A major submarine deal underscores how the new theatre for great-power competition is maritime
Trade between the nations continued from then on, with Australia providing a range of raw materials, but never at a particularly impressive rate. Then China’s market reforms took off in the 1990s, and with them an unprecedented appetite for coal and ores of all sorts. By the 2010s China was Australia’s biggest trading partner, a hungry buyer not just of bulk materials but of high-end seafood and beefy shiraz.
As an arms deal it is big; at least eight nuclear submarines suggests a contract value in the tens of billions of dollars. As a strategic shift it is bigger. The pact is America’s most dramatic and determined move yet to counter what it and others in the Indo-Pacific region see as a growing threat from China. As Stephen Walt of Harvard University writes, “it is a move designed to discourage or thwart any future Chinese bid for regional hegemony.
To go from a diesel-electric fleet to a nuclear fleet is thus a change of strategy, not just of propulsion. It provides a way to project power from the shipping lanes which feed the all-important Malacca Strait to the waters off Taiwan. Add on the capacity to launch much longer-range missiles—a submarine could deliver missiles to China’s mainland while sitting to the east of the Philippines—and the country has a greatly expanded offensive capacity.
China’s intimidation of other countries which claim parts of the sea, including Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, has largely been carried out through “grey zone” activities by the coastguard, survey vessels and fleets of Chinese fishing vessels forming “maritime militias”. These activities can be highly effective.
Vietnam and Malaysia have now followed the Philippines in lodging objections to China’s territorial claims with the. Mr Hayton contends that, overall, China’s insular terraforming and flagrant bullying have left it with less influence than it had to begin with.’s members and reshape the role some countries in the group play in regional security.
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