Australia's American Alliance: Towards a New Era?

By Melbourne University Publishing Ltd

The central importance of the U.S. – Australia alliance has been self-evident for decades. Its relevance remains today, despite the intervening collapse of the Berlin Wall; the rise of China; the threat of international terrorism, and the economic transformation of the Asia-Pacific region. This publication draws together, in a timely way, a detailed analysis of a relationship of enduring importance to our nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9780522868623

Book preview

Defence Studies

Series editors

Associate Professor Peter J. Dean and

Associate Professor Brendan Taylor

The aim of this series is to publish outstanding works of research on strategy and warfare with a focus on Australia and the region. Books in the series take a broad approach to defence studies, examining war in its numerous forms, including military, strategic, political and historic aspects. The series focus is principally on the hard power elements of military studies, in particular the use or threatened use of armed force in international affairs. This includes the history of military operations across the spectrum of conflict, Asia’s strategic transformation and strategic policy options for Australia and the region. Books in the series consist of either edited or single-author works that are academically rigorous and accessible to both academics and the interested general reader.

Dr Peter J. Dean is an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University and is a specialist on Australian strategic policy, the ANZUS alliance, and Australian military operations. He was the 2014 Fulbright Scholar in Australia-United States Alliance Studies and is currently a non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for Australian, New Zealand & Pacific Studies at Georgetown University. Peter is the Co-Editor of the Melbourne University Press Defence Studies Series. A former managing editor at the journal Security Challenges (2012–15) he is currently on the boards of the Australian Army Journal and the Journal for Global War Studies.

Dr Stephan Frühling is an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, and Associate Dean (Education) of the College of Asia and the Pacific of the Australian National University. He is a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project on Small Allies and Extended Nuclear Deterrence, and has widely published on Australian defence policy, defence planning and strategy, nuclear weapons and NATO. Stephan was a member of the Australian Government’s external panel of experts on the development of the 2016 Defence White Paper, and the 2015 ‘Partner across the globe’ research fellow in the Research Division of the NATO Defence College in Rome.

Dr Brendan Taylor is Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. He is a specialist on great power strategic relations in the Asia–Pacific, economic sanctions and Asian security architecture. His work has featured in such leading academic journals as International Affairs, Survival and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He is the author/editor of five books, including Australia as an Asia–Pacific Regional Power (2007) and Sanctions as Grand Strategy (2010).

Australia’s American Alliance

Edited by Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling and Brendan Taylor

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston St, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2016

Text © Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling, Brendan Taylor, 2016

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design by Phil Campbell

Cover design by Phil Campbell

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

Printed in Australia by OPUS Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Title: Australia’s American Alliance : towards a new era? / Peter J Dean (editor); Stephan Frühling (editor); Brendan Taylor (editor).

ISBN: 9780522870008 (hardback)

ISBN: 9780522868616 (paperback)

ISBN: 9780522868623 (ebook)

Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: Alliances.

International relations.

Australia—Military policy—21st century.

Australia—Government policy—21st century.

Australia—Relations—United States.

United States—Relations—Australia.

Other Creators/Contributors:

Dean, Peter J. (Peter John), 1974– editor.

Frühling, Stephan, editor.

Taylor, Brendan, 1974– editor.

327.116

Contents

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Contributors

Introduction

Brendan Taylor, Stephan Frühling and Peter Dean

Part I The US alliance and Australia’s strategic policy

1 Wrestling with commitment: Geography, alliance institutions and the ANZUS treaty

Stephan Frühling

2 The Australia–US alliance in US strategic policy

Thomas G. Mahnken

Part II Strategic context

3 The United States in world affairs

Elsina Wainwright and James Brown

4 ANZUS and Australia’s role in world affairs

Andrew Carr

5 ANZUS and Australia’s Regional Challenges

The Hon. David Feeney MP

6 Economic links between Australia and the United States

Amy King

Part III Mechanics of alliance cooperation

7 US–Australian military cooperation in Asia

John Blaxland

8 The alliance as an intelligence partnership

Michael Wesley

9 Interoperability

James Goldrick

10 Capability development and defence research

Richard Brabin-Smith

Part IV Managing trade-offs

11 Sovereignty and the US alliance

Kim Beazley

12 The alliance, Australia’s strategic culture and way of war

Peter J. Dean

13 Australia and the United States in Asia

Brendan Taylor

Appendix: ANZUS Treaty

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Producing an edited book always requires dedication, hard work and a measure of flexibility by all the people who contribute, as authors, editors or behind the scenes. This book is no exception, and we are very much indebted to the authors for sticking with us from inception, through the workshop and to completion, despite delays caused by the Defence White Paper, editors’ schedules and much else. Many of the authors are our colleagues from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, and we would also like to extend our thanks to Thomas G. Mahnken, James Brown, Elsina Wainwright, James Goldrick and Kim Beazley for their contributions to this work, as well as to David Feeney MP, who provided his chapter amid a hard-fought election campaign. MUP, and in particular Catherine McInnis, have been most accommodating in adjusting their schedule to publish this book, and we are most grateful for their willingness to work with us in getting it to completion. Cathryn Game copy-edited the book to an excellent standard and to a tight timeline.

Finally, we can genuinely say that this book would not have been possible without the diligent and reliable work of our editorial assistant, Dr Helen Taylor. Helen kept us and the authors on task, organised and reorganised the schedule and project-managed the book through the most difficult periods to completion. We cannot express how much relief it was to know that the project was in such capable hands, and are very sorry that it is the last task she completed at SDSC, as she prepares to take up a position elsewhere that will see her considerable skills put to good use.

Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling and Brendan Taylor

Canberra, 2016

Glossary

Contributors

The Hon. Kim Beazley, AC was a minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor governments (1983–96) holding, at various times, the portfolios of Defence, Finance, Transport and Communications, Employment, Education and Training, and Aviation as well as being Special Minister of State. He was Deputy Prime Minister (1995–96) and Leader of the Australian Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition (1996–01 and 2005–06). Beazley served on parliamentary committees, including the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Joint Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee.

After his retirement from politics in 2007, Beazley was appointed Winthrop Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Western Australia. In July 2008 he was appointed Chancellor of the Australian National University, a position he held until December 2009. Beazley became Ambassador to the United States of America in February 2010 and served until January 2016.

Upon returning to Australia he was appointed President of the Australian Institute for International Affairs, Distinguished Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Senior Fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre and board member of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue.

Dr Richard Brabin-Smith AO is a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. Before this, he spent some thirty years in the Australian Department of Defence, in a wide variety of analytical, policy and corporate management positions. These included all of Defence’s senior policy appointments, including Deputy Secretary for Strategic Policy and Chief Defence Scientist. His recent publications include an essay, Contingencies and Warning Time, in SDSC’s Centre of Gravity Series, and, with Emeritus Professor Paul Dibb, a paper, Australian Defence: Challenges for the New Government.

Dr John Blaxland is a senior fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. His work focuses on military history, intelligence and security, and Asia–Pacific affairs. He is the editor of East Timor Intervention (2015) and author of The Protest Years: The Official History of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation 1963–1975 (2015). Earlier publications include Information-era Manoeuvre (2007), Strategic Cousins (2006) and Revisiting Counterinsurgency (2006).

Dr James Brown is the research director and adjunct associate professor at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. A former Australian Army officer, he commanded a cavalry troop in southern Iraq, served at the Australian taskforce headquarters in Baghdad, managed operations and contingency planning for Australia’s Solomon Islands mission, and was attached to special forces in Afghanistan. Between 2010 and 2014 Dr Brown was the military fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy researching Australian defence and strategic policy. A regular contributor to Australian and international media, his first book was the acclaimed Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession (2014). His most recent publication is the Quarterly Essay, Firing Line: Australia’s Path to War (2016).

Dr Andrew Carr is a research fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. His publications include work on Australian foreign and defence policy, middle power theory and Asian security. His latest book, Winning the Peace: Australia’s Campaigns to Change the Asia–Pacific (2015), examines how Australia has influenced Asia’s security and economic order. He is the co-editor of Australian Foreign Policy: Controversies and Debates (2014) and Asia-Pacific Security (2015). Dr Carr is also the editor of the ‘Centre of Gravity’ policy paper series, and a co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Security Challenges.

Dr Peter J. Dean is a senior fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific. Dr Dean was the 2014–15 Fulbright Scholar in Australia–United States Alliance Studies. He is series editor of the Melbourne University Publishing Defence Studies Series and editorial board member of Global War Studies and the Australian Army Journal. He was a managing editor of the journal Security Challenges from 2012 to 2015. He is also a regular media commentator on Australian and regional defence issues.

Dr Dean’s publications include: The Architect of Victory (2011), Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War (2013), Australia 1943: The Liberation of New Guinea (2014), Australia’s Defence: Towards a New Era? (2014) and Australia 1944–45: Victory in the Pacific (2016).

Dr Stephan Frühling is an associate professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and Associate Dean (Education) of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. He is also a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project on Small Allies and Extended Nuclear Deterrence. From August to December 2015, Dr Frühling was the ‘Partner across the globe’ research fellow in the Research Division of the NATO Defense College in Rome, and in 2014–15 Stephan was a member of the Australian Government’s external panel of experts on the 2016 Defence White Paper. He is the author of Defence Planning and Uncertainty (2014), A History of Australian Defence Policy Since 1945 (2009), and co-editor of Australia’s Defence: Towards a New Era? (2014) and Australia’s Nuclear Policy: Reconciling Strategic, Economic and Normative Interests (2015).

Dr Amy King is a lecturer at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. She graduated with a PhD in international relations from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Her research focuses on the China–Japan relationship, Chinese foreign and security policy, and the international relations and security of the Asia–Pacific region. Her most recent publication, China–Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949–1971 (2016), is based on hundreds of declassified documents from the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive, gathered during extensive fieldwork in China between 2008 and 2012, and examines the post–World War II rebuilding of economic ties between the People’s Republic of China and Japan.

Rear Admiral James Goldrick AO, CSC, RAN (Ret.) is a fellow at the Sea Power Centre and the Lowy Institute for International Policy, and an adjunct professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. He commanded HMA Ships Cessnock and Sydney (twice), the RAN task group and the multinational maritime interception force in the Persian Gulf (2002) and the Australian Defence Force Academy (2003–06). As a rear admiral, he led Australia’s Border Protection Command (2006–08) and then commanded the Australian Defence College (2008–11). His publications include The King’s Ships were at Sea: The War in the North Sea August 1914–February 1915 (1984), No Easy Answers: The Development of the Navies of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (1997), and Navies of South-East Asia: A Comparative Perspective (2012) with Jack McCaffrie.

The Hon. David Feeney MP is the Labor member for the House of Representatives seat of Batman. David studied at Melbourne University, before completing a Master’s of Public Policy and Management (MPPM) at Monash University. David entered Federal Parliament in July 2008 as a senator for Victoria. He served on various committees, including the Senate Defence, Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Climate Change. In September 2010 Feeney was appointed Parliamentary Secretary for Defence, and he was reappointed to this position in the second Gillard Government ministry. In August 2013 he resigned from the Senate to contest the election for the Division of Batman in the House of Representatives. After winning the seat of Batman, David was appointed to the Opposition front bench as Assistant Shadow Minister for Defence, Shadow Minister for Justice and from June 2014 the Shadow Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Shadow Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC. He was re-elected as member for Batman at the 2016 Federal election.

Professor Thomas G. Mahnken is a senior research professor and the director of the Advanced Strategy Program at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, as well as the Jerome E. Levy Chair of Economic Geography and National Security at the US Naval War College. From 2006 to 2009, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning. Between 1997 and 2006, he served as a Professor of Strategy at the US Naval War College. He is currently serving on the staff of the congressionally mandated National Defense Panel and served on the staff of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, and as a member of the Gulf War Air Power Survey. His most recent edited and authored books are American, Australian, and Japanese Perspectives on a Changing Security Environment (2016), Strategic Studies: A Reader (2014) and Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century: Theory, History, and Practice (2012).

Dr Brendan Taylor is an associate professor and head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. He is a specialist on great power strategic relations in the Asia–Pacific, economic sanctions and Asian security architecture. His work has featured in such leading academic journals as International Affairs, Survival and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He is the author of several books, including Australia as an Asia–Pacific Regional Power (2007), Sanctions as Grand Strategy (2010) and co-editor of Australia’s Defence: Towards a New Era? (2014).

Dr Elsina Wainwright is a senior fellow in conflict prevention at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. From 2002 to 2006, she was the Strategy and International Program Director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), and was then a visiting fellow at ASPI until 2007. Before joining ASPI, she was an associate with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company and a consultant political analyst for the International Crisis Group in Bosnia. She studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she completed both her masters and doctoral degrees in International Relations. While at Oxford, she was a stipen-diary lecturer in Politics at Oriel College.

Professor Michael Wesley is Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Coral Bell School of Asia–Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. His career has spanned academia, with previous appointments at the University of New South Wales, Griffith University, the University of Hong Kong, Sun Yat-sen University and the University of Sydney; government, where he worked as Assistant Director General for Transnational Issues at the Office of National Assessments; and think tanks, in which he was Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Professor Wesley has also served as editor in chief of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He is a non-executive member of the Senior Leadership Group of the Australian Federal Police and a member of the NSW/ACT Advisory Board for CEDA. His book, There Goes the Neighbourhood: Australia and the Rise of Asia, won the 2011 John Button Prize for the best writing on Australian public policy. He is also the author of Restless Continent: Wealth, Power and Asia’s New Geopolitics (2015).

Introduction

Brendan Taylor, Stephan Frühling and Peter J. Dean

The US–Australia alliance has been a central pillar of Australian foreign and defence policy ever since Australia, the United States and New Zealand signed the Australia, New Zealand and United States Security Treaty (ANZUS) in 1951. For more than six decades, it has endured through significant changes to Australia’s strategic environment: the fight against communism in Southeast Asia leading to the Vietnam War; Australia’s relative security in the latter part of the Cold War; the development of multilateralism in Asia while the United States became the sole superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union; the fight against terrorism amid ongoing conflict in the Middle East; and the rise of China to economic and strategic pre-eminence among the East Asian powers. The defence policies and priorities of the United States have been an essential context for the way Australia has reacted to these evolving challenges in its own defence policy and planning.

Although based on a treaty more than six decades old, the alliance has been successful because it has continued to adapt. Today, it is once more in an important phase of reinterpretation. The changing strategic environment in the Asia–Pacific, especially the rise of China, the US ‘rebalance’ to the region, increasing tensions in the East and South China Seas, Australia’s economic ties to China, Asian military modernisation and questions over US resolve in the region have reignited debate in Australia about the future of the alliance, and how Australia’s defence policies and preparations should relate to those of its larger ally.

As the contributions to this book illustrate, opinions vary as to how and how far the alliance will and should evolve in this new era. For some commentators, the alliance is strategically more significant to Washington now than at any other time since its establishment. Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, for instance, Bates Gill and Tom Switzer contend that ‘Australia now figures more prominently in US foreign policy than at any time since 1942–45, when Australian combat troops served under General Douglas MacArthur and scores of US air and naval bases and army camps were stationed Down Under’.¹ Other commentators, by contrast, argue that the alliance could well be headed for one of its more testing periods. As Michael Green and Zack Cooper of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) have observed,

Leading Australian political figures now debate whether [an] apparent divergence of security and economic interests presages a dilution of the United States–led alliance system in the region. These public debates by the United States’ closest ally in the Pacific have some senior US officials quietly questioning whether Japan may in future replace Australia as the most trustworthy ally should US and regional tensions continue mounting with Beijing.²

No alliance relationship exists without episodes of tension. Australia, New Zealand and the United States are all predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries devoted to the same values of liberty, rule of law and democracy, but the third link of the ANZUS alliance broke when the United States and New Zealand fell out over the latter’s opposition to US nuclear policies. Australia’s trilateral Cold War alliance therefore became a bilateral one just as the Cold War was about to end, but the coincidence of strategic interests between the United States and Australia has proved far more enduring than that between the United States and New Zealand. The fact that this alliance has risen to every challenge so far gives hope that it will remain a positive influence on regional stability and both countries’ security—but if that is to be so, it will have to continue to adapt.

A new era in alliance politics

With the ending of the Cold War, it became fashionable in the academic debate and commentariat on international affairs to argue that alliances were increasingly less relevant in a more globalised world characterised by security challenges of an increasingly trans-national nature.³ Scholars and strategic analysts pointed out that states were not exhibiting signs of ‘balancing’ behaviour in the face of China’s rise, further reinforcing the irrelevance of alliances.⁴ While Chinese officials, in particular, continue to make the case that alliances as a mode of security collaboration are a relic of the past, arguments contending that such strategic relationships are becoming passé seem increasingly hard to make.⁵ If anything, old alliances seem to be coming back into fashion even as new forms of strategic partnerships develop. While touring Asia in April 2014, for instance, Barack Obama became the first serving US President to confirm publicly that the US–Japan Security Treaty extended to a conflict involving the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.⁶ More recently, while speaking at the July 2016 NATO Summit in Warsaw, Obama reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the trans-Atlantic alliance and reiterated that ‘as treaty allies, we have a solemn, binding Article 5 duty to defend each other. And in this obligation, we will never waver.’⁷

This renewed salience of alliances by no means guarantees the sustainability of existing arrangements. Indeed, as the doyen of alliance politics Stephan Walt has observed, in more tranquil strategic circumstances alliances can often meander along quite comfortably, sustained by the institutions and habits of cooperation built up around them over time. It is not until the alliance faces a situation of genuine crisis that it is tested and sometimes terminated. Or, as Walt more colourfully puts it, ‘The alliance may be dead long before anyone notices, and the discovery of the corpse may come at a very inconvenient moment.’⁸

Few serious commentators would suggest that the US–Australia alliance is hollowed out or even in acute crisis. After fifteen years of joint operations in the Middle East, both allies are arguable as close as they have ever been in political and military terms. But as a number of the contributions to this book illustrate, a shift in focus to the strategic implications of Asia’s territorial disputes could generate alliance dilemmas for Australia that it did not have to confront after the instability in Southeast Asia of the 1950s and 1960s was overcome. As far back as August 2004, the then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer controversially stated that Australia’s obligations under the ANZUS treaty would not extend to a Taiwan Strait contingency—much to the chagrin of Washington, which issued a public rebuke stating that Australia’s ANZUS obligations were clear.⁹ As recently as June 2014, the then Defence Minister David Johnston made an almost identical claim with reference to the possibility of Australian involvement via ANZUS in conflict in the East China Sea.¹⁰ A January 2015 poll found that 71 per cent of Australians would opt to stay out of an East China Sea conflict, even if the United States were to become involved militarily.¹¹

While the above demonstrates that alliance dilemmas could emerge relatively quickly and perhaps even unexpectedly, they could also transpire in a more gradual fashion. This is particularly so as rising powers seek to fashion new institutional architectures that better reflect both their own interests and the region’s changing power relativities. Throughout the Cold War period, this was less of a concern due to the dearth of multilateral mechanisms in the Asia– Pacific. Indeed, for that reason, it was relatively commonplace to refer to the US-led network of Asian alliances as the region’s dominant security architecture. In the immediate post–Cold War period, some concern existed among US officials that emerging multilateral structures—such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF)—were intended to provide an alternative that would ultimately usurp America’s Asian alliances.¹²

The failure of these nascent multilateral organisations to respond meaningfully to a number of Northeast Asian crises—including the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1993–94 and the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995–96—quickly dispelled these concerns, and reinforced the continued importance of an ongoing US military presence in the region, one facilitated by its alliance arrangements. Today, the return of US forces to Australia as part of the ‘Force Posture Initiative’, of which the rotational presence of US Marines in Darwin is the intended as only the first stage, highlights that Australia is becoming not only an increasingly important but also a more ‘normal’ ally in this regard, despite its relative geographic isolation.

While most Asia–Pacific countries remain supportive of this evolving US presence, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s new ‘Asia for Asians’ security concept highlights China’s continued fundamental opposition to the US alliances in the region. Unveiled during his keynote address to the May 2014 Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA)—a multilateral organisation whose most influential members are China and Russia and which was chaired by China from 2014 to 2016—the ‘Asia for Asians’ security concept proposes that the region’s security challenges should be solved by Asians themselves, not by external powers such as the United States.¹³ It forms part of a more extensive suite of similarly exclusionary (from Washington’s perspective) initiatives including an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) New Development Bank, a New Silk Road Land Belt, and a 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road. One long-term aim of these initiatives seems to be the marginalisation of the United States and its alliances from the region.

Whether Xi’s ‘Asia for Asians’ security concept ultimately materialises or whether it encounters many of the same challenges that other aspiring architects have faced over recent decades in this highly variegated region remains to be seen. Even if Xi’s vision ultimately evaporates or, more likely, emerges as a less consequential challenge to the US-led network of Asian alliances than some worse-case scenarios contend, it would be unwise to assume that alliance politics might not still become significantly more fluid owing to larger structural shifts associated with periods of power transition. History suggests that the emergence of new centres of power in the international system generate heightened levels of strategic promiscuity. As Paul Dibb has observed, ‘Multipolarity by definition involves more players and therefore a greater number of combinations or permutations of state actors, which can compound uncertainty. Cooperation becomes more complicated as the number of actors increases.’¹⁴

As the strategic challenges increase, US alliances throughout the region are therefore characterised by increasingly closer military cooperation, even integration, on the one hand, and uncertainties and doubts about political commitment and the extent to which their strategic interests will always coincide on the other hand. Examining one of these aspects while ignoring the other would give an insufficient, unbalanced view of the alliance. Australia is neither faced with an abstract choice between Washington and Beijing, as some would have it, nor does the camaraderie and trust between the Australian Defence Force and its US counterparts in any way lessen the potential strategic dilemmas facing Australian policy-makers. At a time of significant geostrategic change in Asia—and in light of the increasing uncertainty and instability of domestic politics in the United States and, arguably, Australia—the main challenge for both allies will be to reconcile and negotiate conflicting trends and uncertainties as they chart the future of alliance cooperation.

The approach of this book

Despite the importance of the alliance for Australia, there have been few ‘long form’ attempts in recent years to provide an in-depth understanding of how the US–Australia alliance is evolving in response to the demands of this new era, and what this means for Australian defence policy.¹⁵ Even fewer studies provide analysis that sets