Address at 2025 Shangri-la Dialogue Plenary Session 3: Managing proliferation risks in the Asia-Pacific

I am delighted to be back at the Shangri La Dialogue, my fourth as Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister for Defence. 

It is a credit to the Government of Singapore and the IISS that the Dialogue has become the indispensable forum to talk about Indo-Pacific security. 

Our region has become the world’s most consequential strategic arena. 

And while war and disorder rages in European and Middle Eastern theatres, we cannot be complacent here. 

Resurgent geopolitical tensions mean the Indo-Pacific is not only the venue for the world’s largest conventional military and nuclear re-armament, it has also become ground zero in the race for technological supremacy. 

So today’s session on arms control and proliferation, a set of issues that sit at the intersection of military capability and technology, is particularly apt. 

We owe the arms control regime we know today – this architecture of restraint – to the Cold War, when the fateful emergence of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technologies drove an urgent global consensus on the need to de-risk US-Soviet competition. 

It created the platform for one of the great achievements of multilateralism: the landmark Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the NPT. 

This treaty not only became the indispensable framework to limit the spread of nuclear weapons; 

it and subsequent agreements formed the cornerstone of global non-proliferation efforts: first nuclear, then biological, and then chemical. 

The NPT has made the world safer. It remains as relevant today and is as important as ever. And it is essential that all of us remain committed to it. 

For our part Australia conforming to the NPT is a fundamental tenet of our strategic and foreign policy.

Australia acquiring a nuclear powered submarine capability under the banner of AUKUS is essential to our national security and will play a part in providing geostrategic balance in the Indo-Pacific. 

In moving down this path at all times Australia will comply with the NPT, which is why we are pursuing the highest safeguard standards through an arrangement with the IAEA under Article 14 of Australia’s Comprehensive  Safeguards Agreement. 

Also emerging from the Cold War era, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). 

These were not acts of altruism, but pragmatic responses to the existential dangers of unbridled proliferation. 

These agreements, while imperfect, provided crucial stability in an era where the risk of miscalculation could have been catastrophic. 

When the Cold War ended thirty-five years ago, many assumed the need for strategic arms control ended too. It is a measure of our times that this assumption has proved so spectacularly inaccurate. 

The world now faces new and increasingly complex strategic challenges – ever more uncertain and unpredictable. 

The global architecture that provided a foundation for strategic deterrence and assurance has fallen into dangerous decline.

The INF collapsed in 2019, leaving non-strategic nuclear weapons unchecked by a formal agreement.

Russia suspended its participation in the last remaining binding bilateral arms control treaty between the United States and Russia – NewSTART – in 2023, with the Treaty itself set to expire in February next year. 

This leaves no legally binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two largest nuclear powers for the first time since 1972. 

In a more interconnected world, bilateral controls are insufficient. More countries are invested in shaping the geostrategic environment.  

China’s decision to pursue rapid nuclear modernisation and expansion, which aims in part to reach parity with or surpass the United States, is another reason the future of strategic arms control must be revitalised. 

And that is a difficult and daunting project. 

Today’s world demands we move beyond the simple focus on numbers and types of warheads and delivery systems.

New technologies like cyber, the weaponisation of space, and the ability to integrate nuclear weapons with autonomous systems means traditional arms control frameworks are being surpassed without any established method of control to supplement them. 

We also have to counter the grim, potentially imminent, possibility of another wave of global nuclear proliferation as states seek security in a new age of imperial ambition. 

In a profound abrogation of its responsibilities as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons in its war of conquest in Eastern Europe. 

Not only does this work against states disarming their own nuclear arsenals, as Ukraine responsibly did in 1994, the war is prompting some frontier states most exposed to Russian aggression to consider their options. 

And this has dire consequences for our region too. Russia has agreed a strategic partnership with North Korea to access the munitions and troops Moscow needs to continue its war. 

The probability that Russia is transferring nuclear weapons technology in payment for Pyongyang’s support places intolerable pressure on both South Korea and Japan. 

At the same time Iran’s nuclear program and its belligerence to its neighbours is also destabilising.  

All these actions risk sparking new proliferation cycles in both Europe and Asia, jeopardising US extended nuclear deterrence arrangements: a critical if under-sung asset in the fight against nuclear proliferation.

In short, arms control today is vastly more complicated and the risks are growing.

The landmark treaties that defined that era of arms control, including the NPT, are just as relevant today as they were decades ago. 

As imperfect as they are, strengthening transparency, compliance and risk reduction is key to making them work today.

As Australia’s National Defence Strategy argued last year, we must also invest in the arduous task of building a new architecture of restraint that addresses the realities of today’s geopolitical environment and the unique characteristics of new technologies before they are fully integrated into military arsenals. 

The arms control regime that we knew was a foundational component of an oft-maligned concept – the international rules-based order.  

Arms control must be seen as a necessary but not sufficient feature of a broader strategic order that we must build anew, an order defined as much by rules and norms as it is by power. 

Any such durable Indo-Pacific order must be characterised by a balance of power that helps manage strategic competition. 

In geopolitics, imbalance is provocative.

It alters the calculus around the risks of military force and invites the kind of deterrence failure we saw in Europe three years ago. 

China is embarked on the largest conventional military build-up since WWII. 

It is doing so without providing any strategic transparency or reassurance. 

And this remains a defining feature of the strategic complexity that the Indo-Pacific and the world faces today.   

The commitment underscored by US Secretary of Defense Hegseth today – that the Indo-Pacific is the United States’ strategic priority – is deeply welcome. 

The reality is that there is no effective balance of power in this region absent the United States. But we cannot leave this to the US alone. 

Other countries must contribute to this balance as well, including Australia. 

Through the largest peacetime increase in Defence spending since the end of the Second World War, Australia is investing in a generational transformation of the ADF to ensure we are not only in a position to deter force projection against us but also – and perhaps even more importantly – to contribute to an effective regional balance where no state concludes that force is a viable way to achieve strategic goals.

Our Government is making a generational investment into Defence, and we will continue to make further funding decisions based on the assets and capabilities we need to play our part and to meet the strategic moment.

A durable order in the Indo-Pacific must also maintain incentives to keep the peace. 

While a balance of power seeks to ensure that states accept the risks of territorial conquest are too great, they must also be convinced that the peace is too valuable. 

In practice, this means both preserving and building the interdependencies among states in trade, investment, ideas, and people. 

De-risking supply chains is an unfortunate but necessary response to intensifying strategic competition. 

But letting this tip over into wholesale decoupling would be a grave mistake. 

Dividing the Indo-Pacific into geo-strategic and geo-economic blocs would not only make us all poorer, it would make us more vulnerable to conflict. 

If opportunities are removed to become more prosperous through trade and investment between states, key incentives are also removed to keep the peace. 

Interdependence is no panacea, but nor is securitisation, which imposes only binary options and counterintuitively undermines deterrence. 

Liberal trade matters. 

Trade has been the lifeblood of the Asian region. 

And the shock and disruption to trade from high tariffs has been costly and destabilising.

Australia will always ensure due attention is paid to the requirements of security. 

And likewise we will continue to advocate for closer regional trade and investment integration, for the free flow of people and ideas, and for investing in the region’s unique multilateral structures that support all this – above all ASEAN and the Pacific Islands Forum. 

When I attended the dialogue last year, I was struck by President Prabowo’s speech in which he said the nations of the world both depended on and demanded the wisdom and statesmanship of great powers. No fact illustrates President Probowo’s point more acutely than the re-emergence of strategic nuclear competition and the technological tools that makes this competition even more dangerous.  

A stable and durable regional order, inclusive of urgent arms control requirements, won’t be possible unless all countries – pursue their strategic aims in a manner that respects the sovereign rights of others, the obligations imposed by international law, and the global rules based order. 

The effectiveness of such arms restraints will ultimately be the test of our times.

Thank you. 

ENDS