During my current visit to Australia, I had a chance to discuss with one of Australia’s leading strategists, current strategic dynamics in the region. Given the priority upon North Korean developments, we focused largely upon this aspect of regional dynamics. After all, it is the most near term game changing challenge. Dr. Ross Babbage is the Chief Executive Officer of the Strategic Forum, a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former senior official in the Australian Department of Defence.

In a strategy report released in December, Ross Babbage, senior fellow at U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, explained: “In effect, Beijing is pressuring regional countries into an arrangement that mirrors the contract struck with its own people: economic benefits in exchange for political compliance, with a big stick lurking in the background threatening retaliation for aberrant behavior. … Significant damage is being done to U.S. and allied credibility. In the absence of major changes in allied policy, much of Southeast Asia will likely shift into Beijing’s orbit.”

Last month it appeared that the Chinese were again on the move in the South China Sea.

The provincial administrator of Beijing’s land claims in the region told Chinese state media that work would soon begin on  an ‘environmental monitoring station’ on Scarborough Shoal, a large reef system  just 140 nautical miles west of Subic Bay, well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

A study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Australia’s Strategic Forum, published late last year, underlined China’s increased expansion and militarization in the South China Sea, especially since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. According to the study, by pushing “through boundaries of international law and norms of international behavior, and [taking] much higher risks than its Western counterparts,” the Asian power is “now close to claiming effective sovereignty over” the strategic waterway and has installed “military facilities on several newly created islands” in the area. Moreover, to “prepare the global space for [its territorial and military] expansionism,” the communist-ruled country, described as “a rising revisionist state” by this joint research, has carried out “an extensive program of psychological warfare.”

Ross Babbage, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, argues the US and its allies (including Australia) need to implement a solid strategy to counter China under the lead of the Trump administration. 

Writing before these statements were made, Ross Babbage of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said the U.S., Japan and Australia must “thwart Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea and deter further Chinese adventurism.”