Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the actions and developments shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 21 August 2026 – 3 September 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Scheduling conflict

Word from US Forces Japan has it that the combined US-Japan-South Korea multi-domain exercise Freedom Edge 26 will proceed as planned in early September. Under usual circumstances that wouldn’t be news, but we’re in unusual times. The major US-South Korea exercise Ulchi Freedom Shield was cut in half this year – it ended on 21 August, six days ahead of schedule – following a directive penned in the inimitable hand of President Donald Trump. The same day, rumour hit the Korean press that the biennial combined Ssang Yong exercise (it’s an amphibious warfare thing) would be cancelled entirely. The defence ministry in Seoul confirmed the cancellation in a press briefing on 24 August; unconfirmed reports suggest they’ll run a national amphibious exercise instead. Turns out the United States concluded back in June that a prolonged commitment to the Iran conflict left them unable to spare the forces for Ssang Yong.

Those forces would have been considerable. Training to land on a beach held by people who’d really prefer you wouldn’t – the Korean People’s Army, for example – is quite the enterprise. Ssang Yong 2024 had a cast of more than 13,000, featuring two US amphibious assault ships, a division-sized landing force and a brief cameo from the British Royal Marines. It’s not on the order of a major combined-arms warfighting exercise like Ulchi Freedom Shield normally is, but it’s up there, and it demands a suite of rather specialised US capabilities. Those have been busy. The Okinawa-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the associated USS Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group – the likely candidates to have anchored Washington’s contribution to Ssang Yong 2026 – were unexpectedly sent to the Middle East back in March and didn’t return until the end of July. Details are scant, but it looks like they saw a lot of action over there. Those forces will need time to get back up to fighting strength, and you can easily imagine a Seventh Fleet planner reasoning that a major landing exercise in early September just doesn’t give enough time.

Iran absorbing US assets and attention otherwise earmarked for the Indo-Pacific has been a familiar tale in recent months, but it’s not the whole story. The great Persian Gulf kerfuffle (a technical term) is logistically burdensome, but it certainly hasn’t kept the US from sustaining a high tempo of joint and combined exercises in the Western Pacific. Some, such as this year’s Rim of the Pacific or Balikatan exercises, have been unprecedented in scope. It isn’t hard to find commentary offering a political explanation for at least the de-scoping of Ulchi Freedom Shield: there’s clear US intent to extend an olive branch to Pyongyang (testing ten short-range ballistic missiles at once on 20 August may suggest what Kim thinks of that), and Seoul’s persistent unwillingness to wave the Taeguk flag at the Strait of Hormuz still has the White House miffed. But under these conditions, the exercises that aren’t cancelled are just as revealing.

Freedom Edge is smaller than Ssang Yong or Ulchi Freedom Shield, but with a broad remit: the US, Japan and South Korea practice everything from defeating incoming ballistic missiles to anti-surface warfare on the high seas. It’s one of the more significant legacies of the relatively Japan-friendly era in Korean foreign policy under former president Yoon Suk-yeol. Where major US–South Korea bilateral exercises tend to focus on traditional Korean War-style contingencies – Ssang Yong, for example, is a pipe, sunglasses and one division short of an Incheon landing – Freedom Edge doesn’t. It builds interoperability across a range of tasks, many of them equally if not more relevant to a hypothetical US-led coalition fighting a regional war against China. US Pacific Command’s activities this year don’t suggest any lack of enthusiasm (or resources) for exercises of that kind.

News from abroad

• NATO has technical standards for military equipment, procedures, information sharing, you name it. Some are public, others are not. This is useful to know if you want to sell military hardware to them. The South Korean defence ministry press briefing on 24 August also announced that the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (Australians should here envision the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group crossed with the Illuminati) had streamlined access to these standards for Korean defence manufacturers. Previously this was all done ad hoc, on a case-by-case basis; as of last week, DAPA has a defined process Korean firms can use to request access to non-public NATO standards. Sounds very dull and bureaucratic, but it’s the stuff genuine defence-industrial cooperation is made of.

• Japanese guided missile destroyer JS Chokai returned to its home port of Sasebo on 30 August. It’s been a year in San Diego getting fitted out to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles, completing a live-fire test back in July. This is the biggest step forward Japan’s taken yet in its plan to build out long-range precision strike capabilities. Eventually, Japan’s other seven Aegis destroyers will get the same treatment.

• Defence budgets are tricky at the best of times – ask us how we know – and Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te hasn’t been having a good one. His latest special budget request (about A$10 billion for uncrewed systems) has finally been passed by the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan, but as a series of annual appropriations rather than the upfront lump sum that Lai wanted. It’ll leave the government with far less discretionary authority to accelerate procurement. This is good if you like constitutional process but bad if you like spending a lot of money on drones very quickly. ASPI’s State of the Strait has the details.

Southeast Asia

Build it and they will come

On 28 August, Vietnam’s foreign ministry issued a protest against new Chinese construction on Yagong Island in the Paracels. Known as Ba Ba Island in Hanoi – which claims it along with the rest of the Paracels – it’s your classic 200-metre sandbar in the South China Sea, soon to be as long and wide as the Chinese navy’s dredgers deem appropriate. Satellite imagery captured in August indicates installations that could be the beginnings of an early-warning radar facility.

In context, you see the bigger picture. About 16 km away, Beijing appears to have just completed the first stage of land reclamation at Antelope Reef. The scale of works there – almost six square km – makes it the largest land reclamation project in the South China Sea in recent years and puts it at about the same size as China’s established naval and air base at Mischief Reef in the Spratlys, far to the south. Antelope had deep-water access already. What it has now is room enough for a 3,000-metre runway, and there are some signs that China’s already started building one. A radar facility at Yagong would be a logical complement to what’s shaping up as the biggest expansion of China’s military footprint in the South China Sea in a decade.

Playing the field

Indonesia’s ‘free and active’ foreign policy is as fascinating to watch as it must be hair-raising to manage, and you’d be hard put to find a better showcase than the fortnight just gone. On 21 August, Indonesia’s foreign and defence ministers met their Chinese counterparts in Jakarta’s second-ever meeting of this kind with Beijing. They agreed to expand military training and exchanges and discussed plans for defence technology transfers and the joint development of munitions factories in Indonesia. Next up on 26 August was Indonesia’s foreign and defence ministers meeting with Australia, the first since the two countries signed a landmark security treaty earlier this year. There, amid many reaffirmations, the order of the day was deepening interoperability and cooperation in the maritime domain, including Australia’s provision of drones and training to Indonesia’s coast guard.

Their presence in Melbourne for that meeting gave Indonesia’s and Australia’s defence ministers the opportunity for a surprise trilateral meeting with Japan’s, though Shinjiro Koizumi had to join online. This built on rapidly deepening Japan–Indonesia defence ties and an expanding role for Japan in providing security assistance in Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s foreign minister then continued to Auckland, where broader talks with his New Zealand counterpart on 28 August included calls to finalise a framework for military-to-military talks and an agreement on defence cooperation, as well as continued support for law enforcement capacity building programs. The same day, Russian officials confirmed that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would be the principal foreign guest at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok this month – the only foreign head of state, in fact, with a potential meeting with Vladimir Putin on the agenda. Rounding off all this was the opening of exercise Super Garuda Shield on 31 August. The exercise is the crown jewel of US–Indonesia military cooperation, involving some 4,700 personnel from 13 countries.

The whole art of this sort of thing isn’t in making deals with everyone, but in knowing what you want out of each and keeping every other issue in its own box. Russia’s got Hormuz-proof crude oil, and Jakarta wants it, despite the threat of EU sanctions. The US and its allies have the nous and the kit for the multi-domain archipelagic warfare training Indonesia’s military finds useful. China, meanwhile, has markets, capital and industrial capacity (defence industry too, needless to say) of which Indonesia has every reason to want a piece.

News from the neighbourhood

• Australia, the Philippines and the US conducted another multilateral maritime cooperative activity in the Philippine exclusive economic zone from 19 to 25 August, involving ships and maritime patrol aircraft from all three countries. The unusually long seven-day activity expanded on previous iterations with more complex training, while Australia deployed replenishment ship HMAS Supply rather than the surface combatants that contributed to previous activities.

• Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore reaffirmed their commitment to keeping the Malacca and Singapore Straits free, open and safe at the 17th Co-operation Forum on 25 August, stressing the importance of freedom of navigation and transit passage under international law. The statement follows a short-lived suggestion from Indonesia’s finance minister earlier this year, inspired by Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz, that the three countries charge ships for passage through the Malacca Strait.

• Malaysia sent mixed signals on the use of force in the region. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim declared that Taiwan was ‘part of China, period’ and appeared to justify Beijing’s potential use of force to prevent secession. Days later, Defence Minister Khaled Nordin warned that growing military activity around Borneo – including the expanding US–Philippine presence north of Sabah – was increasing the risk of miscalculation. At the same time, he stressed that Malaysia viewed neither Washington nor Beijing as a threat.

Oceania

There and back again

The annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting got underway in Palau this week, with more than a few peculiarities. Start with the special guest at the formal opening ceremony on 31 August: Taiwan’s foreign minister, Lin Chia-lung. That doesn’t normally happen – not the minister part (Taipei usually sends a deputy minister) and not the high-visibility appearance alongside other dignitaries.

Taiwan’s an irregular guest at the PIF, not because it rarely shows up (its delegations have been a fixture since 1993) but because it’s considered a ‘development partner’ – a category consisting solely of Taiwan, carefully distinct from the PIF’s ‘dialogue partners’, which happen to include the People’s Republic of China. It’s a classic face-saving arrangement that allows whoever’s hosting to avoid the awkwardness of having two Chinas at one table, and as all but three PIF member states presently maintain official diplomatic relations with Beijing in preference to Taipei, it usually means that Taiwan’s delegation keeps a low profile. But Palau is one of the three exceptions. The last time the PIF leaders met in a country that recognised Taiwan was in 2019 in Tuvalu – not incidentally the last time Taiwan was represented by its foreign minister.

Naturally, Beijing isn’t terribly pleased with this. Aside from the usual grumbling about separatism, China’s special envoy to the Pacific Islands, Qian Bo, warned of unspecified ‘consequences’ for Palau as a result of Taiwan’s expanded engagement. The Chinese foreign ministry’s decision a few days earlier to advise travellers to exercise caution in Palau hints at one lever they could pull: while down from its pre-pandemic peak, Chinese tourism is still a significant contributor to Palau’s economy. In remarks to the press on 30 August, Palau’s president – soon to be PIF chair – Surangel Whipps Jr frankly took the view that China was trying to coerce his country over its recognition of Taiwan.

The broader story here is that the PIF’s ability to compartmentalise great-power competition is increasingly footnoted. Last year’s leaders meeting in Solomon Islands made a point of excluding all external partners, which lowered the diplomatic temperature but isn’t ideal for the summit’s diplomatic objectives. This year, Palau called everyone back in, and an air of intrigue hangs very densely over proceedings. Several PIF leaders are conspicuously absent. Samoa, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji have sent their apologies as well as substitutes in place of their heads of government. That isn’t altogether out of the ordinary, but the scale of absenteeism this year is unusual. Kiribati, whose parliament last week voted in favour of enshrining recognition of the PRC over Taiwan in its constitution, sent David Teaabo, head of the country’s foreign service and a former ambassador to China. New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters publicly entertained suspicions that foreign interference had a hand in that, without naming any particular culprit. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale, meanwhile, has the best excuse of all: barely off the tarmac in Koror, Wale had to leave in a snap to face a no-confidence motion from his own home affairs minister, Manasseh Maelanga. Maelanga and two other members of Wale’s cabinet resigned shortly after, and the motion will face a vote next week.

Empty chairs where heads of government should be don’t strictly prevent the leaders meeting from getting things done, but they do diminish the authority in the room. At a time when the PIF understandably wants to demonstrate that its member states, not external powers, set the agenda in the region, several of its key decision-makers are not there to set it.

News from the family

• Papua New Guinea’s long-awaited parliamentary vote on whether to ratify the result of Bougainville’s 2019 independence referendum may still be months away, as PNG’s parliament adjourned debate on the issue late last week. Prime Minister James Marape said that the date of the vote would not be determined until October, after further consultations between the governments of PNG and Bougainville.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the actions and developments shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 7 August 2026 - 20 August 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

I can see your house from here

On 13 August, Vladimir Putin visited the Southern Kuril island of Iturup – a picturesque, windswept, Russia-held disputed territory about 100 or so kilometres off Japan’s northeastern tip. This was Putin’s first visit, the first by any senior Russian official since the war on Ukraine began, but not the first of its kind. Since 2010, Russian leaders have shown up in the Southern Kurils every couple of years to poke Japan in the eye.

We’ll spare you the hundred-page legal argument. Call it a difference of opinion. Iturup, Kunashir and a few smaller nearby islands have been claimed and controlled by Moscow since the end of World War II. Tokyo disputes that claim. Since February 2022, both sides have dug in their heels. Russia has withdrawn from existing dialogues over the dispute and terminated visiting arrangements for former Japanese residents, while Japan has officially designated the Southern Kurils as ‘illegally occupied territories’. Putin’s visit unsurprisingly drew a sharp rebuke from Tokyo: Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi called in Russia’s ambassador for a frank exchange of views, while Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called it ‘absolutely unacceptable’.

Behind this war of words – as with many land disputes, really – there’s a lot of woundable national pride, but that’s not all. The quality of local caviar cannot entirely explain Moscow’s late efforts to consolidate its footprint on the Kuril arc, chiefly through economic development. Putin’s prior movements show you the big picture: Russia’s navy was out on a major exercise across the Sea of Japan, Sea of Okhotsk and northwestern Pacific from 4 to 12 August, and Putin was present to observe the wrap-up.

Sixty surface ships, submarines and support vessels, 30 aircraft and uncrewed systems and 13,000 personnel – roughly half the Pacific Fleet – made that exercise a substantial undertaking. It appears to have been Russia’s largest maritime activity so far this year and closely resembled exercises conducted in June of 2024 and 2025: a theatre-level defence of the Kuril arc against a simulated enemy task group.

The rationale isn’t too mysterious. The Pacific Fleet has shrunk considerably since the late Cold War when it was the largest component of the Soviet fleet. Today, it accounts for barely a quarter of the much-diminished Russian navy. Yet its contribution to Russia’s nuclear posture has not declined to the same extent. The Pacific is increasingly the destination of choice for Russia’s modernised nuclear-armed ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs): the five Borei-class SSBNs stationed at Vilyuchinsk on the Kamchatka peninsula are 40 percent of the SSBN fleet, and its newest 40 percent. In the event of a major war with the United States and its allies, protecting those SSBNs will be among the Pacific Fleet’s high-priority missions.

It’s not an enviable one. For a combination of historical and geographical reasons, the SSBN base at Vilyuchinsk is on the less convenient side of Kamchatka: it faces the (dangerous, US Navy-infested) Pacific, not the (warm, welcoming) Sea of Okhotsk. That was manageable when the Soviet Union was willing to devote enormous resources to the Pacific Fleet, but budget cuts have hit hard. Getting those very expensive and strategically valuable submarines to a safer place in a tense moment now means not only establishing a defensive perimeter along the Kuril Islands and getting the SSBNs out of base and through it in a timely and stealthy manner; it also means doing it on the cheap. Meanwhile, the Japanese military – which alone outmasses the Pacific Fleet’s conventional component – and the US Navy together hold considerable advantages in anti-submarine warfare in both quality and quantity. And in a conflict, they’d very much like to use them to stop you.

News from abroad

• The major annual US-Korean civil-military exercise Ulchi Freedom Shield began on 17 August under something of a cloud. Mere hours before kickoff, US President Donald Trump issued a directive to reduce the exercise’s scope on the basis that it’s not only ‘costly’ but also sends a signal ‘that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.’ That means North Korea, believe it or not. It’s not yet clear what de-scoping Ulchi Freedom Shield will mean in practice, but one can only imagine what choice words were had in Seoul when this message came down the pipe. Set against the president’s complaints about South Korea not chipping in for the Iran war, the more charitable interpretation is that the decision is intended as an olive branch to Pyongyang. Compare Lee Jae-myung’s recent proposal to restart talks on an inter-Korean peace treaty. The White House claims that Kim Jong Un has responded positively; at present, there’s no public confirmation of that.

• On 12 August, the Indonesian frigate KRI I Gusti Ngurah Rai conducted a passage exercise with the Chinese frigate Honghe in waters east of Taiwan, where China has maintained coastguard patrols since June. It was the first time a foreign military had exercised with China in those waters. Although the two-ship exercise involved routine formation, communications and replenishment drills, Taipei viewed it as reinforcing Beijing’s efforts to normalise a Chinese presence and assert authority in the area. China called it a ‘navigation exercise’, while Indonesia described it as ‘routine’ and stressed that it was not geared towards warfighting.

Southeast Asia

Exit stage left

If by chance you were piloting a container ship through the Strait of Malacca on 12 or 13 August, you’d have seen a beacon pop up on your automatic identification system tracker displaying a nondescript, though unquestionably correct, name: ‘US GOVT VESSEL’. You might then have looked out the window and seen the USS George Washington carrier strike group – nuclear-powered supercarrier, destroyer and cruiser escorts, support vessels and all – floating serenely past. Last fortnight, you’ll recall, George Washington was in the South China Sea. It’s now heading for the Arabian Sea, where it’s expected to relieve USS Abraham Lincoln, currently deployed in support of US operations in the Persian Gulf.

This has left the US’s carrier footprint in the Western Pacific unusually thin. Non-existent, actually, unless you take a very generous view of amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, in port at Sasebo, Japan. Sure, you can launch an F-35B off Tripoli if you really want to, but with half the displacement, a third of George Washington’s embarked air wing and no organic airborne early-warning and anti-submarine warfare screen, it just isn’t the same. (Don’t tell the Marines.) The US Seventh Fleet has kept a carrier strike group forward-deployed at Yokosuka, near Tokyo, since October 1973; it’s the only one permanently stationed outside the US, and you’ll generally find it patrolling the region between June and December each year. For those in the ‘carrying big sticks’ business, there are few more conspicuous pieces of timber. Their absences are no less conspicuous. They’ve happened in the recent past, notably between August and November 2024 after USS Ronald Reagan rotated out of Yokosuka and George Washington hadn’t yet replaced it. This absence is also a little awkward, coming only days after US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby spoke in Manila to the effect that Southeast Asian states should judge security frameworks by whether they actually result in ‘more ships in the water’.

Still, a ship in the water isn’t necessarily useful. On forward deployment, a carrier such as George Washington spends at least four months of the year in heavy maintenance, during which its ability to project sea power is seriously restricted. But it’s precisely that that makes a carrier strike group’s limited time on deployment so valuable and makes quite the juggling act out of keeping a persistent carrier presence anywhere at all. As the Iran war has sputtered and guttered along since February, Abraham Lincoln’s deployment has stretched considerably beyond what was planned. It’s been a record-breaking 250 consecutive days at sea, with no port calls since December. Supplies are strained and crew morale is in a parlous state. The official line is that George Washington is subbing in for Abraham Lincoln as part of its regular deployment schedule, which in theory means it’ll be home by Christmas. In practice, how long the Western Pacific goes without its most visible US security presence is now in pertinent part a question about when the Iran war will end. Your guess is as good as ours.

News from the neighbourhood

• Another stop on Colby’s Southeast Asia itinerary: Cambodia, on 14 August. The key outcome there was a public commitment from Prime Minister Hun Manet to restart Angkor Sentinel – formerly a major US-Cambodian joint military exercise, suspended in early 2017 at a time when Cambodia was perceived to be drawing much closer to China militarily. In many ways, it still is: Beijing is still Phnom Penh’s biggest defence supplier, and last year’s combined Golden Dragon exercises with the Chinese military were the biggest yet. That Thailand – a country that has been on-again off-again at war with Cambodia for the past 18 months or so – is a US treaty ally makes the situation more delicate still.

Oceania

The final frontier

On 13 August, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) issued its annual threat assessment. The report identified China as the only state conducting espionage against New Zealand ‘at scale’ and highlighted methods of coercion being used.

The report highlights that Beijing’s national security laws can compel private Chinese businesses based in China to cooperate with intelligence services – creating potential risks for New Zealand firms that engage with them – and draws attention to China’s attempts to recruit New Zealanders who have inside access to government information. More concretely, the assessment outlines an incident involving Chinese government-linked entity Purple Mountain Observatory, which sought to install ground-based space infrastructure, used for tracking satellites and orbital debris, in New Zealand through cooperation with an unsuspecting local company.

The attention given to space is notable. The sector receives substantially more attention in this year’s report than in previous iterations, when it earned, at best, a passing mention. New Zealand is a prime location for both launches and satellite tracking, giving rise to a sizable space industry that includes the world’s only private orbital launch range, on North Island’s Mahia Peninsula. The range is operated by New Zealand-founded, now US-headquartered Rocket Lab.

NZSIS says this industry has become a regular target of espionage, and it’s not difficult to see why. Rocket Lab has launched satellites for customers such as the US Department of Defense, National Reconnaissance Office, Space Force and NASA from its New Zealand and US launch sites. It also has close partnerships with telecommunications giants such as Globalstar. As NZSIS says, New Zealand is a good place to ‘track satellites passing over the Asia-Pacific in a variety of orbits, with minimal radio frequency interference and visual impediments.’ Convenient for New Zealand and its allies; enticing for ‘foreign states seeking to advance military capabilities and intelligence operations’.

China has denied New Zealand’s allegations. According to the Chinese embassy in Wellington, the report is the work of ‘anti-China forces’ coordinating an international campaign of ‘slander and vilification against China’. The embassy further claimed the report ‘may well itself be a product of foreign interference’.

The report ultimately highlights a broader problem for New Zealand: its geography and strategic assets are generating security demands disproportionate to the size of the organisations responsible for managing them. Alongside protecting New Zealand’s growing space industry, NZSIS must also counter efforts to ‘undermine Pacific regionalism, sovereignty and the national interest of a range of countries’. NZSIS reports that New Zealand’s proximity to Antarctica has also made the country, particularly its key gateway city of Christchurch, a target. This is all in addition to NZSIS’s growing counterterrorism responsibilities. Combined, these factors indeed present a significant remit for a smaller nation such as New Zealand to manage.

Other Pacific countries face similar pressures. As NZSIS itself puts it, ‘our relatively small economies and government systems’ can become ‘overwhelmed by the growing number of security challenges we collectively face’. Perhaps, for New Zealand’s adversaries, that is part of the point.

News from the family

• The Pacific Islands Forum Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on 7 August failed to reach consensus on a joint statement condemning last month’s Chinese SLBM test in the region. Nauru and Kiribati objected to the proposed statement’s wording. New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters took issue with what he saw as the inappropriate use of the forum’s consensus requirement as a de facto veto, and accused the two countries of ‘gaming the system’ to appease an unnamed external partner. Be that as it may, Australia, New Zealand, Marshall Islands and Palau shortly afterward signed on to a US statement condemning the launch.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the actions and developments shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 24 July 2026 - 6 August 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Dancing with the staffs

The Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise, which wrapped on 31 July, is the biggest combined maritime drill in the world and every bit what its American hosts might call a ‘prom’ for Indo-Pacific navies: everyone shows up in their finest hardware, performs elaborate routines and, if they’re lucky, gets a spot on the organising committee. This year, for the first time, a South Korean officer – Rear Admiral Kim In-ho – commanded RIMPAC’s maritime component.

It’s quite the component when you’re talking 30 countries, 30,000 personnel, 31 surface ships, five submarines and 500 exercise events over a month – all told, about as close to a wartime coalition operation as one could get. South Korea’s navy has come a long way since it first showed up at RIMPAC in 1990 with two frigates and a dream. Back then, the time-honoured South Korean tradition of army-first force planning didn’t envision a major role for sea power beyond sight of the coastline. Seoul’s contribution to RIMPAC this year, the largest after the US Navy’s, paints a striking picture of how much has changed. From the P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft above to the Aegis guided-missile destroyer on the surface to the indigenously designed KSS-III submarine below, you have pretty much the full suite of high-end naval warfighting capability. The only things missing are nuclear-powered submarines (they’re working on it) and fixed-wing carrier aviation (aspirational). That Rear Admiral Kim is the first officer hailing from any of the US treaty allies in East Asia to command RIMPAC’s Combined Force Maritime Component shows that Seoul can now not only build the ships, but direct complex multinational naval operations in the Pacific theatre at large.

News from abroad

• In a 25 July statement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia was preparing in the Voronezh region to receive 30,000 new North Korean troops. The Kremlin has unsurprisingly neither confirmed nor denied that assertion, though the North Korean foreign minister’s visit to Moscow earlier in July and Russia’s increasingly acute recruitment difficulties are suggestive. Seoul has so far declined to comment. If the deployment happens, it’d be a significant step-up in Pyongyang’s involvement: estimates of the number of North Koreans serving on the frontline in Russia’s war on Ukraine hover around 14,000. Pyongyang already supplies between 25 and 40 percent of Russia’s artillery shells. Russia’s use of what Ukrainian officials have said were North Korean short-range ballistic missiles in strikes on 30 July – the first such missile strike in almost a year – further indicates the already high baseline of cooperation from which that step-up would occur.

• Japan’s new National Intelligence Bureau was officially launched on 31 July. ‘New’ is relative: the staff of the former Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, which the NIB replaced, have mostly kept their desks. The point is to give the institutional machinery the authority to centralise intelligence assessment and direction of the broader intelligence enterprise under the Cabinet. So it’s not a CIA, but it is the groundwork you’d need to lay if, as the present government is, you’re aiming to create a dedicated foreign intelligence agency down the track. Japan hasn’t had one of those since World War II.

Southeast Asia

The map and the territory

In New York last week, the Philippines formally deposited a hydrographic chart with the United Nations showing the precise extent of Bajo de Masinloc, a low-lying reef about 200 km west of Luzon. The chart indicates the normal baselines of the reef – the lines from which legal entitlements under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea are measured. While Manila has made its sovereign claim over that feature known for many years, this is the first time that claim has had exact geometry attached. A day after the Philippine foreign ministry announced the deposit, the Chinese government issued a policy for the administration of the Huangyan Island National Nature Reserve. Among its provisions, the policy prohibits any individual or group from entering the reserve except on Beijing-approved business.

This wouldn’t be news were Bajo de Masinloc and Huangyan Island not one and the same – better known internationally as Scarborough Shoal, and arguably the single most bitterly disputed feature in the South China Sea. What you see here is Beijing’s latest major effort to draw the net of domestic governance around the dispute while the Philippines tries to keep it alive on the level of international law. What seemed like a rather mundane-sounding government announcement about a nature reserve was accompanied, on the same day in the same area, by military exercises featuring serious hardware – a Chinese navy amphibious warfare taskforce with bomber escort. This indicates that international law in the South China Sea hasn’t become irrelevant; it’s become a stage for heavily armed theatre.

The 1 August exercises were also a quite pointedly timed response. A combined US–Japan–Philippines exercise in the rough vicinity from 21 to 25 July included the USS George Washington carrier strike group, two US Coast Guard cutters and two Philippine Coast Guard ships – an unusually comprehensive multinational integration of naval and coast-guard forces. The same, incidentally, could be said of this year’s RIMPAC exercise, which saw the participation of the Philippine Coast Guard for the first time. Meanwhile, the China Coast Guard allegedly fired water-cannons at Philippine ships around the shoal during a messy confrontation on 23 and 24 July.

Time and tide

If you’re wondering where the USS George Washington wound up after that combined exercise, it went to Da Nang. The carrier strike group arrived on 30 July for a five-day goodwill visit. This is only the fourth time a US aircraft carrier has shown up in Vietnam since relations normalised in 1995, and it’s the first since Washington and Hanoi signed their Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2023.

Da Nang is where the US ground war in Vietnam began in 1965. As a South China Sea claimant state, there are eminently pragmatic reasons for Vietnam to welcome a highly visible US security presence in that same neighbourhood today. China took the nearby Paracel Islands from Vietnam at gunpoint in 1974, and the Chinese navy forward base that backstops Beijing’s continued occupation of those islands – which Vietnam still claims – lies at Sanya on Hainan Island, less than 300 km from Da Nang.

Only a day earlier and hundreds of kilometres south at Cam Ranh, Vietnam waved farewell to a Russian Pacific Fleet task group. That was more technical than symbolic; Vietnam operates Russian Kilo-class submarines, so the Pacific Fleet is a logical choice for cross-training submarine crews.

But the symbols were still there. Like Da Nang, Cam Ranh was built out by the United States as a logistics hub during the Vietnam War. From 1979 to 2002, though, it was one of the Soviet Union’s (later Russia’s) largest overseas military bases and the Pacific Fleet’s principal port of call in Southeast Asia. Vietnam accepted that arrangement, its non-aligned posture notwithstanding, because it faced an intense security threat from China. Hosting Russia and the US concurrently is a potent show of non-alignment, but the very infrastructure being used is a hint that non-alignment has its limits.

News from the neighbourhood

• Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnivirakul called for ‘calibrated re-engagement’ with Myanmar in a 4 August speech at the headquarters of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Bangkok has long been at the forefront of efforts to reopen ASEAN’s lines of communication with the military government in Naypyidaw. What’s significant isn’t that they’re continuing to push ASEAN in that direction, even as the junta openly challenges ASEAN’s peace framework for the civil war; it’s that in a few days’ time, Bangkok is rolling out the red carpet for Myanmar’s leader, Min Aung Hlaing, whether the rest of ASEAN likes it or not.

Oceania

Casting a net

Days after returning from his trip to Washington, Solomon Islands’ new prime minister, Matthew Wale, signed what’s called a ‘shiprider agreement’ with the US in Honiara. The technical term for this is a Maritime Law Enforcement Agreement (MLEA), and the general idea is to give authorised Solomon Islands law enforcement officers a regular mechanism ‘to embark on designated US vessels to jointly undertake maritime surveillance and enforcement operations.’

This is far from the first agreement the US has brokered along these lines. In fact, with the addition of Solomon Islands, the US has run out of independent Pacific states to broker them with. Washington’s net of MLEAs across the Pacific began with Cook Islands in 2007, and the effort has picked up considerable steam in recent years. Since 2022, agreements with the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and Samoa have stepped up to become enhanced MLEAs, which allow the US to enforce a partner’s laws inside that state’s exclusive economic zone. This doesn’t appear to be within the scope of the deal just inked with Solomon Islands. Concern that it might be, however, has animated the country’s opposition leader and former prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, to claim that the deal amounts to a US violation of Solomon Islands’ sovereignty.

It’s not hard to see the rationale for the agreements. If you’re interested in security cooperation with the Pacific at all, a coast guard – the US Coast Guard, for example, which helpfully has a budget about two and half times the GDP of Fiji – is a useful thing to have. Coast-guard capabilities correspond closely to the concrete problems Pacific states tend to face. According to the Solomon Islands government, the new MLEA ‘will support national efforts to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, transnational crime, illicit trafficking, and other unlawful maritime activities’.

There’s also a broader strategic benefit for Washington. The US can provide great-power resources against practical Pacific security problems in ways other partners such as Australia and New Zealand simply cannot match. At the same time, these agreements give Washington the option of maintaining a US-flagged security presence across much of the Pacific without the baggage or the optics of formal defence cooperation.

News from the family

• On 25 July, Bougainville’s leadership formally endorsed a three-stage pathway culminating in a proposed declaration of independence on 1 September 2030. The move came amid concerns in Bougainville that Papua New Guinea’s government is seeking to disrupt parliamentary ratification of Bougainville’s independence referendum result.

• New Zealand and PNG have signed a new defence cooperation agreement. Titled the ‘Statement of Intent on Defence Cooperation between Papua New Guinea and New Zealand 2026-2029’, it builds on previous agreements and outlines principles for further military and civilian security cooperation.

• As if the rest weren’t enough, this year’s RIMPAC exercise saw yet another first-time participant: Fiji, represented by a platoon of soldiers. No Fijian maritime component is understood to have participated this year – with a navy currently comprising of two Guardian-class patrol boats and two hydrographic vessels, you probably wouldn’t want to risk sailing one to Hawaii either – but the prospects are looking up. RIMPAC coincided not only with last month’s defence pact with Australia, but also the release of the Republic of Fiji Navy’s first maritime strategy, which incorporates a stronger emphasis on regional partnerships alongside a 10-year plan for naval capability development.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 10 July 2026 - 23 July 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Helicopter yen

The Takaichi government has issued high-level guidance for Japan’s next financial year, with ‘defence industry’ in bold text and a rather expansionary fiscal policy to underline it. Approved by the Cabinet on 21 July, the Honebuto—to use its full name, the Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform—functions as an annual statement of the government’s overall policy priorities; it’s not a budget, but you can see one from there. It tells the ministries what they should think about when they develop their budget requests for the coming year. On defence, Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi clearly wants them thinking big.

The 2026 Honebuto outlines a ‘Strong and Prosperous Japan Investment Framework’ with 17 investment priorities, including defence industry alongside aerospace, shipbuilding, national resilience, AI and a variety of high-tech manufacturing sectors. For agencies’ new policy proposals relevant to these sectors, the government is removing the requirement that budget requests be capped based on the previous year’s budget. Not only is there no cost ceiling, but new policies will also be able to receive multi-year funding commitments at the budget-formulation stage. The general idea of Takaichi’s Honebuto, and a significant break with Japanese fiscal practice, is to budget toward a stable long-term reduction of the debt-to-GDP ratio, rather than trying to avoid a deficit every year. Underlying that is a vision in which the government manages the 17 ‘strategic fields’ as one big investment portfolio road-mapped out to 2040.

That’s music to the ears of defence industry—which has never met a program budget it didn’t want bigger and guaranteed for the next decade—even before you find the (as-yet tentative) idea floated for a kind of state-owned enterprise to promote Japan’s defence exports overseas. A decision on that seems to be pending the Takaichi government’s revision of Japan’s key strategic documents, including the National Security Strategy, which the Honebuto also promises to accelerate. As defence industry policy goes, the ambition on display is hard to match in the region or worldwide—and it’ll matter for both if Japan pulls it off. For fiscal hawks, both in the Diet and Japan’s central bank, the 2026 Honebuto is a massive gamble on today’s deficit spending producing tomorrow’s long-term growth. Takaichi’s challenge between now and next March is to convince them it’s a gamble they want to make.

Seoul origin

Lee Jae-myung’s 7 July speech at the NATO Summit Defense Industry Forum in Ankara—the one with his proposal to expand defence industry cooperation between South Korea and NATO members, moving beyond arms sales to encompass joint R&D, manufacturing and operation—seems to have ruffled some feathers in Moscow. On 16 July, deputy foreign minister Andrei Rudenko met with South Korea’s ambassador Lee Seok-bae and conveyed the view that it is ‘unacceptable’ for Seoul to become a ‘de facto accomplice in the qualitative and quantitative rearmament of NATO.’

Since 2022, Russian officials have repeatedly drawn a red line (which South Korea has so far respected) at providing lethal equipment to Ukraine; the usual practice is to threaten the end of the bilateral relationship, sometimes with a light dusting of ‘retaliatory measures, including asymmetric ones.’ What’s new here is the scope: the threat isn’t narrowly centred on Seoul’s aid to Ukraine, but on its broader alignment with NATO.

That alignment is as much a strategic proposition to NATO as it is an economic one to South Korea’s domestic defence industry, which has done well out of the initial wave of European rearmament since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But now—with Europe simultaneously seeking to unwind its reliance on US supply chains and planning for a tense post-Ukraine standoff with Moscow—South Korea seems to recognise that it needs to ‘Europeanise’ its value proposition (building the factories over there, among other things) if it wants to capitalise on the gains it’s made thus far. That will probably mean more than industrial ties. Europe will want a partner willing to line up politically with a harder stance on Russia. Which is easier said than done when Seoul has a delicate relationship to manage with its nuclear-armed neighbour to the north; Russia’s deepening partnership with North Korea gives it both the tools and the incentive to make it all the more delicate.

Surf and turf

US and South Korean forces conducted their biennial Combined Joint Sustainment Training (CJST) activity over 13-16 July—the largest on record, with over 4,400 troops participating, and the first since 2017 to involve over-the-shore training. This means that it’s not just a test of how good the two countries are at getting military equipment off the boat and into the fight; it’s a test of how well they can do that without a port. Useful to know if you want to be ready for a conflict where North Korean ballistic missiles might put existing port facilities out of action early on.

This was also the first test in a combined operation of the South Korean Navy’s brand-new Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore System—a whole family of floating bridges, logistics vessels and other deployable equipment operated by a dedicated support battalion created in January 2025. While the US and South Korea have trained over-the-shore logistics since at least 2011, it’s only in the last year or so that South Korea has fielded the capability to run the whole ship-to-shore part by itself. That’s consistent with the current long-term thrust of alliance policy under presidents Trump and Lee Jae-myung: recalibrating the balance of front-end military responsibilities more in Seoul’s direction.

News from abroad

• Indonesia’s Navy announced on 13 July that a task group led by the frigate KRI I Gusti Ngurah Rai—including embarked helicopter elements, divers and naval special forces—had set out for Vladivostok to participate in ORRUDA 2026, the second of the combined Russia-Indonesia ORRUDA series of naval exercises. The plan through to August is for both navies to drill modern naval combat tactics, with an emphasis on potential threats from sea drones and uncrewed surface vessels.

  • Prior to 2024, Indonesia’s and Russia’s navies encountered each other mainly in a multilateral context—such as the KOMODO exercises from 2014 onward, or the inaugural (and thus far one-off) Russia-ASEAN naval exercises in 2021, which Indonesia co-hosted. But bilateral ties have deepened in the last two years, and the Russian Pacific Fleet has started showing up at Indonesian ports more often.

• After the Russia-China JOINT SEA 2026 naval exercises finished at Qingdao on 13 July, select ships from both participating task groups set out into the Yellow Sea together on a joint patrol. No details of the patrol’s planned route have been made publicly available, though China’s defence ministry stated that it would take place in ‘relevant areas of the Pacific Ocean’.

  • This is the sixth joint patrol of its kind, the first having been conducted in 2021, the rest on a roughly annual basis. If last year’s is any indication, this one might get past Japan and well into the central Pacific. The patrol comes during a period of relative expansion and intensification of Chinese and Russian naval activity near Japan and beyond the first island chain.

Southeast Asia

The changing of the Guard

On 15 July, the US Coast Guard announced that its Expeditionary Cutter Squadron (ECS) will transition from the Persian Gulf to the Western Pacific. In fact, they’re already there. The boats have been hanging around their new command at Singapore since the end of March, and spent much of June in maritime cooperative activities with their Philippine counterparts in the South China Sea. This latest announcement is the Coast Guard making things official. They’ve authorised the squadron to support US Pacific Command (PACOM) through to 30 September. Past that, no details have been made public.

The ECS, formerly Patrol Forces Southwest Asia, has played a supporting role to US forces in the Gulf—coastal patrols, securing offshore oil terminals, counter-smuggling operations, you get the idea—since Operation Iraqi Freedom all the way back in March 2003. It’s still the only dedicated cutter squadron the US Coast Guard operate outside North America.

Putting it in Singapore, with rotations out to Subic Bay in the Philippines, doesn’t markedly shift the overall balance of tonnage in the South China Sea. While better-armed, the USCG’s Sentinel-class cutters are small, high-tech ships about on par with Australia’s Evolved Cape-class patrol boats, easily outmatched by the converted warships routinely fielded in the area by the China Coast Guard. But it does give US and Philippines commanders more options for putting American flags—on non-military, law-enforcement vessels—out in support of Manila’s maritime claims. That’s a domain in which Manila has been strategically ‘civilianising’ its response, preferring coast guard vessels to warships, to manage escalatory pressure in confrontations with China. The relocation also gives PACOM more options for having US surface combatants show up for allies and partners—as, for example, at this year’s CARAT anti-submarine warfare exercises (6-15 July) with Thailand, where two ECS cutters filled in for the US Navy’s usual presence—while freeing up higher-end military platforms.

In light of the steady tempo of US-Philippines maritime cooperative activities this year—the sixth of which saw the first-ever USCG participation at the end of May—it’s likely we’ll see much more of the US Coast Guard near disputed features in the Philippines’ EEZ in coming months.

Save the date

On 20 July, a China Coast Guard cutter at Second Thomas Shoal confronted the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) outpost on the beached World War II-era landing ship BRP Sierra Madre—the sole inhabited feature at the shoal. The AFP claims that a Philippine serviceman was injured when struck in the head by one of the CCG officers using a wooden baton. China’s foreign ministry tells a rather different story. President Marcos summoned China’s ambassador over the incident on 21 July, though details of the meeting haven’t been publicised.

Bitter as the fight over disputed South China Sea features can be, it’s rarely a face-to-face fight; aggressive boat manoeuvres, flag-planting, megaphones and social-media blitzes are more the style. The videos released by both sides of the 20 July incident leave no mystery as to why. It’s a loud, messy, chaotic interaction between small-boat crews on the water; just the sort of thing that’s one minor slip or flare of temper away from getting seriously out of control. The last comparable incident took place on 17 June 2024, in which eight AFP personnel were injured, including one who lost his right thumb, during a CCG attempt to board and impound an inflatable boat resupplying the outpost at Second Thomas Shoal. That incident quickly led to a ‘provisional understanding’ over resupply missions to the Sierra Madre outpost being brokered between Manila and Beijing—tenuous, ambiguous, but so far just enough to let the AFP retain their foothold on the shoal while keeping a lid on escalation. Its ability to do the latter is now looking more questionable than it did a week before.

A week before, as it happens, a 12 July joint statement from the Philippines, Japan, Australia, the US, and various allies and partners thereof commemorated the tenth anniversary of the 2016 Arbitral Tribunal ruling under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. That ruling found China’s claim to ‘historic rights’ to most of the South China Sea to lack foundation in international law. The joint statement attracted a sharp counter-statement out of Beijing, with further diplomatic pressure directed at Europe and Japan. All this casts a shadow over the present week of intense diplomatic activity surrounding the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Manila, which China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and his US counterpart Marco Rubio are both attending as dialogue partners. One item on Rubio’s agenda is a gala dinner commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia—a document much in the spirit of the UN Charter, promoting the renunciation of the threat or use of force in international affairs. Anniversaries like that now have a way of seeming ominous.

News from the neighbourhood

• On 12 July in Bangkok, an informal delegation of ASEAN foreign ministers held a face-to-face meeting with their Myanmar counterpart, junta appointee Tin Maung Swe. This was the first such engagement since the February 2021 coup, and a small but significant step toward a reopening of relations between ASEAN and the now tenuously civilianised military junta.

  • It’s a step ASEAN have every reason to make carefully. Dialogue risks legitimising the junta, but five years without it haven’t broken the deadlock: the junta’s persistent failure to progress implementation of the Five-Point Consensus peace framework for the Myanmar civil war is an issue that remains unresolved. The junta has asked ASEAN to review that framework, arguing that it no longer reflects the political realities inside Myanmar; ASEAN’s representatives have continued to insist on it.

  • On 21 July, ASEAN foreign ministers agreed to develop new benchmarks for assessing Myanmar’s progress toward peace, and to open discussions regarding a longer-term special envoy.

• On 15 July, Jinan University (JNU) removed from its website a report claiming that the Philippines’ Batanes province, comprising the archipelago’s northernmost islands, is a ‘natural geographical extension’ of Taiwan and constitutes Chinese territory on that basis. This claim arose from an academic symposium hosted by JNU at its Guangzhou campus on 30 June and received coverage in Chinese media in the week thereafter. The Philippines’ defence minister and the governor of Batanes have both dismissed the claim.

  • The Batanes claim hasn’t been officially endorsed by the Chinese government; it’s been articulated, if by anyone, by a group of international law and area-studies academics, and maybe a few Global Times op-ed writers. It’s possible that the removal of the symposium report is Beijing officialdom distancing itself further: after all, JNU isn’t your average provincial university. As an institution historically oriented toward foreign students, including those of Chinese heritage, it is directly supervised by the United Front Work Department of the CCP Central Committee—that is, the Party’s premier foreign influence organ.

  • In that light, not to mention that of the China Coast Guard’s simultaneous push to normalise law-enforcement patrols in the nearby waters east of Taiwan, the Philippines’ defence minister’s earlier view of the claim as ‘a signal of preconceived intention’ from Beijing doesn’t seem altogether far-fetched.

Oceania

Multiple choice

Last week, Papua New Guinea closed Taiwan’s Economic Office in Port Moresby. A statement from foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko held that Taiwanese representation ‘will no longer be recognised or required’.

Which is a curious thing to say about your fifth-largest trading partner. Roughly a third of all the liquefied natural gas sailing out of Port Moresby, which is itself more than 40 per cent of PNG’s exports as a whole, winds up in Taiwan. While it’s unlikely that existing gas contracts will be cancelled on the spot just because Taiwan no longer has an office in town, their future is uncertain. The foreign ministry in Taipei has promised to ‘review’ gas purchases from PNG—and while these are a notable portion (about 8 per cent) of Taiwan’s overall LNG imports, they’re far from unsubstitutable. Economically, Taiwan no longer buying PNG’s gas is probably more costly for the latter than the former. Which would understandably make PNG’s apparent willingness to absorb that cost a troubling sign to read from Taipei. Not least because of the narrative frame in which Port Moresby cast the decision: not only as part and parcel of an ‘unwavering commitment to honouring, respecting, and upholding Papua New Guinea’s foundational One-China policy’, but as a statement of intent on the part of the PNG government to take its relationship with China to ‘unprecedented levels.’

This follows a similar move made by Nauru in May of this year, where a government directive required all public servants to adhere to a strict interpretation of the One-China Principle that functionally prohibited interaction with Taiwan. That both are close Australian partners—indeed, a treaty ally in PNG’s case—makes this less a setback for Canberra’s foreign policy than a healthy reminder that the ‘permanent contest’ for influence in the Pacific is one in which alignment is rarely one-dimensional. If indeed the TEO’s closure is more about throwing Beijing a bone to provide cover for deepening security ties with Australia, which it well could be, you might call it ‘stabilisation’ as much as you might call it a concession. But even if PNG’s talk of ‘unprecedented levels’ of partnership with China is mostly presentational, the line between stabilisation and Beijing’s pressure delivering results looks very faint when viewed from Taipei.

News from the family

• Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea have signed a policing agreement aimed at combatting transnational crime and increasing interoperability. Although Vanuatu is not yet a major node in the Pacific drug highway, recent large-scale drug seizures suggest this may be about to change. Policing has become a focal point of strategic competition throughout the region, as China and Australia have both sought to become the policing partner of choice.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 26 June 2026 – 9 July 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

In a sieve we’ll go to sea

Spare a thought for North Korea’s naval shipbuilders. Decades of sustaining a low-tech, low-tonnage brown-water fleet with ambitions no higher than coastal defence and laying the occasional mine—then one day Kim Jong Un shows up and demands a guided-missile destroyer. Nuclear-capable? As if you needed to ask. Yet with all the odds stacked against it, from COVID aftershocks to the Western-led sanctions regime, Pyongyang’s surface fleet modernisation has shown remarkable albeit irregular progress since the 8th Party Congress put it on the agenda in 2021. Last May the Kang Kon—their second 5,000-tonne Choe Hyon-class destroyer, making the two the largest North Korean surface combatants to date—was launched at Chongjin shipyard and capsized immediately in one of the regime’s most notorious procurement fumbles. But that was then, this is now. Last week the Kang Kon was somewhere off North Korea’s east coast for sea trials, including what’s claimed to be a test-launch of a ‘strategic cruise missile’—the same thing its sister ship, the Choe Hyon, did back in March and April this year. A third destroyer of the same class is understood to be under construction. At a speech delivered at the Choe Hyon’s commissioning ceremony on 23 June, Kim indicated plans to build out naval basing infrastructure for a larger surface fleet. That fleet is planned to include still larger warships (in the 10,000-tonne range, about the size of a US Arleigh Burke-class destroyer) and engage in operations beyond North Korea’s immediate region.

Like many of Pyongyang’s major military equipment acquisitions, it’s hard to tell how much of this responds to a genuine strategic need and how much is being done for the prestige. The North is certainly shifting away from its traditional army-first, land-based force structure, but without a dedicated screen of ASW frigates and maritime patrol aircraft, a destroyer has pretty slender odds of surviving the opening salvo of a serious fight with the South’s high-tech navy. Mind you, if all it needs to be is one more hard surface from which to launch nuclear-armed cruise missiles, it might have done its job by then.

East is east and west is west

On 4 July, the China Coast Guard announced that a task group led by the cutter Xiushan had replaced the task group which deployed to the waters east of Taiwan back in early June. Like its predecessor, the CCG Daishan, the Xiushan is now about a hundred kilometres off Taiwan’s east coast—with a view to continuing ‘routine law enforcement patrols’ in the area.

Routine is precisely what these patrols weren’t until a few weeks ago. The original Daishan task group was presented as part of China’s response to Japan and the Philippines’ decision to progress delimitation of their exclusive economic zones, which—as luck would have it—potentially overlap just next to Taiwan. Rotating a new patrol in after a month suggests something more permanent, though the basic logic behind it hasn’t changed: the PRC asserts its territorial claim by performing what having it legitimately would entail, namely ordinary everyday maritime administration. That’s a familiar sight around China’s claims in the South China Sea, becoming more familiar by the year—Scarborough Shoal, for instance, has seen more concerted CCG activity in the last six months than at any time since 2019. Those tactics—including the use of hydrographic research vessels—are now beginning to show up in the waters east of Taiwan, on the far side of the first island chain.

News from abroad

• Russia and China conducted their first joint bomber patrol of the year on 27 June. Two Chinese H-6 and two Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers accompanied part of the way by maritime patrol aircraft and a fighter escort traversed Japan’s air defence identification zone on a patrol path stretching from the Tsushima Strait into the East China Sea, around Okinawa, and out into the Pacific. The Japanese and South Korean defence ministries lodged diplomatic complaints, both countries having also scrambled fighters (in undisclosed numbers) in response.

  • While provocative ADIZ overflights from the PLAAF and RuAF have become pretty common around Japan in recent years, activities like this haven’t. This is only the eleventh joint bomber patrol since they began in 2019, and the last was back in December.

  • Putting nuclear-capable bombers in the air is a delicate matter. Having them rehearse the functions you’d expect of a real long-range strike mission, still more so. The timing put this rehearsal quite clearly in conversation with this year’s VALIANT SHIELD—the annual US-led multilateral exercise, centred on Guam and the Mariana Islands, which ran from 22 June to 1 July. China and Russia’s own major annual maritime exercise, JOINT SEA 2026, began on 6 July.

• On 2 July, artillery gunners of South Korea’s Marine Corps conducted live-fire drills from Baengnyeong and Yeonpyeong—outlying islands off the country’s west coast, both about thirteen kilometres from the North Korean coastline. Drills of this kind are done a few times a year, and the setting is quite deliberate. The Northwest Islands Defense Command, which runs them, was set up back in 2011 in response to the shelling of Yeonpyeong a few months earlier—the first North Korean attack on a civilian settlement since the Korean War, and something of a turning point in the recent history of Seoul’s defence planning.

  • The drills were suspended in 2018 during the brief thaw under Moon Jae-in, but restored in 2024 under the conservative government of Yoon Suk Yeol. Early expectations that Lee Jae-myung would suspend them again proved unfounded; as with so much of his foreign policy, there’s more continuity with Yoon than you’d expect from a progressive administration.

Southeast Asia

Look on my works ye mighty

A week of protests, in Bangkok and across fourteen southern provinces—plus a hundred thousand petition signatures, give or take—turned out to be just enough to bring Thailand’s government to the negotiating table. Talks with the civil society group SEC Watch on 30 June led to a significant concession: the transport ministry agreed not to submit its draft Southern Economic Corridor (SEC) bill for the Cabinet’s consideration, pending a new planning process with more public consultation. The ministry also agreed to pause implementation work on the Landbridge project while the multiple ongoing impact reviews play out.

The struggle between state-sponsored megaprojects and local interest groups springs eternal. In Thailand, civil society is animated by the recent precedent of the Eastern Economic Corridor—sort of a mega-SEZ created out of three provinces by the military government in 2017, which, as you might expect, wasn’t overly encumbered by concern for public feeling on the road to a high-tech, high-growth industrial future. The EEC has been great news for foreign capital (Japanese and Chinese, mostly; go ask BYD’s shareholders) but less so for the locals, and residents of Thailand’s southern provinces around the Kra Isthmus understandably want a seat at the table before the bulldozers rev up.

All the more so because the proposed SEC and its centrepiece, the Landbridge, is no ordinary megaproject. More than two decades in the making, the US$31 billion plan for two massive deepwater ports on either side of the isthmus—with a ninety-kilometre stretch of road and high-speed rail to join them—is among the most notable fits of infrastructural megalomania provoked by the narrow, congested, dangerous, egregiously blockadable Strait of Malacca. Just look at a map and you’ll see the vision. On the one side there’s the Gulf of Thailand, by extension the South China Sea and by further extension the voluminous world-GDP pie-slice that is East Asia. On the other side there’s the Andaman Sea, the Indian Ocean, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, eventually Europe. The Malay Peninsula, a mere 44 kilometres at the thinnest, adds an extra thousand kilometres or so onto every trade route forced to skirt around it through Malacca. Visions of a Suez-style canal have captivated Thai rulers for centuries, but the rugged intervening geology has never proven amenable. A land bridge is the next best thing, though with the added inefficiencies from unloading and reloading cargo it’s an open question whether the economics work out as nicely as Bangkok hopes—particularly with Malaysia’s competing East Coast Rail Link running ahead of schedule to link Port Klang near Kuala Lumpur with Kuantan on the peninsula’s east coast by early 2028.

Still, the geopolitics of getting trade to circumvent Malacca remain seductive. Witness in parallel the interesting turn taken during Bangladeshi prime minister Tarique Rahman’s visit to Beijing on 26 June: the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor is still almost entirely unbuilt due to Myanmar’s civil war, but that didn’t stop China generously offering to extend it into Bangladesh. Much as they’d love a good old-fashioned BRI capex bonanza to build out Chattogram, Dhaka’s treating the proposal with due caution. If they agree, it would resurrect—with one very revealing exclusion—the original concept of a Malacca-bypassing Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar corridor that preceded CMEC back in the 1990s, before China-India relations soured to where they are today. But it’s hard for Bangladesh to look over the border and see a security situation worth the bet. Any credible overland route would have to run through the northern borderlands of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, where the central government’s authority has mostly disappeared and the unresolved Rohingya crisis could turn Beijing’s Belt and Road into Dhaka’s border-security headache.

Inclined planes

Indonesia’s defence ministry confirmed on 26 June that plans for local co-production of the South Korean KF-21 fighter jet have been cancelled. Word from the ministry is that they’re still intending to buy KF-21—which would make them the first export customer for Korea’s homegrown 4.5-generation fighter, a significant technical milestone in its own right—but they’ll buy from Korean production lines, and they’re not sure how many.

Thus ends a lengthy saga. Indonesia agreed to cover a fifth of the KF-21 development costs back in 2016, in exchange for technology transfer and the right to manufacture them locally. Which would have been industrially significant for the region: while many ASEAN member states operate and sustain high-end supersonic combat aircraft, they don’t build them. Trouble was, Jakarta didn’t front up the cash. (That incident in 2024 when several Indonesian engineers in Korea were accused, later acquitted, of stealing sensitive data was also a sore point.) After many missed payments, Seoul agreed last year to cut about 60% from Indonesia’s expected contribution, with the scope of technology transfer to be reduced accordingly. That’s now been paid. A procurement deal for 16 Korean-made KF-21 jets is apparently also on the table, but it’s hard to say how realistic that is. Next year’s budget is in the works in Jakarta, and while the finance ministry has given defence a ceiling of Rp139 trillion (A$11.1 billion), defence minister Sjamsoeddin has asked for more than twice that—and even this is a far cry from the Rp667 trillion (A$53.5 billion) he thinks his portfolio actually needs next year. Achieving either without blowing past Indonesia’s legislated 3% GDP cap on deficit spending would strain not only fiscal but mathematical credulity.

This isn’t the first time Indonesia’s defence procurement strategy has had to face down budget realities, and it won’t be the last. On top of any potential KF-21 purchase from Korea, Jakarta is buying high-end jet fighters from France and Türkiye simultaneously, with serious interest in China’s J-10, and concurrent plans to acquire US-made F-15EX fighters only abandoned a few months ago. This is, mildly put, an extraordinary way to recapitalise your air combat fleet, and there’s an inefficiency premium you pay for it. Each platform has its own bespoke training ecosystem, its own munitions stocks, its own maintenance pipeline, its own export-control laws to comply with—the list goes on. Avoiding dependence on any one supplier may be consistent with a non-aligned foreign policy. The unenviable task of the defence ministry’s budgeteers is now to work out how much policy consistency they can afford.

News from the neighbourhood

• On 6 July, Vietnam’s foreign minister Le Hoai Trung led an official delegation to inspect the construction works at the US$4 billion port project on Hon Khoai—a small island about twelve kilometres off the southern tip of Vietnam. Since general secretary To Lam’s visit last November the port has been elevated to a ‘critical national priority’, and the military engineers building it (as well as what will be one of Southeast Asia’s longest sea bridges, to connect Hon Khoai to the mainland) have accelerated work accordingly.

  • The Mekong Delta furnishes a significant portion of Vietnam’s exports, but its coastline is too heavily silted to allow a deepwater port. Hon Khoai solves that problem, but as you might expect from the military involvement, that’s not all it’s for. The port will allow Vietnam’s navy to sustain a more persistent naval presence on the country’s southwestern flank, counterweighting what Hanoi sees as the problem of Cambodia’s China-backed infrastructure at Ream Naval Base.

  • Not to mention providing more options for projecting power out across Vietnam’s nearby territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Oceania

Kind of a big deal

Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese was in Suva on Monday to sign the Vuvale Union Treaty with his Fijian counterpart Sitiveni Rabuka. This one’s been in the oven for a while; it’s a broad-ranging deal with an eye to deepen cooperation across many policy areas, naturally including economic development, people-to-people links, and security. On security, you’d be forgiven for thinking Australia bought one and got one free: signed alongside was the Ocean of Peace Alliance, which commits both countries to defend one another in the event of an armed attack. This is the second treaty Australia’s signed in as many years with one of its Pacific partners bearing that curiously ANZUS-like language—the Pukpuk treaty with Papua New Guinea, which came into force on Wednesday, being the other.

There is, however, one line in the Ocean of Peace Alliance you won’t find in Pukpuk: a clause which, with mutual consent, permits other Pacific states with militaries to join the alliance. Bit of an odd choice. Militaries aren’t common in the Pacific islands; the only other countries that have them are New Zealand, PNG, and Tonga. Of those, Tonga’s the only one with which Australia doesn’t already have a mutual defence pact. Potential redundancy aside, if Ocean of Peace does accept new members down the track it would create a genuine multilateral alliance in the Pacific islands—perhaps not quite the pan-Pacific security architecture again advocated for by Solomon Islands prime minister Matthew Wale last week (by sheer coincidence, in Fiji) but moving in that direction.

With the ink scarcely dry on Vuvale and Ocean of Peace, it was somewhat difficult to treat as totally coincidental China’s decision to test-fire a nuclear-capable submarine-launched ballistic missile over the South Pacific that same day, with the rocket and dummy warhead splashing down somewhere between Nauru and Tuvalu—both close Australian partners, by the way. Tests of this kind are unusual for China, and this is only the second since the Cold War—the first near Kiribati in 2024. As a demonstration of a nuclear-capable delivery vehicle on a realistic attack flight path, it’s clearly targeted at audiences far beyond the region. But the region got the message anyway. Albanese’s meeting with Matthew Wale in Honiara the next day saw both condemn the test as provocative, with Wale taking the view that it reinforced the need for a pact with Australia within a broader regional security architecture—a pact that Australia now intends to ‘fast-track’.

It’s quite the pivot for Solomon Islands, whose security treaty with China—brokered in secret under the previous government in 2022—has loomed ominously in the eyes of Australian strategists ever since. Canberra’s grand design for the Pacific seems to be slowly taking shape, though not without setbacks. This latest batch of talks and handshakes rounded out the signing of the Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu last week, long delayed through successive renegotiations. Nakamal’s initial ambit for a functional Australian veto over Vanuatu’s critical infrastructure and security arrangements—like those Canberra enjoys with Nauru and Tuvalu—didn’t make it into the final text over Vanuatu’s objections. China’s parallel pursuit of its own Namele Agreement with Vanuatu, accompanied by an unprecedented level of grant funding to the government in Port Vila, may have had something to do with that. Relative lack of concrete security commitments aside, Nakamal does require Vanuatu not to host any foreign military bases—placing a check, at least, on long-held Australian anxieties over a potential PLA footprint in the Coral Sea.

News from the family

• The killing of an American pilot in West Papua last week has sparked fears of an uptick in conflict between the West Papuan separatist militia and the Indonesian government. The separatists said the killing was payback for the US, Indonesian and Dutch governments’ roles in the transfer of West Papua to Indonesian control in the 1960s.

  • Meanwhile, a recent report has stated that under Prabowo, the number of Indonesian troops deployed to West Papua has increased to nearly 60,000—six times more per capita than the national average. This is in comparison to 1,500 separatist fighters. Some have suggested the increase is part of a strategy to render Papuans a minority in key parts of the island.

• New Caledonia’s provincial election has returned a clear victory for the anti-independence parties. It’s also shown how the political boundaries have hardened. Support for the anti-independence coalition has consolidated in the vicinity of the capital, Nouméa, while the more rural areas—which are predominantly inhabited by indigenous Kanaks—have shifted further towards the hard-line FLNKS over more moderate pro-independence groups.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 11 June 2026 - 25 June 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

A bridge too short

Somewhere in the bundle of agreements that Russia and North Korea signed in 2024 was a promise to build a road bridge between the two countries. It’s a bigger deal than it sounds. There’s been a rail crossing since 1959—heavily used in the wake of Pyongyang’s decision to back Russia’s war in Ukraine—but never anything driveable unless you have a lot of faith in the Tumen River’s winter freeze. That bridge is now nearly complete, though not quite in time for the two-year anniversary of the Putin-Kim handshake on 19 June as planned. Customs facilities and connecting roads on the Russian side are yet to be finished.

Chalk that up to the dubious Chechen construction firm, if you like; seen from Pyongyang, the story is ironically familiar. Pan the camera to the other side of the country and you’ll find the New Yalu River Bridge, a sleek, ultra-modern 3,000-metre span completed at great expense to the Chinese taxpayer back in 2014 and so far totally useless, as the necessary facilities on the North Korean side were never finished.

Both bridges could be economically significant for the North. The Russia one has the potential to admit 300 trucks a day—that’s in the same neighbourhood as what currently goes over the Yalu at the Dandong-Sinuiju crossing on a busy day. This in turn is a hefty portion, perhaps as high as 60-70 per cent, of the North’s trade with China—still by a huge margin its most important economic relationship. And right now, the only way to drive cargo from the Chinese border city of Dandong to the other side of the river is a rather rickety single-lane bridge built by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1943. The much larger and wider New Yalu River Bridge is meant to replace it.

But economic arguments alone have a hard time getting over the North Korean border. Even now that the North’s economy is improving and (since early 2025) construction on their side of the Yalu has finally begun progressing, the regime’s habitual suspicion of foreign trade and the outside world in general is still much in evidence. Cross-border bridges are as much about facilitating an economic lifeline as they are about politically managing dependence on that lifeline—and in that sense, even a Russia bridge that’s not yet open is a political signal.

The complication is, the Tumen is mostly a Chinese river; walk a few minutes from the new Russia-North Korea bridge and you’ll find yourself in Jilin Province. It’s only the last seventeen kilometres before it empties into the Sea of Japan that China doesn’t control—one of many concessions Russia extracted from the Qing Dynasty in the nineteenth century. For decades Beijing has been trying to secure freight access through the Tumen, giving its far north a direct route to markets in Japan and beyond; for decades it’s been frustrated, among other things by the fact that the existing Russia-North Korea rail bridge is only seven metres above the water, making it practically impossible for Chinese ships of any serious proportions to reach the ocean. The new road bridge, as far as one can tell, has been built at the same height.

News from abroad

• Speaking in Luxembourg on 15 June, EU High Representative Kaja Kallas claimed that the EU now has ‘verified reports’ that the Chinese military has been training Russian forces to fight in Ukraine.

  • At first glance, that seems counterintuitive; the Russians are the ones with combat experience, so you’d think the historically war-shy PLA would be coming to them. The EU intelligence assessments Reuters got their hands on last month—which Kallas’ remarks now seem to have confirmed—suggest the training was small-scale, centred around upskilling a select group of Russian personnel (many of them military instructors themselves) in combined-arms tactics with heavy use of uncrewed systems.

• Another special defence budget request—about US$6.6 billion primarily earmarked for buying drones and uncrewed systems—was presented to Taiwan’s legislature on 18 June. Much of this is money that was cut from the Lai government’s earlier special budget when the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan passed a stripped-down version back in May.

• Taiwan’s National Security Bureau launched a new citizen reporting website on 14 June. Not their citizens, mind you; the idea is to give disgruntled residents of the People’s Republic a secure online ‘dead drop’ where they can pass intelligence to Taipei.

  • ASPI’s State of the Strait has the details.

• President Lee Jae Myung’s first Defense White Paper is in the works, and there’s something of a wrangle about whether it should refer to North Korea as the South’s ‘principal enemy’.

  • The last white paper—a rather hawkish document composed under the increasingly ill-fated president Yoon in 2022—did exactly that, and on 18 July the defence ministry in Seoul indicated the ‘enemy’ wording wouldn’t be dropped. Only hours later, in a briefing to reporters, the Ministry of Unification argued that Lee’s stated goal of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the two Koreas was fundamentally inconsistent with treating Pyongyang as an enemy.

Southeast Asia

Persona non grata

The Philippines’ defence minister Gilberto Teodoro and his immediate family have been sanctioned by the Chinese government on 11 June. Probably something to do with his remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue earlier. Teodoro is barred from entering the PRC, Hong Kong or Macau, and Chinese businesses and individuals are prohibited from any kind of contact with him. While former officials and senior legislators have been fair game in the past, this is the first time—as far as we know—that China has sanctioned a serving cabinet minister of any country other than Taiwan.

Under other circumstances, this would be the diplomatic nuclear option; it’s tough to sustain high-level dialogue when one country’s defence minister is legally prohibited from engaging with the other’s. But given where Manila and Beijing already are, the operational impact is limited. You might recall Teodoro himself refused to speak with his Chinese counterpart at the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting last November. Most of the key bilateral arrangements (like the regular China-Philippines Bilateral Consultation Mechanism on the South China Sea, which is exactly what it sounds like) are wired through the two countries’ foreign ministries instead. So this is less about pulling the plug on an extant defence-ministerial dialogue, than Beijing making it clear there will not be one while Teodoro is on the other end.

Man of the hour

Myanmar’s leader, Min Aung Hlaing, got the full red-carpet treatment in Beijing during his state visit from 15-19 June: bouquet on arrival, PLA guard of honour, 21-gun salute, Golden Hall banquet—a real class act. Eighteen MoUs rounded out the trip.

While he’s visited China before as head of the military junta, Myanmar’s (now notionally civilian) leader hasn’t previously received the full head-of-state treatment. India—which was Min Aung Hlaing’s first destination abroad as president a few weeks earlier—pointedly withheld those honours, and kept media coverage to a minimum to avoid overtly legitimising the government in Naypyidaw. China has done the exact opposite. In the joint statement, it’s gone as far as calling for Myanmar’s ‘full, equal and constructive’ participation in ASEAN mechanisms and the UN—from both of which the junta has been barred since the 2021 coup.

News from the neighbourhood

• The same day he got sanctioned, Teodoro signed a Mutual Logistics Support Arrangement with Canada’s defence minister David McGuinty. It’s the fourth agreement of that kind Manila’s made since 2021—Australia, New Zealand, and Japan holding the others—on top of a similar long-standing arrangement with the United States. Like those, the Canadian MLSA has an accompanying Status of Visiting Forces Agreement—Canada’s was signed a few months back—includes an underlying political commitment to deeper defence cooperation.

  • The logistics arrangement allows the two forces to exchange logistical support during combined exercises, training, deployments and operations. It builds on the Philippines–Canada Status of Visiting Forces Agreement signed in November 2025.

Oceania

Moving target

Earlier this month, Papua New Guinea’s government made a surprise announcement: while the PNG parliament will soon vote on whether to ratify Bougainville’s non-binding 2019 independence referendum, that vote will now require a three-quarters majority to pass.

The president of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), Ismael Toroama, probably isn’t alone in suspecting Port Moresby of putting its thumb on the scale. For a constitutional amendment—which this isn’t, though it’s sort of in the same neighbourhood—PNG generally requires two-thirds of the parliament to vote ‘yes’. Last week Toroama accused the PNG government of violating the 2025 Melanesian Agreement, which requires a vote in the PNG parliament to ratify the referendum outcome but says nothing about majorities, and called for the UN to step in. Meanwhile, the ABG’s vice-president, Ezekiel Masatt, has hinted at the possibility of a unilateral declaration of independence if PNG lawmakers don’t approve the referendum, although he noted the ABG is in ‘no rush to make that declaration’ and intends to continue the process in good faith.

Mind you, even if the three-quarters bar in the PNG parliament is met, the plan outlined by PNG Prime Minister James Marape on 22 June envisions a 15-year transition period in which Bougainville will be required to meet benchmarks on financial self-sufficiency, peace and stability before independence can be granted. If the vote fails, it’s also a 15-year transition period, in which, pending Bougainville’s achievement of other ‘agreed benchmarks’, the parliament will vote on the referendum again.

So, it’s independence by 2041 at the earliest—a long wait from the 2027 date provisionally agreed in 2021. The ABG, less than impressed by this timeline, has countered with its own: Bougainville proposes to prepare for greater self-government until September 2027, after which point it would be granted maximum autonomy until full independence in 2030. No comment as yet from Port Moresby.

All the while, recent talks between PNG’s foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko and his Australian counterpart Penny Wong to finalise the Pukpuk defence pact have been chugging along. Both countries, according to Wong’s statement to press, have completed domestic processes to ratify Pukpuk, which should enter into force ‘in the near future’. It could hardly be far from either minister’s mind that the Bougainville referendum—which returned a 97.7 per cent vote for independence—was a core element of the peace agreement that ended a ten-year conflict in 2001. The potential re-emergence of violence has been the subtext of all subsequent negotiations. If it does, it will become, in an increasingly concrete sense, Australia’s problem.

News from the family

• On 16 June, regional media reported that French authorities had reduced polling stations in Nouméa from 57 to nine ahead of New Caledonia’s 28 June provincial elections. Independence advocates have criticised the move, arguing that it will disproportionately affect working-class indigenous Kanak voters—not incidentally, their main base of support.

  • New Caledonia’s much-anticipated provincial election—the first since the 2021 independence referendum—is set to take place after an over 18-month delay caused by the riots that resulted in the deaths of 14 people the last time it was attempted. Proposed voter reform is behind the unrest—specifically, attempts to politically enfranchise the one-fifth of New Caledonia’s population who remained ineligible to vote in local elections under the Nouméa Accord.

  • A watered-down version of voter reform passed the French parliament last month, granting 10,000 voters—all born in New Caledonia—the right to vote for the first time in the upcoming election. While controversial, unrest has not re-emerged, although some ATMs have been vandalised, telecommunications poles stolen, and alcohol sales temporarily banned until election day.

  • Meanwhile, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu—who was recently reappointed to the post after he quit the role—has highlighted the risk of foreign interference in the election, citing the involvement of malign state actors’ in the 2024 riots (three guesses who that might be).

• It’s now come to light that the Canberra trip made by Solomon Islands’ new prime minister Matthew Wale a few weeks ago had another item on the agenda: a Pacific-wide security pact.

  • While the vision of a ‘Pacific-led’ security architecture has generated plenty of rhetoric over the past decade, practical follow-through has remained piecemeal. A formal multilateral security treaty, if achieved, would mark a significant shift from the region’s current machinery that’s largely declarative, non-binding and dependent on political consensus rather than clear commitments.

• Vanuatu will be excluded from Australia’s Pacific Engagement Visa ballot—a government program which annually offers permanent residency to about 3000 citizens of eligible Pacific states—for the coming financial year. The omission is notable; it’s the first time Vanuatu has been ineligible since the program was established in 2024.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 29 May 2026 - 11 June 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

In water writ

A few pages deep in the readout from the Takaichi-Marcos summit on 28 May, there’s an innocuous-looking paragraph. Japan and the Philippines, so it says, will initiate formal negotiations to delimit the maritime boundaries between their exclusive economic zones and continental shelves.

You’d be forgiven for wondering where those are; if you’ve got a map with both countries on it, odds are you can’t see the islands responsible. Japan’s Hateruma and the Philippines’ Mavulis Island (total land area: four Canberra suburbs) are about 200 nautical miles apart, meaning there’s a massive overlap in the area either country could legally claim as an EEZ, and no legal definition of what they actually do claim. Trouble is, that overlap happens to include a sizeable chunk of ocean that both Chinas consider theirs.

Here’s the thing. One of the ground rules of international law is that bilateral agreements don’t prejudice the claims of third parties. Meaning—and this is the official Japanese view of the situation—whatever lines Tokyo and Manila draw can’t erase anyone else’s. In practice, it’s never that simple. A treaty can still affect facts on the ground—by changing where fishing fleets or coast guards feel entitled to go, for example—in ways which challenge another claimant’s practical control over their EEZ. Since the only major maritime disputes Japan and the Philippines have had in that area were with Taiwan, not each other, it’s safe to say Taipei understands that pretty well; hence, while its foreign ministry agrees with Japan’s reading of the law, there’s considerable public debate on how much more should be done to safeguard Taiwanese fishing rights. If the Lai government hasn’t gone further than seeking consultation with Japan, it’s mainly because there’s a bigger problem closer at hand: the China Coast Guard and the PRC Ministry of Transport, who as of the first week of June have discovered some laws they urgently need to enforce in the waters east of Taiwan.

China’s left no doubt it considers the Japan-Philippines boundary talks illegal, invalid, et cetera; the tough-sounding ‘absolutely will not allow’ and ‘reap what they sow’ language is boilerplate when it comes to Taiwan-sovereignty issues, and that’s exactly what they view this as. Sending civilian vessels hundreds of kilometres beyond Taiwan on ‘special maritime traffic law enforcement operations’ is, however, a novelty. Sure, the PLA Navy’s been out there on and off for a few years (in fact, the Liaoning carrier group is still somewhere east of Luzon, not far away) and recent major exercises around Taiwan such as JOINT SWORD 2024A have started including large CCG components. But while Coast Guard and nominally civilian-led activities of this kind have become common in the South China Sea—asserting a claim by performatively doing the same maritime traffic control and policing you’d do inside your own EEZ—they hadn’t, until last week, been visible in Taiwan’s eastern approaches.

News from abroad

• On 29 May, Japan’s defence ministry announced that four JSDF officers would be sent to NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU) for one year, with replacement after the tour ends. The officers, two from the ground forces and one each from the air and maritime SDF, arrived at NSATU Headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, the same day.

  • Japan’s been a major provider of financial and non-lethal aid to Ukraine since 2022, but as far as we know this is the first time Tokyo has ever put its uniformed personnel inside a NATO command (even a non-combat one like NSATU).

• On 31 May, South Korea’s defence minister Ahn Gyu-back told press that ‘discussions regarding a potential ACSA [with Japan]’ had taken place on the sidelines. An Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) would routinise military logistical support to each other—food, fuel, ammunition, maintenance services, and so on—during joint exercises and operations, replacing the messy suite of ad hoc arrangements they currently use.

  • You might recall Korea’s defence ministry saying back in May that an ACSA with Japan was off the table. Wouldn’t be the first time Seoul has flip-flopped on this sort of thing; if the 2016 Korea-Japan agreement on military information-sharing is any guide, even a signed treaty is no firm guarantee.

  • Both countries already have ACSAs with other partners, including the US and Australia, but not with each other. Getting one has been an ambition for Tokyo’s national security hawks since at least 2013, but it’s a sensitive issue over the water. Any move on Seoul’s part that raises the odds of Japanese boots on Korean ground during a crisis has a lot of ugly historical baggage to carry.

Southeast Asia

Keep the receipts

Every year the Shangri-La Dialogue briefly sends Singapore rocketing up the ‘defence ministers per capita’ leaderboard, with two main results: keynote speeches as interpretable as the Gospels, and meetings on the side for would-be artists of the deal. Sometimes, alas, of the no-deal. Norway’s defence minister, who met his Malaysian counterpart on 31 May, apologised for his government’s decision back in March to revoke the export licence for Malaysia’s purchase of Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile (NSM). But the decision stands.

Malaysia—which had not only paid over 90% of the roughly US$150 million contract price, but was expecting delivery in a matter of days when Oslo pulled the rug—understandably wants a refund more than an apology. While EU and NATO countries have been tightening controls on defence exports for several years (witness Italy’s 2021 decision to block bombs and missiles going to Saudi Arabia), they generally don’t revoke licences for active contracts unless there’s domestic political pressure and/or a particularly bloody fight from which they could be credibly accused of profiting. Neither applies here; it’s also very unusual for a contract as large as Malaysia’s NSM purchase to get blocked by the seller so close to completion. Norway’s official explanation is pretty terse: the security environment in Europe and globally has changed, so, for that reason, ‘exports of some of the most sensitive Norwegian-developed defence technologies will be limited to our allies and closest partners’. It may be that Malaysia’s vaunted non-alignment is no longer close enough for comfort; you can imagine how having a Russian land border might put Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim’s occasional visits to Moscow in a different light. Or maybe it’s those Sukhoi jets Malaysia’s air force operates, sustained by a limited company with partial Russian ownership—if, like Oslo, you want NSM to keep the Baltic Fleet awake at night, you might not want to give Russian engineers an excuse to be anywhere near it. Or maybe it’s just another inadvertent consequence of the State Department’s controls on NSM’s American-made components.

Whatever the real story, the understandable perception that a signed contract from a Western defence manufacturer isn’t necessarily something your force planners can trust is a bit of a stumbling block if you’re trying to make security in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific indivisible. NATO’s renewed efforts to keep high-end capabilities like NSM inside the house come at a time when demand from outside is going nowhere but up. All the Southeast Asian countries whose coastlines bound the South China Sea have the same problem—its name is the People’s Liberation Army Navy, and its size is ‘bigger than yours’—and the same incentive to chase asymmetric advantage where they can. India’s BrahMos cruise missile solves roughly the same problem as NSM (bigger, faster, louder, but it still sinks a ship for less than it costs to build another) and has already found buyers in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Ironically, it’s a Russian joint venture.

News from the neighbourhood

• On 2 June Cambodia formally initiated UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) conciliation proceedings over its long-running maritime boundary dispute with Thailand. The UN will convene independent legal experts nominated by both sides to examine the case and produce (non-binding) proposals for a solution. On 5 June Thailand agreed to participate.

  • With some grumbling. Bangkok clearly wanted a new bilateral mechanism, but since it was the Thai cabinet that tore up the previous bilateral dispute-resolution framework at the beginning of May, the Thai foreign minister’s suggestion that Cambodia should have ‘give[n] talks a chance’ before going to the UN can only raise an eyebrow.

  • Thailand’s prime minister has indicated that all other bilateral talks will be frozen while UNCLOS conciliation plays out, including those on the (comparatively much more dangerous) land boundary dispute.

Oceania

Quad erat demonstrandum

The latest Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting wrapped in New Delhi two weeks ago, with one unusual outcome: a joint infrastructure project to upgrade Fiji’s ports. Unusual because the Quad as such (as distinct from its individual members, which have done this sort of thing a fair amount) isn’t known for delivering infrastructure projects, in the Pacific or anywhere else. Its genuinely joint efforts are mostly in the enabling layer—infrastructure-related scholarships, development financing coordination, technical assistance and so on—but that’s about as close as it’s ever got to pouring concrete. The plan (still more a sketch than a portrait; check back later for details) is to change that.

If you were going to start anywhere, Fiji’s a good choice. Fiji is a regional hub, with ambitions to become even more so; exclude the immense LNG outflows from Papua New Guinea and you’re already looking at a significant fraction of the entire Pacific’s trade volume. Its major ports at Suva and Lautoka (which, per foreign minister Sakiasi Ditoka’s later remarks to press, would be the Quad scheme’s top priority) are also getting old. The national port operator has already identified the need for a major buildout to accommodate rising agricultural exports; you might recall it was a topic of discussion at prime minister Rabuka’s first meeting with Xi Jinping back in 2023, though Beijing doesn’t seem to have moved on it. (Extensive Chinese trade exposure and investments in practically every other part of Fiji notwithstanding.)

Earlier this year, Fiji Ports held talks with US officials on two distinct redevelopment concepts: a US$181 million port upgrade plan, and a US$1.82 billion relocation plan for the port of Suva. If Australian foreign minister Penny Wong’s characterisation of the Quad scheme as its ‘strongest ever commitment’ to the Pacific is to be taken at face value, that is the ballpark in which it’s probably playing: a considerable undertaking even at the low end. Wong’s US counterpart Marco Rubio has said that the Fiji project will serve as a model for others in future.

News from the family

• A month on from the Pacific Islands Forum’s decision to invoke the Biketawa Declaration, there appears to be no relief on the horizon for the fuel crisis in the Pacific. Samoa announced an ‘amber alert’ last week, meaning the country’s sole power provider will now start load shedding and Samoan schools will move to remote learning. Meanwhile, Fiji and Nauru have increased their fuel price caps, with Nauru’s maximum diesel price to increase by about 40%.

  • In a small, yet very ‘un-Pacific’ move, Jude Hofschneider, a Northern Mariana Islands legislator, has called for the territory to consider nuclear power in an effort to alleviate its fuel troubles. New Zealand’s defence minister Chris Penk had a very similar idea last week.

• New Zealand’s new budget sets aside NZ$1.2 billion for foreign aid next fiscal year—an increase of NZ$116 million over last year’s budget. An additional NZ$110 million will also be spent specifically on Indo-Pacific aid over three years starting in FY 2027/28. On the other hand, the Ministry of Pacific Peoples will be cut by NZ$2.8 million over four years.

  • Concurrently, the New Zealand Defence Force will see an increase of NZ$3.3 billion in spending, with spending towards combating the trans-Pacific drug trade also to be increased.

• The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has forecast an 80% chance of El Niño conditions forming between June and August, and a 90% chance of it happening sometime later. WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo noted the possibility of severe impacts on agriculture, energy, trade, water, and supply chains across the Pacific and beyond.

• The Solomon Islands security pact with China will not be publicly released despite new prime minister Matthew Wale’s initial indications he would do so once in power. Wale—a long-time opponent of the agreement—cited a non-disclosure clause within the pact, saying that he cannot release it as ‘the Prime Minister of a responsible government’.

  • This comes off the back of Prime Minister Wale’s visits to Australia and New Zealand, where he’s publicly entertained hopes of a new treaty with Australia along the lines of those Australia has with Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and PNG.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 15 May 2026 - 28 May 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Playing ball

At Incheon Airport on 17 May, the members of Naegohyang Women’s Football Club—for those not yet hooked on the high-stakes world of North Korean premier league women’s soccer, that’s one of the top teams—arrived, strolled up to Immigration, and presented their passports.

No, really, this is news. North Korean athletes haven’t visited the South since December 2018—a rather more optimistic moment, during the brief thaw in relations under President Moon Jae-in. Back then, both Koreas officially entertained the view that they were each the only one, with part of their territory temporarily occupied by some non-state armed group. Visitors from one to the other weren’t considered to be arriving from a foreign country, so no passport was required.

Since late 2023, Pyongyang has changed its mind on this point, and its latest constitution seems quite convinced there are two sovereign states on the peninsula, not one. Which puts Seoul—and not least the officials at Incheon—in a tricky spot. Its constitution still holds the traditional one-Korea view, so visitors from the North need special permits issued outside the normal immigration system. Because the soccer team had those—the Unification Ministry had already spent US$200,000 toward a cheer squad for them, so it wasn’t about to turn them away at the airport—the show of passports was more of a political stunt. Refusing them would have prompted an avoidable diplomatic incident, but stamping them would have been illegal: as far as South Korean law is concerned, they’re not issued by a recognised country. In the end they were treated purely as ID documents and not otherwise acknowledged.

As an illustration of the new shape the North Korea problem has now assumed for Seoul, the passport incident couldn’t have been timed better: the Lee administration’s first Unification White Paper was released one day later. It’s a considerably more dovish document than the previous one, which was composed under former President Yoon. You’ll find much less on human rights and freedom, and much more on dialogue and peaceful coexistence. It acknowledges, for the first time in a UWP, the ‘reality that the South and North exist as de facto two states’—about as conciliatory toward the North’s new position as it’s possible to get without a constitutional amendment.

Lee’s northern policy isn’t out of character for the Korean progressive left, but it’s an odd pairing with the increasingly hard-power-centric security architecture—and the closer ties with Japan—he’s chosen to carry over from Yoon. The summit with Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi at Andong on 19 May only sharpened the contradiction: both agreed to cooperate on the North Korea issue, but Lee emphasised peaceful coexistence (and avoided mentioning the North at all in his press statements) whereas Takaichi underscored the nuclear and missile threat. Japan’s expressed interest in securing an Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA)—a treaty to facilitate cooperation on military logistics—with South Korea was rebuffed earlier this month.

News from abroad

• Reportage from Kyodo on 21 May indicates the US military will deploy Typhon and HIMARS missile launchers to Kanoya Airbase in southwestern Japan later this year to support the VALIANT SHIELD and ORIENT SHIELD joint exercises between June and September.

  • China’s foreign ministry made the obligatory strongly worded statement in opposition, and it’s no mystery why. The main purpose of a Typhon land-based missile launcher is to shoot Tomahawk cruise missiles—you know, the ones that can range practically all of China’s eastern seaboard, and North Korea to boot, while sitting on a driveway in Kagoshima.

  • In the small print: the systems will stay in Japan afterwards, stored at an undisclosed US military base. First time we’ve seen an arrangement like that for Typhon. It was deployed to the US Marine Corps base at Iwakuni in September last year to support Exercise RESOLUTE DRAGON, and removed that November after criticism from Japanese civil society groups.

• South Korea’s roadmap for acquiring nuclear-powered submarines was announced on 26 May. Having received Washington’s green light last year (can’t enrich uranium for use in naval nuclear power reactors without it), the plan is now to build a fleet of at least four SSNs entirely through domestic industry. The first is to be launched by the mid-2030s and enter service by the late 2030s.

Southeast Asia

The road to Mandalay

With its civilian coat of paint still drying, Myanmar’s military junta now has two big items on the to-do list. First, normalise relations with the neighbours; second, do something about the whole ‘not controlling half the country’ thing. Since April, the military’s renewed offensive in Myanmar’s border regions has tried to split the difference, and it has recently produced significant results. The towns of Mawtaung in the south near Thailand, and Tonzang, in northwestern Chin State near India, were reportedly retaken on 19 and 20 May respectively after weeks of heavy air and drone strikes.

Those towns sit on overland trade corridors, and both had been controlled by regional ethnic armed organisations for some months—Tonzang since May 2024. Refocusing military strategy on these areas isn’t simply about denying tax revenue to the anti-junta forces (though it is about that). By putting itself in a position to control the border—customs, policing, immigration, all the normal state functions—the junta gives its neighbours a strong incentive to treat it as the legitimate dialogue partner inside Myanmar. For Thailand especially, which has seen an influx of refugees, stray munitions and transnational crime out of Myanmar’s civil war, stabilising the border has been a high priority for some time—and with the anti-junta forces as fragmented as they are, the alternatives for achieving it are not especially promising.

While Thailand’s previous efforts to engage the military government got a cold reception from the rest of ASEAN—which put the junta in the diplomatic doghouse in 2021—recent months have seen the organisation shift somewhat toward Bangkok’s point of view. After discussions at the ASEAN Summit in Cebu in early May, a virtual meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers, including Myanmar’s, is now expected to occur in the ‘very near future’. It’s no consolation to the civil war’s many victims, but the logic is as cold and hard as it gets. The junta’s military position is slowly strengthening, and the existing ASEAN strategy of refusing high-level engagement until the junta progresses the 2021 peace process hasn’t delivered results. Meanwhile, China—with nothing invested in restoring democracy to Myanmar, but a great deal in the heavy rare earth elements buried in northern Kachin State—has demonstrated time and again that it can broker ceasefires and shape the civil war on the ground. So ASEAN can either engage and risk legitimising the junta, or abstain and watch Beijing play the by-no-means-impartial referee—driving the principle of ASEAN centrality into practical irrelevance.

News from the neighbourhood

• On 19 May, Indonesia’s defence minister, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, informed lawmakers of an American offer to develop Kertajati Airport in West Java (about 150 kilometres east of Jakarta) into a regional maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility for US-made C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft.

  • The offer seems to have been accepted in principle, but it’s still at the conceptual stage; a definite contract and timeline are nowhere to be found.

  • While there are existing C-130 service centres in Malaysia and Singapore, the notion of a single Indonesian facility to centralise C-130 sustainment ‘throughout Asia’ at US expense—as Indonesian media have portrayed the Pentagon’s offer—would be a step change if realised, and a very difficult one to treat as a merely commercial proposition. The C-130 is the backbone of the US military’s tactical airlift capability; if we’re talking about shuffling high-end missile systems around the First Island Chain in a pre-conflict scenario, the C-130 is what’s doing it. What shape this MRO facility takes, if any, will test Indonesia’s traditional policy of non-alignment.

Oceania

What’s in a name?

Last week, Nauru’s cabinet issued an unusually firm directive to the effect that officials should not only refer to Taiwan strictly as ‘Taiwan Province of China’, but refrain from any formal engagement with the ‘province’. Taiwan’s trade office (read: unofficial embassy) in Suva was taken by surprise, but probably not too much. As recently as 2024, Nauru not only engaged with Taiwan but was one of the few countries to formally recognise it over the PRC.

It’s hard to call Nauru’s stance on Taiwan anything but pragmatic; the country has switched recognition back and forth before, usually (not to put too fine a point on it) following the money. You might recall that in August last year, Nauru signed up to a ‘mysterious’ investment program valued at A$1 billion—an incredible sum for a nation of only 12,000 people, around four times its annual GDP—to be delivered by a Chinese rural development company nobody seems to have heard of. Details are scant. Ostensibly a comprehensive infrastructure package implicating energy, resource extraction, agriculture and green tech, it’s just the sort of thing for which the Nauru-Australia Treaty—which wasn’t to enter into force until a month afterward, in September 2025—would have obliged prior consultation with Canberra. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade indicated it’d look into the matter, but so far nothing’s come to light in public; when and how the money’s even being delivered is up in the air.

It’s an awkward spot, all told. The security provisions in Australia’s treaty with Nauru are unusually strong, and amount to what’s very nearly a Canberra veto on future foreign investment in sensitive sectors. Quid pro quo, of course: Australia’s giving Nauru a lot of money (A$100 million in budget support over five years, for starters) for that privilege. But none of that is incompatible with a partner hardening its diplomatic posture in China’s favour, and a vast, vague, opaque deal slipping in just before the gate closed is a vulnerability Australia’s Pacific realpolitik has to live with. DFAT has told Parliament that treaty mechanisms will apply to any later action on that A$1 billion. But the Chinese deal still gives Beijing and Nauru a framework to build on, and leaves Canberra policing the implementation of a deal its treaty framework missed by that much. Money may buy concessions, but lasting alignment is priceless.

News from the family

• The French National Assembly expanded the New Caledonian local electoral roll last week to include over 10,000 voters who were not eligible under the 1998 Noumea Accord—all of whom were born in New Caledonia.

  • Emmanuel Tjibaou, the largest New Caledonian independence party’s representative in the French legislature, opposed the reform and stated that the timing was inappropriate given that the campaign for the new Caledonian elections next month had already begun. Notably, this is an election that has been delayed since 2024 due to civil unrest.

  • In 2024, President Macron’s attempts to extend local voting rights to all 37,000 electorally disenfranchised French citizens in the territory led to months of riots and unrest. Independence advocates fear that the section of society unable to vote is largely pro-France, and their enfranchisement would tip the local balance too far in France’s favour.

• Meanwhile, PNG Prime Minister James Marape was in France for an official visit last week. Prior to his departure, Marape noted that France was one of PNG’s most important global strategic partners as both a resident power in the Pacific and a leading European economy. On the agenda was trade, investment, aid, climate, aviation and the strategic situation in the Indo-Pacific.

  • One thing that was squarely not on the agenda was New Caledonia. Instead, after receiving a lengthy round of applause, Marape sat in the National Assembly while it engaged in debate regarding the controversial voter roll reform in New Caledonia. This continues PNG’s pragmatic approach to Melanesian separatist movements in West Papua and New Caledonia, prioritising strategic relationships with powerful partners like Indonesia and France over Melanesian solidarity.

  • Additionally, PNG accepted US$1 million in humanitarian assistance from China two weeks ago, continuing the trend of ongoing economic cooperation.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 1 May 2026 - 14 May 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

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Northeast Asia

You scratch my back…

North Korean soldiers—about 120 of them—marched in the Victory Day parade in Moscow on 9 May. First time that’s happened. The annual parade through Red Square commemorates the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945; it’s Russia’s most militarised public holiday, and as with Soviet history in general, the Russian government tries its best to make it ‘on message’. North Korea sent combat forces to support Russia’s war on Ukraine in October 2024, and you might recall the Kremlin initially denied it was happening. In the past year, however, Moscow has doubled down on military cooperation with Pyongyang to the point of defending it at a 30 April UN Security Council debate—a debate, no less, on the North Korea sanctions regime Russia helped create in the 2000s. (The Russian permanent representative’s claim that their relationship is ‘in all areas in accordance with the UN Charter’ requires no commentary.) Now, sixteen years ago British, French, and American troops marched, you instead see the symbolic side of a North Korean partnership that’s already operational.

Yet the parade itself was a sad affair—barely forty-five minutes long, with Moscow under a mobile data blackout for fear of Ukrainian drones. That could also explain the absence of the usually slow-moving column of armoured vehicles and other military hardware, but the truth is probably simpler: the front in Ukraine hadn’t any to spare. All across Russia, military parades for this year’s Victory Day were scaled back or called off, in some cases for the first time in decades.

It’s times like these you can see the hard transactional core seep through the comradely trappings of the relationship. Russia is in straitened circumstances, and North Korea has what it very much wants: artillery shells in Soviet calibres, ballistic missiles, and manpower. Russia also has what North Korea wants: food, fuel, a deep bench of talent for high-tech weapons systems, precisely zero regard for the UN sanctions regime, and the opportunity to gain combat experience at the very sharpest end of contemporary land warfare. The rest is, shall we say, the art of the deal.

Technical aid is already accelerating Pyongyang’s missile program, as weapons bought by Moscow and fielded in Ukraine trickle battlefield performance data back to engineers in North Korea. On 12 May, reportage from CNN disclosed a still more significant development: the Russian freighter Ursa Major, which sank mysteriously in the Mediterranean in December 2024 while underway to Vladivostok, is now believed to have been carrying two submarine nuclear reactors. Not many buyers for those. While their loss will have set back Pyongyang’s effort to develop a nuclear-powered submarine capability, neither it, nor Russia’s assistance to it, show any sign of stopping. And as long as the Russian war machine keeps grinding away in Donbass and North Korea’s nuclear weapons keep soaking up US and allied attention, Kim Jong Un will be hard put to find a warmer handshake than Vladimir Putin’s.

News from abroad

• Remember Taiwan’s legislature blocking President Lai’s US$40 billion supplementary defence budget earlier in the year? Well, they passed it—just not the whole thing. A pared-back US$25 billion budget was approved by the Legislative Yuan on 8 May.

  • It’s looking like the approved money will mostly be used to buy weapons from the US. Lai’s ambitions for a domestic industrial buildout—particularly for drones and counter-drone systems—will have to wait.

• On 8 May Japan’s second-largest oil refiner, Idemitsu Kosan, purchased its first shipment of Russian crude oil. Three days earlier, a smaller refiner, Taiyo Oil, received a shipment of Russian crude oil at its facility in western Japan.

  • Japan imports about 95% of its oil from the Middle East. Well, it did; then Operation EPIC FURY happened. Idemitsu and Taiyo are the first Japanese refiners to begin Russian oil imports since the conflict in the Middle East disrupted supply.

Southeast Asia

Your guess is as good as mine

There’s about 27,000 square kilometres of the Gulf of Thailand which Cambodia and Thailand have disputed since the 1970s. Your next question: vast amounts of untapped oil and gas? You bet. In 2001 the two countries signed an MoU to work towards a deal for finally pinning down the maritime boundary and jointly developing the resources in the Overlapping Claims Area (OCA). A quarter-century of diplomatic wrangling hasn’t produced any such deal, and on 5 May the Thai cabinet unilaterally terminated the MoU.

The OCA, and the prospective future division of hydrocarbon revenues lurking beneath, is a touchy issue for nationalist sentiment in Bangkok and Phnom Penh alike. The past 18 months of sporadic armed conflict on the land border created the charged situation in which Thailand’s conservative-populist Bhumjaithai Party was swept into power by voters back in February. Cancelling the 2001 MoU was one of their election promises. Whether or not it conceded too much to Cambodia, as some sectors of Thai opinion maintain, a replacement will be in order. Bangkok still wants to talk—they can’t get the gas otherwise—but on different terms. They’ve indicated they want to manage negotiations going forward in accordance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Cambodia is more forward-leaning, but in the same direction: it wants to take the matter to the UNCLOS compulsory conciliation mechanism. (That’s the one used for the first time—so far the only time—in the long-running maritime boundary dispute between Australia and Timor-Leste.)

Wherever the new framework ends up, if it’s in some way under UNCLOS it’ll be more public and more grounded in international law than the quite opaque backroom diplomacy characteristic of the old MoU. It makes sense that Cambodia, being the smaller country, sees putting a neutral third party in the middle of the dispute as giving it better odds of a favourable result. (Though not a binding one: UNCLOS conciliations only create recommendations, not legal awards.) Thailand, historically, prefers to keep things bilateral where sovereignty issues are on the line. But the closed-door MoU process clearly hasn’t done the job, and Bangkok knows that it holds more of the cards: its offshore energy sector is immensely larger and decades more mature than Cambodia’s, so in terms of practical return on ‘joint development’ of the OCA they’d probably do relatively well out of almost any compromise. The great risk is that a more public-facing process framed in legal language will inflame the same domestic political dynamics that have kept a compromise out of reach for decades.

Shoulder to shoulder

After nineteen days of activities for 17,000 troops from seven countries, Exercise BALIKATAN 2026 wrapped up on 8 May. As a fair summary it’s hard to go past Adm. Samuel Paparo’s remarks at the closing ceremony: BALIKATAN has decisively evolved from a bilateral training day for Washington and Manila to a ‘full-scale, multinational mission rehearsal for the defense of the Philippines.’

That’s a mission with more than a few moving parts, and probably the most notable outcome from BALIKATAN was the field trial of a new Common Operating Picture (COP) for multinational forces. A COP, to its friends, is what it says on the tin: a shared source of real-time information on the battlefield that a military force can use to inform its decisions and keep its left hands up to speed on what the right hands are doing.. This one in particular, designed to meet the needs of prospective complex multi-domain coalition operations in the Pacific, has been an ambition of US Indo-Pacific Command for many years.

The slow going’s understandable: anyone who’s had the pleasure of working with a large business’s IT system knows how hard this can get inside a single building. As of BALIKATAN 2026, the US now seems to have the system in a working state. In live-fire training in early May, US, Filipino, Canadian, and Japanese forces—the first Japanese combat troops to set foot on the Philippines since 1945, by the way, and with an invitation this time—used it to coordinate fire from land, sea, and air elements to defeat a simulated amphibious landing. That’s no mean feat. You’ve got different software, different languages, different data security regimes—and they all need to talk in real time under battlefield conditions. It’s not as photogenic as the mandatory ‘stuff blowing up’ you see in major exercises—plenty of that at BALIKATAN, to be sure—but it’s the kind of backbone a coalition of modern, high-tech armed forces demands if it’s going to get anything done at all.

News from the neighbourhood

• Myanmar’s junta has moved former president Aung San Suu Kyi from prison to house arrest. Suu Kyi has been a prisoner since the military coup in 2021, and an image of her broadcast on state media earlier in the month is the first photograph of the Nobel Laureate seen in years.

• Exercise BERSAMA SHIELD—one of the major exercises held under the Five Power Defence Arrangements by Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK—finished up on 3 May.

  • It’s much smaller in scale than BALIKATAN (only about a thousand troops participating), but it still saw a few notable firsts, including the incorporation of information operations into the exercise lineup.

Oceania

Trade routes

Fiji came close last week to declaring a state of emergency over its widening drug crisis. Police and military patrols have stepped up across the country, and Suva has seen a run of raids and surge operations. The declaration was ultimately judged unnecessary, but the issue has nonetheless acquired a political edge: in mid-April, a suspected drug lord died in military custody—with a murder investigation ongoing—and in the same month the defence minister’s daughter was struck by a vehicle attempting to force its way through a checkpoint.

Fiji has lately become a transit hub for illicit drugs crossing the Pacific, and it’s no mystery why. Australia’s growing demand and constrained access to supply mean that cocaine from Central and South American can fetch street prices here of up to A$400 per gram—among the highest in the world, and more than enough to make sense on a cartel spreadsheet. But products like these tend to create markets wherever they go, and in recent years UN and Australian authorities have watched the Pacific drug trade’s waystations become destinations as well. Drug-running ‘narco-submarines’ now ply the waters of the Solomon Islands and the Marshall Islands, while local seizure volumes have grown explosively. In 2012, the drug trade was a problem Fijian police measured in milligrams; now they measure it in tonnes.

It’s one more wrinkle in a security environment that’s far from smooth even on a good day. Fiji’s near-emergency declaration came as Canberra and Suva were concluding negotiations over the Vuvale Union Treaty—a comprehensive framework for partnership across multiple policy areas, with security in the forefront. Fiji’s Cabinet approved the treaty on 8 May; Canberra will likely follow soon. Australian officials highlighted the Treaty’s potential to facilitate further capacity-building for Fijian police. They’ll need it. Fiji’s 2024 Counter Narcotics Strategy identified persistent under-resourcing and inadequate legal frameworks as ‘critical factors’ hampering Fijian law enforcement. There’s also an integrity issue, rounding out the drug trade’s broader test of state capacity: last year Prime Minister Rabuka ordered the Counter Narcotics Bureau shut down barely a year on from its creation, after multiple high-profile arrests of CNB’s own officers were arrested for methamphetamine smuggling.

News from the family

• This week, Vanuatu’s cabinet approved a revised version of the Nakamal Agreement—the security pact with Australia whose signing fell through last year.

  • The revised version won’t limit Chinese investment in Vanuatu—a sticking point for ni-Vanuatu leaders. The revised version now has to receive Australia’s approval.

• PNG Prime Minister James Marape was in Guangzhou, China last fortnight seeking to shore up infrastructure investment. Marape was particularly interested in Chinese investment in water infrastructure, ports, and resource development.

• France and Vanuatu have been in a diplomatic spat since last week after the ni-Vanuatu government hosted the leadership of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS)—a New Caledonian independence group. Authorities in New Caledonia suspended trade cooperation with Vanuatu in response, and the French Ambassador in Port Vila took to Facebook to protest the ni-Vanuatu government.

  • Despite heightened tensions, a freight line between Vanuatu and New Caledonia still made its maiden voyage this week, with officials stating that the fundamental friendship between France and Vanuatu remains intact.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 17 April 2026 - 30 April 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Terms and conditions apply

On 21 April, Japan revised its defence export policy. You could just as well argue it’s only now started to have one. For decades, Japan’s defence industries were only permitted to export finished products with non-lethal purposes: search and rescue, transport, minesweeping, and so on. They’re now permitted to export lethal equipment—exactly what you think it means—to a select list of countries, including Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

While Japan’s massive economy has long allowed it to sustain a high-tech defence sector about the same size as South Korea’s on a modest trickle of GDP, the impact of the historical policy is clear when you take the comparison further. Aggressive state-directed investment and promotion has brought the value of Korea’s defence exports roughly on par with domestic demand for new military equipment. In Japan, domestic demand is almost the entire industry. Australia’s acquisition of the Mogami-class frigate—for which Japan’s and Australia’s defence ministers put ink to paper on 18 April—is only the second transfer of a Japanese-manufactured piece of defence equipment to a foreign military force on record, the first being a very non-lethal air-surveillance radar system sold to the Philippines in 2023.

How much Japanese defence industry can achieve once it’s taken out of the pot, planted, and properly fed and watered is an open question. Deregulation doesn’t automatically make firms competitive—especially if they’ve never really been able to compete on the world market before. South Korean firms with an eye on the competition seem most concerned about Japan’s ships and submarines, whose high unit costs and relatively low production volumes render Japan’s limited experience in leveraging economies of scale less of a disadvantage.

Save the date

South Korea maintains one of the largest and best-equipped militaries in the world, supported by indigenous defence industries most states of comparable size can only envy. Yet if a war broke out tomorrow, Seoul wouldn’t be in charge of the military response. That would fall to Combined Forces Command, a bespoke binational construct set up under the US alliance in 1978—and CFC has always been led by a four-star general in the US Army, with a Korean four-star as deputy.

This was a Cold War expediency, never really meant to be permanent. Speaking before Congress last week, General Xavier Brunson—who currently commands US Forces Korea—said that a joint US-Korean roadmap for meeting the conditions for transfer of wartime operational control by January-March 2029 had been submitted to the Pentagon. The ‘conditions-based’ framework for OPCON transfer established in 2014 after many missed deadlines and postponements stipulated that Korean forces must meet an agreed standard of warfighting capability before Seoul would be put in charge of the combined force. Brunson’s remarks are the first time a US official has publicly revealed when that’s expected to happen.

If realised, it’ll have been a long time coming—more than two decades since it became US and Korean policy to pursue wartime OPCON transfer in 2007, and thirty-five years since peacetime operational control of Korean forces was handed back to Seoul in 1994. While there’s a lot of political impetus on both sides right now—the Trump administration’s desire to see allies do more needs no introduction, and progressives like President Lee are the traditional constituency for a more independent Korean military posture—OPCON transfer is unlikely to solve the core alliance management problems responsible for these decades of to-ing and fro-ing, and may well make them worse. These are issues of trust: Seoul’s trust in Washington to stay committed to its defence, and Washington’s trust in Seoul to be a responsible steward for its strategic aims on the Peninsula.

News from abroad

• So, about that US-Korea trust issue: since about 21 April, the US has begun limiting what intelligence it shares with Seoul on the North’s nuclear program.

  • While there are few confirmed details yet, it’s looking like Unification Minister Jung Dong-young disclosed—in the National Assembly, no less, back in March—US-origin classified material on a North Korean uranium enrichment facility.

• Former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol—already serving a life sentence for that whole ‘attempted insurrection’ thing—is back in court.

  • He’s accused of ordering military drones to overfly Pyongyang in October 2024, with the intent to provoke a North Korean response and create a pretext for imposing martial law. Prosecutors requested an additional 30-year sentence at the closing hearing on 24 April. The court is yet to rule.

  • Willingness to poke a nuclear-armed neighbour in the eye in preparation for a coup d’état could be characterised in a few ways; ‘trustworthy ally behaviour’ isn’t one of them.

• If you’ve been in Pyongyang lately, you might have noticed a few senior Russian officials looking busy. Interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, and defence minister Andrei Belousov have all visited North Korea in the last two weeks for high-level talks with the Kim regime.

  • The visits were occasioned by the opening of a new memorial to the (probably more than 6,000) North Korean soldiers killed fighting alongside Russia in its war on Ukraine since 2024.

  • Belousov’s remarks on the trip, alongside Kim Jong Un’s speech at the memorial’s opening, suggest both sides have a mind to sustain military cooperation for the long haul, beyond whatever settlement might be reached in Ukraine. Russia and North Korea will sign a medium-term cooperation plan out to 2031 later this year.

• On 24 April China placed seven EU companies—including Belgian small-arms manufacturer FN Herstal—on its export control list. The listing prohibits Chinese-origin dual-use items from being sold to the companies concerned. This sort of US-style entity list is a recent innovation for China, and while it’s been used in the past with certain US and Japanese companies, this is the first time EU companies have been listed by the Ministry of Commerce.

  • The official line out of MOFCOM is that the EU companies have been listed for selling arms to Taiwan. That’s probably not the whole story: only the day before, the EU’s latest round of Russia sanctions caught a handful of Chinese companies in the crossfire, drawing an unusually direct protest from MOFCOM.

Southeast Asia

Stuck in the middle with you

The biggest joint US-Philippines exercise of the year, Exercise BALIKATAN, kicked off at Camp Aguinaldo on 20 April. It’s still going, in fact, so we’ll save the details for next time after it wraps up on 8 May. Like every US and allied exercise nowadays, it has produced an equal and opposite PLA Navy (PLAN) exercise. True to form, on 24 April the PLAN held live-fire drills in international waters east of Luzon, led by the Type 055 destroyer Zunyi. Meanwhile the aircraft carrier Liaoning was last seen heading south through the Taiwan Strait on 20 April, and is now believed to be operating with its task group in the South China Sea.

So you’ve currently got two serious PLA naval groupings, one on either side of the Philippines, while a US warfighting exercise plays out in the middle. A gentle reminder, one might conclude. Officially, BALIKATAN’s scenario is defensive and not directed at any country in particular; in practice a good amount of the operational muscle memory it’s designed to build is clearly relevant to a potential US and allied defence of Taiwan—rapidly deploying missiles to the northernmost parts of Luzon, for example.

In the zone

The Pax Silica—a US economic security initiative launched last December, uniting like-minded countries around the idea that semiconductors are somehow important—welcomed the Philippines as its newest partner on 16 April. That announcement had an interesting footnote. Manila will offer 4000 acres of land in the Luzon Economic Corridor as an ‘Economic Security Zone’, which as far as we can tell means a special economic zone with American characteristics.

You can imagine the elevator pitch. Manila has critical minerals, an established high-tech sector, and wants to move up the value chain in both; the US wants to surge (and secure) production for the whole stack supporting modern AI and advanced information technology. A happy marriage between American capital (plus a regulatory environment favourable to same) and Filipino land, labour, and resources.

This isn’t a wholly original idea. The Philippines already has over 400 special economic zones for various purposes, and you can see the DNA of this new ESZ in the Luzon Economic Corridor itself: a Washington-Tokyo-Manila trilateral venture launched back in 2024, with a strong focus on building out semiconductor supply chains. The ESZ idea looks rather like the Trump team putting their own spin on the previous administration’s project. (Let a government that hasn’t done this cast the first stone.) That spin is much more security-forward, and it foreshadows the White House’s vision for Pax Silica’s next step: this ESZ, the announcement claims, will be only the first of a large, interconnected constellation across the Pax Silica partners. The ambition is to turn Pax Silica into ‘a genuine system capable of competing with—and ultimately displacing—the concentrated supply chains on which the world currently depends.’

Sounds good, at least. But ‘concentrated supply chains’ also sounds like a polite euphemism for ‘China’, and if so—well, you’re going to need a lot more ESZs.

I’ve been working on the railroad

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi was in Myanmar the other day, for all the usual reasons: photo, handshake, deepen practical cooperation. Compared to the earlier legs of his trip to Southeast Asia this month—kicking off the new 2+2 mechanism with Cambodia, brokering a five-year Joint Action Plan for partnership with Thailand—the visit to Naypyidaw looked mostly symbolic, with few concrete deliverables. Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing was sworn in as president earlier this month, having won a rather dubious election. Arguably Wang’s trip was about normalising the ‘new’ government, which here means entertaining the pretence that swapping uniforms for civvies has made the junta something other than the junta. There aren’t many international partners willing to do that, and the appointment in January of Tin Maung Swe—ambassador to Beijing since 2022 and something of a China hand—as Myanmar’s foreign minister suggests Naypyidaw wants to capitalise on the one they have.

A few days earlier in the northern city of Lashio, four hundred kilometres of mountains, jungles, and civil war away from the capital, Chinese officials are understood to have held much lower-key meetings with representatives from several of the ethnic armed organisations fighting the junta. What’s interesting isn’t that they’re talking to all sides but that, in Lashio as in Wang Yi’s readout, they’re talking about the same thing: accelerating construction along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC).

CMEC is the white whale of Belt and Road projects. Xi Jinping has spent practically his entire term in office trying to get it built, initially as a joint venture with India and Bangladesh, then as a bilateral project after 2017 as relations soured with the other partners. It hasn’t been going well. Aside from the natural gas and crude oil pipelines (completed 2013 and 2017 respectively) from Kyaukphyu on the Bay of Bengal through to the Chinese border, most of CMEC’s key projects still haven’t left the drawing board. The centrepiece—a high-speed rail link from Kunming in southern China through to Kyaukphyu—has seen rapid progress on the Chinese side, but no construction inside Myanmar.

Understandable, really: megaprojects are hard even when you’re not building them in a war zone. But the strategic case for CMEC—a conduit for trade cutting right from China’s inland Yunnan province to the Indian Ocean, bypassing the eminently disruptable Strait of Malacca—is as compelling as ever. Getting construction on the Kyaukphyu end of the railroad moving as early as May this year (as unconfirmed reports indicate China intends to do) means facing reality: the port of Kyaukphyu is in Rakhine State, and Rakhine State is almost entirely controlled by the Arakan Army, not Naypyidaw. This is the long-term trend: since 2023, in Rakhine as elsewhere, China’s engagement with Myanmar has quietly diversified beyond dealings solely with the junta. Much as Beijing would prefer it otherwise, the military government now controls barely half the country and is no longer capable of securing many Chinese investments. Beijing certainly doesn’t need every armed group fighting the civil war to love CMEC; it just needs a modicum of stability from the ones which hold ground along the corridor. Sometimes it even gets it.

News from the neighbourhood

• Speaking of Malacca: last week, Indonesia’s finance minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa floated the idea of charging a toll to ships transiting the Strait of Malacca. The revenue (which, given that over a hundred thousand ships transit Malacca every year, would be considerable even with a modest toll) would be shared with Malaysia and Singapore.

  • The idea didn’t float for long. A firmly negative response from Singapore and Malaysia (not to mention other regional states) induced Jakarta to walk back the proposal the following day.

  • Still, it’s hard not to see recent events in the Strait of Hormuz as having left many international maritime norms looking more ‘negotiable’ than they did last year.

Oceania

Deal or no deal

On 21 April, an article appeared in the Vanuatu Daily Post citing an unidentified ‘senior Australian source’ as follows:

“We are aware of reports Vanuatu might soon sign a security deal with China. Obviously, this could affect agreements with Australia, especially on visas that we know Prime Minister Napat has been advocating for,” the source said.

Later reportage from the ABC identified the source as ‘Australian officials in Port Vila’—which does narrow it down, perhaps even to within the walls of the Australian High Commission on Winston Churchill Avenue. It appears now that a China-Vanuatu treaty known as the Namele Agreement has secretly been in the works for several months, content unknown. In an official statement Prime Minister Jotham Napat characterised it as a ‘comprehensive development cooperation agreement’, categorically not a security deal.

It’s no coincidence that negotiations over the still-unsigned Australia-Vanuatu Nakamal Agreement—initialled at the summit of an active volcano last August, for good luck—appear now to be in a critical phase. Unlike Namele, Nakamal is definitely a security deal, among other things: the precise scope of it isn’t public, but the issues that have delayed its signing for eight months are suggestive. In September Vanuatu government sources expressed concerns over Nakamal’s potential to limit engagement with other countries through infrastructure development agreements. That Nakamal would do that at all strongly hints that things aren’t quite so categorical from Australia’s point of view: there’s plenty in an infrastructure agreement that can be security-relevant without the text coming close to a security deal. An agreement like the Falepili Union (which gives Australia a de facto veto over foreign investment in Tuvalu’s critical infrastructure) might here be aspirational for Canberra, but it looks to be a bridge too far for Port Vila. The question now is whether Australia’s diplomats can get Nakamal signed—and what security-relevant assurances they can extract with it—before the Namele Agreement with China goes through.

Fuels rush in

On 24 April Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele announced that the Pacific Islands Forum had chosen to invoke the Biketawa Declaration—the PIF’s framework for collective emergency response—to address the ongoing fuel crisis in the region.

That announcement was attended by considerable procedural confusion: the decision was made at a meeting of only four PIF heads of government, blindsiding the rest. Manele’s statement to the press may well have jumped the gun on a formal invocation of Biketawa. It’s not the ideal start to a crisis response, but the region has to start somewhere. The Pacific is deeply exposed to oil price shocks: the average PIF member state spends 6.8% of its annual GDP on importing fuel. Electricity generation, inter-island shipping, air transport, road transport, and fisheries—not to mention every economic output downstream of these, such as tourism—all begin at the far end of a very long fossil-fuel supply chain. In the last month we’ve seen Tuvalu and Marshall Islands declare economic states of emergency, with Tuvalu unable to ensure a consistent supply of fuel beyond June. Over the same period, better-resourced states have used fiscal policy to offset price increases: Fiji with F$56 million (AUD$35 million) and PNG with a K$1 billion (AUD$352 million) crisis package. The rest have adopted various suites of measures to stabilise and rein in domestic consumption.

As much of a test as this is for the domestic economies of Pacific states, it’s also a real test for Biketawa—if indeed it has been properly invoked. The regional crisis-response machinery has historically been used only for localised events such as coups or civil unrest. Only its invocation for the COVID-19 response comes anywhere near a precedent for what it now may have to contend with. Not only that: a prolonged oil price rise is likely to seriously impair economic activity across the PIF states, leaving the region in a far more fragile and dependent position against the designs of great powers.

News from the family

• Last week, representatives of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua appeared before a parliamentary committee in The Hague to call on the Netherlands to cease arms sales to Indonesia. The ULMWP allege that the arms are used for illegal killings by Indonesian security forces in West Papua.

  • The call came after the twelve civilians were killed during an Indonesian military operation the week before. The incident is currently being investigated by Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to a special edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

While ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program continue their fortnightly monitoring of the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security, there’s lately been one big move close to home that we think is worth special attention.

This special edition collects the last week of ASPI commentary and analysis on the 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) and Integrated Investment Program (IIP), which were released on 16 April 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Stop the World: ASPI unpacks the 2026 National Defence Strategy

Self-reliant but not alone

ASPI’s Head and Deputy Head of Defence Strategy, Mike Hughes and Courtney Stewart, joined David Wroe on Stop the World to unpack Australia’s new National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Program.

They examined whether the strategy is adequately resourced, even with a funding increase, and explored what operational self-reliance should look like without slipping into unrealistic notions of full self-sufficiency.

The conversation also covered the evolving strategic environment, the US alliance, AUKUS and how Australia should think about defending its interests beyond its immediate region.

Mike and Courtney assessed key capability priorities, including drones, long-range strike and integrated air and missile defence, and discussed how to draw the right lessons from conflicts such as Ukraine and Iran.

These are among the biggest defence questions facing Australia today and this episode offers a clear, expert guide through them. Listen here.

ASPI views in The Strategist

And you may ask yourself: ‘How do I work this?’

You won’t find the word ‘unreliable’ in the new NDS, but trust us, it’s there. The United States, write Mike Hughes and Justin Bassi, is ‘no longer the benign hegemon to which we’ve been accustomed.’ The question for Australian policymakers is what to do about it. The answer the NDS chooses is that the US, despite everything, is indispensable—yet Australia needs to manage its risk by pursuing greater self-reliance within the alliance. This, they write, is a ‘pragmatic recognition that a strategy that shifts away from the US (and Europe) and prioritises only our immediate region will not keep us safe or deter adversaries.’ The divergent values and mounting strategic incoherence of the current US government don’t detract from the cold, hard logic behind the alliance. Australia has accrued far too many benefits from it—intelligence, cutting-edge technologies, industrial depth and extended nuclear deterrence—to make giving it up an attractive proposition.

Our policy challenge is not whether to work with the US but how. A vital component of the democratic relationship is an ability to criticise US actions antithetical to our principles without upending the alliance. It is a false equivalency to compare the US with China and Russia, which are irretrievably authoritarian and hostile to free and open societies and liberal democracy.

For Richard Gray, self-reliance is neither hedging nor total self-sufficiency: it’s one of the hardy perennials in Canberra’s strategic thought. Australian dependence on major extra-regional security partners is about as traditional as Australian anxiety about whether they’ll show up on the day. Self-reliance, which the NDS defines as ‘an ability to employ and sustain credible military power to defend Australia in a crisis or conflict, including when support from allies or partners may be limited’, isn’t simply a matter of becoming able to do more independently of the US. It’s a matter of making Australia a more valuable security partner to the US for precisely that reason.

Mind you, without judicious and adequately funded capability investment, Malcolm Davis reminds us, self-reliance is ‘wishful thinking.’ The new Integrated Investment Program has prioritised uncrewed systems, with A$12-15 billion planned over the next decade for drones in all domains. Only about a quarter or less of that is earmarked for smaller, low-cost drones; the focus of investment remains wedded to high-end uncrewed systems like the MQ-28A Ghost Bat. Long-range strike and integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) are two other winners.

In short, the 2026 IIP indicates that some very good decisions have been made. But given the rapid deterioration of Australia’s strategic outlook and the growing risk of war, time is not our friend. Capability development proposed in this year’s IIP must occur quickly – well before the decade is out. And more money than planned may be needed soon to ensure that the capability is delivered in time.

Money itself is increasingly an alliance-management problem on top of a budgetary problem. Linus Cohen looks at the technicalities of the NDS’ move toward bringing Australia’s reporting of defence spending in line with the metric used by NATO. It’s by no means an unreasonable move on the part of the Albanese Government—‘it’s only fair,’ he writes, ‘that if America’s NATO allies are being held to an arbitrary standard, its non-NATO allies should be held to the same arbitrary standard.’ But transparency is lacking.

Transparent or not, the process at work behind the NDS and IIP, writes Colin Karotam, is strategy-making about as rigorous and regular as it’s ever been. There’s a certain art to timing documents like the NDS. Going a decade or half-decade without fresh strategic guidance, given the pace of change in world affairs we’ve seen in just the last 24 months, isn’t a winning proposition. But strategy can’t move too fast, either: defence industry and capability development need a certain level of stability. The current two-year cycle, he writes, ‘appears to have hit a sweet spot.’

And what has that strategy-making process learned from the last 24 months? ‘While the 2024 strategy focused on maintaining a rules-based order,’ writes Courtney Stewart, ‘the 2026 NDS prioritises active contribution to a favourable regional balance of power.’ What that means in practice is that the NDS now forms a companion piece to the US National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy from a few months back. The basic strategic logic at work in it is American. What victory looks like for the NDS, she writes, ‘is clear: contribute to a US-led counter-balancing coalition, build capability, and deepen partnerships to support Australian and regional deterrence, defence and security.’

In the media

ASPI in recent coverage of the NDS/IIP

• ASPI Deputy Director of Defence Strategy Courtney Stewart joined the ABC’s 7.30 program to discuss the 2026 National Defence Strategy, describing it as ‘an evolution, not a revolution’ that reflects growing strategic uncertainty. She also highlighted challenges in rapidly delivering capability and the need for greater public clarity on threats and defence spending.

  • Watch here.

• ASPI’s Director of Defence Strategy Mike Hughes joined Sky News to assess the 2026 National Defence Strategy, highlighting the government’s progress in setting capability priorities. He also noted increased investment in drones, long-range strike and integrated air and missile defence, while questioning whether overall spending will meet Australia’s strategic needs and stressed the importance of drawing the right lessons from recent conflicts.

  • Watch it here.

• In the Australian Financial Review, ASPI’s Director of Defence Strategy Mike Hughes examined the government’s use of ‘alternative financing’ to fund some defence capabilities, noting it could unlock new funding if implemented effectively. He also argued that planned increases in defence spending remain modest relative to Australia’s strategic environment.

  • Read more here.

• Following the release of the 2026 National Defence Strategy, ASPI’s Mike Hughes joined ABC Radio National Breakfast to discuss the need for increased defence investment and how Australia can balance a strong US alliance with greater self-reliance.

  • ‘We need to get away from that post-Cold War dividend, where essentially the Australian taxpayer derived their security off the back of the American taxpayer. We know that is no longer possible. It’s not a feature of the modern world.’

  • Listen here.

• In The Age, ASPI Executive Director Justin Bassi praised Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles for rejecting the ‘cynical claim that rules are dead and we need to rely on interests over values’ in his speech launching the 2026 National Defence Strategy.

  • Read more here.

That’s all for this special edition. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 3 April 2026 - 16 April 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

People, ideas, machines—in that order

On 7 April, South Korea’s defence minister Ahn Gyu-back revealed plans to cut front-line guard forces from 22,000 to 6,000 along the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ)—that 248-kilometre monument to barbed wire which has sufficed for an inter-Korean border since the 1950s. The idea is that three-quarters of the current force staffing outposts on South Korea’s side of the DMZ (and inside it) will be pulled back to rear combat positions, while those remaining on the front line will be supplemented by a suite of AI-enabled surveillance systems. North Korea’s been remilitarising its side of the DMZ at scale since 2023, so anything resembling a deliberate lowering of the South’s readiness, and a cut to the DMZ guard force in particular, must have been a tough sell. Two days after the announcement, Ahn had to clarify that—like all sound policy—it’ll be done gradually, after phased review, by the year 2040.

While this is the first time Korean officials have provided specifics of a plan to do so, the general idea of supplementing and/or replacing border units with high-tech surveillance systems has been around for a few years. Field trials of such systems in 2024 fed into the previous conservative government’s flagship reform initiative (Defense Innovation 4.0) and if you go back to President Yoon’s 2022 Defense White Paper you’ll find an ambitious scheme to replace the whole border security apparatus with an ‘AI-based boundary system’ by 2026. It’s not surprising that didn’t happen. The DMZ is a mountainous place, heavily vegetated, that’s prone to fog, snowstorms and monsoons. Automating surveillance in that environment is a considerable technical challenge, and it’ll probably take a while for Seoul to build a system they can rely on.

Behind all of this is demographics. Like Japan, South Korea has an ageing society and fertility rates far below replacement. But the need to conscript from a smaller population to maintain a force that’s relatively large (about one percent of South Koreans are currently on active duty) means that a shrinking military-age cohort is potentially a much bigger problem. Over the last twenty years, Korean governments left and right have aimed defence policy in one direction: a smaller army and a higher-tech, more capital-intensive force structure. Ahn’s remarks last week were quite candid on this point, and the cuts to forward positions on the DMZ were only one part of a broader plan, yet to be given President Lee’s approval, to relieve demographic pressure. The proposed reforms include shifting responsibility for coastal surveillance from the Navy to the Korea Coast Guard, and outsourcing rear-area base security to private contractors. There’s also a notion of reforming conscription, creating 50,000 new technology-specialist NCO roles as alternative to the usual mandatory service.

Pyongyang has of course been watching all this with interest. Recent missile tests showcased the North’s new cluster munitions, an electromagnetic warfare system (of unclear characteristics), and what it claimed to be a graphite bomb designed to disrupt power grids and military electronics. That’s a capability Seoul is approaching too, and the North’s pursuit of it is an indicator of how both Koreas, in their own way, continue to move in a broadly similar direction: away from the traditional mass-army concepts, and toward high-tech conventional and electronic warfighting.

News from abroad

• Russia’s foreign ministry summoned the Japanese ambassador in Moscow last week, and gave him an earful. Turns out the relationship’s at an all-time low due to the ‘unfriendly policy’ of the Takaichi Government. The immediate cause of this incident was an agreement made by Japanese UAV manufacturer Terra Drone on 31 March to invest in the Ukrainian firm Amazing Drones.

  • This is the first known partnership between a Japanese manufacturer and Ukraine’s military drone sector. If the bumper appropriation for drones in Japan’s next defence budget is any guide, it won’t be the last. Japan wants a layered architecture of uncrewed defensive systems, and Ukrainian industry has the know-how.

• China’s foreign minister Wang Yi visited Pyongyang on 9-10 April, for the first time since 2019. North Korea’s recent pivot to Russia has made things a bit tense over the Yalu River, and this trip looks a lot like an effort to reset things. Hard to gauge success here; while much highfalutin language and comradely reaffirmation came out of both countries’ foreign ministries, few concrete outcomes are visible thus far.

• Xi Jinping met the leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party—KMT chair Cheng Li-wun—during the latter’s trip to mainland China on 10 April. There hasn’t been any official contact between Xi and a Taiwanese President for a decade, so the opposition leader getting a handshake is something of a jab at President Lai.

  • ASPI’s State of the Strait has the details.

Southeast Asia

A maze of hedges

It takes a certain kind of foreign policy for a president to sit down with Vladimir Putin and agree to long-term cooperation in the energy and minerals sector—on the very same day his defence minister is in Washington signing up to a new defence partnership. But Indonesia is a certain kind of country, and President Prabowo Subianto’s ‘free and active’ approach to foreign affairs produces ironies like this on the regular.

With a quarter of its crude oil imports behind the Strait of Hormuz—and only twenty days’ reserve at home—Indonesia’s interest in a seat at Putin’s table is very obvious. Prabowo’s energy minister duly brought home an agreement to buy Russian crude and LPG. Considering Russia’s been using Indonesian ports to get around Western sanctions on its oil for a while now (Jakarta denies all knowledge of this) one would hope they’re getting a discount.

On the US side, the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership mostly repackages existing capacity-building and joint training initiatives from the Defense Cooperation Arrangement, with a handful of new elements such as ‘co-developing sophisticated asymmetric capabilities’. What’s more interesting is what’s not in it. On 13 April, Indonesia’s defence ministry notified media that leaks of an American-proposed arrangement to give US military aircraft ‘blanket overflight access’ to Indonesian airspace were genuine—but that the documents were drafts for interagency discussion, not policy, and that nothing was final. The new MDCP, an Indonesian official emphasised the next day, does not contain any such agreement.

Streamlined access to Indonesia’s voluminous airspace would be rather valuable for the US military, particularly if they had a mind to operate aircraft out of, say, bases in northern Australia. It’d also be a very overt signal of US alignment on Jakarta’s part—the sort of thing they’ve made a trademark of not providing. Quite how the Pentagon got Indonesia even this close to a deal over airspace is a mystery.

Wax on, wax off

Barely three months into the year, the South China Sea has already seen 2026’s fifth joint maritime exercise between the US and the Philippines—the second this year to feature Australian participation. From 9-12 April, naval and air elements from the three countries combined to test interoperability on a range of tactical manoeuvres, communications and logistics tasks. Those elements included the frigate HMAS Toowoomba, which took part the first time back in February—somehow managing to squeeze sanctions enforcement on North Korea, a joint exercise with Japan, and the contractually-obligated unsafe interaction with the PLAN into the interim.

These joint exercises, which kicked off in 2024, are an increasing part of what regional presence looks like for the Royal Australian Navy. They aren’t quite training for a high-end fight, but that’s sort of the point: partner militaries need to nail down the basic, unspectacular parts of working together at sea to demonstrate a credible deterrent posture, and Washington and Manila have spent the last few years drastically increasing opportunities for their forces (and regional partners) to build that kind of collective muscle memory across all domains. The Mutual Defense Board and Security Engagement Board—the annual meeting between the chiefs of US Indo-Pacific Command and the Philippines Armed Forces—approved 281 security cooperation activities for 2019. For 2026 they’ve approved over 500.

That’s a qualitative change as well as quantitative one. Exercise BALIKATAN—the primary annual US-Philippines warfighting exercise—will commence for this year on 20 April, bigger than ever. Not only will Japan take part as a full participant rather than an observer this time, but—as the JSDF Joint Staff recently revealed—its contingent will run to over 1,400 personnel, much larger than anticipated.

News from the neighbours

• Singaporean think tank ISEAS released its 2026 State of Southeast Asia survey report the other day. The result that’s making the headlines: if forced to choose between partnering with China or the US, ASEAN sentiment now averages 52% pro-China, 48% pro-US.

  • Check the full report, though: ASEAN is still on average more worried about China’s political and strategic influence than America’s. But the gap is narrowing.

• Vietnam’s president To Lam is in Beijing on a state visit from 14-17 April—his first overseas trip since Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party (of which he is, by sheer coincidence, General Secretary) elected him president in February.

  • The meeting will follow up on the inaugural ‘3+3’ strategic dialogue last month and is likely to cement a stronger focus on security cooperation in the relationship—including a potential agreement to import Chinese surveillance tools.

• On 4 April the Royal Cambodian Navy took delivery of the first of two Chinese-built Type 056C guided missile corvettes. The second one’s expected in June. This is major step-up for the RCN. Where previously they operated only small coastal patrol boats, the Type 056C is a genuine (though still fairly small) modern surface combatant, with missiles and a multi-domain sensor fitout.

  • They are, moreover, a donation—not a purchase—from Beijing.

Oceania

The perfect storm

The Northern Mariana Islands, an US external territory north of Guam, are ‘key to reinforcing the US military’s presence in the Indo-Pacific’—thus stated US Assistant Secretary of War for Indo-Pacific Affairs, John Noh, in reply to an official delegation from the Marianas who’d written recently to President Trump. The delegates wanted government help to ward off a deepening economic crisis. The crisis was triggered by the collapse of tourism revenue after COVID. Much of that tourism came from China and is unlikely to return, particularly after direct flights from the PRC ceased in 2024. The situation has worsened due to soaring fuel prices in the wake of the conflict in the Persian Gulf. Noh acknowledged the problem and, without committing to specific policy changes, indicated the Pentagon will step up its engagement with the Marianas in response.

That engagement is already concrete. Several airfields across the archipelago are currently being upgraded; the island of Tinian is to be transformed into a major US Air Force hub through a US$409 million revamp. The idea is to bring Tinian’s North Field—unused since the Second World War—back online as an alternate base of operations to Anderson AFB on Guam, which is one of the largest and most strategically important in the Pacific. Prior to the Iran war, USINDOPACOM commander Admiral Samuel Paparo expressed concern about how the islands’ struggling economy could hamper US military efforts in the territory, noting the islands’ civilian infrastructure and community wellbeing are ‘inextricably linked’ to the US’s ability to carry out military operations in the region. Paparo too called on the federal government to act to assist the territory.

Assistance will now be far more urgent. As if their economic woes weren’t bad enough, the Northern Marianas were hit by Super Typhoon Sinlaku this week. There’s been severe damage to homes and infrastructure—on Tinian in particular. The US government has pledged financial support, and a military task force under USINDOPACOM has been readied to deliver disaster relief. The impact of the storm on the USAF’s redevelopment projects is unknown.

What’s notable here is that Sinlaku is unusually strong and unusually timed. Northwest Pacific typhoons are normally a July-November thing, and this one’s appearance in April makes it one of the strongest off-season typhoons on record—about on par with last year’s Hurricane Melissa, which devastated the Caribbean to the tune of some US$48 billion. It’s a pointed reminder, not only that the Pacific operating environment is volatile in both human and non-human terms, but that volatility itself is getting harder to price in—though a persistent US posture will need to try nonetheless.

News from the family

• The French Parliament rejected without debate the government’s constitutional reform bill on the status of New Caledonia.

  • The bill—initially agreed to by 5 out of 6 New Caledonian political parties in the wake of the 2024 riots—called for a ‘state of New Caledonia’ within the French republic and a distinct New Caledonian nationality in addition to French citizenship. The bill was rejected at the urging of pro-independence New Caledonian MP Emmanuel Tjibaou, stating the bill was a ‘model of internal autonomy, not external decolonisation’.

• The Cook Islands and New Zealand have signed a new security declaration, ending the spat caused by the Cook Islands’ 2025 comprehensive strategic partnership agreement with China.

  • The declaration affirms New Zealand as the Cook Islands’ ‘partner of choice’ and commits to consultation with New Zealand before signing on to any pacts with third parties. New Zealand’s Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, said the declaration limits the scope of the Cook Island’s deal with China.

• The PLAN hospital ship Silk Road Ark docked in Port Moresby this week, the latest stop on this year’s iteration of the annual ‘Mission Harmony’ medical diplomacy initiative. The Ark’s crew offered free medical care—including surgeries—for local residents.

  • Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister, James Marape, dined aboard the vessel with PLAN officers at an official reception on 14 April.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or elsewhere on Substack:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Each fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 20 March 2026 - 2 April 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Far and away

Take a look at how Japan’s Ministry of Defense want to spend that 8.8 trillion yen they’ve asked for this year, and you’ll find a considerable portion (a mere trillion, or about AUD $9 billion for those watching at home) earmarked for ‘Stand-off Defense Capabilities’. That means missiles: more, more performant, and longer-ranged missiles than Japan’s ever had. In the last two weeks the MoD has hit not one but three key milestones here. Let’s check ‘em out.

Two new domestically-developed major systems—the Type 25 SSM and the Type 25 HGP Block 1—got their first operational deployments on 31 March. The SSM (‘Surface-to-Ship Missile’, does exactly what you think it does) can range about a thousand kilometres, and there are quite a few things less than a thousand kilometres from its new home at Camp Kengun in Kumamoto. The PLA’s Eastern Theater Command Navy at Ningbo, for instance. Then there’s HGP Block 1. Japan’s homegrown hypersonic weapon is presently in a somewhat ‘minimum viable’ state (the range is probably around 300-500 kilometres) to get it out in the field as fast as possible. HGP Block 2A, planned to finish development in 2027 and deploy before the end of the decade (don’t be surprised if Takaichi’s revised Defense Buildup Program pulls that forward), will exhibit performance about on par with the Chinese DF-17—ranging two thousand kilometres. Beijing and Tokyo, by sheer coincidence, are two thousand kilometres apart.

But then there’s Tomahawk. On 27 March the MoD confirmed that the JS Chōkai—a guided-missile destroyer—is now capable of firing the US-made Tomahawk cruise missile. Sea trials later this year will operationalise that. The plan is to eventually have all warships of that type Tomahawk-capable, which is a bigger deal than it sounds. The role of the Chōkai and its siblings in Japanese strategy has up to now been roughly akin to that of Australia’s Hobart-class Air Warfare Destroyer: a mobile shield defending major assets from airborne threats, including ballistic missile threats. With an effective range of about 1600 kilometres, Tomahawk turns the shield into a sword. The overt framing of all this on the Japanese side is, for constitutional reasons, centred on increasingly ingenious ways of characterising weapons designed to strike deep inside enemy territory as ‘defensive’. For a country that’s still technically prohibited from possessing armed forces, it’s doing a very passable imitation.

Show me the money

Useful as missiles are, you do need to pay for them. In Japan that’s a minor issue. Prime Minister Takaichi’s budget got delayed in the Upper House and didn’t pass before the end of the financial year on 31 March. No doubt she’d like it approved there, but it’s not strictly necessary; the Japanese constitution lets the Lower House’s approval take priority, so her budget will become law on 11 April no matter what.

The Taiwanese system is not so convenient. On 30 March a bipartisan delegation from the US Senate visiting Taipei urged the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan to approve President William Lai Ching-te’s supplementary defence budget. That they felt the need is revealing. Long story short—State of the Strait has the details—Lai wants an extra USD $40 billion for new capabilities, and the KMT-led opposition have spent the last four months not giving it to him.

Budget gridlock is never fun, but the real trouble is that Lai’s been buying things on credit. A lot, in fact. Taiwan is spending big on US-made weapons, including 82 HIMARS missile launchers and munitions from Lockheed Martin—just the sort of high-mobility precision-strike complex you’d need if you wanted to turn an island into a porcupine—at a cost of about USD $4 billion. Lai’s supplementary budget was meant to fund an initial payment for that on 30 March. It hasn’t. Instead the US has allowed Taiwan to defer the initial payment until contract negotiations with Lockheed conclude, which’ll probably be late May.

A deferral of this kind is extremely rare if not unprecedented for US foreign military sales, and seems to have been agreed at the last minute. On the one hand, such unusual generosity is a good omen for the US commitment to Taiwan. On the other hand, Taiwan’s tendency to trip over its own feet on long-range capability development is a problem with no clear solution in the near term. Once that HIMARS contract is signed, President Lai will have five days to front up the cash—or risk further delays to a key acquisition.

• German defence minister Boris Pistorius met his Japanese counterpart Shinjirō Koizumi in Yokosuka on 22 March.

  • The key outcome there was an agreement to establish regular security consultations. The key non-outcome was a Reciprocal Access Agreement, which would have allowed the two countries to deploy troops on each other’s soil more easily for training, exercises, or operations. Looks like Pistorius proposed an RAA, but its absence from the Japanese readout indicates nothing was agreed.

  • While Japan and Germany have been quietly upgrading defence ties (no jokes, please) for the last few years, German military engagement in Asia is still something of a novelty, as well as modest and intermittent. It’s not yet clear Berlin can sustain the consistent presence that would make an RAA worthwhile.

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko made his first-ever visit to North Korea on 25-27 March, where the two countries signed a new Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation.

  • It’s one of those big-tent framework treaties for enhancing bilateral engagement on basically everything. Unclear if that includes security; few details are public. North Korea and Belarus both already have significant bilateral arrangements with Russia, so this colours in the third side of the triangle.

Southeast Asia

No sudden moves

Getting ‘painted’ by a warship’s fire-control radar is the naval equivalent of staring down the barrel of a loaded gun: it generally means they’ve got a firing solution, and your remaining lifespan is a function of their trigger discipline. Not very friendly, you’ll agree. On 20 March it was disclosed to the public that the BRP Miguel Malvar—that’s the Philippine Navy’s newest warship—wound up on the pointy end of a PLA Navy corvette’s fire-control radar near the disputed Sabina Shoal on 7 March. That went about as well as you could hope: the Malvar’s captain got on the radio, told his Chinese counterpart to cut it out, and the PLA-N vessel backed down. Diplomacy prevails.

There aren’t many compelling reasons (or at least, any innocent ones) to deliberately give another country’s armed forces the impression you’re seconds away from opening fire. Tends to put people on edge. Unlike the incident last December when Chinese fighter jets intermittently locked radar on Japanese F-15s near Okinawa, there’s far less plausible deniability here—which perhaps explains why China’s ordinarily-talkative diplomats in Manila have been very quiet about the Miguel Malvar incident.

That the Philippines has publicised it, and promptly, merits mention. Confrontations between military vessels are often considered more sensitive than those involving coast guard or civilian ships. In February 2020 a similar incident occurred: the Philippine Navy corvette BRP Conrado Yap visually identified (though couldn’t confirm electronically) that a PLA-N corvette near Commodore Reef had sought a firing solution with its main gun. That didn’t become public for more than two months, and not until after Manila had lodged a diplomatic protest. Where the Duterte government kept the incident under wraps to help manage its relations with Beijing, Marcos Jr. doesn’t seem to find a policy of ‘assertive transparency’ inconsistent with doing the same. Bilateral Philippines-China high-level talks on the South China Sea and energy security restarted on 27 March after more than a year on ice. Maybe diplomacy does prevail after all?

• France and the Philippines signed a Status of Visiting Forces Agreement in Paris on 27 March—the first such agreement Manila’s made with an EU member state.

  • Manila’s been signing SOVFAs at an impressive clip lately; you’d be hard pressed to find another country that’s minted four in only 21 months, and negotiations for a fifth with the UK are ongoing. The speed of it all suggests the value-add they see in any individual country is probably secondary; more important is the network effect.

Oceania

Inclement weather

Small states can make for big headaches. Vanuatu for instance. Port Vila’s pressing ahead with a UN General Assembly resolution backing the ICJ’s July 2025 advisory opinion on climate change, despite sustained opposition from the United States and other major emitters.

Short version: the International Court of Justice has come around to the view that anthropogenic climate change creates obligations for states beyond what the UN climate treaties say. As a result, breaches of those obligations can engage the ordinary rules of state responsibility. Washington, as often happens when it encounters international law that doesn’t go its way, isn’t too happy. Reporting on a US diplomatic cable indicates the Trump administration ‘strongly objects’ to Vanuatu’s draft resolution and has urged other governments to oppose it, on the grounds that it could be used to advance claims of legal obligation and liability.

Pressure works, let’s be honest. Some of the sharper language in earlier drafts—particularly around liabilities for loss and damage—has reportedly been watered down or removed.

But setbacks don’t imply defeat. An ICJ opinion and ten dollars won’t buy you too much these days, least of all enforcement, but hey; you take what you can get. What Vanuatu wants to get is political endorsement from the same General Assembly that requested the ICJ opinion, and to make it harder at the margin for major emitters to treat the Court’s findings as diplomatically ignorable. UN human rights experts have framed the effort in much the same way, urging states to support a General Assembly resolution upholding the advisory opinion and warning against attempts to block discussion of it.

It’s a familiar tune in much of the Pacific. Those who lack power can use process, institutions, can build legitimacy from legality. What’s a rules-based order, after all, if not one where the smallest states are free to annoy the biggest?

Mind you, the US digging in its heels on this issue hands China yet another opportunity to present itself in the Pacific as the less overtly disagreeable great power, even while its own exposure as a carbon emitter remains significant. That dynamic was already visible in Vanuatu’s policing relationships before this latest UN fight, with Beijing offering equipment and a broader security partnership while Port Vila continued its careful balancing act with traditional partners such as Australia and New Zealand.

• In response to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, New Zealand has quietly ceased attempts to close a loophole which allows for the import of Russian oil if refined in a third country.

  • When pressed on the issue, Resources Minister Shane Jones stated ‘New Zealanders want to make sure that they can still fill up their bulldozer and fill up their ute’.

• Japan and Fiji have signed a 400-million-yen Official Security Assistance agreement.

  • Japan will provide the Republic of Fiji Military Forces with medical equipment such as ambulances with the goal of strengthening Fiji’s disaster response capabilities and building closer security ties between the two states.

• This week, Australia and Fiji began the final round of negotiations to upgrade the Vuvale Partnership to a formal security treaty, the ‘Vuvale Union’.

  • The treaty will enhance cooperation across areas such as transnational organised crime, terrorism, cybercrime, and illegal fishing. The treaty is expected to be signed after the current round of negotiations wrap up.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or our other Substack newsletters:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Every fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 6 March 2026 - 19 March 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Missile gap

Here’s how you know it’s spring in Korea: the plums are in blossom, the frost is thawing, and the hills are alive with the sound of US and ROK force elements on a massive joint all-domain combined-arms exercise. FREEDOM SHIELD, running 9 to 19 March this year, is the latest incarnation of an annual tradition dating back to the Cold War. This and its sister ULCHI FREEDOM SHIELD (more of a summer thing) are the alliance’s two major warfighting exercises. As a ‘conditions-based’ transfer of wartime operational control to the ROK inches closer, they’re increasingly something of a driving exam to see if Seoul’s ready to take the wheel. That the US might have trouble keeping its eyes on the road is, alas, a live concern.

The same day FREEDOM SHIELD kicked off, reports came through indicating the US was withdrawing parts of its THAAD battery from Korea, against President Lee’s objections. THAAD—Terminal High Altitude Area Defense to its friends—is a US-made ballistic missile defence system, and a boutique one at that. The US has only eight batteries, each about a billion dollars’ worth and comprising six or so launchers plus a high-resolution radar. For each interceptor those launchers fire, Lockheed Martin will invoice you a cool US$15 million. As far as we know it’s just some of those interceptors and not the launchers themselves that the US has pulled out of the THAAD battery deployed at Seongju in Korea’s southern highlands.

Where are they going? A mystery indeed. Ongoing operations in the Middle East—the White House would like you to know they’re a crushing success, by the way, thanks for asking—have been burning US munition stockpiles at a fantastic rate, interceptors very much included. No hard numbers yet, but considering last April’s campaign against Iran probably consumed a quarter of the American THAAD inventory in less than a fortnight, it’s no surprise Operation EPIC FURY has started raiding the Indo-Pacific pantry.

Surprise or no, the optics of the US quietly shuffling serious missile defence capability out of Korea on the eve of the alliance’s biggest exercise are not great, and North Korea has done its best to make them worse. At sea trials on 3-4 March and again on 11 March the Choe Hyon—the North’s first genuine guided missile destroyer—tested sea-launched cruise missiles, likely to be nuclear-armed when fully operational. When that somehow didn’t convince the South to call off FREEDOM SHIELD immediately, Pyongyang followed up on 14 March with an extraordinary volley of ten ballistic missiles at once. Lockheed couldn’t have written the advert better.

The official line out of Seoul is that this is all regrettable but acceptable. The overall deterrent posture is still intact, despite losing at least some of THAAD. You have to wonder what they’re thinking behind closed doors. While in the medium-term Seoul is relatively well-positioned—their indigenous missile defences have improved greatly since 2017 when THAAD was first deployed, and work on a Korean-built interceptor with THAAD-like performance is expected to deliver by 2028—in the near term their layered air and missile defences are missing at least part of a layer.

The moral of the story (and not just for Korea) is that an America more willing to use force isn’t necessarily more credible for it. Munitions are finite, and for boutique systems they’re very finite. The Pentagon has a global footprint and must prioritise across it. And when the White House can change those priorities on a dime, any ally hosting forward-deployed US capability will start looking for the fine print.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Informal economic sanctions: the political economy of Chinese coercion during the THAAD dispute (Review of International Political Economy, 2022)—The original THAAD deployment to Korea provoked a sharp Chinese reaction. Why?

• After Epic Fury, a munitions supplemental becomes imperative (Breaking Defense, 2026)—The US needs more munitions, and fast. But will Congress pay for them?

Southeast Asia

Anything happen while we were out?

The Indonesian island of Morotai is about the size of the Australian Capital Territory, but warmer, with one-sixth the population and far fewer F-35 overflights. Fair warning: that last part might change. An Australian Army survey team will be dispatched to Morotai later this year; an international all-domain military training facility is to be built there, expanding existing infrastructure, and their job is to figure out how much expansion that’ll be. Thus the readout from Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles’ trip to Jakarta last week. It’s provided some details about those new initiatives announced alongside the security treaty Australia signed with Indonesia at the beginning of February.

Mind you, as new initiatives go, this one isn’t quite new. Building out Morotai for training with friendly forces on exercises is Jakarta’s idea, and it’s been bouncing around there for a couple of years, at least since Prabowo’s term as Defence Minister. The intent to do so was announced officially in November 2024, and the case for Morotai in particular as an international military training site seems to revolve around its location (somewhat out of the way, lightly-populated, relatively flexible for all-domain operations) and the presence of legacy infrastructure from the Second World War. The broader Indonesian ambit to rebalance its forces to the east of the archipelago is also a factor in what’s intended for Morotai. Plans for a pier suitable for warships and a long-range air defence radar were announced in 2024 and 2025 respectively, though it’s unclear if they’ve gotten beyond the planning stage.

What is new, is an Australian commitment to help build this training facility, which is likely to include refurbishment and extension of WW2-era airstrips. Arguably, it’s very appropriate: Australia helped build those originally. RAAF engineers were at work on Morotai within seventy-two hours of the US landings in 1944. The pace of construction demanded by General MacArthur back then probably won’t be replicated, but the amenities should compare favourably to those Army enjoyed when it was camped out preparing to invade Borneo. And, of course, they’ll be shared. During the Deputy Prime Minister’s trip, Indonesia floated plans for two new trilateral security agreements: one to bring in PNG, the other to bring in Japan. Indonesia also specifically expressed interest in hosting forces from the Philippines and Japan for exercises at Morotai.

The letter of the law

Over the weekend the Chinese embassy in Manila circulated on social media what it claimed was a 1990 letter from the then-Philippine ambassador to Germany, addressed to a German ham radio operator. The letter has the ambassador declare, point blank, that Scarborough Shoal isn’t Philippine territory.

Needless to say, Manila wasn’t impressed: someone at the foreign ministry clearly enjoyed drafting the official response. While all sides in the South China Sea dispute dug in their heels on their respective legal positions years ago, the context in which the debate’s happening now is somewhat interesting. The Chinese embassy posted that letter in the midst of a running online argument with Philippine Coast Guard spokesman RADM Jay Tarriela, who’s become a highly visible social media combatant—no better word for it—on Facebook and X. While institutional accounts and government messaging play their usual role in contesting the information domain, the Philippines has taken the unusual step of putting an individual public servant with a name and a face in the front lines—and giving him considerable liberty to speak as he pleases as long as he gets the message across. While it’s a lot of fun watching Tarriela and the embassy get into brawls on X, he’s contributed (as have they) a fair amount to the escalating war of words between Beijing and Manila that’s been playing out since the start of the year.

This is quite the year for that to happen. ASEAN (which the Philippines presently chairs) and China are slowly grinding through negotiations over the South China Sea Code of Conduct. Both sides are politically committed to getting it done in 2026, and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi even seemed upbeat about the possibility at the latest round of talks in Bangkok, while pointedly reminding Manila of its responsibilities as chair. With online fisticuffs in the foreground, recent high-profile espionage arrests—three Filipinos linked to the Department of National Defense, the Navy and the Coast Guard, alleged to have passed details of South China Sea rotation and resupply missions to Chinese handlers—will hardly lower the temperature domestically. Manila’s challenge is keeping the ASEAN process in one lane while fighting an information war in the other. The risk is that they can’t; negotiations can proceed on schedule and still be hollowed out by the politics around them. A Code of Conduct signed in a climate of public acrimony, information warfare and counterintelligence panic may still be a diplomatic achievement. It just won’t necessarily be a stabilising one.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Australia-Indonesia defence and security partnership: Overcoming asymmetric aspirations to tackle common threats (ASPI, 2025)—What are the opportunities for Jakarta-Canberra cooperation on defence? What are the limits?

• China’s Disinformation Narratives in the Philippines (Perry World House, 2025)—Considered by volume, the SCS dispute is an information war with occasional maritime skirmishes.

• With the Philippines as ASEAN chair, a South China Sea agreement is unlikely to be concluded in 2026 (Chatham House, 2025)―The pessimistic view.

Oceania

Cooked as, bro

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown heads to New Zealand this week, and conspicuously absent from the press release announcing that is any mention of a meeting with New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon. Will there be one? Brown’s office was a bit cagey when asked; Luxon, meanwhile, was in Samoa getting his matai title and hadn’t time to comment.

It’d be a calculated snub to send Brown home without so much as a leader-level handshake, but it wouldn’t be the first. Relations between Wellington and Avarua (remember that for trivia night) have been quite fraught this past year, and it’s all to do with—alright, yes, it’s China, but it’s more than that. The two countries have a peculiar constitutional arrangement; it creates a principle (which New Zealand increasingly interprets as a duty) of consultation around defence and foreign policy. Prime Minister Brown believes the suite of MoUs he signed with China in February 2025—which commit to cooperation on a range of activities, including infrastructure, multilateral diplomacy, and seabed mineral resource development—didn’t require prior consultation with New Zealand. Prime Minister Luxon believes otherwise, and his foreign ministry’s had some sharp words for what it views as Cook Islands’ lack of transparency about issues of ‘significant strategic concern’. And not only that: as Cook Islands’ largest development partner Wellington’s got plenty of precision-targetable leverage, and it’s using it. Since mid-2025, NZD$29.8 million in direct public sector support over two financial years has been cut. That’s a big enough hole in the public finances to send Brown to Parliament asking for a new budget, and the buzz from the Beehive is that the money’s not coming back until trust is restored to Wellington’s satisfaction.

If that sounds coercive—well, it is. ‘Free association’, which Cook Islands has with New Zealand, was never really a construct designed to accommodate strategic divergence. If two free associates remain such while trying to go their separate ways, eventually they either demonstrate independence or one dominates the other. For Brown, restoring trust with Wellington is the obvious path forward. He’s under pressure domestically to do it, and it’ll probably mean a fence of risk-mitigation policies around the China MoUs, plus some consultation machinery to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But in the long run, New Zealand’s and Cook Islands’ interests may not be that easy to reconcile. Wellington seems to want to contain great-power competition in its region, which means interpreting its tie to Cook Islands as a veto on security policy. That way it can manage which external players get in, and how. Cook Islands, under Prime Minister Brown, seems to want autonomy. It wants to make the best of great-power competition, and also, ideally, a lot of money. NZD$29.8 million, at least.

How? By opening up its expansive EEZ to foreign capital seeking a return on seabed minerals, of course—many of which are also, conveniently, critical minerals. The usual suspects: cobalt, nickel, manganese, copper, batteries need ‘em, drones need ‘em, China’s got most of the value chain, you’ve heard this song and dance before. That means bringing external players in and, implicitly, reducing dependence on Wellington—and it’s not just China circling. Enter Jared Novelly, President Trump’s billionaire nominee for Ambassador to New Zealand, Niue, Cook Islands and Samoa, very gung-ho about Cook Islands’ potential for seabed mining in his Senate hearing the other day. Witness the freshly-minted critical minerals MoU from last month that does for Washington pretty much exactly what last year’s seabed mining MoU did for Beijing. What did Mark Brown say about it? “It gives Cook Islands options.”

Maybe so. But—and this is Luxon’s leverage—not yet.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Ramifications of the China-Cook Islands’ Partnership (RUSI, 2025)—What exactly does China get out of its MoUs with Cook Islands?

• Geopolitics in the Pacific Islands: Playing for advantage (Lowy, 2024)—How do Pacific Island countries play the great powers against each other? What are the risks?

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or our other Substack newsletters:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Every fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 20 February 2026 - 5 March 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Hard Friendly new world

As South Korea’s former President Yoon Suk Yeol contemplates life imprisonment (memo to Kim Yong-hyun: friends don’t let friends attempt coups d’etat) it’s probably cold comfort that the new government’s foreign policy has a central plank in common with his: improving economic and security ties with Japan. On 1 March, President Lee Jae-myung made a speech welcoming continued Japanese engagement with the aim of creating a ‘friendly new world based on genuine mutual understanding and empathy.’

Of all the days to say it, too: 1 March is a public holiday in Korea, the anniversary of mass protests against Japanese occupation in 1919. The Korean left, contra conservatives like Yoon, has long tended to foreground historical issues with Japan; it’s tough to partner for security with a country that ruthlessly colonised yours. Ten years ago, Lee Jae-myung was the progressive mayor of Seongnam and his opinion was that ‘from a military point of view, Japan is still an enemy country.’ But ten years is a long time in politics, and when Lee became President last June he inherited Yoon’s bilateral thaw and a new US-Japan-ROK trilateral architecture spun up at Camp David in 2023. Annual meetings at the leader and ministerial level, named joint multidomain exercises, real-time data sharing on missile threats—the whole shebang.

With relations northward in the deep-freeze and a rather mercurial character in the White House, it’s no surprise Lee figured keeping Japan on side could be useful. Visiting Tokyo first, before Washington, wasn’t just to commiserate about tariffs. Before the election Lee foreshadowed a dual-track approach—keep historical reckonings in one lane, security and trade in the other—and eight months and one jam session later it seems to have all gone extremely well. Bilateral search-and-rescue exercises are back; personnel exchanges and cooperation on AI and uncrewed systems are on the table.

Trouble with a friendly new world is, not everyone wants to share it with you. A few days earlier and two hundred kilometres away, the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea unveiled the next five-year plan, and its posture toward the South hasn’t budged: ‘The DPRK has nothing to discuss with the ROK, the most hostile entity, and will exclude the ROK from the category of compatriots forever.’ Doesn’t seem too friendly. Lee’s conciliatory efforts so far—he’s apologised for those drone incursions, which it turns out did happen but were caused by private citizens flying them over the DMZ—haven’t rebuilt the roads the North blew up in October 2024.

The wording of the summary report of Kim Jong Un’s speech to the Congress leaves a highly conditional door open to dialogue with the United States, but Seoul gets nothing. It’s very clear who Pyongyang thinks is worth making a deal with, even in principle—and the remote possibility that it might happen is another factor incentivising Lee Jae-myung to find a friend in Japan.

Let’s have your people call my people

Mind you, friends bring their own problems. On 18 February, in the course of a US Forces Korea (USFK) training exercise, a USAF flight of about ten F16 fighter aircraft over the Yellow Sea entered a region between the Korean and Chinese Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). The PLA Air Force scrambled jets in response, leading to a ‘rare standoff’ between US and Chinese fighter jets. While the two sides de-escalated safely and everybody went home, it’s unusual for USFK to run exercises close to China’s ADIZ without involving Korean forces, and senior officials on the Korean side aren’t happy: they weren’t fully briefed in time.

USFK commander Gen. Xavier Brunson has expressed regret for that, but the coordination problem it signals probably isn’t going away; the way things are trending, Washington seems to think about USFK more in the context of deterring China rather than purely providing extended deterrence to the South against the North. As the vexed issue of OPCON transfer grinds its way toward a major milestone this year—South Korea won’t quite be granted a fully independent chain of command in wartime, but it’s getting there—there’s a risk not only that USFK and the Korean armed forces might wind up with diverging priorities in a crisis, but that some of the bureaucratic wires that let them talk to each other will end up snapping when OPCON changes hands. Which isn’t what you want, when the possibility of a Chinese response to USFK activities is a very live one.

Island in the sun

Yonaguni is Japan’s westernmost island, known for mysterious undersea rock formations, an endangered species of miniature horse, and being a hundred kilometres from Taiwan. That last part is poised to become more important, as plans to add a missile unit to the Japanese Ground Self Defense Force (JGSDF) presence there now have a delivery timeline. Defense Minister Koizumi revealed on 24 February that Type-03 medium-range surface-to-air guided missiles will be stationed on Yonaguni (which we’ve known since 2022) in 2030 (which is new information). Ministerial fine print: timeline may be subject to change, please check back after the next election. That’s on top of previously-announced plans for a radar jammer to be built on Yonaguni sometime this year. 2030 or not, that choice of missile is indicative of the JGSDF’s concern for escalation. Medium-range, for the Type-03, means about fifty kilometres: it’s not holding anything over Taiwan at risk, let alone the Strait or the disputed Senkaku Islands to the north. Also timeline-relevant: the Type 03’s ongoing upgrade program is expected to deliver a robust terminal-phase interceptor for hypersonic glide vehicles by 2028. Good news for anyone who might be planning to use Yonaguni as a forward position to arm and refuel combat aircraft—hey, didn’t the US Marine Corps give that a test-run last October?

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Continuity or change? Navigating ROK-Japan relations in the post-election era (EUI Global Governance Programme, 2026)—More continuity than change from Yoon’s to Lee’s foreign policy. Why?

• Navigating the new normal: Strategic simultaneity, US Forces Korea flexibility, and alliance imperatives (Atlantic Council, 2025)—USFK was put there to defend Seoul; can it balance that with deterring China?

• Don’t judge islands by their sizes: The role of remote Japanese islands in the regional military balance (Journal of Strategic Studies, 2025)—There’s more at stake in putting missiles on Yonaguni than Japan’s homeland defence.

Southeast Asia

Striking similarities?

Manila has an eye on the Middle East, and for obvious reasons: about 1.1 million Philippine nationals work there, and given present hostilities a fair number have asked to be repatriated. But some reasons are less obvious. On 1 March, Senator Erwin Tulfo—chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—stated to media his intent to call for a review of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), on the grounds that US forces in the country could be targeted in a regional conflict, with collateral damage affecting nearby residents in a manner analogous to what’s happening near US bases in the Persian Gulf. EDCA is a 2014 treaty, giving the US authority to rotate forces through specially designated Philippines military facilities, as well as to pre-position materiel and make improvements to infrastructure; bilateral and multilateral exercises involving the US use the EDCA sites extensively. It’s not a basing agreement—a point on which the Department of National Defense was quite insistent in a press release following Sen. Tulfo’s comments. (Nor is it of relevance to current hostilities in the Middle East; even if it was, Iran has no demonstrated capability to strike targets that far away.) Still, the Senate may well take a look at it. Grounded or not, it’s a type of concern which is becoming more salient wherever the US has a footprint in the Indo-Pacific, including here in Australia for Perth residents near the future site of SRF-West. Nobody likes being blown up, and it’s reasonable to question whether PLA staff planners distinguish a ‘base’ from a ‘rotational presence’ quite as sharply as the lawyers do. For the Philippines armed forces, the question’s more concretely one of how to make the best of EDCA to deter a blowup in the first place. Last week’s Philippines-Japan-US joint military exercises saw airborne patrols over the Bashi Channel—the hundred-kilometre stretch of water between northern Luzon and Taiwan, marking the first time these trilateral drills have taken place outside the South China Sea. That comes alongside recent news that the US will deploy further tranches of US Typhon mid-range missile launchers to the northern Philippines over 2026. Contra Japan’s Type-03, ‘mid-range’ for Typhon means two thousand kilometres or more.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Missiles Over Fleets: How A2/AD is Redefining Maritime Power in Southeast Asia (AMTI, 2026)—It’s not just the Philippines getting land-based anti-ship missiles. Why?

• Allies entwined: Australia’s strategic convergence with the Philippines (ASPI, 2025)—Manila’s a longtime US treaty ally. Where does Australia fit in?

• A Decade On: EDCA and the Philippines-US Alliance (RUSI, 2024)—EDCA has faced domestic challenges before, but the China threat keeps Manila and DC together.

Oceania

Technically also an island country in the Pacific

The Japan–Pacific Islands Defense Dialogue (JPIDD) ran from 22 to 24 February this year—the third and biggest yet, with ASEAN states participating as observers for the first time. JPIDD is quite new (round 1 was in 2021) and is notable for being quite inclusive as these things go: there aren’t many standing armies (or defence ministers) in the Pacific Islands, so the annual South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting only gets representation from Fiji, Tonga, and PNG. JPIDD, which is the only other Pacific-oriented ministerial dialogue of that kind, invites everyone. (Countries without armies usually send police or coast-guard officials at the undersecretary level.) Having twenty-eight flags in the room provides ample opportunity for bilateral pull-asides (Japan did a few, likewise the Philippines) but the main discussions circled around the need to deepen cooperation on humanitarian assistance, climate change, and maritime law-enforcement. So far there’s no radical new policy line out of Takaichi’s cabinet on the Free and Open Indo-Pacific construct, but there are some novel initiatives: Defense Minister Koizumi announced a ‘Next Generation Leadership Security Program’, with Japan’s Ministry of Defense to run professional development for early- and mid-career security officials from Pacific Island nations.

On the Strait and narrow

Whoever raised the topic of illegal fishing as an existential threat to Pacific Island countries at JPIDD might have provoked a sharp glance across the room—from PNG’s representatives to Indonesia’s observers. Papua New Guinea’s National Fisheries Authority opened a new state-of-the-art command centre in Daru earlier this year, and it’s already chalked up some wins: NFA boat seizures near the Torres Strait boundary with Australia led to the successful prosecution of 27 Indonesian nationals on 23 February for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in PNG territorial waters. The Australian Border Force, on the other side of the line, also has its eye on IUU fishing boats entering from Indonesian waters; it has noted an uptick in intercepts and vessel destructions since the start of the year. PNG’s tougher line on illegal fishing is an index of where its priorities for building out maritime domain awareness lie, and Australia’s kept up its end of cooperation across the Strait. But the prevalence of Indonesian nationals among the perpetrators, and the sensitivity of fishing resources to local sentiment in PNG, will need pragmatic handling. Australia’s two northern neighbours—and newest security-treaty partners—are likely to keep their relationship ‘messy but managed’ for years to come.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Japan-Australia defence cooperation in the Pacific: the case for a partial division of labour (ASPI, 2025)—Japan wants a bigger role in the Pacific. How’s the geography work out?

• Leveraging PNG’s strengths and location to become a small maritime power (SAA, 2024)—What are PNG’s maritime security imperatives? What are its constraints?

• Drivers of illegal livelihoods in remote transboundary regions: the case of the Trans-Fly region of Papua New Guinea (Ecology and Society, 2018)—IUU fishing near the Indonesia-PNG maritime border is a classic wicked problem.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or our other Substack newsletters:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Every fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 6 February 2026 - 19 February 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

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Northeast Asia

Drumroll please

Sanae Takaichi led Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party to a historic victory in the snap election on 8 February—is news you’ve already read somewhere else. It’ll take a moment for the LDP’s new supermajority to get the policy ball rolling, but you can be pretty sure that passing Takaichi’s FY2026 budget will be top priority once they do. Another priority, however, will be updating the decade-old Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy—as foreshadowed by Chief Cabinet Secretary Kihara on 16 February. A ‘more severe’ security environment demands expanding the scope of FOIP; he’s left us guessing on what exactly that means, but Japan’s recent behaviour suggests enhanced security cooperation with Pacific states is a good guess.

Back to Takaichi’s budget. While the new government’s willingness to spike trillions of yen into defence spending is likely to go down well in Washington (sure, they’re only going to 2% of GDP, but it’s a big GDP) it may turn out that throwing money around is the easy part. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) have less tractable difficulties: they’ve had serious recruitment shortfalls of late, particularly in the Maritime SDF, and unlike neighbouring South Korea (which faces similar demographic headwinds in its super-aged population) they can’t just conscript the numbers they want. The 2026 budget’s record-high allocation for uncrewed systems is a strong hint at the shape of things to come, but—according to anonymous Ministry of Defense officials quoted in the Asahi—there are indications procurement is running faster than the forces can build doctrine around new capabilities. Japan’s tightly-regulated electromagnetic spectrum and lack of wide-open spaces make training for drone warfare quite tricky. Makes you wonder if there’s a country down south that could help with that.

Catch and release

On 12 February Japan’s fisheries agency seized a Chinese fishing boat at sea and arrested its captain, citing his refusal to comply with an order to stop for inspection. That’s the first fishing boat seizure of the year, and the first time a Chinese boat’s been seized since 2022. Despite elevated Beijing-Tokyo tensions—they even sent the pandas back last month—China’s foreign ministry had a low-key response. They made a measured statement calling on Japan to ensure the safety of the crew, then quietly paid the captain’s bail the next day.

The focus of Chinese maritime pressure activities against Japan has long been the Senkaku Islands—uninhabited, administered by Japan, subject to a three-way dispute with China and Taiwan. When in 2010 Japan seized a fishing boat near the Senkakus and detained its skipper, Beijing responded with sustained diplomatic pressure and a (at that time unprecedented) curb on rare-earth exports. While it’s arguable that the muted response to this latest incident reflects Beijing’s effort to ‘climb down the escalation tree’ through minor cooperative efforts now that Takaichi has a secure mandate, the simpler explanation might just be that they view the Home Islands’ EEZ as one thing and the Senkakus as another. On 14 February, the China Coast Guard sailed four ships through what Japan considers its territorial waters at the Senkakus—that’s the second time this year. They spent about two hours inside before Japan’s Coast Guard herded them out.

Takes two to tango

On 6 February, the UN Security Council’s North Korea Sanctions Committee—you’ll never guess what it does—approved exemptions to the Resolution 1718 sanctions regime for seventeen humanitarian assistance projects. This is a general prerequisite to aid going into North Korea, and these programs are nothing special in that regard: healthcare, water, sanitation improvements, classic UNICEF fare. They’d been held up in the Committee since early 2025, largely thanks to the United States refusing to let them pass; South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, who was in the US in early February, seems to have talked the administration around. It’s hard to tell if the White House sees this as a preamble to re-engaging Pyongyang. There was a period back in the first Trump administration when the odd couple of a right-wing White House and left-wing Blue House, same as today, seemed to be making real progress on denuclearisation talks. Those talks broke down, and since then the North has done its best to look aggressively uninterested in dialogue—or indeed in foreign aid. UN staff haven’t been allowed to enter the country since early 2021, so even once the diplomats approve a sanctions exception, the UN’s ability to deliver the aid is severely constrained.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• FOIP 4.0? Continuity or Evolution under PM Takaichi (Pacific Forum, 2025)—How might Tokyo take FOIP to the next level?

• Japan’s Strategy of “Proactive Restraint” in Defending the Senkaku Islands (Sasakawa Peace Foundation, 2025)—How does Japan seek to manage Chinese pressure in the Senkakus?

• The 2026 Window: Can the “Ember” of US-North Korea Diplomacy Still Catch Fire? (38 North, 2026)—Is dialogue with Pyongyang still on the table?

Southeast Asia

Watch your step

On 11 February, three Thai soldiers were injured by a landmine explosion in Sisaket Province—that’s in Thailand’s far east, on the Cambodian border. If this story sounds eerily familiar, it should. Last July’s military clashes between Thailand and Cambodia, which saw tens of soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced, were sparked by a very similar incident. Implementation of the ceasefire and peace deal brokered that October (this is one of the numerous wars Donald Trump claims to have stopped, by the way) was paused in mid-November after yet another case of Thai soldiers falling victim to landmines in the border region. Cross-border skirmishes restarted in early December, and it wasn’t until nearly the end of the year that the two parties brokered another ceasefire. In fact, there were more landmine incidents than this throughout 2025—at least five in August alone according to Thailand’s foreign minister.

Cambodia’s northwestern provinces (which border Thailand) are some of the most landmine-contaminated places on Earth—the legacy of bygone decades of armed conflict—and every year about forty Cambodians are killed or injured by them. The government in Bangkok, however, insists the mines wounding its soldiers are freshly-laid. That government—the conservative Bhumjaithai Party—was returned to power in the general election on 8 February on the back of strong nationalist messaging and a tough stance on the border conflict. (A partial border wall with Cambodia was a major election promise.) While at the time of writing the December ceasefire appears to hold, if recent history’s any guide the fighting could restart with little warning, and escalate quickly.

Finding a long-term solution to Thailand-Cambodia is ASEAN’s biggest problem at the moment—aside from the junta in Myanmar, which is more of a chronic problem—and it’ll probably consume a lot of diplomatic oxygen this year. Quite aside from the humanitarian crisis we’d see if fighting restarts, there’s other important work ASEAN wants to get done and a limited amount of senior-level calendar time. Most importantly: the Philippines (chairing ASEAN this year) has expressed a strong desire to conclude the South China Sea Code of Conduct in 2026. On 6 February their foreign ministry announced that ASEAN and China will quicken the tempo of working group meetings, from quarterly to monthly. A higher tempo is welcome; the intent for some kind of agreed set of rules to keep a lid on the many and varied territorial disputes in the SCS is 34 years old, and the job of realising it has frustrated generations of diplomats. (Not least because the parties involved have changed the facts on the ground in the interim, often literally through land reclamation.) The current process has been wrangling a draft produced in 2018 ever since, with some success, but the core issues—notably the precise geographical scope of the Code, whether it’s to be legally binding or not (China prefers not), and how it’s to be enforced—are still unresolved, and the Philippines’ own strained relations with China at present add another complication. With this much on ASEAN’s plate already, there’s reason to be pessimistic about the schedule.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Thailand-Cambodia conflict: legacy politics and premeditated escalation (ASPI, 2025)—Last July’s Thai-Khmer border clash had a lengthy prelude. How did it happen?

• The Elusive Code: Why ASEAN Needs a New Playbook for the South China Sea (ISEAS, 2025)—Why’s it so hard to agree on a Code of Conduct? What are ASEAN’s options here?

Oceania

I’m not your Palau, buddy

Hokkons Baules, President of Palau’s Senate, was banned from entering the United States on 10 February on the grounds of alleged ‘involvement in significant corruption on behalf of China-based actors.’ Big if true—a State Department press release isn’t an indictment, and no criminal charges have yet been laid against Baules in Palau—but if it is true he wouldn’t be the only Palauan elite in that position. Chinese organised crime has made plays in Palau in the recent past, almost certainly with Beijing’s tacit consent if not approval. Hundreds of PRC nationals were arrested and deported at the beginning of 2020 for running an illegal online casino out of Koror, Palau’s largest city. These and related schemes have been tied to members of the Chinese expatriate community on the island, as well as to state governors and two former presidents. In countries like Palau, where the Compact of Free Association with the United States puts Solomon Islands-style partnerships off the table (not to mention that they’re one of the few remaining states that officially recognise Taiwan) you tend to see the less photogenic side of Chinese influence in the Pacific. Think less infrastructure projects, more triad gangsters, shady businessmen, and crypto scams. Criminal ventures—like the ‘pig-butchering’ scam operations increasingly familiar to Palauan police—often need local facilitators to grease the wheels, and corrupt officials can in turn ease the way for further inroads. Palau is set to host significant US military infrastructure, notably a large-scale over-the-horizon radar for the US Air Force under construction on the main island, and proposed materiel pre-positioning sites for the Marine Corps. A distinct pattern of land near those facilities being long-term leased by Chinese businesspeople is now visible. Whether or not Baules is connected, he’s certainly been an advocate of friendlier relations with Beijing, and the Senate under his tenure has passed several resolutions critical of the deepening US military footprint on the island.

No, the other grey zone

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—a G7 initiative set up to combat international money laundering back in the late 1980s—maintains a ‘grey list’ of countries that are working to address serious deficiencies in their ability to stop illegal money (including terrorist financing) flowing through their institutions. Last Friday, Papua New Guinea got put on the grey list. That’s no life sentence—PNG’s been grey-listed before, 2014 to 2016—but getting off the list might be trickier this time. FATF now pay more attention to enforcement, and while PNG’s legal framework to combat money laundering has improved, enforcement is under-resourced and under-delivering. That PNG’s perceived level of public corruption has worsened in recent years—it’s viewed as the most corrupt state in the entire region—doesn’t help. Since PNG’s near-term growth is largely pinned to foreign-funded megaprojects, prominently in LNG and gold mining, grey-listing’s tendency to make foreign capital skittish could be a serious problem—though we needn’t over-egg it. Most punters saw this coming after the 2024 Mutual Evaluation Report, notwithstanding the Bank of PNG’s best efforts, and the upbeat tone of Westpac’s latest monthly outlook suggests investors have already priced in the risk. It’s a pointed reminder for Australia that, while PNG makes for a relationship worth investing in, it’s going to take a lot more investment to get Port Moresby where it wants to go.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Will PNG be on the anti-money laundering grey list? (DevPolicy Blog, 2025)—Turns out, yes. But what’s the significance of it?

• Politics at Play: Geopolitics and Organized Crime in the Pacific (Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, 2024)—How does organised crime tie in with foreign policy in the Pacific islands? Part of a series.

• Palau deports Chinese criminals, reinforces Indo-Pacific security (FDD, 2025)—What’s at stake in the contest over Palau?

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or our other Substack newsletters:

Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Every fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 22 January 2026 - 5 February 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Two’s company

As of 24 January, the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party—the highest command authority over China’s armed forces—consists of President Xi Jinping, General Zhang Shengmin, and five empty chairs. Successive purges since 2023, culminating with the removal of two generals two weeks ago, have left the senior leadership of the PLA greatly reduced for reasons which are, in fine CCP style, opaque. Corruption? Could be. Factional strife? Possible. Sold nuclear secrets to the US? Doubtful, but a solid cover story. Whatever the pretext, it’s a relatively safe bet that Xi will continue to do what he’s been doing for many years now: centralise as much power as possible in his own person. Eliminating the bulk of the senior sources of military advice may signal the CCP’s becoming more prone to miscalculation; it might just as well signal Xi’s lack of confidence in the PLA. Needless to say, Taipei’s trying to figure it out too.

High pressure areas

On 1 February, Japan Coast Guard officials observed four China Coast Guard ships—including Haijing 2502 and 2503, each a 5,000-tonne platform armed with a 76mm deck gun—in the contiguous zone outside Japan’s territorial waters near the Senkaku Islands. It’s an unusually large CCG commitment, officials said, even by recent standards. Larger hulls are better able to cope with rough seas or tropical storms, allowing them to remain on station near the disputed islands for extended periods of time. That seems to be the play: in 2025, CCG ships were present around the uninhabited Senkaku Islands for 335 consecutive days until October, surpassing the previous record by over 100 days. China’s maritime posture at the Senkaku chain is increasingly persistent, larger in scale, and armed.

In the air, it’s a similar story. For more than a decade Japan has reported scrambling fighter jets to secure its airspace around seven hundred times a year, usually more. These levels of activity haven’t been seen since the late Cold War. The tempo is impressive: in the nine months from 1 April to 31 December 2025, the JASDF scrambled 448 times, two-thirds of which were in response to Chinese military aircraft entering Japan’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea. In the last fortnight alone the JASDF has scrambled in response to Russian nuclear-capable bombers, fighter escorts, and surveillance aircraft.

These incidents in themselves aren’t too consequential. But that’s precisely the point. In the sea and in the air, it’s this sustained, routine pressure that incrementally normalises Chinese or Russian presence and tests Japanese responses, without ever appearing to achieve anything decisive. That’s grey-zone activity for you: repetitious, almost boring, a constant drain on the defender’s time, fuel, and attention.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• The People’s Liberation Army: modernised but still mistrusted (ASPI, 2025)—How confident is Xi in the PLA, really?

• China’s Military Activities in the East China Sea: Implications for Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force (RAND, 2018)—Why constant challenges to Japan’s ADIZ matter.

• Why Did China and Russia Stage a Joint Bomber Exercise near Alaska? (CSIS, 2024)—Well, why did they? A ‘new era of joint operations’ has implications far beyond Japan.

Southeast Asia

It’s not who votes that counts...

Myanmar’s general election—the first since the 2021 military coup—wound up on 25 January with a landslide victory for the Union Solidarity and Development Party. Since the USDP is the military junta’s parliamentary proxy, this was unsurprising. With major opposition parties banned, widespread reports of coerced voting, and criticism of the electoral process itself criminalised, UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews has described it as ‘an empty parody of an election.’ (And that’s him being polite.)

Unfortunately, in trying to legitimise itself abroad, the junta has partners willing to meet it halfway. Myanmar is rich in heavy rare earth elements—dysprosium, terbium, and other elements used in the manufacture of high-performance magnets. It’s China’s largest external supplier. The Trump administration has in past months shown signs of being tempted by a rapprochement with the junta to secure these minerals. China meanwhile not only depends on Myanmar’s resources, but has billions of dollars tied up in BRI projects throughout the country. That gives Beijing a strong incentive to see ‘stability’ restored on terms the junta can live with. No matter how paper-thin the narrative of free and fair elections, as long as the international community gets an alibi out of it to re-engage Myanmar per ‘business as usual’, it’ll find an audience.

Fair-weather friends

On 23 January the Devon Bay, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, capsized about a hundred kilometres northwest of Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. The Chinese and Philippine Coast Guard, so often at odds with each other, cooperated in the ensuing search and rescue operation. By the end of the first day, 17 of the 21 all-Filipino crew had been recovered; two later died, and four are still missing. On 25 January, the CCG turned over the survivors and the remains of two crew members to the PCG during a ship-to-ship transfer. It was an unusually cooperative moment in waters more often associated with ramming, water cannons, and megaphone diplomacy.

But don’t expect too much. When the grey hulls show up, everyone’s back in their usual spot. On 25-26 January, the US guided missile destroyer John Finn and the Philippines frigate Antonio Luna conducted a maritime cooperative activity—a joint military drill, the eleventh of its kind since 2023—near Scarborough Shoal. Philippine sailors spotted the Chinese frigate Xianning nearby; it didn’t take any action, but PLA Southern Theater Command later issued a statement characterising the joint drill as disruptive to regional peace and security.

Over the hedge?

Fears that Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base—rebuilt these past few years with substantial Chinese funding—might become a PLA-N foothold on the Gulf of Thailand got a notable (albeit carefully stage-managed) rebuttal this fortnight.

From 24 to 28 January, the USS Cincinnati made a five-day port call at Ream, the first US warship to dock there since the base expansion was completed in April. USINDOPACOM chief Admiral Samuel J. Paparo was along for the ride; he used the visit to publicly affirm Cambodian assurances that Ream was a sovereign port open to partners, while both sides flagged an expansion of military cooperation. That cooperation could soon include the revival of the long-paused ANGKOR SENTINEL exercise: Paparo said planning would restart in late February or early March with a view to conducting the drills around 2026-27.

It’s probably too early to call this a ‘reset’ in the relationship. The facts on the ground haven’t changed: Beijing’s investment has materially increased Ream’s capacity and Chinese naval vessels have reportedly maintained a rotating presence there. But Phnom Penh is clearly trying to send the message that Ream isn’t a Chinese exclave.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Rare Earth Mining in Myanmar: A Primer (University of Warwick, 2024)—What gets mined in Myanmar, where, and why it matters.

• Marcos in the middle (Lowy, 2025)—Joint military drills as a tool of Philippines statecraft: how and why?

• Strategic Crossroads: Navigating diverging perspectives to enhance Cambodia-US ties (Pacific Forum, 2025)—Washington’s stake in rebuilding the bilateral relationship with Cambodia.

Oceania

Minding the gap

What would Tom Uren say? You might remember September 2024, when Timor-Leste’s President José Ramos-Horta opined that the late Labor luminary would tell his protege, now-Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, to ‘stop the crap’ and ‘go and visit Timor-Leste and increase support.’ Well, here we are. On 28 January in Dili, the leaders of Timor-Leste and Australia signed a joint declaration spelling out the intent to further cooperate along a variety of policy axes. The nuts and bolts (which include defence cooperation) will have to wait for a Joint Plan of Action to get worked out between the two countries’ foreign ministries, but what we have now is strongly suggestive of an Australian value proposition designed to do two things at once: meet immediate development needs while reducing the temptation to ‘shop around’ for other strategic patrons. ASEAN centrality is affirmed as a matter of course for ASEAN’s newest member, with an $8.2 million package to support Timor-Leste’s membership. That’s in addition to $220 million to support education and healthcare, and a ten percent cut of the revenue from the Greater Sunrise gas field earmarked for a dedicated infrastructure fund. Read in context, the joint declaration comes across like a bid for institutional stickiness, tying Australia to Timor‑Leste’s long-term trajectory.

All at sea

On 30 January the Republic of the Marshall Islands, represented by Foreign Minister Kalani Kaneko at Stirling, WA, took delivery of a new Guardian-class patrol boat: the RMIS Jelmae. This is the last of the patrol boats—24 in total—to be donated to Pacific Island countries under Australia’s Pacific Maritime Security Program since the commitment was made back in 2018. Through-life sustainment for the Guardian-class is guaranteed by Australia out to 2048, with an overall price tag of about $5.9 billion for the whole fleet—making it one of, if not the biggest capability transfers to the Pacific from any aid donor.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Local impacts of foreign interests in Timor-Leste (Xcept, 2025)—There are many players in T-L, and Australia’s only one of them.

• Kangaroos and crocodiles: the Timor Sea Treaty of 2018 (UNSW, 2018)—There’s a lot of history (some of it ugly) behind the maritime boundary between Australia and Timor-Leste.

• Australia’s Contributions to Pacific Maritime Governance (East-West Center, 2025)—Australia’s been donating patrol boats to the Pacific for decades. What’s the strategy?

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast—or our other Substack newsletters:

Welcome to the first edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.

Every fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the moves and countermoves shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.

This edition covers the period 1 January 2026 - 22 January 2026.

Follow the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on X, on LinkedIn, and on Bluesky.

Subscribe now

Northeast Asia

Tools of the trade

With the Trump administration’s erratic (to say the least) tariff policies having dominated headlines last year, China’s ongoing pressure campaign against Japan is a useful reminder that the toolbox of economic coercion has a lot more in it.

On 7 November last year, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made remarks in the Diet to the effect that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could justify a Japanese military response. When Taiwan becomes an irritant, the PRC can always—as it did on 29-30 December—run large-scale military exercises at short notice to make known its displeasure. (Though this doesn’t seem to have deterred the United States from brokering arms deals of unprecedented proportions with Taipei.) Diplomatic pressure, likewise, is always on the table, though rarely as crude as Consul-General Xue Jian. DFAT’s official line on the exercises mentioned above was met with a piece in the Australian from Beijing’s Ambassador—strident, somewhat questionable, but as international relations go, polite.

Japan’s a very different matter. What’s a great power to do?

Well, they can issue travel advisories warning citizens to avoid Japan; economist Takahide Kiuchi estimates the loss of Chinese tourists could cost Japan over USD $14 billion. They can de facto ban Japanese seafood imports, holding them in port indefinitely while throwing up procedural roadblocks. There are already reports that Chinese authorities have massively stepped-up inspections of Japanese sake and other food products, doubling customs delays across the board. And now that China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) are all back at the office after New Year’s, it’s time for export controls. On 6 January MOFCOM prohibited all exports of dual-use items to Japanese military end‑users, for military end‑uses, and to any other end‑uses that would contribute to enhancing Japan’s military capabilities.

MOFCOM did pretty much the same thing in January last year to 28 named US companies, mostly large defence contractors like Raytheon and Boeing, but this time there’s neither an entity list attached nor a pathway to apply to MOFCOM for special permission. Not only Chinese exporters, but international re-exporters of Chinese-origin dual-use items will need to demonstrate to MOFCOM’s satisfaction that they won’t end up supporting the JSDF. While MOFCOM later clarified that the ban will not affect ‘civilian users’, its scope is still extraordinarily vague: up to 42% of Japan’s annual imports from China (worth some USD $68.4 billion) could be affected. Rare earth elements appear to be a particular concern: on top of the controls imposed on 6 January, Chinese state media have indicated the intent to enforce more stringently China’s pre-existing export controls for rare earths, specifically where Japan is the destination. While the effects of all this aren’t expected to hit until next month, it’s worth noting that the rare-earth card is one China’s dealt Japan before—with limited success. So far Tokyo seems to be biding its time. With a snap election on the way, Japan’s government has made diplomatic protests, but so far taken no formal economic countermeasures.

Laying down the law

Late last year Taiwan’s legislature voted to amend the Telecommunications Management Act, among six other laws, to raise penalties for intentional damage to undersea cables. The amended laws became effective on 7 January. The new legal framework was drafted by the Executive Yuan in reaction to a sequence of suspected cable sabotage incidents in early 2025, attributed to Chinese-crewed vessels operating under flags of convenience. They increase the criminal penalties for intentional damage to critical undersea infrastructure, empower Taiwanese authorities to confiscate tools, vessels, and equipment used to illegally endanger undersea cables regardless of ownership, and make it legally obligatory for vessels within territorial waters to report their location and movements through the Automatic Identification System (AIS). The new laws also require the Ministry of the Interior to publish maps and data on undersea cable locations, making it harder for offenders to claim ignorance.

The Great Wall of the East China Sea

Speaking of AIS—if you happened to be monitoring AIS ship location data in the Western Pacific on about 11 January, you would have noticed something quite odd. About 1,400 Chinese fishing boats dropped whatever they were doing and made a beeline for the East China Sea, where they arranged themselves into a line about 300 kilometres long. What you’d have been seeing there was the Chinese maritime militia, or a significant part of it, showing off an unprecedented degree of coordination. Chinese authorities are yet to comment, but expert opinion finds it unlikely they were all there to fish; the point is taken that, in a crisis, China could not only mobilise but effectively command vast numbers of nominally-civilian vessels to support military activities.

Ground control to Major Kim

After a two-month lull, North Korea kicked off the year with at least two ballistic missile tests in the early hours of 4 January (2250 UTC, 3 Jan). It’s as yet unconfirmed whether—per DPRK media’s claims—these were hypersonic missiles. In keeping with the recent trajectory of the DPRK missile program, these were short-range systems whose projectiles splashed down in the Sea of Japan after about 1,000 kilometres of flight. While Pyongyang disclosed a new ICBM in late 2025, there haven’t been any ICBM tests since 2024. Their efforts over the last year have focused on maturing theatre-level weapons, probably with a view to courting the Russian export market.

Signalling matters a fair bit with North Korean missile tests, but in this case, while the timing is suggestive, the intent is open to interpretation. The launches came only a few hours after US special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, and a few hours before South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung flew to Beijing for leader-level talks. Things are complicated by North Korea’s questionable claim the following week to have shot down a South Korean surveillance drone on 4 January. In remarks to state media, Kim Jong Un characterised the tests as a demonstration of the DPRK’s nuclear deterrent, and said they were made necessary ‘by the recent geopolitical crisis and complicated international events’—without further elaboration.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Pressure Points (ASPI, 2025)—Beijing’s growing use of military coercion against Taiwan.

• The Old Logic Behind China’s New Economic Weapons (The Washington Quarterly, 2025)—When, how, and why does China use economic sanctions?

• Disrupting the Gray Zone: Unrestricted Warfare in the Pacific (USNI, 2025)—On the Chinese Maritime Militia.

• New Missiles But Fewer Launches, a Missile Sub Reveal, and a Nuclear-Armed Air Force (38 North, 2026)—North Korea’s missile program during the last quarter of 2025.

Southeast Asia

Sir, do you know how fast you were fishing?

On 12 January, about thirty kilometres southeast of Scarborough Shoal in the West Philippine Sea, the Philippines-flagged fishing boat Prince LJ was harassed by a China Coast Guard vessel (CCG 23521) and a PLA Navy vessel (PLAN 621). The Chinese ships blocked the Prince LJ’s path, forcing it to change course to the southeast, pursuing it while blaring sirens. A Philippine Coast Guard vessel arrived after approximately three hours and began documenting the encounter. This was the first incident this year of harassment from Chinese security forces recorded by Philippines sailors inside the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in an area which is also claimed by China as part of the ‘nine-dash line’. This area saw a marked rise in Chinese maritime activities over 2025: Philippines authorities recorded 447 military and law enforcement vessels, up from 278 in 2024. As part of an increasingly persistent posture in contested areas, it’s become more common in recent years for China Coast Guard vessels within the ‘nine-dash line’ to be shadowed closely by PLA Navy warships—though as the August 2025 collision between two such vessels indicates, joint operations might not be perfected. This latest incident comes only a few months after China’s State Council approved a plan to create a nature reserve at Scarborough Shoal.

Beachfront property, if you can keep it

At Antelope Reef in the Paracel Islands—a sandbar about 200 metres end-to-end, claimed by China, Vietnam, and Taiwan—the dredgers are back. Recent satellite imagery indicates a flurry of new land reclamation activity at Antelope, which presently hosts a small Chinese outpost. Since last November new infrastructure has been built on the reef, including a roll-on/roll-off berth—which suggests plans to move heavy equipment onshore, consistent with a large-scale dredge. If that comes about, it’ll be China’s first major land reclamation since the 2013-2016 period of extensive dredging in the Spratly Islands. Chinese activity in the South China Sea since then has been characterised more by consolidation and militarisation of the land reclaimed in that earlier phase, while other players have used the interval to push forward with their own island-building efforts. Vietnam’s work since 2021 has nearly matched, if not surpassed, China’s earlier build-out.

Professionals talk logistics

On 15 January Japan and the Philippines signed a mutual logistics support agreement, allowing both countries’ armed forces to exchange supplies and services tax-free. It follows on from and strengthens the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) the two countries concluded in July 2024, which entered into force in August last year. The RAA creates a legal framework for each country’s armed forces to enter and operate within the other’s territory.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Maritime Incidents in the South China Sea: Measures of Law Enforcement or Use of Force? (International Law Studies, 2024)—Where do the tactics of the China Coast Guard stand under international law?

• Island Tracker (AMTI, 2026)—Five claimants have built more than 90 outposts in the South China Sea. Who owns what?

• Japan’s Defense Cooperation with the Philippines under the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) Initiative (NIDS, 2025)—A quasi-alliance is gradually coming into existence between Japan and the Philippines.

• Southeast Asia’s evolving defence partnerships (Lowy Institute, 2025)—Deepening Japan-Philippines defence cooperation in broader context.

Oceania

Whatever floats your boat

Two speedboats of Chinese manufacture were handed over to the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force on 13 January, in a ceremony attended by the Minister of Police and the PRC’s Ambassador. This is the first time the PRC’s made a gift of this kind to the Solomon Islands, with which it concluded a Security Cooperation Framework in April 2022. Boat donations—whether they’re the armed patrol boats characteristic of Australia’s Pacific Maritime Security Program, hydrographic survey vessels capable of playing a surveillance role, or small police craft driven by outboard motors—have become increasingly salient in external actors’ security engagement with the Pacific Islands over the past decade. Excluding Australia’s long-standing defence cooperation program, since 2018, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, China, the United States, New Zealand, and most recently India have gifted vessels of various kinds to support Pacific coast guards and police forces.

For more on these topics, we suggest:

• Global policing: China’s police training in Solomon Islands (IISS, 2025)—Since 2022, China has rapidly expanded its police-training programmes with the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force.

• Friends to all: Solomon Islands juggles security partners in search of maximum support (ASPI, 2025)—On the Solomon Islands’ approach to security cooperation.

That’s all for this fortnight. For more timely analysis and commentary, check out The Strategist and ASPI’s Stop the World podcast.