Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Secretary of State Antony Blinken speak with Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton prior to a joint press conference at the Department of State, Sept. 16, 2021. (U.S. Department of Defense)

The Biden administration entered office with promises to strengthen our alliances, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. Yet from unfilled ambassadorial posts in key countries such as Australia, Japan, India, and South Korea, to the unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, many allies now have good reasons to question whether America under President Biden will keep its promises.

This week’s announcement of a new trilateral security partnership between the U.S., UK, and Australia upset some allies, but cemented bonds with other key powers needed to withstand coercion and aggression from China. From belligerence in the South China Sea to the obstruction of efforts to investigate the origins of COVID-19, an allied response to China's behavior is critical. In his latest policy memo, John Lee outlines five critical areas of cooperation for the AUKUS security alliance.

And earlier this week, Hudson President and CEO John Walters and Senior Fellow David Asher joined British MP and Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Tom Tugendhat and Australian Senator and Select Committee on COVID-19 Deputy Chair James Paterson to discuss an allied response to Beijing's COVID obstructionism. Read key quotes from their discussion below.

Key Quotes

Key quotes from "An Allied Response to Beijing’s COVID Obstructionism"

What this has exposed is not just the intertwined nature that we all have and the danger that dictatorships of the world pose to free peoples—not in necessarily an aggressive sense, but simply in the culture that they emanate at home and the way that they're able to encourage secrecy and self-deceit, let alone international deceit—but also the failures of the international system that we have built up since the 1950s, 1960s, and that we now need to look at really hard to see how it is updated.

The only thing that's controversial about the origins of this virus is it happened to happen on the watch of the Chinese Communist Party. And they are highly sensitive to criticism, scrutiny, and the disinfectant that comes with transparency… And so we should all be confident in asserting on behalf of all of the people of the world that the Chinese government has an obligation to be open and transparent about what happened and how, and until we have those answers, we need to all continue to demand them and forthrightly.

We need to create a biodefensive alliance structure and it can't just be about nuclear and chemical [threats].  We need to create a network of new understanding. These biological threats, however they may emanate, are eminently possible to be propagated through nature and the globalized system we live in, but also through just high technology, lack of transparency and adverse intentions.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

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