Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines.
Every fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the actions and developments shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.
This edition covers the period from 21 August to 3 September 2026. Subscribe here to receive every edition of Fault Lines direct to your inbox.
Northeast Asia
Scheduling conflict
Word from US Forces Japan has it that the combined US-Japan-South Korea multi-domain exercise Freedom Edge 26 will proceed as planned in early September. Under usual circumstances that wouldn’t be news, but we’re in unusual times. The major US-South Korea exercise Ulchi Freedom Shield was cut in half this year – it ended on 21 August, six days ahead of schedule – following a directive penned in the inimitable hand of President Donald Trump. The same day, rumour hit the Korean press that the biennial combined Ssang Yong exercise (it’s an amphibious warfare thing) would be cancelled entirely. The defence ministry in Seoul confirmed the cancellation in a press briefing on 24 August; unconfirmed reports suggest they’ll run a national amphibious exercise instead. Turns out the United States concluded back in June that a prolonged commitment to the Iran conflict left them unable to spare the forces for Ssang Yong.
Those forces would have been considerable. Training to land on a beach held by people who’d really prefer you wouldn’t – the Korean People’s Army, for example – is quite the enterprise. Ssang Yong 2024 had a cast of more than 13,000, featuring two US amphibious assault ships, a division-sized landing force and a brief cameo from the British Royal Marines. It’s not on the order of a major combined-arms warfighting exercise like Ulchi Freedom Shield normally is, but it’s up there, and it demands a suite of rather specialised US capabilities. Those have been busy. The Okinawa-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the associated USS Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group – the likely candidates to have anchored Washington’s contribution to Ssang Yong 2026 – were unexpectedly sent to the Middle East back in March and didn’t return until the end of July. Details are scant, but it looks like they saw a lot of action over there. Those forces will need time to get back up to fighting strength, and you can easily imagine a Seventh Fleet planner reasoning that a major landing exercise in early September just doesn’t give enough time.
Iran absorbing US assets and attention otherwise earmarked for the Indo-Pacific has been a familiar tale in recent months, but it’s not the whole story. The great Persian Gulf kerfuffle (a technical term) is logistically burdensome, but it certainly hasn’t kept the US from sustaining a high tempo of joint and combined exercises in the Western Pacific. Some, such as this year’s Rim of the Pacific or Balikatan exercises, have been unprecedented in scope. It isn’t hard to find commentary offering a political explanation for at least the de-scoping of Ulchi Freedom Shield: there’s clear US intent to extend an olive branch to Pyongyang (testing ten short-range ballistic missiles at once on 20 August may suggest what Kim thinks of that), and Seoul’s persistent unwillingness to wave the Taeguk flag at the Strait of Hormuz still has the White House miffed. But under these conditions, the exercises that aren’t cancelled are just as revealing.
Freedom Edge is smaller than Ssang Yong or Ulchi Freedom Shield, but with a broad remit: the US, Japan and South Korea practice everything from defeating incoming ballistic missiles to anti-surface warfare on the high seas. It’s one of the more significant legacies of the relatively Japan-friendly era in Korean foreign policy under former president Yoon Suk-yeol. Where major US–South Korea bilateral exercises tend to focus on traditional Korean War-style contingencies – Ssang Yong, for example, is a pipe, sunglasses and one division short of an Incheon landing – Freedom Edge doesn’t. It builds interoperability across a range of tasks, many of them equally if not more relevant to a hypothetical US-led coalition fighting a regional war against China. US Pacific Command’s activities this year don’t suggest any lack of enthusiasm (or resources) for exercises of that kind.
News from abroad
- NATO has technical standards for military equipment, procedures, information sharing, you name it. Some are public, others are not. This is useful to know if you want to sell military hardware to them. The South Korean defence ministry press briefing on 24 August also announced that the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (Australians should here envision the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group crossed with the Illuminati) had streamlined access to these standards for Korean defence manufacturers. Previously this was all done ad hoc, on a case-by-case basis; as of last week, DAPA has a defined process Korean firms can use to request access to non-public NATO standards. Sounds very dull and bureaucratic, but it’s the stuff genuine defence-industrial cooperation is made of.
- Japanese guided missile destroyer JS Chokai returned to its home port of Sasebo on 30 August. It’s been a year in San Diego getting fitted out to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles, completing a live-fire test back in July. This is the biggest step forward Japan’s taken yet in its plan to build out long-range precision strike capabilities. Eventually, Japan’s other seven Aegis destroyers will get the same treatment.
- Defence budgets are tricky at the best of times – ask us how we know – and Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te hasn’t been having a good one. His latest special budget request (about A$10 billion for uncrewed systems) has finally been passed by the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan, but as a series of annual appropriations rather than the upfront lump sum that Lai wanted. It’ll leave the government with far less discretionary authority to accelerate procurement. This is good if you like constitutional process but bad if you like spending a lot of money on drones very quickly. ASPI’s State of the Strait has the details.
Southeast Asia
Build it and they will come
On 28 August, Vietnam’s foreign ministry issued a protest against new Chinese construction on Yagong Island in the Paracels. Known as Ba Ba Island in Hanoi – which claims it along with the rest of the Paracels – it’s your classic 200-metre sandbar in the South China Sea, soon to be as long and wide as the Chinese navy’s dredgers deem appropriate. Satellite imagery captured in August indicates installations that could be the beginnings of an early-warning radar facility.
In context, you see the bigger picture. About 16 km away, Beijing appears to have just completed the first stage of land reclamation at Antelope Reef. The scale of works there – almost six square km – makes it the largest land reclamation project in the South China Sea in recent years and puts it at about the same size as China’s established naval and air base at Mischief Reef in the Spratlys, far to the south. Antelope had deep-water access already. What it has now is room enough for a 3,000-metre runway, and there are some signs that China’s already started building one. A radar facility at Yagong would be a logical complement to what’s shaping up as the biggest expansion of China’s military footprint in the South China Sea in a decade.
Playing the field
Indonesia’s ‘free and active’ foreign policy is as fascinating to watch as it must be hair-raising to manage, and you’d be hard put to find a better showcase than the fortnight just gone. On 21 August, Indonesia’s foreign and defence ministers met their Chinese counterparts in Jakarta’s second-ever meeting of this kind with Beijing. They agreed to expand military training and exchanges and discussed plans for defence technology transfers and the joint development of munitions factories in Indonesia. Next up on 26 August was Indonesia’s foreign and defence ministers meeting with Australia, the first since the two countries signed a landmark security treaty earlier this year. There, amid many reaffirmations, the order of the day was deepening interoperability and cooperation in the maritime domain, including Australia’s provision of drones and training to Indonesia’s coast guard.
Their presence in Melbourne for that meeting gave Indonesia’s and Australia’s defence ministers the opportunity for a surprise trilateral meeting with Japan’s, though Shinjiro Koizumi had to join online. This built on rapidly deepening Japan–Indonesia defence ties and an expanding role for Japan in providing security assistance in Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s foreign minister then continued to Auckland, where broader talks with his New Zealand counterpart on 28 August included calls to finalise a framework for military-to-military talks and an agreement on defence cooperation, as well as continued support for law enforcement capacity building programs. The same day, Russian officials confirmed that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would be the principal foreign guest at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok this month – the only foreign head of state, in fact, with a potential meeting with Vladimir Putin on the agenda. Rounding off all this was the opening of exercise Super Garuda Shield on 31 August. The exercise is the crown jewel of US–Indonesia military cooperation, involving some 4,700 personnel from 13 countries.
The whole art of this sort of thing isn’t in making deals with everyone, but in knowing what you want out of each and keeping every other issue in its own box. Russia’s got Hormuz-proof crude oil, and Jakarta wants it, despite the threat of EU sanctions. The US and its allies have the nous and the kit for the multi-domain archipelagic warfare training Indonesia’s military finds useful. China, meanwhile, has markets, capital and industrial capacity (defence industry too, needless to say) of which Indonesia has every reason to want a piece.
News from the neighbourhood
- Australia, the Philippines and the US conducted another multilateral maritime cooperative activity in the Philippine exclusive economic zone from 19 to 25 August, involving ships and maritime patrol aircraft from all three countries. The unusually long seven-day activity expanded on previous iterations with more complex training, while Australia deployed replenishment ship HMAS Supply rather than the surface combatants that contributed to previous activities.
- Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore reaffirmed their commitment to keeping the Malacca and Singapore Straits free, open and safe at the 17th Co-operation Forum on 25 August, stressing the importance of freedom of navigation and transit passage under international law. The statement follows a short-lived suggestion from Indonesia’s finance minister earlier this year, inspired by Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz, that the three countries charge ships for passage through the Malacca Strait.
- Malaysia sent mixed signals on the use of force in the region. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim declared that Taiwan was ‘part of China, period’ and appeared to justify Beijing’s potential use of force to prevent secession. Days later, Defence Minister Khaled Nordin warned that growing military activity around Borneo – including the expanding US–Philippine presence north of Sabah – was increasing the risk of miscalculation. At the same time, he stressed that Malaysia viewed neither Washington nor Beijing as a threat.
Oceania
There and back again
The annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting got underway in Palau this week, with more than a few peculiarities. Start with the special guest at the formal opening ceremony on 31 August: Taiwan’s foreign minister, Lin Chia-lung. That doesn’t normally happen – not the minister part (Taipei usually sends a deputy minister) and not the high-visibility appearance alongside other dignitaries.
Taiwan’s an irregular guest at the PIF, not because it rarely shows up (its delegations have been a fixture since 1993) but because it’s considered a ‘development partner’ – a category consisting solely of Taiwan, carefully distinct from the PIF’s ‘dialogue partners’, which happen to include the People’s Republic of China. It’s a classic face-saving arrangement that allows whoever’s hosting to avoid the awkwardness of having two Chinas at one table, and as all but three PIF member states presently maintain official diplomatic relations with Beijing in preference to Taipei, it usually means that Taiwan’s delegation keeps a low profile. But Palau is one of the three exceptions. The last time the PIF leaders met in a country that recognised Taiwan was in 2019 in Tuvalu – not incidentally the last time Taiwan was represented by its foreign minister.
Naturally, Beijing isn’t terribly pleased with this. Aside from the usual grumbling about separatism, China’s special envoy to the Pacific Islands, Qian Bo, warned of unspecified ‘consequences’ for Palau as a result of Taiwan’s expanded engagement. The Chinese foreign ministry’s decision a few days earlier to advise travellers to exercise caution in Palau hints at one lever they could pull: while down from its pre-pandemic peak, Chinese tourism is still a significant contributor to Palau’s economy. In remarks to the press on 30 August, Palau’s President – soon to be PIF chair – Surangel Whipps Jr frankly took the view that China was trying to coerce his country over its recognition of Taiwan.
The broader story here is that the PIF’s ability to compartmentalise great-power competition is increasingly footnoted. Last year’s leaders meeting in Solomon Islands made a point of excluding all external partners, which lowered the diplomatic temperature but isn’t ideal for the summit’s diplomatic objectives. This year, Palau called everyone back in, and an air of intrigue hangs very densely over proceedings. Several PIF leaders are conspicuously absent. Samoa, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji have sent their apologies as well as substitutes in place of their heads of government. That isn’t altogether out of the ordinary, but the scale of absenteeism this year is unusual. Kiribati, whose parliament last week voted in favour of enshrining recognition of the PRC over Taiwan in its constitution, sent David Teaabo, head of the country’s foreign service and a former ambassador to China. New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters publicly entertained suspicions that foreign interference had a hand in that, without naming any particular culprit. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale, meanwhile, has the best excuse of all: barely off the tarmac in Koror, Wale had to leave in a snap to face a no-confidence motion from his own home affairs minister, Manasseh Maelanga. Maelanga and two other members of Wale’s cabinet resigned shortly after, and the motion will face a vote next week.
Empty chairs where heads of government should be don’t strictly prevent the leaders meeting from getting things done, but they do diminish the authority in the room. At a time when the PIF understandably wants to demonstrate that its member states, not external powers, set the agenda in the region, several of its key decision-makers are not there to set it.
News from the family
- Papua New Guinea’s long-awaited decision on whether to ratify the result of Bougainville’s 2019 independence referendum may still be months away, as PNG’s parliament adjourned debate on the issue late last week. Prime Minister James Marape said that a decision on when the vote would be held would itself be deferred to October, after further consultations between the governments of PNG and Bougainville.
This article was originally published in , ASPI’s fortnightly newsletter that monitors the actions and developments shaping the regional order and Australia’s security.
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