Australian Strategic Policy in the Asian Century

Abstract

Crafting Australia’s strategic policy involves difficult choices between imperfect outcomes. Though Australia is an island continent blessed with formidable geographic defences, it is also maritime trading nation with significant interests and vulnerabilities extending far beyond its shores. Generally speaking, Australia’s approach to security falls into two traditions: an ‘expeditionary’ posture that commits national power to extra-regional contingencies such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a more regionally oriented ‘fortress Australia’ tradition that focuses primarily on the Asia-Pacific system we inhabit. Both approaches contain strengths and have ably served Australian security imperatives at different times in the past. During periods of national imperilment, such as the Second World War and a turbulent Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1960s, Australian strategic policy fixated on developments close afield. Today, emerging US−China strategic competition heralds the return of great power politics in Asia and portends to regional instability. Accordingly, Australia can ill afford to diffuse its national power across multiple strategic systems over the globe. Against a backdrop of relatively declining Western power in Asia, Australia must once more return to a regionally focused strategic policy and eschew commitments to extraregional contingencies.