Stephen Kuper
As the United States continues to emphasise locking down the western hemisphere, Beijing continues to expand its reach across the Indo-Pacific, with some claiming a Chinese-led region is preferable to a pseudo-imperial US-led order, but what does that look like?
Since the end of the Second World War, Australia’s economic, political and strategic outlook has been shaped above all by two external relationships: its longstanding alliance with the United States and its increasingly consequential and complex relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Together, these relationships have underpinned Australia’s prosperity and security while also generating the central strategic tensions confronting the country today.
The Australia–United States relationship emerged directly from the experience of the Pacific War. The fall of Singapore and Britain’s inability to defend Australia decisively ended any lingering reliance on the United Kingdom as Australia’s principal security guarantor. In its place, Australia turned to the United States, a shift formalised in the 1951 ANZUS Treaty. Throughout the Cold War, this alliance was reinforced by shared democratic values, deepening intelligence cooperation, and Australia’s participation alongside the US in major conflicts, including Korea and Vietnam.
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