So, there’s this running joke in Defence that goes ‘this was thing number 14,019 that made me realise we’re going to lose the next war.’

It’s funny, but we might be getting signed up for some catastrophic shit and it’s also maddening.

14,020

I’ve dusted off some guides prepared for colleagues and begun posting them on Substack.

They’re a bit different from my usual focus, but I hope they’re useful.

As always, I welcome feedback and corrections

Regardless which stand you take, you’ll be more persuasive if you understand the rules in question. If you think FONOPs are only about strategic signalling, or supporting one country and deterring another, then you don’t understand them as well as you assume.

The former speak a language that doesn’t easily translate without a lot of explanation. The latter can over-estimate their understanding. They’re dismissive of international law, or simplistic in their advocacy for it.

Maritime disputes thrust international law into conversations about defence and strategy in recent years. But international lawyers and strategic analysts still talk past each other.

I guess I assumed parts of the US government were already using it 😬

Maybe you just wrote most of it?

You’ve outdone yourself.

It’s effective though because it sounds intuitive to someone who doesn’t follow the issues. We’re paying for our community’s general lack of interest in the region around us.

Also, don’t know if it’s just me but it feels weird to refer to the Philippines arbitration as a PCA case/judgement. It was an ad hoc arbitral tribunal. The PCA acted as the registry. Which flippantly means it provided a venue and record keeping. Not the actual legal judgements. Maybe I’m wrong 🤷‍♂️

On a pedantic level, in case anyone cares about Australian defence terminology, ‘joint’ means ‘more than one service’ (e.g. the Army and Navy doing something together). ‘Combined’ means ‘more than one country’ (what the article is referring to). What can I say, I’m indoctrinated.

The broader logic of this piece seems to be that might equals right. Any country can arbitrarily depart from what it agreed with the international community, and then declare that responses appear like military escalation. This sounds like extortion.

🇦🇺 doesn’t have a formal position on who ‘owns’ many (all?) SCS islands. And ADF planes wouldn’t be entering within 12nm of them. So this argument is puzzling unless it’s proposing that all countries everywhere get more airspace than 12nm everywhere in the world.

I only invest my time writing about things that don’t matter

What a nerd

Whoa - that’s big!

I’m worried too; it’s easy to be insular and revert to familiar muscle movements. Australia retreats into itself when confronted or uncertain. Some of our reactions to the pandemic felt like that; same with anti-migration protests. I’m not sure we’re ready to abandon habits or embrace uncertainty.

For so long we at least had a sense of the left and right arc of potential US foreign and defence policy decisions; it made filling in other parts of the puzzle slightly easier. It’s almost as though we’ve got to get better at our jobs now 😬