Mutually assured destruction beyond nukes: Former foreign minister warns

It is the confrontation that keeps many strategists, public policymakers and leaders the world over up at night — a direct and kinetic conflict between the US and its allies and China, whether triggered by mounting tensions over the island democracy of Taiwan or a miscalculation as two superpowers fall for “Thucydides Trap”.

While both sides have taken measures to talk down the possibility of conflict or the potentiality of the world entering a Cold War 2.0, the reality is the possibility of either a considered conflagration or miscalculation means that the possibility for nuclear conflict between the two powers is not out of the realm of possibility.

Where the US and Soviet Union took active steps toward toning down tensions and engaging in dialogue following the calamity that came as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, tensions between Beijing and Washington and the resulting sophistication in the mechanisms of dialogue and de-escalation remain far more underdeveloped.

In place of de-escalation, tensions and competition between the two powers have raised major concerns and theories about the outcome of any potential conflict between the two superpowers as they vie for dominance in the 21st century.

This reality has only been further exacerbated amid growing antagonism and sabre rattling from Beijing seeking to solve its “Taiwan problem”, which has been reinforced by growing speculation from leading US defence leaders like former Commander, US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee: “Taiwan is clearly one of their [Beijing’s] ambitions before then. And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact in the next six years.”

This ominous warning heralds a more concerning impact on the global order should a conflict break out in Taiwan, with ADM Davidson further adding: “I worry that they’re [Beijing] accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order, which they’ve long said that they want to do that by 2050. I’m worried about them moving that target closer.”

In light of these concerning realities, former NSW premier and foreign minister Bob Carr has presented a closer look at the potential fallout of a potential nuclear exchange between the two superpowers, that goes beyond the traditional concept of mutually assured destruction or MAD, the Cold War-era concept of nuclear Armageddon.

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While the spectre of MAD has only become more likely in recent years as growing concerns about Russia’s unilateral launch of nuclear weapons should the Ukrainian invasion efforts collapse into an embarrassing rout, the globally accepted aversion for nuclear exchange seems to have been lowered, meaning the potential for nuclear exchange between the US and China is not something that should be discounted.

Citing retired US Navy Admiral James Stavridis and former US Marine Corps special operations team leader Elliot Ackerman’s novel, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, Carr unpacks the broader reaching impacts of any potential confrontation between the US and China.

A conventional loss will lead to a MAD decision

For Carr, Stavridis and Ackerman, the potential for conflict between the US and China begins with a conventional confrontation between the two nations in the western Pacific, which ultimately leads to a major defeat for the US.

Leveraging complex cyber, electronic warfare capabilities to blind, and then using its large ballistic and anti-ship missile stockpiles, Beijing is able to destroy two US carrier battlegroups operating in the western Pacific, which Carr describes, as “their [Stavridis and Ackerman’s] conceit is that in the first phase of conflict China has used cyber and missile supremacy to sink two US carrier groups. The view that the US could lose a conventional exchange with China is reasonably widely held.”

The loss of two supercarriers and their supporting battlegroups precipitates a collapse in US confidence at home and a disastrous collapse in the trust and belief in US primacy, the bedrock of the global economic, political and strategic order since the end of the Second World War, spelling disaster for US-aligned nations and allies, including Australia as their primary strategic benefactor has been left humbled, by the upstart rising superpower.

Carr then highlights how this loss of prestige and “face” results in a truly MAD decision being made by the US administration, stating: “The blow to US primacy is shattering, the effect on US opinion traumatic. The president (whom Stavridis makes a woman, under pressure to prove her strength) responds by approving the use of a tactical nuclear weapon over a Chinese city with a population of 10 million, heedless of the certainty that China will respond. Beijing does respond, exploding tactical nuclear weapons on Galveston and San Diego.”

In doing so, this limited nuclear exchange highlights the futility of reverting to nuclear weapons when facing down a nuclear-armed power, but going further, Carr highlights the wider impact such an exchange would have as both sides sought to press on bruises and vulnerabilities, stating: “Both sides are vulnerable. Contemplate US strikes on the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, where flood control and irrigation have formed the basis for all Chinese civilisation.

“Tactical nuclear strikes would leave hundreds of millions homeless, poisoned and starving. Chinese missiles lobbed at America’s west coast would destroy the farm bowl of California’s Central Valley, which produces 25 per cent of the nation’s food. All America’s mighty energies would be required to treat survivors of radioactive fallout crowded in tent cities under clouds of poison. The economies of both superpowers would be pancaked,” Carr states, as both superpowers are left with catastrophic wounds.

The fallout is catastrophic

The collapse in global US primacy, coupled with the hobbling of Beijing’s economy and, more broadly drawing on further analysis and research conducted in recent years about growing concerns about the demographic decline in China and mounting societal tensions in the US, it is difficult to see how the world would be in a good position following a scenario similar to that presented by Stavridis and Ackerman and explained by Carr.

Indeed, the only nations to emerge as new centres of gravity in the proposed scenario are India, Russia and Iran, with India emerging as the new democratic global hegemon, which presents its own unique challenges as Carr elaborates, stating: “India asserts its claim to world leadership and insists the relocation of UN headquarters to Delhi, even as it quickly evolves into an authoritarian Hindu dictatorship. Russia, of course, is also set up for triumph in this burnt-out, post-American world community. The other triumvir, quickly assuming full nuclear weapons strength, is Iran, still in 2034 a theocracy run by its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

The fallout doesn’t end there, as we can only begin to fathom that a collapse in US primacy, coupled with a shattering of the world’s largest economy, would present widespread economic and political damage, as the era of globalisation ushered in by the rewriting of the global rules in the aftermath of the Second World War comes crashing to the ground like the mythical tower of Babel.

Australia as an island nation, heavily dependent on the unmolested access to the global commons, particularly in the maritime domain, for our economic prosperity and stability, would undoubtedly be ravaged by such an outcome, even if the conflict remained below the nuclear threshold.

Final thoughts

Such a scenario would also serve to highlight Australia’s overwhelming dependence on other major powers for critical supplies ranging from raw industrial inputs and liquid energy, through to highly specialised military munitions. This reality has increasingly drawn attention from policymakers and strategic planners, yet despite the rhetoric of successive governments, we seem to be going around in circles and reinventing the wheel.

However, with renewed emphasis on modernising and expanding the US defence industrial base, and the Western defence industrial base more broadly, is it time for Australia to take real, measurable steps to embrace the opportunities presented by agreements like AUKUS and to take the initiative to build a viable, competitive, and sustainable defence and advanced manufacturing industrial base?

Meanwhile, the rapid devolution of our strategic environment, coupled with the advent of grey zone warfare and hybrid conflict being levelled against us require a dramatic reimagination of our concept of national security and sovereignty. This shift is perhaps best explained by US academic Charles Maier, who unpacks the concept of national security as: “National security ... is best described as a capacity to control those domestic and foreign conditions that the public opinion of a given community believes necessary to enjoy its own self-determination or autonomy, prosperity and well-being.”

Despite the nation’s virtually unrivalled wealth of natural resources, agricultural and industrial potential, there is a lack of a cohesive national security strategy integrating the development of individual, yet complementary public policy strategies to support a more robust Australian role in the region.

While contemporary Australia has been far removed from the harsh realities of conflict, with many generations never enduring the reality of rationing for food, energy, medical supplies or luxury goods, and even fewer within modern Australia understanding the sociopolitical and economic impact such rationing would have on the now world-leading Australian standard of living.

Enhancing Australia’s capacity to act as an independent power, incorporating great power-style strategic economic, diplomatic and military capability serves as a powerful symbol of Australia’s sovereignty and evolving responsibilities in supporting and enhancing the security and prosperity of Indo-Pacific Asia. This is particularly well explained by Peter Zeihan, who explains: “A deglobalised world doesn’t simply have a different economic geography, it has thousands of different and separate geographies. Economically speaking, the whole was stronger for the inclusion of all its parts. It is where we have gotten our wealth and pace of improvement and speed. Now the parts will be weaker for their separation.”

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