Can Australia keep sailing through the Taiwan Strait?
HMAS Sydney's February 2026 transit through the Taiwan Strait broke years of Australian caution. But a single voyage does not make a deterrence posture. Whether Canberra can sustain what it started depends on fleet size, shipyard output, and political stamina it may not possess.
A Frigate in the Narrows
HMAS Sydney slipped through the Taiwan Strait in February 2026, shadowed by Chinese warships, and Canberra called it routine. Beijing called it provocative. Both were right, and that duality reveals everything about whether Australia can sustain what it just started.
The transit itself was unremarkable—an Anzac-class frigate sailing through waters that international law designates as open passage. What made it significant was accumulation. Australia had avoided the Strait for years while Canada, France, and Britain sailed through periodically. Joining that club was a political act dressed in operational clothing. The Taipei Times reported that the frigate passed “unimpeded,” and Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued warm thanks. But a single transit does not make a posture. The distance between a gesture and a doctrine is measured in repetition, resources, and political stamina—three currencies Canberra holds in limited supply.
Surface Signals, Structural Depths
The conventional reading frames the transit as Australia “standing up to China.” This is incomplete to the point of distortion.
Australia’s calculus operates on at least four levels simultaneously. At the alliance level, the transit signals solidarity with Washington’s freedom-of-navigation operations and reinforces AUKUS credibility at a moment when submarine delivery timelines face serious doubt. At the regional level, it communicates to Tokyo, Manila, and Hanoi that Canberra will share the diplomatic cost of contesting Beijing’s claims. At the domestic level, it lets the Albanese government demonstrate resolve without committing to the harder decisions—force structure, basing, and war powers—that genuine deterrence demands. And at the adversary level, it tests Beijing’s response calibration.
Each level tells a different story about durability.
The alliance story is the strongest argument for repetition. The trilateral naval logistics agreement signed between the United States, Australia, and Japan in mid-2025 created the institutional scaffolding for sustained interoperability in the Western Pacific. The Reciprocal Access Agreement with Japan further cements this architecture. Within this framework, periodic Strait transits become not favours to Washington but obligations embedded in a web of mutual commitments. Allies that don’t show up lose influence over how the alliance operates. Australia, having spent enormous political capital on AUKUS, cannot afford to be seen as a country that buys nuclear submarines but won’t sail conventional frigates through contested waters.
The regional story cuts both ways. Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia want a counterweight to Chinese maritime assertiveness, but none wants to be dragged into a confrontation they cannot survive. Australia’s transit provides diplomatic cover for smaller states to harden their own positions—but only if Canberra sustains the pattern. A single transit followed by retreat would signal that middle powers buckle under pressure. It would confirm Beijing’s theory of coercion.
What the Fleet Can and Cannot Do
Intention and capability inhabit different worlds. Australia’s surface fleet operates eleven major combatants. The future force structure envisions growth, but vessels under contract are not vessels at sea. The Hunter-class frigate programme has absorbed delays. The Virginia-class submarines promised under AUKUS face production bottlenecks at the source—the US Navy requested only one Virginia-class boat for fiscal year 2025 instead of two, because American shipyards cannot build them fast enough to meet American demand, let alone Australian orders.
This production reality constrains everything.
A durable Taiwan Strait transit posture requires rotating vessels through the Western Pacific on predictable cycles—what the Royal Australian Navy describes as Regional Presence Deployments. But predictability demands surplus capacity. When a frigate sails north to the Strait, it is not patrolling Australia’s northern approaches, not exercising with Pacific Island partners, not in maintenance. A navy of eleven major surface combatants conducting a transit every quarter would dedicate roughly 15-20% of its operational tempo to a single signalling mission. That is sustainable in peacetime. It becomes untenable the moment Beijing escalates grey-zone pressure elsewhere—in the South China Sea, around undersea cables, or through the maritime militia operations that blur every legal category Australia’s rules of engagement were designed to handle.
China’s shipbuilding capacity sharpens this asymmetry. Chinese yards launched 305 vessels from top-tier facilities between 2019 and 2024, generating tens of billions in revenue while simultaneously feeding the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s expansion. Military-civil fusion allows commercial innovation—modular construction, automation, workforce scaling—to flow directly into naval production. AUKUS, by contrast, fragments its industrial effort across Virginia-class maintenance, Australian Virginia-class transfers, and the future SSN-AUKUS design, with vendor qualification acknowledged to be “in its infancy” as of 2025. China builds with one integrated system. AUKUS builds with three separate ones, hoping they converge.
The numbers do not forgive ambition untethered from production.
The Domestic Furnace
Military capability constrains the ceiling. Domestic politics determines whether Canberra reaches for it.
Here, the transit exposes a fault line that neither major party wants to discuss. Australia’s Westminster system grants the executive near-total prerogative over military deployments. The Prime Minister and cabinet decide where ships sail without parliamentary approval. This power has persisted because voters have not scrutinised it. That is changing. Polling shows roughly 90% of Australians support requiring parliamentary approval before committing forces to conflict. The war powers reform campaign’s strategy is straightforward: make the invisible prerogative visible, and its legitimacy collapses.
Taiwan Strait transits sit in the gap between “routine deployment” and “drift towards conflict.” Each transit that Beijing denounces generates media coverage. Each round of coverage educates voters that the executive sent warships into contested waters without consulting parliament. The very repetition that would make the posture credible also accumulates the democratic scrutiny that could make it politically unsustainable.
This is not a hypothetical tension. It is a structural one. The executive’s institutional strength—low public awareness of closed-door decision-making—becomes a vulnerability the moment deployments generate headlines. A government confident enough to sail through the Taiwan Strait once may find itself explaining, transit by transit, why parliament had no say. The opposition, whether Labor or Coalition, will exploit whichever side of the argument suits the electoral cycle.
Canberra’s strategic culture compounds the problem. Australia has fought in every major American conflict since 1945, but always as a contributor to someone else’s war. The idea of independent middle-power deterrence—using Australian assets, in Australian interest, on Australian initiative—lacks deep roots in the political imagination. The transit feels bold precisely because it is unusual. Unusual things require political energy to sustain. Political energy is finite.
Beijing’s Calibrated Response
China’s reaction to the February 2026 transit was pointed but controlled. PLA Navy vessels tracked HMAS Sydney. Official statements protested. No shots were fired, no dangerous manoeuvres reported. This restraint is itself a message.
Beijing calibrates responses to impose costs without triggering the very alliance consolidation it seeks to prevent. If China had confronted the frigate aggressively, it would have validated Australia’s narrative of Chinese belligerence and strengthened the case for more transits, not fewer. Instead, by monitoring and protesting, Beijing signals displeasure while preserving the option to escalate later—when the domestic political cost to Canberra of continuing might be higher.
The coercion playbook is well-documented. Between 2020 and 2022, China imposed trade restrictions on Australian wine, barley, coal, lobster, timber, and other commodities worth billions. The impact on merchandise exports was significant but survivable—Australian producers found alternative markets faster than Beijing expected. The Lowy Institute’s assessment of Chinese coercion and Australian resilience concluded that economic punishment failed to change Canberra’s policy. But the trade war also revealed Australia’s dependence: iron ore sales to China remain the single largest revenue stream in the national economy. Beijing has not weaponised iron ore because the cost to China would be enormous. That mutual dependence is a brake, not a barrier. It holds until it doesn’t.
If transits become routine, China’s response will evolve. Grey-zone tactics—fishing militia incursions into Australian-claimed waters, increased cyber activity against defence networks, diplomatic pressure on Southeast Asian states to distance themselves from Canberra—offer Beijing tools that stay below the threshold of the alliance’s collective response mechanisms. Australia would face the exhausting choice of escalating each incident or absorbing the cumulative cost. Neither option is cheap.
Three Forks, One Default
Australia’s Taiwan Strait posture resolves toward one of three trajectories.
Regularisation. Transits become quarterly, integrated into Regional Presence Deployments, coordinated with the US, Japan, and Canada. This requires the government to absorb domestic political friction, maintain fleet readiness above current levels, and accept that each transit incrementally commits Australia to a Taiwan contingency posture it has never formally adopted. The trilateral logistics agreement provides the institutional spine. The cost is strategic clarity: Beijing will treat regularisation as confirmation that Australia has chosen sides, eliminating whatever residual diplomatic flexibility Canberra retains. Political feasibility: MEDIUM. It depends on whether the next election cycle penalises or rewards resolve.
Episodic signalling. Transits occur once or twice a year, timed to diplomatic moments—before AUKUS summits, during periods of Chinese assertiveness, or when Washington requests solidarity. This preserves ambiguity and reduces fleet strain but sacrifices deterrent value. Adversaries and allies alike will read the pattern as conditional commitment. Beijing will probe each gap between transits for leverage. This is the most likely trajectory because it demands the least political courage.
Retreat. A change of government, a serious naval incident, or a successful Chinese economic pressure campaign leads Canberra to quietly stop transiting. No announcement—simply an absence. This would damage Australia’s credibility across every alliance and partnership it has built over the past decade. It would confirm that middle-power deterrence is a phrase, not a practice.
The default is episodic signalling. Not because it is strategically optimal, but because it matches Australia’s institutional metabolism: bold enough to act, cautious enough to avoid committing to the consequences of action.
What would shift the trajectory toward regularisation? Three conditions. The Defence Department should integrate Taiwan Strait transits into published deployment schedules, removing the appearance that each one requires a fresh political decision. Treasury should accelerate the naval shipbuilding programme, even at the cost of delays to other capital projects, because eleven combatants cannot sustain a two-ocean posture. And the government should initiate—not wait for—a parliamentary debate on the scope of executive deployment authority, converting a political vulnerability into democratic legitimacy.
Each carries costs. Publishing transit schedules sacrifices tactical surprise. Accelerating shipbuilding means cutting elsewhere. Opening war powers to parliamentary scrutiny means accepting constraints on future executive freedom. A middle power that wants deterrence without sacrifice gets neither.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is the Taiwan Strait considered international waters under international law? A: The Strait is wider than 24 nautical miles at most points, meaning it contains a corridor of high seas or exclusive economic zone through which all vessels enjoy freedom of navigation under UNCLOS. China contests this characterisation, claiming the entire Strait falls under its jurisdiction, but most maritime law scholars and the majority of transiting nations reject Beijing’s position.
Q: How often do Western navies transit the Taiwan Strait? A: The US Navy transits approximately once per month. Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany have conducted transits periodically since 2019. Australia’s February 2026 transit was notable because Canberra had previously avoided the passage, making it a late entrant to what has become a growing multinational practice.
Q: Could China impose economic sanctions on Australia for Taiwan Strait transits? A: China imposed sweeping trade restrictions on Australian exports in 2020-2022, targeting wine, barley, coal, and other goods. Australian exporters diversified faster than expected, and bilateral trade has since partially normalised. Iron ore—Australia’s largest export to China—was never sanctioned because China depends on it as heavily as Australia depends on selling it. Future economic coercion is possible but faces diminishing returns.
Q: What role do AUKUS submarines play in Australia’s Taiwan Strait posture? A: AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines will not enter service until the 2030s at the earliest, and production delays make even that timeline uncertain. The current posture relies entirely on conventional surface vessels. Submarines would add a covert deterrence dimension, but the gap between promise and delivery remains Australia’s most significant capability vulnerability.
The Long Passage
In the Braudelian sense—the longue durée of geopolitical structure rather than the froth of events—Australia’s transit matters less for what it signals today than for what it forecloses tomorrow. Each passage through those waters narrows the corridor of future ambiguity. Canberra cannot unsail the Strait.
The deeper question is not whether Australia will transit again. It is whether a nation of 27 million people, with a navy built for a different era’s assumptions, possesses the industrial base, the political consensus, and the strategic patience to convert a gesture into a grammar—a recurring, legible pattern that adversaries must factor into their calculations and allies can rely upon in theirs.
February 2026 proved Australia can act. The next five years will reveal whether it can persist.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- Australian frigate transits Taiwan Strait unimpeded - Taipei Times reporting on the February 2026 transit
- Australian warship transits Taiwan Strait, tracked by China’s navy - Straits Times coverage of PLA Navy response
- Chinese coercion, Australian resilience - Lowy Institute analysis of Australia’s response to economic pressure
- The impact on Australia’s merchandise exports - University of Adelaide study of trade coercion effects
- US, Australia and Japan sign trilateral naval logistics agreement - Breaking Defense on trilateral logistics framework
- Australia-Japan Reciprocal Access Agreement - Australian Defence Department on bilateral access
- Australian Naval Review 2025 - Naval Institute of Australia on force structure and industrial base
- Future of the Royal Australian Navy - Overview of planned fleet expansion
- Opinion Polls on war powers reform - Public attitudes toward parliamentary oversight of military deployments
- MOFA response to naval transits - Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on allied Strait transits
