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.

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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.

Subscribe now

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.

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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.

Subscribe now

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.

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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.