SINGAPORE – Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Friday stressed the importance of dialogue as a “fundamental guardrail” to avert disaster in the face of intensifying great-power competition between the United States and China, as he outlined his country’s role in the Indo-Pacific region at the Shangri-La Dialogue.

Guardrails are central to ensuring that countries can disagree without that disagreement ending in disaster, he said.

“This isn’t about a policy of containment. It’s not a question of placing obstacles in the way of any nation’s progress or their potential,” Mr Albanese told some 600 defence ministers, military leaders, senior officials and security experts from over 40 countries gathered to attend Asia’s top security summit at the Shangri-La hotel in Singapore’s downtown Orchard Road on Friday evening.

“This is a matter of simple practical structures, to prevent a worst-case scenario. And the essential precondition to this is, of course, dialogue.”

Mr Albanese was giving the keynote speech to mark the opening of the 20th edition of the three-day forum organised by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

His address comes against the backdrop of increasingly complicated ties between the US and China as the two powers fail to see eye to eye on a range of issues from the ongoing Ukraine war to their stances on Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Mr Albanese referenced a recent speech by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in China, in which PM Lee noted big powers’ “heavy responsibility to maintain stable and workable relations with one another”.

“Because the alternative – the silence of the diplomatic deep freeze – only breeds suspicion, only makes it easier for nations to attribute motive to misunderstanding,” he said.

“If you don’t have the pressure valve of dialogue, if you don’t have the capacity, at a decision-making level, to pick up the phone to seek some clarity or provide some context, then there is always a much greater risk of assumptions spilling over into irretrievable action and reaction.”

The consequences of a communication breakdown “within the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere”, Mr Albanese said, would be “devastating for the world”.

“That is why, as leaders in this region… we should be doing everything we can to support the building of that first and most fundamental guardrail,” he added.

While Beijing has returned to the table in some aspects in recent months, it has struck a tougher posture in others, pushing to set the terms of its re-engagement with Washington.

This week, the Pentagon said China rebuffed a request for a defence meeting on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue. This came as Beijing urged Washington to drop its sanctions against Chinese officials.

But at the summit on Friday evening, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin and Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu were photographed shaking hands.

The intensifying Sino-US rivalry has permeated politics, trade and other areas of global governance, shaping geopolitical dynamics and pressuring smaller nations in their orbit to take sides.

In his speech, Mr Albanese urged countries in the Indo-Pacific to take collective responsibility for the stability of the region, pushing back against characterisation of smaller nations as lacking the agency to shape the future of their region.

Such characterisation, he said, is “dangerously wrong”, presenting the future of the region as “somehow a foregone conclusion”.

“To move from imagining conflict is impossible, to assuming war is inevitable, is just as harmful to our shared goals,” he added.

He also defended Australia’s moves in recent years to boost its defence capabilities as an effort to keep war at bay.

“Australia’s goal is not to prepare for war, but to prevent it through deterrence,” he said, “making it crystal clear that when it comes to any unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force, be it in Taiwan, the South China Sea, the East China Sea or elsewhere, the risk of conflict will always far outweigh any potential reward.”

Australia’s defence policies have drawn global attention, as it acquires its first nuclear-powered submarines under the Aukus pact with Britain and the US, and implements plans to build a stronger armed forces.

Mr Albanese said Canberra’s latest defence investments were “an investment in regional stability”.

“Multilateral institutions are essential to writing the rules and keeping them relevant. But reinforcing the rules and upholding them depends on our capability as well.”

Dr Chen Dongxiao, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies and a delegate at the summit, agreed that constructive dialogue is vital to building trust and reducing the risk of miscalculations between China and the US.

“It takes two to tango, and both sides need to take further steps… But talking for the sake of talking won’t make a difference, particularly on the Taiwan issue,” he said.

“The guardrail, if any, is about whether and how the ‘one China’ principle would be observed… For the objective of regional stability and peace, it would be critical for Washington to reassure Beijing that it will continue to observe the fundamentals in good faith of the ‘one China’ principle.”

Dr William Choong, a senior fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, said he saw Australia’s security frameworks such as Aukus starting to gain some traction among Asian nations in terms of their ability to deter and reassure. 

But from Beijing’s view, he said, “there is a very fine line that separates deterrence and potential escalation”. 

“The Chinese will see it as tantamount to provocation, set in the broader context of containment of China. And it is highly unlikely that Mr Albanese’s comments, which are totally rational and pragmatic, will go down well with the Chinese.”