From the Incomplete Superpower to Strategic Collision: Paul Dibb Reads China

Before I came to Australia in 2014, I was part of a global sovietological community. I wrote about that community, and about what its habits of mind allowed us to see and kept us from seeing, in my 2027 book Present at the Ending: Working to Close the Cold War. Paul Dibb was a key influence on me in that effort.

When I finally made it to Australia, one of my great privileges was to meet him and spend time with him at occasional dinners at the home of our mutual friend, the late Brendan Sargeant. Those evenings were seminars in all but name, and they helped guide my work with the Sir Richard Williams Foundation.

In October 2019, near the end of a visit, I sat down with Dibb in Canberra. His verdict on where Australia stood was blunt: “My view is that we’re sleepwalking.” China’s power projection now reached Australia, warning time was shrinking, and the country carried on with a “she’ll be right” attitude.

Seven years later, the 2026 National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Plan show that Australia is no longer sleepwalking. Dibb’s latest assessment suggests that waking up and getting ready are two different things. In a conversation with Dr Lavina Lee on the United States Studies Centre’s USSC Briefing Room podcast, released on 27 October 2026, he set out what he calls the prospect of a “strategic collision” with China, and why the answer is not to leave the American alliance but to change how Australia carries its share of it. It is a perspective we should all take seriously, and it is worth asking why a Sovietologist reads China the way he does.

The Incomplete Superpower

In 1986 Dibb published The Soviet Union: The Incomplete Superpower. His argument was that Moscow was a global power only in the military dimension. Its backward economy and technology pointed toward instability and deepening crisis. He was also cautious: he did not forecast that the system would collapse.

That combination, a clear read of structural weakness and a refusal to predict the date of the reckoning, is close to where I ended up. In the book I describe how the profession split in the mid-1980s. One camp held that the Soviet system’s institutional commitments were durable enough to constrain any leader. The other, where I sat as a junior scholar, argued that the totalitarian model overstated coherence and that a stagnating economy, a widening technology gap and a costly war in Afghanistan had made reform close to necessary. I wrote that I do not think either camp was simply wrong. I also wrote that almost no one I worked alongside saw the ending coming, in the shape it took or on the timeline it followed.

The habit Dibb and I shared, from very different institutional starting points, was a refusal to take the order of battle at face value. At the Defense Intelligence Agency I learned that two analysts looking at identical numbers could reach different conclusions depending on whether they could read the doctrinal literature behind them, and that DIA and the CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis, looking at the same evidence, regularly reached different answers. At the Center for Naval Analyses, colleagues reading Soviet naval journals concluded that the Soviet Navy would concentrate on protecting its ballistic-missile submarines in home-water bastions, not scatter its fleet to cut Western sea lanes as American planners assumed. It took the Navy’s own signals intelligence years to confirm it. The lesson was that confident assumptions about an adversary can be professionally reinforced by years of repetition and still be wrong.

Dibb now applies the same discipline to China, and it cuts in both directions. He pushes back on the Western habit of assuming Chinese military superiority because the PLA Navy has more ships. “Well, so what?” He argues that Chinese submarine quietness lags well behind American standards, that the PLA has no recent combat experience, and that it lacks the professional non-commissioned officer corps Western militaries rely on to turn orders into action at the tactical level. He sees the same weakness in Russia’s performance in Ukraine. This is not comfort. It comes from the same man who warns of a strategic collision. It is calibration.

Probing, Not Invading

Dibb is careful about what a strategic collision is not. It does not mean Australia is headed for war with China, which, short of a global war, he says is “not something that we could handle, frankly, alone under any circumstances.” What he sees is more persistent and harder to manage: a China that tests Australia without attacking it.

They’re probing. They’re probing for the soft points.

His main example is the PLA Navy task group that conducted live-fire activity in the Tasman Sea and then sailed around the continent, far from Chinese home waters and through archipelagos where detection is hard to avoid. He calls the minimal notice given to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific island states “quite ominous” and “an arrogant attitude,” and suggests a Chinese nuclear attack submarine may have been operating beneath the group, looking for Australian submarines collecting intelligence. Beijing is learning the operating environment, testing responses and showing it can reach the country, while Australia remains one of the nations most dependent on trade with China. Pressure can come through the economy as well as at sea.

The economic point has a Cold War echo. In France in the 1980s I found a consistent willingness to compartmentalize commercial and strategic relations with Moscow, which French interlocutors defended as commercial realism and set against an American instinct to fuse the two. I came to regard it as one of the genuine fault lines inside the alliance. Australia’s version is sharper, because the trade partner is also the strategic competitor.

The book’s closing argument is about judgment: the capacity to read ambiguous evidence under pressure and to decline the reading that is most frightening, most flattering or most convenient. The stakes of Able Archer in 1983 and a task group in the Tasman Sea are orders of magnitude apart, but the discipline is the same. Dibb’s reading, probing rather than preparing, avoids both “she’ll be right” and panic.

The Alliance Case Rests on Capability

The most pointed part of the conversation is Dibb’s response to Australians who argue for loosening or leaving the alliance. He names Hugh White, Paul Keating, Bob Carr and, to his evident disappointment, Gareth Evans, and cites Kim Beazley’s view that advocates of greater independence “will soon find out how unrealistic their concept of independence is.” He argues the case through capability, not sentiment: if Australia leaves, what replaces what the alliance provides?

• Undersea warfare. The United States dominates submarine warfare with no real competitors. Australia’s submarines carry the same combat system as the Virginia-class boats and the Mark 48 torpedo, and Australian defence science supports the torpedo’s maintenance. No other country has this access.
• Electronic attack. Australia is the only country besides the United States to operate the EA-18G Growler, which is effective because it is regularly loaded with highly classified American targeting data. Without that data it is a much less capable platform.
• Pine Gap, earlier Nurrungar, and North West Cape provide what Dibb calls “hot day-to-day intelligence for the Australian use,” a benefit Australians “never seem to mention.”

On the Trump administration his judgment is realistic rather than alarmed: “It’s been challenged now by Trump. But he won’t be here forever. And we should not … cut off your nose to spite your face.” Lee put the cost of genuine self-reliance at 5 to 10 percent of GDP. Dibb’s reply was short: “And the rest.”

France is the instructive comparison. In the book I describe a country that belonged firmly to the Western alliance without accepting integrated military command, answerable in the end only to itself, and whose elites showed less candor about how much French policy still depended on the American guarantee it claimed to have transcended. It was a story, I wrote, about how much work that exception actually required. France paid for it with an independent nuclear force built over decades. Dibb is asking Australians to price their own version of the exception honestly, and finding that it does not add up.

His prescription is self-reliance inside the alliance, not instead outside of it. Australia must show Washington it can handle military threats in its region of primary strategic concern: Southeast Asia, the South China Sea, the South Pacific well beyond Fiji, and the western approaches to Western Australia. His precedent is East Timor in 1999, when, as he tells it, John Howard asked President Clinton to lead and Clinton replied that East Timor was only about 500 kilometers from Darwin and this was Australia’s task. The goal is to “pull our weight more with the Americans, so Trump can’t accuse us of free-loading,” and to “hit relatively hard for our size.” That means rethinking the army’s role in maritime operations, and investing in robotics, uncrewed systems, AI and, critically, comprehensive air defense, “which we do not have.” He also suggests studying Ukraine’s use of drones closely.

Geography Is Back

The hinge of the Indo-Pacific, Dibb argues, is the Strait of Malacca, through which roughly 80 percent of China’s Middle East oil passes. “Why isn’t anybody talking about that?” Just beyond it lie Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands: “Think about how we could use that if push came to shove.” Add the growing American presence around Perth and Fremantle and the long-standing joint facilities, and Australia becomes “geopolitically very important.” The Americans, in his phrase, are “rediscovering us.”

Geography cuts both ways. In the Second World War Japan was “knocking on the gates at Port Moresby” and bombing Darwin. “It is not an impermeable continent. We can no longer think of it like that.”

When I lectured across West Germany in the early 1980s, what struck me was that the nuclear discourse there was territorial, not theoretical. The Federal Republic was where forward defense would be fought, and every audience knew it. Distance spared Australians that sensation for most of seventy years. Dibb’s message is that the sensation is returning.

Denial, Throw Weight and the Hull Gap

The most useful single point in the interview for anyone following Australian force design is Dibb’s comparison of today’s ADF with the force of two decades ago. Then: roughly 110,000 personnel, six submarines, 11 or 12 major surface combatants, an army of around 40,000 regulars plus reserves. Now: much the same. The force is better equipped, but it delivers essentially the same throw weight against a far more demanding threat. He credits Richard Marles for spending around A$60 billion a year and praises recent Defence documents for their candor, but doubts that 2.5 to 2.8 percent of GDP will be enough. This matches what I have been calling the decade of the hull gap for the Royal Australian Navy.

The language of strategy has shifted too. Dibb recalls a paper he wrote with Richard Brabin-Smith for the then Chief of the Defence Force that deliberately avoided “deterrence,” which he regards as nuclear language, and used “denial” instead: the military capability to deny a superior force operating in Australia’s vital strategic approaches. The 2026 documents have adopted denial. “It’s not perfect,” he concedes, but policy sometimes calls for a “lateral arabesque”: move to the side, but get on with what you need to make into policy.

The contrast with the world I studied is telling. The Euromissile crisis was fought over a deterrence whose value lay in weapons that were never meant to be used, including the independent French and British forces that I came to see as the crisis’s hidden center of gravity. Denial is a different bet. It rests on conventional capability that has to work, in the approaches, under pressure. A denial strategy is only as credible as the force behind it: an integrated force able to sense, decide and strike across those approaches and keep doing so. That is the kill web operating at the scale of a continent, and the throw-weight comparison suggests a gap between the doctrine and the force that must carry it out.

An Alignment With Seams

Dibb calls the deepening cooperation among China, Russia and North Korea a “wilderness we’re sort of stumbling into” that Australia has not had to think about since the Second World War. But he is skeptical about how deep the China–Russia relationship goes, pointing to historical memory and Xi Jinping’s sense of China’s own superiority. Of the old slogan “always together,” he says simply: “I don’t buy that one.” He is equally clear on the response: a “serious alliance” with Japan, with intelligence sharing on China at its core.

The Cold War taught me to be wary of treating an adversary as one actor. The lesson of the DIA years was that no single, stable “Soviet Union” existed as an object of American analysis, and the lesson of German unification was that the West negotiated with competing Soviet positions, not one. My own early work on Soviet arms sales argued that they were as much a business as an instrument of grand strategy, a lens I have since applied to the China–Russia–Iran alignment. Alignments of convenience have seams. That is not a reason for comfort, but it is a reason to look for them.

The Way Ahead

Asked at the end for a single defining statistic, Dibb chose a larger observation. In his years working on the Soviet Union the American president was routinely called the leader of the free world. “Well that doesn’t apply anymore, does it?”

That is the tension running through the conversation. Dibb remains firmly committed to the alliance because he understands what it delivers in ways many of its critics do not, yet he recognizes that it can no longer be the foundation for Australian complacency. In 2019 his warning was that Australia was sleepwalking. In 2026 Australia is awake, its strategy documents are candid, and its doctrine has moved toward denial. But the force that must carry out that doctrine is much the same size it was twenty years ago, and the region it operates in has changed dramatically.

Dibb spent a career asking what lies behind the numbers, first in Moscow and now in Beijing. Whether the question concerns the Soviet economy, a PLA Navy hull count or an ADF order of battle, his answer is the same, and so is his conclusion: this is not something Australia can dodge.

Sources

• USSC Briefing Room, “‘Strategic collision’ with China and how ANZUS must adapt with Paul Dibb,” United States Studies Centre, 27 October 2026: edu.au
• Video version: com/watch?v=zx50ga7QnBc
• Robbin Laird, “Australian Defense Strategy in Transition: The Perspective of Paul Dibb,” Defense.info, 2 November 2019: info
• Robbin Laird, Present at the Ending: Working to Close the Cold War (Second Line of Defense, 2027).
• Paul Dibb, The Soviet Union: The Incomplete Superpower (1986; 2nd ed. 1988).