Little Power, Big Choices: Australia’s Strategic Future

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Building on Power and Choice, the Lowy Institute's major report on Asian Security Futures, Mr Heinrichs argues that while US primacy or a 'concert of Asia' are the most preferable futures for Australia, a competitive balance of power is the most likely. Between new risks for Canberra of being dragged into competition and old fears of being left to fend for itself, Mr Heinrichs recommends a major build-up of Australia's independent strategic weight, and reduced reliance on the United States, as a hedge against the most serious dangers arising from Asia's transition.
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For Australian strategists, recent decades have been relatively easy. Since at least the end of the Vietnam War, Australia’s fundamental security has been assured by a fortuitous set of circumstances. A prolonged era of US primacy in Asia has kept the region open and orderly. It has fostered trade and economic growth and prevented relations between Asia’s major powers from devolving into the kind of destabilising
competition that would be damaging to Australian security.

The coming decades promise to be far less tractable. In the cold calculus of power, it is China, not the United States, which has benefited most from the stability of US primacy. Yet China’s growing power, together with the complex responses this is
eliciting across the region, is slowly but steadily transforming Asia’s strategic order.1 Exactly how that transformation occurs lies beyond Australia’s control, as does the shape of the order that eventuates and the dynamics by which it operates. For better or worse, Australian security will continue to depend to a large extent on the way the region’s major powers choose to manage their relations as the balance among them changes.

This is not a reassuring prospect. Power and Choice: Asian Security Futures assessed the gradual emergence of a more competitive balance of power as the most probable trajectory for Asia’s security environment, and suggested that the transition away from US primacy ‘may already be under way’...

Read More Raoul Heinrichs Report.