Most Australians could not say who and what governs activity on Antarctica. Fewer still could say that we claim about 42 per cent of it, a wedge of frozen continent nearly 80 per cent the size of the Australian mainland, administered from Hobart and defended by almost nothing. It is the largest territorial claim we make anywhere on earth, and the one we think about least. That inattention is a strategic vulnerability, because the ice at the bottom of the world is one end of a strategic geography we have not learned to read.We are used to arguing about our security along one axis. The debate runs east to west: the first and second island chains, the sea-air gap to the north, the arc from the Bay of Bengal through the archipelago to the western Pacific. The 2024 National Defence Strategy fixed the country’s primary area of military interest as the immediate region running from the northeast Indian Ocean through maritime Southeast Asia into the Pacific. That is a latitudinal map. It reads the world in bands of latitude, left to right across the top of the continent.
There is another axis, and it is becoming the one that matters. Run a line down the meridians of longitude that pass through our part of the world and you trace a single band that begins in the Arctic Ocean, comes down through Northeast Asia, threads the Chinese coast and the archipelago, crosses Australia, and ends on the Antarctic ice. It is a hemisphere read the long way, pole to pole. I will call it the long meridian. The contest now taking shape is not only for the sea lanes across our north. It is for primacy over the whole of that vertical band, and Australia sits at its southern anchor, the developed state closest to the one continent the international system has not yet decided how to govern.
The map we do not use
Strategists have always known that geography is read in more than one direction. Halford Mackinder gave us the heartland, Nicholas Spykman the rimland that surrounds it, and I have used both before to think about how an independent Australia might organise its own command. What I want to do here is simpler and, I think, more uncomfortable. Take the rimland and turn it on its side. Stop reading our region as a horizontal arc to the north and start reading it as a vertical column from the top of the planet to the bottom.
Seen that way, three things change. The poles stop being scenery and become the ends of a corridor. The chokepoints of the archipelago stop being gates in an east-west fence and become rungs on a north-south ladder, the narrow points through which everything on the meridian must pass. And Australia stops being a continent tucked safely behind the sea-air gap and becomes the southern keystone of the whole structure, holding the door to the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean.
The reason this matters now is that a single power is reaching for both ends of the meridian at once. That is not a claim about intentions. It is an observation about presence, and presence is what changes a map.
The strategic geography of the meridian
Geography is not a backdrop to strategy. It is one of its raw materials, and it rewards reading at two levels.
At the level of grand strategy, the meridian is a single system that links things we are used to filing separately: the Arctic passages a warming north is opening, the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic with their fisheries and their post-2048 question, and the chain of straits between them that carries the trade of half the world. Alfred Thayer Mahan taught that national power rests on command of the sea lanes; the meridian is Spykman’s rimland read the long way, and a power that can anchor both its ends and sit astride the straits between them gains three things together: strategic depth, assured access to routes and resources, and the ability to raise the cost of everyone else’s trade without firing a shot. That is the grand strategic prize, and it is why presence at the poles is worth the expense to a state that means to compete for the whole band. For Australia at the southern anchor, the same geography makes us either a keystone of the structure or its softest point, and which one we are is settled entirely by whether we build the weight to hold our end.
Nowhere is that resource logic sharper than in fisheries. Well over a third of the world’s assessed marine stocks are now fished beyond sustainable limits, even as fish remains a principal source of animal protein for billions of people. As the old grounds thin, the world’s distant water fishing fleets, of which China’s is by far the largest, are pushing further south toward the one ocean where the stocks are still abundant. The Southern Ocean’s krill and finfish are close to the last great underexploited protein reserve on the planet, and China has already built a new krill vessel to sail for Antarctica. Command of those fisheries is not a marginal environmental question. In a century that will struggle to feed itself, it is a question of who controls a strategic food supply, and the answer runs straight through the waters off our southern coast.
At the level of military strategy, three features of the meridian matter in particular, and Australia has under-weighted each.
One, space. The orbits that carry the most valuable reconnaissance and communications satellites are polar and near polar, and a satellite in these orbits crosses the poles on every revolution. That makes ground stations near the poles disproportionately valuable: the orbital planes converge there, so a single site can work satellites the rest of the world reaches only in glimpses. It is no accident that the premier downlink stations sit in Svalbard and on the Antarctic ice, nor that China’s new Qinling station carries a satellite ground station whose position raises the question of what else it can hear. The meridian is, among other things, one of the key axes of space situational awareness, and the poles are its command posts.
Two, intelligence and reconnaissance. The meridian band is the natural line along which to watch and to listen: its deep straits are the collection points, its seabed carries the cables, and its polar ends are listening posts with an open field of view. When a Chinese underwater glider turns up in the Lombok Strait, it is not lost. It is part of a patient effort to chart the corridor. The Southern Ocean approaches, by contrast, are very largely an Australian blind spot. We do not watch the space we claim, and a country cannot defend what it cannot see.
Three, manoeuvre. The meridian is an axis of movement as much as of trade. Submarines run north and south, submerged and unannounced, through the deep water of the Lombok and Ombai-Wetar straits, the passages a boat can transit without surfacing where Malacca is too shallow and too crowded. Surface forces project up and down the band. The Southern Ocean is not a wall at our back but an approach that can flank the continent from below. Distance is manoeuvre space for a power that can hold and use it, and an open flank for one that cannot, and we have told ourselves the first story while spending as though the geography would enforce it for nothing.
Hold these two readings together, the grand strategic prize and the military strategic uses, and the presence now building at both ends of the meridian stops looking like a scatter of unrelated research projects and starts looking like what it is.
The far end: the Arctic and the band between
Begin at the top. In 2018 China published an Arctic policy white paper that described the country as a ‘near-Arctic state’ and set out a ‘Polar Silk Road’ of shipping routes across the warming north. China is not an Arctic nation by any ordinary reading of a map. It has decided to become an Arctic actor anyway, because the north is one end of the corridor and the corridor is what it means to compete for. Russia, for its part, has spent two decades reopening Soviet-era bases along its northern coast and turning the Northern Sea Route into a militarised national highway.
Come down the band and the presence becomes maritime power in its most conventional form. The People’s Liberation Army - Navy is now the largest navy in the world by number of hulls, with more than 370 ships and submarines and a trajectory that the Pentagon projects will reach 435 by 2030. That fleet does not have to sail to Australia to affect Australia. It has only to sit astride the meridian, at the rungs of the ladder, to change the terms on which everything we buy and sell moves.
And almost everything we buy and sell moves by sea. More than 99 per cent of our trade by volume travels on ships we do not own, through straits we do not control. Around 90 per cent of our liquid fuel is imported, and if the tankers stopped we would exhaust normal stocks in under a month. I have written before about the sea lines and the chokepoints, and about the crude dependency that a hot war would expose. The point here is only that the vulnerability runs the length of the meridian, not just across the top of it. Malacca, Sunda and Lombok are not east-west gates in someone else’s fence. They are the rungs of our own ladder, and we do not hold any of them.
China has already shown, in the middle of the band, that it grasps this logic. Across the South China Sea it presses the nine-dash line, a claim to almost the entire sea that an arbitral tribunal found in 2016 to have no basis in law, and it has answered that ruling not with argument but with concrete. From around 2013 it built more than 3,000 acres of artificial land on reefs and features throughout the South China Sea, then gave them runways, radars, harbours and missile batteries, in spite of Xi Jinping’s assurance that it would not. Those features are not a defence of Chinese soil, because they are not Chinese soil. They are instruments of control over movement, a chain of fixed positions from which one power can watch, and if it chooses obstruct, the passage of everyone else through one of the busiest stretches of the meridian. It is the clearest demonstration we have that China reads the band the way this piece does: whoever holds the rungs decides who may climb the ladder, and China is building the means to hold them.
China is not the only power that reads the band this way, and not the only one building the weight to matter in it. India has made itself the gatekeeper of the western approaches to the Malacca Strait, running a tri-service Andaman and Nicobar Command from islands astride the channel through which much of East Asia’s trade must pass, and it reaches to the far end of the meridian as well, with two Antarctic stations of its own and an Antarctic Act to govern them. Indonesia holds the centre outright. The world’s largest archipelagic state sits across Malacca, Sunda and Lombok at once, bridges the Indian and Pacific oceans, and under its Global Maritime Fulcrum doctrine has begun, unevenly, to think of itself as a maritime power rather than a maritime thoroughfare. It is already Southeast Asia’s largest economy, and Goldman Sachs and PwC both project it among the world’s four largest by 2050. Neither India nor Indonesia wants a single master on the meridian any more than we do, and that shared interest is the raw material of the one future in which a country our size keeps room to move.
The southern anchor
Now go to the bottom, because this is the end we own on paper and have almost nothing to back it with.
Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty system, and its most important environmental instrument, the Madrid Protocol, prohibits mining outright. There is no expiry date on that ban. What there is, and what is often misdescribed, is a review point: from 2048, fifty years after the Protocol entered into force, any consultative party may request a conference to review how it is working. That is not the same as the ban lapsing. But it is a date on the calendar, and dates on the calendar concentrate the mind of any state that wants to keep its options open. It is worth asking, as the Lowy Institute has, who will want that conference and why.
The presence at the southern end is following the same pattern as the north. In February 2024 China opened its fifth Antarctic station, Qinling, on the Ross Sea coast, its third built to run year round. It operates two polar icebreakers. Australia, which claims nearly half the continent, runs three stations on the ice and a single icebreaker, the Nuyina, on which almost our entire Antarctic logistic chain depends. A claim to 42 per cent of a continent, serviced by one ship, is a claim in the sense that a title deed to a house you never visit is ownership. The paper is real. The presence is not.
The deeper gap is not presence but agency. A claim to territory normally implies the capacity to govern it, and there we have almost nothing. Australian law formally applies across the Australian Antarctic Territory, but no permanent police, court, border or customs presence exists to give it effect. We could not readily police a serious crime, turn away an unwanted vessel, or enforce our own customs and quarantine rules on the ice, in a place we say is ours. The contrast with how others treat their footprint is sharp. The United States, which pointedly claims no Antarctic territory at all, still extends its criminal law to its citizens on the continent and makes the manager of its main station a deputy federal marshal. We claim nearly half of Antarctica and exercise less practical authority over it than a country that claims none.
The same gap runs out into the water. Australia proclaims a vast exclusive economic zone around Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, and for a while we defended it seriously. When the Viarsa 1 was caught poaching Patagonian toothfish inside that zone in 2003, an Australian civilian patrol vessel pursued it almost 4,000 nautical miles across the Southern Ocean in one of the longest chases in maritime history. The campaign worked. Sustained and expensive enforcement, including an armed year-round patrol ship, drove illegal toothfishing in our zone down to almost nothing. The lesson was that presence, not paper, protects a claim, and it is a lesson we have since let slip, as the dedicated Southern Ocean patrol wound down and was folded into general border work.
The other thing the Southern Ocean asks of us is rescue. Australia’s search and rescue region covers a vast sweep of it, and we have repeatedly had to go in: in 1997 the frigate HMAS Adelaide steamed deep into the Southern Ocean to pull two round-the-world yachtsmen from freezing water far south of the mainland. Those operations save lives, and they are paid for in ships. The Southern Ocean is among the most punishing sea states on earth, and driving vessels built for warm water operations through it accelerates structural fatigue and shortens their working lives. That is the deeper problem beneath the icebreaker count: we build our fleet for the tropics, not the ice. No frigate or other combatant in the Royal Australian Navy is ice-rated or able to work in Antarctic waters at all.
This is the case Elizabeth Buchanan has pressed harder than most. She calls our domestic discourse on Antarctic geopolitics “shamefully shallow”, notes that our navy’s future fleet features “no ice-hardened vessels”, and writes that Antarctica is treated as “sorted” because the treaty holds, a complacency that “could not be further from reality”. We have leaned on the Antarctic Treaty to do the heavy lifting, mistaken the survival of the system for the security of our interests, and barely begun to think about the world after 2048, when any party may call the review that reopens the settlement. A treaty is a set of rules, not a garrison. Relying on one to hold a claim you will not resource works only for as long as every other party wants the rules to hold, and the presence now building at the southern end of the meridian is a signal that not all of them do.
The contest is not only about stations and ships. It is already visible in the rules. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources has not agreed a new marine protected area in the Southern Ocean for eight years, because it works by consensus and China and Russia have used that consensus to block new protections while pressing to expand the krill harvest. The most recent meeting again ended in stalemate. This is how a rules-based order is hollowed out from the inside: not by tearing up the treaty, but by using its own decision rules to stop it doing anything. Antarctic sovereignty raises a plain question about whether we are serious. On present evidence, we are not.
The southern anchor is a strong illustration of the whole argument, but it is not the whole argument. It is one end of a corridor whose other end is in the Arctic and whose middle runs through every strait our economy depends on. The question is what happens to that corridor over the next generation.
Four futures for the meridian
I have used scenarios before on this Substack, and I will use the method again here, because it is the honest way to think about a future no one can predict. When I looked at the weaponised digital age I set two axes and drew four futures. When I asked what Australia we want to have, the axes turned on our alliance choices. This time the axes belong to the hemisphere itself, not to us, because the meridian’s fate is mostly decided by others and our task is to work out where we would stand in each case.
The first axis is whether the contest produces a settled hegemon. Does one power come to hold recognised primacy over the meridian, or does no single power manage to settle it? The second axis is how the outcome is reached: by accommodation, the cold path of deterrence, spheres and bargains, or by force, the hot path of coercion and war. Cross the two axes and you get four futures.
The Quiet Sphere: A settled hegemon, reached without a shot.
China achieves recognised primacy across the meridian by weight rather than war. The stations, the fleet, the standards bodies and the trade dependencies compound until accommodation becomes the path of least resistance, and the region, Australia included, quietly arranges itself around Beijing. We keep our prosperity and the forms of independence, and lose, one reasonable adjustment at a time, the capacity to set our own course. It is the most dangerous future precisely because it is the most comfortable.
Strategically, we become a peripheral member of a China-centred order as the United States recedes (through neglect or negotiation) from a band it no longer leads, and our say in the region’s rules shrinks to accepting them. Economically, prosperity continues, perhaps even grows, but on terms set elsewhere, with market access held over us as a standing lever. For sovereignty, this is the deepest loss and the least visible, self-government hollowed by increments until the ability to choose is simply gone, because outsourced sovereignty is not sovereignty at all and a sphere of influence entered by consent is still a sphere. For security, there is no war and no independent defence either, as deterrence migrates to Beijing’s tolerance and the ADF turns ceremonial in its own region.
Hegemony by Force: A settled hegemon, reached by war.
Confrontation tips into a decisive conflict, most plausibly over Taiwan or the South China Sea, and China’s victory imposes the primacy that accommodation would otherwise have delivered.
Strategically, the alliance that has underwritten our security for eighty years is defeated or withdraws, and we face a new hegemon without the partner we built our plans around. Economically, it is the sphere of influence’s slow bill arriving all at once: trade severed at the chokepoints, fuel and imports cut, a war shock recession imposed from outside on a continent that owns almost no ships. For sovereignty, coercion is direct, through basing demands, blockade, and the terms of a settlement written by the victor. For security, this is close to the worst case, a continent that cannot resupply along its own distance, with no ice-capable ships for the south and thin magazines for the north.
The Armed Balance: No settled hegemon, held by deterrence.
Several powers end up weighty enough that none dominates: the United States still present, China risen but checked, India, Japan and Indonesia each consequential in their own stretch of the band. The meridian becomes a tense, militarised, expensive equilibrium, held because each can deny the others a cheap win. It is not a comfortable world. It is the best realistic one for a country our size, and the only one we can actively help to bring about.
Strategically, Australia has agency: one weight among several, able to combine with the resident powers without being captive to any, holding the meridian as part of a coalition it helps to form. Economically, the sea lanes stay open because no one can close them cheaply, and the cost is the standing premium of resilience and deterrence, paid deliberately rather than extracted in a crisis. For sovereignty, it is preserved, because a balance is precisely the condition that leaves a middle power room to choose. For security, it is an armed, competitive peace, expensive and uncomfortable, but a peace, because deterrence by denial works when enough powers can each impose an unacceptable cost.
The Shatterbelt: No settled hegemon, and no peace either.
The contest turns hot but settles nothing, and the meridian becomes a zone of protracted, unresolved conflict from the Arctic shipping lanes to the Southern Ocean. This is the warning, not a prediction, and it is the future we would back into by assuming the balance will hold itself.
Strategically, there is no order to belong to and no reliable guarantor, only shifting coalitions and continuous mobilisation. Economically, it is the drag of a permanent war economy, with trade routed the long way or not at all and insurance, fuel and shipping costs structurally higher for a generation. For sovereignty, we are defended and endangered at once, dominated by no one yet unable to secure ourselves, our Antarctic claim now contested ground. For security, it is the most demanding future of all, a two-ended defence problem, north and south at the same time, on a scale the force we are building was never designed to meet.
Two things about those futures should be said plainly rather than left implied.
The first is that the future we would choose by default is the worst of the plausible ones for our sovereignty. The Quiet Sphere asks nothing of us in the moment. It has no invasion to resist, no bill to vote, no obvious day on which we surrendered anything. That is exactly why we would drift into it. A country that will not pay a small price now to keep its options open is a country choosing, without admitting it, to pay a much larger one later. This is the same complacency I described in the comfortable country that prefers not to decide its place, and it has a geography now as well as a temperament.
The second is that in three of the four futures our southern approaches and our Antarctic claim are a liability we have not resourced, and only in The Armed Balance is distance the asset we like to imagine it always is. Distance protects a country that can hold and use the space around it. It exposes a country that cannot. We have spent decades assuming the tyranny of distance works in our favour without building the reach that would make it true. A single icebreaker and three stations are not reach. They are a flag on a claim we are daring someone else to test.
Shaping the future we want
Two things hold across all four futures, and together they are the whole case for acting.
The first is that some investments pay in every one of them. Whoever ends up astride the rungs of the ladder, and whether the meridian settles by accommodation, settles by force, or fails to settle at all, we are better off for holding resilient sea lanes and fuel, a real industrial and logistic base, a presence at our southern anchor, and a force that can deny an adversary a cheap result. None of that is a bet on a single scenario. It is the premium that pays out across the board, which is the definition of a decision worth making before you know which future arrives. Deterrence by denial is the clearest case: the wall of denial I have argued for is calibrated, in the official strategy, to the northern approaches, but a meridian view says the denial problem has a southern face as well, and a force built only for the gap to the north is fit for only one future out of four.
The second is that the odds are not fixed, and this is the part we most often forget. Three of the four futures are bad for Australia. One, The Armed Balance, is merely uncomfortable, and it is also the only one we can actively help to bring about, because it is built out of the very interest that India, Indonesia, Japan and the United States already share with us in denying the meridian a single master. We cannot choose the future. We can weight the dice toward the one we could live in.
That is the deliberate country’s task, and it is the opposite of the drift that ends in The Quiet Sphere. The alternative to accommodation is not a fantasy of going it alone. It is the third path I keep returning to: armed self-reliance, coalition building with the resident powers of the band, and selective, unsentimental alignment with the great power whose interests still run with ours. A country that means to live in the balance has to help hold it.
What should be done
The point of naming the futures is not to guess which one arrives. It is to shape which one does. Every action below is chosen because it either pays across all four futures or tilts the odds toward the one we could live in, and most do both.
Government should do six things.
One, treat the meridian as a single strategic space in doctrine and planning, so the north and the south are two ends of one problem rather than two unrelated files.
Two, resource the southern anchor: more than one icebreaker, ice-capable vessels able to work in Antarctic waters, a restored armed Southern Ocean patrol, and the surveillance to know what happens in the space we claim.
Three, invest in the resilience of the sea lanes, fuel and industrial base the economy rides on in every future, not only the one we hope for.
Four, extend the denial posture to the southern approaches, so the force is fitted for the whole meridian and not just the gap to the north.
Five, and most deliberately of all, build the balance: turn the shared interest of India, Indonesia and Japan into practical defence, maritime and surveillance cooperation along the band, because the future we want is one we can reach only with others.
Six, defend the Antarctic rules from the inside with like-minded states, and begin the diplomatic and legal work for 2048 now, while it is cheap, rather than after the review has been called.
Industry has four tasks.
Rebuild a sovereign shipping and fuel-holding capacity that does not vanish the moment a market turns nervous.
Treat Antarctic and Southern Ocean logistics as national infrastructure, not a research overhead.
Build the ice-capable, long-endurance and surveillance platforms the southern theatre demands, which we currently can neither build nor crew.
And plan supply chains for a meridian that may be contested at both ends at once, not for the open sea lanes of the last thirty years.
The community has a smaller but real part.
Understand that the south is neither empty nor settled, and that a claim to 42 per cent of a continent is either backed or surrendered.
And be willing to carry, in the calm, the modest cost of the reach that keeps the choice ours. The bill for readiness is always smaller than the bill for dependence, but it falls due earlier, which is why it is so easily deferred.
We are used to watching the top of the map. The contest of the next generation runs the length of it, from the ice we are helping to melt in the north to the ice we claim and cannot reach in the south. Three of the four futures on that meridian are ones we would not choose, and the fourth will not build itself. Australia sits at the southern anchor of the long meridian, and the anchor holds only if we decide, deliberately and in time, to make it hold. Our luck has carried us this far.
As I am fond of saying, luck is not a policy. And a hemisphere is not held on paper.