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It is no secret that the world is changing and many would argue – not for the better. But increasingly, it is becoming apparent that it is now fast becoming the perfect storm.
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With bated breath, audiences across the Western world watched as the Soviet flag was lowered from above the Kremlin for the final time on Christmas night of 1991.
In witnessing this epochal defining moment in history, triumph, optimism, and excitement swept across the former Soviet world and the victorious, US-led Western world.
This heralded an era of unrestricted liberalisation and “globalisation” of the global economy, resulting in a hollowing out of national economic bases, the hubristic belief that liberal democracy had once and for all triumphed over the archaic models of autocratic governance, ultimately culminating in the “End of History” as championed by US academic Francis Fukuyama.
Throughout the 1990s and into the first decades of the new millennium, many former “adversarial” nations across the world embraced the economic, political, and strategic opportunities presented by the era of “American Peace”.
All seemed to be travelling pretty well for this new global order, for the most part.
Peace and prosperity flourished despite periodic crises across Africa and southern Europe requiring an intervention, luring many leaders, academics, and those across the broader policy-making community into the “End of History” theory and the promise of a “peace dividend”.
This period of optimism was shattered on the morning of 11 September 2001 as hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, bringing the Western world into direct conflict with radical Islam once again across the Middle East and Central Asia.
All the while, Mao’s revolutionary China – now led by a burgeoning emperor, Xi Jinping – and Putin’s Russia watched the adventurism, hubris, and at certain points, hubris of the US-led Western world while embracing and learning the lessons of the Western world’s approach to modern warfare, influence operations, economics, and industrialising at breakneck speed.
It wasn’t until nearly three decades later that the mask would truly slip as Putin’s Russia began its expansion in central Asia, beginning with Georgia and South Ossetia before turning its attention to Ukraine, first in 2014, and again in 2022.
Meanwhile, China was rapidly expanding its military capabilities and its presence throughout the region, actively posing an ever-increasing threat to the peace, prosperity, and stability that had characterised the preceding decades.
Flanking these two superpowers is one of the world’s most ancient powers in Iran, which since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 has served as one of the Western world’s most consistent threats, through its active support of insurgent groups across the Middle East and Africa.
Rounding out this line of supervillains is everyone’s favourite north Asian hermit kingdom, North Korea, which has recently stepped up its efforts to intimidate South Korea and Japan with the threat of nuclear annihilation.
In forming this new “Axis”, this combination of nations – bound together through multilateral organisations like the BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and a committed vision of pushing back against the various perceived ills of the US-led Western world – present a significant challenge.
Recognising this, Greg Sheridan, writing for The Australian, detailed the mounting challenges this new axis presents to the US-led world order, which spells trouble for US allies, including Australia.
A new ‘Axis of Evil’
It is easy to get caught up in the hyperbole of a “new axis of evil” as the world around us becomes increasingly contested and openly hostile both at home and abroad.
But in the case of Russia, China, and Iran, the rhetoric does hold true. The events in Ukraine, the ongoing proxy conflict across the Middle East and Horn of Africa, coupled with Beijing’s increasing hostility towards Taiwan are all proof positive of this reality.
Highlighting this, Sheridan explained, “The world stands on the brink of security collapse and perhaps widely extended war. Iran has moved its proxies directly into killing American soldiers in the Middle East. In a season of considered escalation by the mullahs in Tehran, the International Atomic Energy Agency warns that Iran now has sufficient highly enriched uranium that it could produce several nuclear devices in a short period.”
Shifting toward the European front and Russia’s growing web of supporting allies, Sheridan stated, “Meanwhile, Russia is starting to prevail in Ukraine. The Ukrainians, long drip fed sufficient weapons to avoid losing, but never enough to make decisive victory possible, are suffering acute battlefield losses, territorial stagnation and the possibility of being overwhelmed at last by an increasing supply of cheap drones to Russia, not least from Iran and North Korea.”
Adding a further layer of complexity is the increasing power of China and its commitment under Xi Jinping to challenging the United States-led world order.
Sheridan explained the growing recognition in the United States that unlike the Soviet Union, Xi’s China is truly a credible economic, political, ideological and strategic threat to the United States, saying, “In the US, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, testified to Congress that Beijing plans, through cyber attack, to wreak havoc on US domestic infrastructure – water supplies, power generation, oil and gas pipelines, even facilities like hospitals – in the event of hostilities over Taiwan.
“Meanwhile, CIA director William Burns sounded the warning on waning US support for Ukraine: ’One of the surest ways to rekindle Chinese perceptions of American fecklessness and stoke Chinese aggressiveness would be to abandon support for Ukraine. Continued material backing for Ukraine doesn’t come at the expense of Taiwan; it sends an important message of US resolve that helps Taiwan,’ he said,” Sheridan explained further.
If this image of diminished US capability sounds a little familiar, it’s because it has been formally admitted, at least in passing by the Biden administration via Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who stated in the dying days of 2022 and following the chaotic and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, “When it comes to Russia’s war against Ukraine, if we were still in Afghanistan, it would have, I think, made much more complicated the support that we’ve been able to give and that others have been able to give Ukraine to resist and push back against the Russian aggression.”
In doing so, Blinken highlighted the very real limitations faced by the United States in this era of renewed and, indeed, reinvigorated great power competition.
This may come as a surprise to many across the West, particularly in Australia, as societally and culturally, we have been conditioned to believe in the never-ending capacity, willingness, and benevolence of the United States to maintain the global order indefinitely.
For Sheridan, this spells trouble, particularly in light of the increasing capacity of this new “axis of evil”, for which he stated, “The authoritarian powers exercise differing degrees of control and influence over their clients and proxies. Few involve absolute control. China is much more powerful than Russia, which is much more powerful than Iran. All three, though, have been steadily increasing their militaries, especially China, although Iran is poised to become the world’s 10th nuclear weapons state (after the US, UK, France, China, Russia, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel).
“The three anti-Western powers share a fixed hostility, if not hatred, of the US and the West generally, with ultra-nationalism and large dollops of paranoia in their respective ideologies. They have been intensifying their military and geopolitical co-operation,” he explained.
Going further, Sheridan explained the increasing diversity of power exercised by the new axis, saying, “All three authoritarian powers have mastered grey zone, proxy and deniable attacks. When Russia first invaded Crimea a decade ago it disguised its soldiers with non-Russian uniforms. Beijing frequently uses navy ships disguised as coast guard vessels, or even alleged fishing and commercial vessels, to enforce military outcomes in the South China Sea. It violates Japanese and Taiwanese air space. Iran uses its Arab proxies to attack Israel and now Americans in the Middle East. Tehran, Moscow and Beijing calibrate their actions to fall just below that which would trigger a military response from the US directed at them.
Again, concerningly for Australia, which has based the entirety of its defence and national security posture on the US, Sheridan stated, “US deterrence has plainly broken down, whereas both Moscow and Beijing achieve a good deal of deterrence through the threat of nuclear escalation. When Iran finally acquires nuclear weapons it, too, will play that game.”
Final thoughts
There is no doubt that Australia’s position and responsibilities in the Indo-Pacific region will depend on the nation’s ability to sustain itself economically, strategically, and politically in the face of rising regional and global competition.
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 explained: “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.”
Yet despite the real and ever-present threats, Australians seem reluctant at best or indeed, even oblivious at worst that the world is increasingly becoming “multipolar” and our own home, the Indo-Pacific, in particular, is rapidly becoming the most hotly contested region in the world.
As we grapple with the challenges presented by the rapidly evolving global geopolitical order, enhancing Australia’s capacity to act as an independent power, incorporating great power-style strategic economic, diplomatic, and military capability serve as a powerful symbol of Australia’s sovereignty and evolving responsibilities and commitment to supporting and enhancing the security and prosperity of Indo-Pacific Asia.
Equally embracing this approach presents the Australian people with exciting opportunities to embrace and take advantage of collectively, while serving to reinforce the post-Second World War order upon which our wealth and stability are built, because without it, many Australians will blindly simply go with the flow and watch as we fade into the pages of history.
Our economic resilience, capacity, and competitiveness will prove equally as critical to success in the new world power paradigm as that of the United States, the United Kingdom, or Europe, and we need to begin to recognise the opportunities presented before us.
Expanding and enhancing the opportunities available to Australians while building critical economic resilience, and as a result, deterrence to economic coercion, should be the core focus of the government because only when our economy is strong can we ensure that we can deter aggression towards the nation or our interests.
Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below, or get in touch at
