The urgent search for a new regional and global order
In Brief
The shifting balance of power in Asia, with the United States no longer a guaranteed force for stabilisation and China asserting itself as its strategic peer, demands that middle powers find new ways to protect an open, rules-based order. In Australia, the Albanese government’s strengthened electoral mandate offers an opportunity to re-anchor its grand strategy in regionalism and re-evaluate costly commitments like AUKUS. Middle powers will be best served not by picking sides, but by collaborating to develop an approach that acknowledges the diverse sources of order-building in Asia's new strategic reality.
In the past we’ve argued that a strategic goal of middle-power collaboration in the Asia-Pacific could be ‘to co-opt the great powers into writing a new rulebook for the region that preserves the prosperity, autonomy and resilience of all in a region where China is the economic centre of gravity and its dominant military power.’
That was in 2023, when the region might have had an ally in that process in the United States. For all the faults of Biden-era foreign policy and its patchy record of engagement with Asia, Washington could still be brought to the table to the extent that Asian regionalism cohered with a US interest in avoiding the emergence of Chinese dominance of the region.
The prospect for the extension of a rules-based system being built through that regionalism without the constructive engagement of the United States — or indeed with the United States actively undermining such enterprises — appears grim.
This is the major implication of this week’s lead article by Evelyn Goh, adapted from a longer essay that appears in the latest edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly, on how Asia can make its way ‘in a world with three leading great powers — all with explicitly revisionist aims when it comes to the international “rules-based order”.’
Goh’s is an important intervention in the debate about the nature and sources of regional and global order amid China’s rise to becoming a strategic peer of the United States. For Asia, the key question is: what will be the principles and patterns underpinning the regional order if and when the United States becomes a second-best power in the region — and to what extent will it be dominated by Beijing’s preferences?
Some scholars anticipate that a China-led ‘illiberal’ international order would likely reflect Chinese preferences for hierarchy, bilateralism and informality — all intertwined with the party-state’s conception of foreign policy as a tool for reinforcing its rule at home. Others argue that despite these inclinations, China’s acquisition of leadership in the international system will necessarily be based upon compromise and collaborationwith — and legitimation from — myriad other powers, thus preserving space for their agency and influence in the order-building process. There is no straight-line projection of a country’s domestic political system to how it behaves internationally.
Goh extends this conversation, while taking into account new questions about the origins of order that arise after the re-election of the Trump administration in 2024 and the emergence of the United States as a revisionist power in its own right. As she argues, ‘[a]t this juncture, being willing to go beyond old assumptions and to ask different questions will help all countries to navigate a new international system dominated by three revisionist great powers’, China, Russia and the United States.
Certainly, for the political and policy elites in our region, finding grounding in a perspective that appreciates the diverse sources of order-building will be the sine qua non of successful middle-power diplomacy. It rejects a view that US primacy is indispensable for achieving a rules-based, open order that works — while also notfalling prey to fatalism about the emergence of a China-centric political order.
If you’re sitting in Canberra, this intellectual challenge looms especially large in the wake of Australia’s federal election. As vote counting wraps up, the centre-left Labor Party’s parliamentary majority has settled at the point where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can boast of the best result for an incumbent Australian federal government since the Second World War.
With the conservative opposition shrunken and fragmented, Albanese and his party have the chance to put a rare and historic mandate to work across a number of areas of domestic and foreign policy. There is no excuse for playing small-target politics on the big questions that challenge Australia — stagnant productivity, a severe housing shortage, rising inequality and the overarching imperative of decarbonisation.
The possibility of another two or more terms in office gives Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong an opportunity to steadily but decisively anchor Australia’s grand strategy in being an active and constructive participant in a renewed Asian regionalism. This does not mean any precipitous break with the United States, which will remain Australia’s key defence partner, but rather getting the importance of the US alliance in Australia’s foreign policy into perspective.
The landmark election result also offers an opportunity for an honest reckoning with the expense and feasibility of AUKUS, which was hatched in the dying days of the previous Liberal–National coalition government in 2021 and presented to the then Labor opposition as a fait accompli.
With the architects of the AUKUS scheme now sidelined, Albanese and Wong have the opportunity to at least review it, or be prepared to justify why Australia should persist with this very expensive exercise in shoring up the US strategic position in Asia given the serious concerns about the United States’ reliability as an ally.
If buying US nuclear submarines turns out to be a price worth paying in narrow military terms, it certainly can no longer be the centrepoint of Australia’s broader security strategy.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Law, Policy and Governance, The Australian National University.