Policy makers recognized that Australia would find life very difficult in a world dominated by hostile powers, even if Australia itself were not invaded.
Strategic circumstances change, but the principles of security are remarkably enduring. Post Cold War, Australia's interests still require seeing disputes resolved and a satisfactory power equilibrium struck at a distance, rather than on its shores. In maintaining a balance of power in East Asia, alliances play a critical role. Good against uncertainty as well as threat, alliances represent a valuable insurance policy. They are important assets built up over time, and need not atrophy in the absence of palpable threat, as long as strategic interests remain congruent.
For Australia, the main value of alliance with the United States has always been deterrence. The alliance greatly complicates the calculations of any would-be aggressor, since none could assume that the United States would fail to assist Australia. Alliance with the United States would offer military support in meeting direct threats, or regional threats beyond Australia's national capacity, in the same way that US support helped the United Kingdom win the Falklands War. The alliance also helps Australia develop its own capabilities in the form of access to weapons and technology, training with the world's most capable military, and intelligence access.
Now equilibrium has been reached in Europe with the collapse of Soviet power, but East Asia is the global focus of unresolved great power strategic tension. Those tensions focus on the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan strait and the South China Sea. Australia, though distant from the locus of regional tension, rapidly feels the knock- on effects of shifts in the balance of power further north. These are transmitted through Southeast Asia, astride the straits that connect the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
China, East Asia's rising power, is enjoying unprecedented strategic latitude because of the way the Cold War ended. No longer tied down by Russian forces on its northern frontiers, China is the great beneficiary of the way the Cold War ended. Enjoying strategic latitude unprecedented in modern times, and fired by the urge to redress history and its loss of territory-above all Taiwan-China is pointing east and south strategically. Its extensive claims in the South China Sea are based on a dubious reading of history. They represent the greatest threat to the strategic stability of the ASEAN states, which remain divided among themselves and unable to resist the slow Chinese forward movement.
China has size, centrality and demographic weight. By pressing on its maritime frontiers, China is engaging the American global interest in freedom of the seas in the South China Sea and the Malacca Straits-even thought the current US administration prefers to avert its gaze. China is also engaging the interests of all those such as Australia and Japan who need maritime protection.
