How would the United States of Oceania become a Superpower?

Question

Give the current geopolitical uncertainty and chaos, caused by the leaders of some of the current powers and super powers; New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and a number of other pacific islands join together to form the great and mighty* federation of the United Stated of Oceania.

*Ok the Great and Mighty part is a bit of an exaggeration. (However that is where you come in)

The new constitution of the USO gives the mandate for the USO to do any and all reasonable things in its power to to become a Superpower.

"Superpower" is defined loosely as having "Excessive Economic, Political, Cultural and Military influence".

"Reasonable" means anything as long as it is not:

1. Nukes (obvious and historical reasons)
2. ICBMs (that path is too likely to lead directly to WW3, which would be bad, very bad)
3. Starting a war (nuf said)
4. Something that will look "bad" in the history books (if USO were to 'lose'). (e.g., 1930 German autobahns == reasonable and good idea; other 1930 German ideas == a (very) bad look in the history books, so not "Reasonable") I am not going to elaborate further, but you get the idea.

The USO and its Constitutional mandate is in for the long game. So if it takes 20, 50, 100 years that is Ok (but sooner is better).

So how would the United Stated of Oceania achieve this goal?

Answer 1

Invest in your education system stressing cutting edge technologies and bribe the finest teachers from around the world to move to your country and teach. Design the curriculum to be brutally difficult, then provide prizes and loan forgiveness to any students graduating with honors levels in any of the hard sciences. Encourage non-international corporate involvement in the education of these super students to build them into highly specialized teams with the best education and equipment imaginable.

Set up a social machine which pumps out a new crop of super scientists every year, then assign them to explore any closed door research which might help solve the current global problems. Focus on famine, drought (clean water), desertification, and climate change and as progress is made on each of those fronts, license the technology (in black box form) to the current superpowers. Offer them fair prices in return for favored nation trade status.

Slowly build an interrelated tree of beneficial technologies and as requests for technical disclosures arrive from experts in the open scientific community, entice those experts to immigrate to your country and join in your efforts to save the world. Become the most luxurious and full-filling place in the world for smart people, then watch as precious IQ points accumulate under your control.

Intellect is ultimately the most valuable tool in any nation's arsenal. The road to becoming a national super power is paved with higher education.

Answer 2

So your USO wants to become a world leader. Actually that is understandable, especially given the current state of affairs around this globe. You mentioned military influence, but I will go for the other points first.

For me, as a German, the US had been idolized in no small way during my youth, for being the leaders of the free world and whatnot. We have Anglicisms in your language, we wear American trousers and drink American soft drinks (but not American beer), we watch American movies, listen to American music.

What this boils sown to is that when I was young, the USA were described as the model of a free and cool country. Let's make sure the USO takes on this role. We will start with universal basic income (UBI), and free access to education for any citizen who is interested. And we add gender equality and non-discrimination to the mix, as well as free use of public transport.

This way, we increase happiness of our population (by removing existential dread via the UBI and by removing inequality), we increase the power of our economy via education and happiness, we reduce environmental problems via the public transport route.

As a result, we soon get a population that likes living in the USO, and could not think of a better place on earth (As a big bonus, you do have almost all the really cool holiday destinations in your territory, too). Now the one thing you are missing is a good meme industry, a.k.a. movie industry. But i am pretty sure this will pop up all by itself. After all, UBI makes it a lot easier being an actor, or director, or writer. Producing movies, depicting your way of life, is the one superpower you need to make sure everybody knows you, and finds you cool.

As for the military: I'd tread carefully there. You want your troops known to be strong enough to discourage any would-be invader. But you don't want to waste half your economic power on a military you don't normally need. You also want to demonstrate their strength at times. If you are very careful, you can send UNO troops to places where they are needed, provide disaster relief where necessary, and since you already have a meme industry, you wan to use that, too.

So now you are THE super power, and you are here to stay. You have also advanced mankind a lot. Could I please become a citizen?

Answer 3

Skyhook

Build a space elevator. The best place to build a space elevator is at the equator. So build it in Indonesia. I would tend to place it towards the western part. Palau Tanahmasa is probably around the right area, although the western coast of Sumatra is also possible. Funding might be provided based on the markets of Singapore (an island in that area). Independence might be maintained by playing off the United States of American and China. Neither is willing to let the other dominate this area, leaving the USO independent between them.

Since the space elevator will be the main way to launch things into space, this will give the country that manages it tremendous influence on space. The counterweight for the space elevator will operate under the USO's laws, and the USO can make it easy to launch space stations under their laws. This will give them outsized influence compared to their Earthbound population.

They can also act as the law enforcement of space. So when two space communities have a legal dispute, they appeal to the USO to adjudicate. The USO also could police travel in space.

Most things that require lots of electricity will move into space, where electricity comes from solar panels. This will give the USO outsized strength in the area of new energy production after fossil fuel burning is banned on Earth.

Desalination

It's also worth noting that Australia's comparatively low population is restricted by its large central deserts. If it could desalinate cheaply, it could hydrate those areas, expanding its populable area.

Mining in space is likely to be done by automation in the asteroid belt. The USO could bring back that technology to Earth and use it to build saltwater greenhouses on the coast of Australia. In addition, a canal could be dredged through the heart of Australia so that saltwater greenhouses could be built all the way through.

Solar power could provide the electricity for this construction. Sun not shining? No work that day. But when the sun is shining, push on. This would be slow, but there's no real hurry. You're willing to wait a century.

Similarly, the islands of the area may be connected by saltwater greenhouse bridges. These will provide water and crops for communities that will build in what is now open water. These also will provide food for land-based communities built on what used to be cropland.

Antarctica

Like Australia, Antarctica is an island continent in the South Pacific. If its icepack melts due to global warming, it will be available for colonization. Adding it to the USO would make the coalition much larger. Again, the USA, Russia, and China may regard dominance by the USO as better than dominance by each other.

Luna

Another large piece of real estate to which the USO would have superior access is the Moon. To get to the Moon from the Earth, people will need to launch into space. And the USO controls the main space launch facility, able to launch cheaper than anyone else.

Population

Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world by population, after China, India, and the USA. Add in the Philippines, and it would jump past the USA. Traditional Oceania would add a more moderate amount, but that would still put it in the top four, even if the European Union was a single country.

Answer 4

One simple answer.

Drill boys, drill

The most powerful weapon today is oil and gas, with mineral deposits a close second. China is currently busy building artificial islands on unoccupied reefs to stake a claim to the oil and gas reserves underneath. Oil and gas are the reason the US kept Saddam Hussein sweet, and the reason the West went to war against him when he invaded Kuwait. Oil and gas are the reason we're good friends with the Saudis, who in every other respect are inimical to Western values. (Even the USSR was philosophically closer to the West than the despotism of the various Middle Eastern absolute monarchies.) Oil and gas are the reason Russia is still a significant world power, in spite of an economy which otherwise is dead on its feet - they literally have the power to turn off the lights in much of Europe.

If your various small islands have banded together, they can reasonably stake a claim to the waters between, or at least to the minor islands between. Either way, they've now got a solid area of territorial waters which they can exploit.

Territorial waters are only useful if you can enforce them, of course. Even international agreements are pointless if you can't make them stick. So militarily you need very few soldiers but an effective navy and air force.

Answer 5

Below the Surface

If they focused expanding downward into the ocean, their expansion would be uncontested and their technology would be if not ignored, but only viewed with curiosity.

USO could be a step ahead of the rest of the world when catastrophe strikes.

When the oceans rise, the USO has a tremendous advantage over everyone else, and as a bonus they can retreat from the surface and become untouchable by the countries that are surface bound.

This could go either the humanitarian way, where the USO helps the rest of the world cope, and become world leaders... or they can use their undersea superiority to raid and destroy the now flooded regions of other nations and prevent them from getting a foothold in the sea.

Answer 6

There is a Russian and very left/Maoistic writer Alexander Rozov, who basically pulls this off in his fiction verse. I am quite sceptical both of his political views and of feasibility of that kind of a country getting airborne, but there's a book about that. Sadly, he slowly descented in late-Heinlein mode in the sequels, but I digress.

Meganesia

Even without Australia and NZ, the small islands in Pacific get bundled up to a very anarchistic government. They basically bootstrap from:

• no one is interested in Micronesia and what happens there (really?)
• leftist terrorist cells are cool (doubt)
• brain drain of highly educated and (if done right: motivated) "superfluous men" (doubt)
• mercenaries (doubt it works right)
• technological state of early 21 century, e.g. 3D printing and distributed fabrication (hello Mao, doubt it's cheaper than large-scale fab).

Time-skip 20 years.

The guys are a mix of ISIS (from Western view) and Communist China. Official state warfare doctrine is terrorism. The best way to fight the equivalent of six day war is: put A-bombs on moderately large drones and then drop them on the unsuspecting invasion fleet. Production and industry are decentralised islands per Mao. Politics and government is a mixture of extreme liberalism and Pol Pot. Meganesia acts as a counterbalance to Western democracies. It almost officially use espionage as an official science and research doctrine. Unofficial collaboration of border service and police with NZ, Australia, Papua New Guinea is in action. They venture to Africa (more of less like China in our world does). In local mafia clan wars meganesian mercenaries (not even military) are able to block satellite communications over an area for weeks (this is easy, just launch enough tinfoil scraps to orbit). At the same time Meganesia positions itself as an intellectual sanctuary for people not willing Western bigotry. For example, things like human cloning are welcomed and even encouraged, because, yay, science.

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This review of fiction shows that it is fully possible to create a superpower based in Oceania. Even is suspension of disbelief works well during reading, the reader may have questions afterwards.

If you have less resources and a delayed start-up time (try founding a superpower in 21 century!), how would you manage? One thing one might borrow from Rozov is that the publicity of this superpower in the West would be bad. And, to get the state going, probably, they would need to commit quite some crimes, too. So the publicity might be not merely hot air.

Another strong point of Rozov is that dual use technologies (even those not thought to be dual use), out of the box thinking, modern technical level, distributed fabrication, and widespread chemicals can also make warfare accessible.

Answer 7

Food scarcity and sea-level rise, my suggestion is that food needs to drive this, if you look at our current world food security situation (shaky at best) and then look at the potential of ocean farming schemes that have never been viable because of cost etc... then an oceanic superpower makes some sense. The great algal farms of the expanded pacific basin could replace the flooded farmlands of Asia and the Americas, and with the destruction of many of the great coastal cities of the world's current powers they'd be in a vulnerable and even dependent position vis-a-vis the new food supply centres of the world.

Answer 8

The key to Oceania being a world power: they don't really need so much to rise in power, but have the rest of the world decline. The standard answer is a global nuclear war, leaving Oceania relatively intact and much quicker to recover and expand, like the USA after WW2. Below is a less extreme version of their rise to power.

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Driven by the isolated nature of the many islands distributed throughout their territory, the USO invests heavily in research into localized manufacturing and energy production (specifically using advanced genetic engineering and nanotechnology).

As cheap available fossil fuels supplies dwindle throughout the 21st century the global economy undergoes a global recession; Shipping cost rise making world wide distribution of goods less economical. Energy costs rise across the world negatively effecting all sectors of the global economy.

A few wars could make this situation very much worse, such as a large destabilizing war in the middle east, or a large war involving China and other Asian manufacturers.

The USO however, having developed key technologies finds itself independent from the energy and manufacturing crisis of the rest of the world. Additional breakthroughs in undersea mining and seawater mineral extraction technology grant them a vast resource base to draw on. As the rest of the world declines the USO expands economically growing into a world power.

Answer 9

No, Australia and New Zealand and parts of South East Asia would be possible. But Oceania as a whole is a dead loss as a Super Power because most of it is just small Island countries with no industrial resources due to their geology. So they would just be a drain rather than an asset, they cannot sustain their own populations unaided and their primary income is from the diaspora.

Most of Oceania was colonised by Europeans quite a while ago and then given independence precisely because they have nothing to offer the first World except a market for rubbish goods. The parts that are ex continental were not given independence so easily because they have natural resources that can be exploited.

Answer 10

In the year XXXX Australia and NZ are released/break off from the states of Commonwealth as the situation in Europe escalates. EU breaks down, as many states start to leave and when Greece says it is not able to pay its debt back, German banks are ruined. Several european states are quickly dominated by foreing economies. Share prices rapidly plummet down and are quickly bought by Russians.

Without its buyers China starts to press on USA, to pay back its' astronomical debts. Rich companies start to control USA and large portions of land are sold as a form of repayment.

As conflicts in the middle-east start to settle down and I.S. is defeated... Egypt and Syria, ally them selves with The New Persia (Iran and Iraq) and starts to support Russian Federation as the new northern economic power.

Without the support of other states Australia has to develop its own industry, the plan is to create industrial zones in the dry main land, the plan is funded by a rich yet mysterious investor from Singapore. As people start to move into the main land, projects for terraforming the desert start to progress quicker than expected.

NZ is cooperating with Australia, supplying them with agricultural goods. It is not enough, so Australia looks for partners in Asia. Vietnam and Laos profit from their new trade agreements. Soon other island states start to join in. Japan starts to supply Australia with technology and United Korea (I hope that happens after the olympic games) doesn't want to fall behind.

As the small island states grow more dependent on A and NZ, ideas about creating a federation start to pop up and USO is born. With the other former economic giants crushed under their own weight USO, China, USA and RF are only remaining. USO starts to invest into Africa and southern America, creating a new granary for themselves and also supplying their new industry.

How is this?

Answer 11

"Superpower" is defined loosely as having "Excessive Economic, Political, Cultural and Military influence".

AFAIK Superpower is a relatively new term, I would be surprised if I learned that was a term referring to the USA or any other nation before WWII. My only previous understanding was that the term referenced the point that it was infeasible to attack said Superpower nation because at a minimum the destruction of the attacker was assured or, at worst mutual destruction was assured (MAD).

The USO could become a Superpower for solely economic reasons by having a strong economic basis and outstripping all rivals. Given the current global political climate this would likely lead to war even though it would not necessitate starting one. The progression to Superpower would start with the USO forming an economic alliance.

Taking control of the United Nations might get the USO to Superpower status also if is is sufficiently strong politically and especially if they are culturally strong and militarily strong also, although, in that case, unless it is by consensus, many member nations might leave the UN.

Answer 12

The current definition for a "world superpower" came post WW2 and was very loosely defined as a country who has all of the following attributes in great forms: "economic, military, technology, and cultural strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence." The lands that this definition was applied to were either large landlocked countries (the U.S.A. and Russia) and lands right next to large land masses (the British empire at the time). But the conventional definition of "world superpower" doesn't conform with the type of nation Oceania is or could be.

What makes Oceania completely different is that it's more spread out than any other country in the world, it's not landlocked, and is a series of islands that're the homes of the Polynesian people. Most people don't know of its history and how despite the times and events going on around its borders in ancient days, it remained very powerful and influential without having a central landmass from which to govern things. THEY ADAPTED TO IT, SO IN ESSENCE THEY DIDN'T NEED ONE. This is an empire of people who not only sailed the entire Pacific Ocean, but colonized nearly every island, the coasts of North America, and all of South America long before the Vikings ever thought of sailing.

Due to the lack of technology to stay in communication with each other, each generation grew further apart as their empire grew until it came apart under its own weight. Those issues can be alleviated with modern technology. Their main source of food and way of life was seafood and trade, both of which are in high demand today, but apparently today in that area there's a lack of proper balanced management. It's over-fished. It'd take a complete government overhaul of it to rectify the issue. Threat of war could make a nation like this think of merging with known friendly nations to stand a better chance at survival, especially with ones they share a history with.

If the world went to war and economic pressures kick in, which they will, it's very possible that the Oceania we know today would be led by Australia, with New Zealand becoming a part of it. They have a lot of cultural and strategic history together. Australia has proven itself capable of being a financial/industrial powerhouse with a strong government and culture not too different than the U.S.A.'s. A key component would be a strong sense of a unified national identity across the board. In other words, the people of the Oceania islands, Australians, and New Zealanders would have to have the spirit, desire, and will to do so. Otherwise, it would fall apart.

If managed correctly by the Australian and NZ entities, the food/seafaring management issues of Oceania could be fixed and balanced out, which would take care of food needs, boost local net income, and gather savings by a lot. Australia has the military know-how, which could be bolstered a bit through the improved economic management and money earned off of trade and other areas not mentioned through their unison. NZ has a strong industrial culture with good economic and seafood trade knowledge that would play a key role in helping to manage Oceania issues. It would be a different kind of "superpower" than traditionally seen, but a power house it would be if done right.

Answer 13

> The new constitution of the USO gives the mandate for the USO to do any and all reasonable things in its power to to become a Superpower.

"Superpower" is defined loosely as having "Excessive Economic, Political, Cultural and Military influence".

So how would the United Stated of Oceania achieve this goal?

Given that Oceania is quite literally the antipode of economic power, and is nothing but sea water and desert, the only way to make the USO into a world power is to move the North American continental plates into the South Pacific.