Kinetic responses are a symptom of policy failures, not an answer to them.
Australia ultimately refused America’s request for a support vessel for its naval moves into the Red Sea. The decision took a week.
The Australian government denies it’s due to a reality of force limitations but is, instead, a reflection of strategic / geographic priorities. This argument ultimately begs the question: does Australia have force capacity in its own region? That’s the question posed here by James Curran.
Unfortunately, the discussion has been narrowcast as one of either supporting some vague game plan to protect open seaways (I will come back to this below) or whether Australia’s navy has sufficient capability. I will not go into this second issue in this short essay.
The question of a naval response needs to be placed into a wider context.
(1) To start with, what Australian interest has ever been served by having forces deployed in the Middle East?
As former defence minister Kim Beazley acknowledges in Curran’s article, this deployment has actually been at the expense of defending Australia. Beazley says:
“In some ways we have hidden behind the good performance of our service personnel and the comparative cheapness of keeping them in the field while the ball has been dropped on defending us”.
Setting aside the obligatory praise of the defence forces, the key point to note is the clear trade-off that Beasley articulated, namely that the defence of Australia has been compromised by the commitment of forces to the Middle East. If the defence of Australia is the principal priority, then it’s clear that resourcing effort in the Middle East should be subordinate to the defence force’s principal objective.
(2) The question of the mission itself.
The argument is that it is imperative to deploy naval forces to protect commercial traffic from Houthi missiles. This line of argument has been made by Geoff Raby, in The Financial Review, when he mobilises the transaction costs arguments of Douglass North to make the point that deploying force is needed to keep transaction costs of maritime traffic low.
As forceful as this argument is, its limitations are evident when we consider:
(A) The actual impact of the deployment.
So far, the mission has hardly been a wholesale success. Many freight lines have already diverted their ships. An Australian deployment would have made zero difference to the risk calculus of the freighters and their insurers.
Put plainly, the mission’s success or otherwise would not have been impacted by an Australian presence. Rather, the mission needs to be considered in broader terms. As things stand, the mission is a bit of a mess, as Mack Williams ably demonstrates.
(B) What the forces will actually do if they engage in a gunfight with the Houthis.
Aside from intercepting Houthi missiles and drones, what can the mission actually accomplish in the longer term? Can it fully mitigate the Houthi attacks? Probably not.
In fact, by firing on Houthi installations in Yemen proper, the mission would more likely result in an escalation rather than the reverse. An escalation would prolong the disruption to trade traffic in the Red Sea, resulting in even greater costs. North’s argument was about dealing with 19th century pirates; the Houthis are an entirely different proposition.
The Houthis are well resourced, have proven capability and are more than likely beneficiaries of support from Iran. If that’s the case, we are not dealing with pirates but with a state with proven depth and capability.
In other words, given the specifics of the situation, unless the Houthis risk could be eradicated – and done so quickly, which is improbable – the transactions costs equation could actually be made worse as a result of the intervention, not better.
Worse still, an escalation into a wider regional conflict would raise the costs even further. And that’s not to even mention the billowing humanitarian considerations of more warfare and destruction. Let’s not forget that the direct war deaths in post 2001 US interventions in Iraq, Syria and Yemen alone amount to an estimated 694,000 people. Indirect deaths and displaced populations from these wars is even greater (source: Costs of War Project, Brown University).
(C) What’s the mission design and scope?
Put plainly, there isn’t one. The aims are vague – hence the operational problems as noted above. The U.S. initiated and led mission is a classic example of “kinetic diplomacy” first, as well-described by Duffy Toff and Kushi in Dying by the Sword. It’s another case of trigger happy premature militarisation. This leaves little scope for alternative remedies to the underlying problems.
Again, refer to Mack Williams’ skilful dissection of the mission design and inadequacies for details.
(D) The US mission is an extension of its approach to the Gaza crisis, in which it has dug a deep hole for itself.
Within days of 7 October, Biden was in Israel embracing Netanyahu. Netanyahu was given a blank cheque behind the rhetoric of “self defence”. The U.S. continues to provide arms to Israel to prosecute a campaign that has become increasingly clear to be a genocide. The Biden administration in fact invoked emergency provisions to bypass Congress to authorise sales of weapons to Israel.
The U.S. was outmanoeuvred at the UN and was forced ultimately to exercise its veto power to obviate a vote at the UNSC calling for a ceasefire.
(Australia’s immediate reaction was also acquiescence to the Israel lobby, with Foreign Minister Wong saying she couldn’t say whether genocide was taking place in Gaza because it was “too far away to tell”. Australia’s position has progressively modified under growing domestic and international pressure.)
Israel’s supposed mission – to destroy Hamas – has so far failed. Some 20,000 people, almost all innocent civilians, have been killed by the Israeli army. Indiscriminate bombing of Gaza has been aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence. The much vaunted prowess of the Israeli military has been exposed. It’s been 3 months in what was meant to be a cakewalk.
Rather than a rapid fire success story of destroying a terrorist organisation, what we have is actually a continuation of U.S. Middle East policy failure. The move to send in naval ships to supposedly protect commercial traffic in the Red Sea is symptomatic of this failure, not a means to resolving it.
(3) Sustainable settlement.
Regional stability is the precondition for a sustainable reduction in transaction costs for Suez Canal shipping. Non-kinetic solutions are more likely to have a chance of breaking the cycle of violence and instability than are kinetic moves.
Australia shouldn’t be sending ships or personnel. It should be telling the Americans, genocide is not on; and it’s time for non-kinetic diplomacy.
China successfully facilitated a detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran early in 2023. This was achieved without recourse to “kinetic diplomacy”.
There’s a lesson in that.
Warwick Powell
Warwick Powell is Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of China, Trust and Digital Supply Chains. Dynamics of a Zero Trust World (Routledge 2023), and numerous peer review articles on global supply chain digitalisation. He is a frequent media contributor on issues of international geopolitical economy, digitalisation and technology, with outlets such as TI Observer (a monthly publication of Taihe Institute), Aljazeera, CGTN, Guancha.cn, South China Morning Post, China Daily and Global Times.