers, cyber intrusions, trade coercion, undersea cables, and rare earth dependencies. Her desired outcome is not to mount a logically compelling argument. If it were, it would deserve a serious point-by-point rebuttal. Rather, her real aim seems to be to renew a sense of urgency and fear about China, just in case Labor is beginning to have second thoughts about AUKUS, or is noticing its fatal flaws.

Her repetition of the tired message — that China is an existential threat and is on its way to get us — is thus not a bug, but a feature: the China threat narrative needs to be diligently refreshed to retain potency. And this narrative repair is necessary to maintain a defence policy ecosystem that already assumes the basic direction of travel is correct, but needs to move faster by spending more.

This brings us back to the underlying agenda behind her speech. On the surface, it seems Reynolds is preaching to the converted, given its context: the Perth conference was an “industry-only trade event”, restricted to those involved in “aerospace, aviation or Defence and related government or industry sectors”. 

Mark Beeson, an international relations boffin, lives in Perth, but clearly does not feel at home at such forums. In response to Reynolds’ speech, he told Crikey:

“Australia cannot ‘deter’ China, unless it does so as a minor part/legitimating fig leaf for an American led effort. That’s our usual position, but it’s led us into a number of conflicts that had no strategic relevance for us, and which are now largely seen as disastrous mistakes — much like Iran at the moment. It’s also a colossal waste of money that can make no difference to China’s strategic calculations.”

But one does not need to take a tutorial from a philosopher of language to see that Reynolds’ speech is best read not as a speech aiming to persuade critics such as Beeson, but as a speech act whose function is more performative and reiterative than substantive. 

The Australian, as the nation’s most ardent advocate for strategic alignment with the US in foreign and defence, is the natural home for Reynolds’ speech. In fact, its publication there offers a textbook example of how the academic-government-industrial-military-media complex operates. AUKUS is not just a defence pact; it is a discursive-material structure where language, public perceptions, defence budgets and industrial capacity mutually reinforce each other. 

But the biggest hole in Reynolds’ version of strategic reality is that the real danger is never that the diagnosis is wrong. It is that the hoped-for solution to the diagnosis — which is this deterrent called AUKUS — might arrive too late to ward off the beast on our doorstep, or may never arrive at all. And that’s on the tenuous assumption that the beast is not just a creation of our own self-induced night terrors, whether we’re sleepwalking or not.