Identity Crisis

Australia’s national security is serene by world standards. We have cooperative, stable, relations with neighbouring countries. We are highly integrated into the regional economy, which has been the major engine driving growth in our national prosperity for generations. We are a significant military power, blessedly far from most other major powers in the region, with no land borders, and no territorial disputes with powerful nations. Despite all of this, we have long suffered an identity crisis about our place in Asia, and heightened security fears in our neighbourhood.

Security consciousness and historical threat perceptions are not unique to Australia. While Australia enjoys close strategic and diplomatic relations with many Asian states, our foreign policy has, nevertheless, been driven by a deep-rooted foreboding about an Asian threat that seems to outweigh any evidence of its imminence. In an article from 1977, Hedley Bull, perhaps Australia’s most eminent theorist of international relations, saw this unease stemming from the contrast between our sparsely populated, bountifully endowed continent, and our less-affluent, more populous Asian neighbours. This disparity – combined with an implicit recognition that our own country was built, under arms, on the dispossession of the native population – leaves Australians with a nagging sense that we must remain vigilant, lest our neighbours eventually seek to redress the imbalance through force.

Today, this sense of impending menace is focused almost exclusively on China. There is now near unceasing media and political representation of the myriad ways that China supposedly ‘threatens’ Australia: as a direct military presence; as a rival to our superpower patron, the United States; as a third power come to usurp our traditional domain in the South Pacific; as a threat to the ill-defined ‘rules-based order’, particularly as it pertains to maritime territory and rights of naval access in the South and East China Seas; as a predatory usurer extending financial largesse to developing nations with one hand, while preparing to snatch up their critical infrastructure and natural resources at the first sign of default with the other; and as an authoritarian surveillance state with no regard for civil rights, dissent, or the rule of law, that threatens to spread these illiberal norms as its power and influence wax across the globe. Inaccuracies, hypocrisies, and misrepresentations mix freely with legitimate concerns, though few commentators seem equipped and motivated to make the distinction.

Given the state of this discourse, it’s easy to forget how positively our relations with China were understood and portrayed in mainstream Australia until quite recently. Tony Abbott, who in recent years has been one of Australia’s loudest and most prominent China critics, is a useful exemplar. In 2014, when seeking to secure a lucrative free-trade deal with China, Prime Minister Abbott described China’s rise as ‘perhaps the most spectacular advance in human welfare ever accomplished’ and declared that it was ‘hard to overstate the importance and strength of Australia’s relationship with China’. At the conclusion of the trade agreement, Abbott agreed with Chinese President Xi Jinping to elevate the relationship between the two countries to the level of a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’.

Greed has been the primary motive force in Australian relations with China since the 1970s. Massive natural resource exports to China have underpinned Australian prosperity for decades now, and were the main reason that Australia weathered the global financial crisis far better than other Western economies. China is by far our largest trading partner, providing a major annual surplus that came to $90 billion in the 2022-2023 financial year. As recently as 2018, Lowy Institute polling showed that 82% of Australians viewed China more as an economic partner than as a security threat. By 2021, perceptions had shifted dramatically, with 63% of Australians stating that they now viewed China as more of a security threat.

The explanation for this dramatic shift from ‘greed’ to fear’ in Australia’s approach to China lies in our relationship with the United States, and the latter’s own position vis-à-vis China. In matters of serious international concern, Australian foreign policy is completely subsumed by the US alliance. Until the late 2010s Australia could have its cake and eat it too. We pursued lucrative trade and investment deals with China while committing ourselves to America’s ‘Pivot to Asia’. China relations took a step-change under the Trump administration, which continued under President Biden. Where preceding administrations emphasised incrementally influencing the shape of China’s rise through institutional and economic engagement, Trump was firmly agonistic. His first National Security Strategy framed China as a direct rival ‘challeng[ing] American power, influence, and interests’, while ‘attempting to erode American security and prosperity’.

Much media and political discourse on the growing tensions between the US and China focuses on domestic Chinese politics – Xi Jinping’s tightening authoritarianism, Chinese repression of Uighurs, and crackdowns on political dissent in Hong Kong – but the core factor lies in China’s rapid growth in economic and military power, and America’s relative decline. China, merely by its gravitational pull in the international system, has come to pose an existential threat to America’s globe-spanning empire. In 2010 China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy; at US$6 trillion, it was just over one-third the size of the United States. By the end of the decade China’s GDP had surged to a fraction below US$15 trillion, which, according to the World Bank, made it around fifteen percent larger than the US in purchasing power parity terms.

While the United States still enjoys a military edge, China is closing the gap here too. A variety of war games conducted by American military strategists and think tanks shows that the victor of a conflict between the United States and China is uncertain, but that casualties and destruction would undoubtedly be catastrophic on both sides. The United States either has or soon will reach a point where it no longer dominates the Asia-Pacific region.

The implications of the new superpower rivalry between the United States and China have quite rightly stimulated a great deal of discussion on Australia’s place in the region. The Old Guard of Australian critical foreign policy scholars – such as Hugh White, Richard Tanter, and Alison Broinowski – continues to make enriching interventions on the topic that foreground Australian foreign policy inertia and question the morality and practicality of permanently enshrining the US alliance at the foundation of our national security. Newer voices – notably Emma Shortis in Our Exceptional Friend (2021) and David Brophy in China Panic (2021) – have questioned the merits of Australian alliance policy in recent years. A string of former Prime Ministers have also weighed in. Malcolm Fraser called for the end of the US alliance as we know it in his posthumously published Dangerous Allies (2014). Kevin Rudd has sought to articulate a new system of ‘managed strategic competition’, in lieu of a war, hot or cold, between the two superpowers in The Avoidable War (2022). Paul Keating has kept to brief articles and long acerbic speeches, but has easily been one of the most audible and compelling voices in the country, warning against making an enemy of a regional superpower that we must find a way to get along with. And Malcolm Turnbull has persistently called into question the wisdom of the AUKUS pact and Australia’s commitment to procuring a fleet of nuclear submarines.

Two of the most recent works concerning Australia’s strategic outlook and its relations with the United States, Sam Roggeveen’s The Echidna Strategy and Clinton Fernandes’ Sub-Imperial Power, strike me as particularly notable. While maintaining their integrity as serious contributions tackling complex issues, both books are highly readable by design, as their authors place front-and-centre the need for open, publicly engaged, discussion of the central question of Australia’s place in the region. They seek to enhance democratic accountability where it is the duty of the government of the day, not only retired leaders, to engage Australians in the critical foreign policy decisions that will shape the fate of the nation. AUKUS is a major focus for Roggeveen and Fernandes, who both agree that the new security pact represents an unprecedented level of Australian commitment to total force interoperability with the United States in its brewing regional contestation with China, thereby turning the focus away from what could be reasonably understood as ‘national defence’.

It also bears mentioning that both authors are former intelligence officers: Roggeveen for the Office of National Assessments, and Fernandes for the Australian Army. Their mutual experience at the heart of the Australian national security establishment protects them from the loose dismissals often heard from national security hawks that those seeking to articulate an alternative to total dependence on the United States, and with it the forward containment of China, are naïve peaceniks or idealistic academics.

Still, much separates the authors, their approaches to the subject, and the theoretical underpinnings of their outlooks. A good deal of what is inevitably missing, due to brevity and selective focus, from either book can be found in the other. Roggeveen is a more-or-less conventional foreign policy realist. The Echidna Strategy is almost exclusively concerned with military capabilities, statecraft, and core national interests. It is the single best contemporary source on the military specifics, defence policy, weaponry, flashpoints, likely scenarios, and the strategic and tactical issues involved in a potential conflict between Australia and China that I have read, bringing specificity to the current Australia-China relational dynamic.

What the conventional realist lens misses, however, are the complex economic structures that provide the impetus for empire building and underlie the contestation of global power. The US-China rivalry is not only about comparative national security, which is Roggeveen’s focus, but also a question of which superpower will shape the economic, strategic, and institutional arrangements of world order in the twenty-first century. Focussing on economics and empire building, Fernandes’ Subimperial Power places the brewing US-China rivalry, and Australia’s place within it, into a world historical context that is absent in Roggeveen’s account. When the issue is understood in terms of empire and contestation for global economic leadership, much that appears confusing from the view of ‘core national interest’ becomes coherent.

Roggeveen’s central argument in The Echidna Strategy is that the United States will not long remain the leading strategic power in Asia, which will soon be led by Asian great powers, and that, in the face of this reality, it behoves Australian foreign policy planners to rethink our dependence on the US alliance as the basis for our national security. China’s challenge to the United States is simply too great, and China enjoys too many geopolitical advantages on this side of the Pacific for the United States to risk a war for regional dominance that it would likely lose. The United States will slowly withdraw, and Australia will be forced to face the realisation of its long-held fear: being left alone in the region without a closely aligned superpower security guarantor. 

It is a bleak prospect for those who believe that the law of the jungle reigns in global affairs, the strong doing as they will while the weak suffer as they must. But Roggeveen looks to a creature that manages to defend itself against predation by virtue of its unique defensive characteristics for inspiration. Enter the echidna: no fear-inducing threat to other animals, save ants and termites, but with sharp quills deterring predators that quickly recognise the costs of an attack outweigh the benefits. Roggeveen convincingly argues that an analogous military posture is ideal for Australia’s geopolitical environment – one focusing on defensive weaponry that would allow us to deny to potential aggressors the strategic maritime approaches to our shores, without setting off alarm bells about our own growing capabilities. The icing on the cake here is that this strategy could cost as little as 2% of the total cost of the offensive alternative of overwhelming power projection. In other words, Australia could successfully pull it off even with the disparities of wealth and manpower that any potential conflict with China would involve.

 Such a posture is the antithesis to the new AUKUS commitment to procuring eight nuclear submarines (‘the apex predators of the sea’) and joining the United States in a forward postured military deployment along the First Island Chain and its surrounding waters, which sits directly off the coast of China. Roggeveen puts it plainly: ‘We are investing in military capabilities designed to disarm and punish an adversary in geographical areas controlled by them’. China has spent the past several decades building the world’s most advanced anti-access/area denial capabilities in the very region we are proposing to send these submarines. The combination of China’s current defensive capabilities and innovations in sensing and undersea drone warfare technologies makes the notion that these submarines will be the key to Australian security (when they are finally delivered sometime in the mid-2050s) highly questionable. The submarines will also entrench our strategic dependence on the United States, with major doubts about Australia’s capability to build, maintain, man, and operate these vessels without constant American assistance. Roggeveen faithfully sets up the arguments put forward by AUKUS proponents, before impressively, systematically, knocking them down.

Where The Echidna Strategy falls short is in the articulation of the impetus behind American foreign policy, and, because of this, in the assessment of the likelihood of American withdrawal from its position of ‘forward defence’ in the Western Pacific. For Roggeveen, the United States entered the Cold War because it believed that Soviet-led communism posed an existential threat to the American nation and its way of life. He recognises that, by the 1960s, this supposed threat had been neutralised, but stumbles over the reason for the Cold War’s continuation. To his mind the United States simply continued its pursuit of global military supremacy because of an entrenched national security state that had few economic or strategic incentives to withdraw, given the ‘affordability’ of maintaining this globe-spanning military architecture at the time. With the challenge China’s inexorable rise poses to the existing American military architecture in the region, and the fact that American military dominance in Asia is not actually necessary for its own physical security in North America, Roggeveen believes that the United States will, gradually but inevitably, withdraw. 

This is a wholly inadequate account of American global pre-eminence and the security architecture that upholds it. The United States did not acquire and entrench a world empire in a fit of absence of mind after a few brief decades of rivalry with the Soviet Union. American leaders had, for at least a century before the Soviet Union’s existence, planned to establish a new era of American global power. Visions of American empire were always multifaceted, tied up with ideologies such as Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. Prominent nineteenth-century American statesmen and thinkers conceived of the American empire as a ‘shining light on the hill’, a beacon for global democracy. Many also argued that it would establish a higher degree of security for the United States. But, as scholars from Norman A. Graebner to Macabe Keliher have argued, the single biggest driver by far was the economic bounty that empire would bring, and from the earliest days of the American republic, leading politicians and businessmen were conceptualising the expansion of their new country with a direct focus on what has historically been dubbed the ‘China market’, which promised to furnish the table of American commerce for generations.

Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, Walter la Feber, Thomas McCormick, Gore Vidal, and many others have exhaustively documented the commercial impetus behind America’s drive for world power, and the special place of China within this broader project. In American Economic Supremacy (1900), Brooks Adams, the great sage of late nineteenth-century American imperial expansion, described the process simply:

The United States looked across the Pacific towards Asia, and China in particular, as a source of prosperity in perpetuity. Security interests stemmed from this. US Secretary of State John Hay’s 1899 ‘Open Door’ policy on China, which guaranteed American access to Chinese markets, provided the blueprint for the American approach to world order that would characterise its foreign policy over the twentieth century.

Where Roggeveen does, briefly, account for American economic interests in maintaining regional dominance, he frames them only in terms of trade. Trade is, of course, an important aspect of the global economic order, but it is from its commanding position over the flows of investment through institutional financial leadership, massive capital accrual, dollar hegemony, intellectual property, and highly developed techno-military-industrial sectors that the United States draws its global economic power.

Roggeveen mentions competition in cutting-edge techno-industrial development, but is, I believe, mistaken in framing the critical friction here solely in terms of the possibility of Chinese state espionage through digital communications infrastructure. By Roggeveen’s account, the US military role in Asia is to deter its potential exclusion by Chinese coercion from the regional economy. But the reality is that Chinese competition has already supplanted the United States to a staggering degree in both regional and global markets. The Echidna Strategy’s laser-focus on contemporary power dynamics and security as an end in itself misses the critical role of economics in American foreign policy calculations. In Clinton Fernandes’ Subimperial Power, the economic logic of American empire, and Australia’s place within it, becomes much clearer.

Conventional accounts of Australian foreign policy tend to focus on one of a few understandings of our place in the world: that we act in accordance with a self-defined ‘national interest’; that we are a middle power behaving in a way that supports international cooperation and stability; or, in the recent fashion, that we are a responsible member of something called the international ‘rules-based order’. Fernandes convincingly rejects these approaches, arguing that Australia is a subimperial power that acts on the world stage to support a US-led imperial order. He characterises Australia as an ‘enthusiastic junior partner’, one albeit anxious that its own needs may not adequately be met by the imperial system.

The AUKUS alliance is foregrounded for critique here too, but unlike Roggeveen, Fernandes looks more broadly at how it locks Australia into an American imperial system, which includes direct military confrontation with China, but also extends to loftier questions of world order and global economic management. Through the attainment of nuclear submarines, he argues, Australia is committing itself to help enforce the US imperial self-defined right to project power globally under the guise of ‘freedom of navigation’. What is meant by this phrase is American military access to other countries’ exclusive economic zones, which favours American offensive naval capabilities, and complements Australia’s economic agreements with the United States and the United Kingdom, with their heavy focus on establishing standards regulating global finance, investment rules, patents, and intellectual property rights. Fernandes’ engagement with how AUKUS interfaces with imperial management and global economics well complements Roggeveen’s incisive analysis of military capabilities and strategic objectives for the reader seeking to grasp Australia’s place in a changing world.

Where Roggeveen tends towards a dispassionate and clinical style of writing, Fernandes is biting and elaborate. The latter’s brief history of Australia’s place in the ‘rules-based order’ reveals a pattern of colonisation, expropriation, and militarism, both on our continent and overseas, that flows into the present day. The history of Australian development is located within imperial political economy: Australia grew and prospered as a primary destination for British capital investment (over the same period that India’s GDP and life expectancy collapsed under the weight of British imperial expropriation) to the tune of many trillions of dollars. Today Australia is a major destination for American investment, and the US imperial system ‘serves as a bulwark against efforts in developing countries to control the pace, depth, and terms of their integration into the international economic system dominated by Western investors’.

Control over the pattern and flow of global economic development and investment sits at the heart of empire building. Visions of the nearly inexhaustible China market, and its capacity to absorb the surpluses of American capitalism, occupied a unique position in the imaginations of nineteenth-century American empire-builders, and played a prominent role in directing the course of westward expansion. After the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, American imperial perceptions of China shifted dramatically. China came to be viewed as the primary Asian threat to the US-constructed system of global capitalism. Following the rapprochement between the United States and China during the early 1970s, and the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, China began to return to its traditional position in the American imperial imagination, as a vast commercial opportunity. Today, after decades of rapid economic growth, China is again coming to be seen as a dire threat in Washington, this time as the great competitor for global economic leadership.

This is a threat that has been long forecast. The great liberal critic of Empire, J.A. Hobson, wrote in his 1901 opus, Imperialism: A Study, that:

Maintenance of the American, and allied-Western, dominance of the world of investment capital and financial flows, rule-making and regulation is the name of the game here. Many readers, long exposed to the notion that China is buying up the farm, will be surprised to read that American investors own the majority of shares in 16 of Australia’s 20 largest companies. Indeed, our AUKUS partners own over $1 trillion apiece of the Australian economy, which makes the $85 billion of Chinese investment into the country start to seem like small change.

It is by locating Australia within complex imperial financial networks that Fernandes offers an answer to the common refrain: ‘why isn’t the Australian business community doing more to prevent the souring of relations with China?’ China is, after all, by far our largest and most important trading partner. His argument that major institutional and political players in the global economy recognise the stability of American empire as more important than any particular trading relationship – as far as the flow of capital investment, and the stability of markets and currencies are concerned – is compelling. This is not to say that businesses big and small all over Australia are not extremely vexed by the recent deterioration in relations with China, but that in our highly financialised global economy, businesses play second fiddle to the managers of capital flows. Australia’s biggest resource companies, including Rio Tinto, Woodside, Newcrest, and BHP, are all majority owned by American institutional investors. Australia too, led by our major financial institutions, has close to $4 trillion in investment capital flowing around the global system at any given time.

Fernandes surveys a variety of other ways – military, economic, and ideological – that an emergent China challenges the American order. The story is familiar to old hands, but Fernandes gives an excellent summation. A particularly novel observation is made about the role of intelligence organisations in imperial planning, and Fernandes sounds a clarion when he ties intelligence failures to a pattern of foreign policy reversals, with important lessons for both Australia and the United States. The line he draws between our cultural fetishization of ‘expertise’, which he parses as ‘the consensus of the powerful’, and several decades of catastrophic foreign policy failures, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia, and now Ukraine, is highly compelling. His indictment of ‘national security experts’, both here and in the United States, is evocative in its simple call for their supposed ‘expertise’ to be judged by the outcomes of their work.

Both works, while replete with strengths and critical insights, contain some arguments that bear closer scrutiny. Roggeveen succinctly identifies a structural weakness in Australian security policy, and provides a well thought-out and highly convincing alternative. Where I think he may be overstepping the mark is in his advocacy for the development of a close security partnership between Australia and Indonesia. In an ideal world this seems attractive, but with the sort of cold realist assessment that Roggeveen applies elsewhere, a concerted campaign of Australian military support for Indonesia raises questions over the long-term.

It strikes me as odd to write an entire book about the threat of a distant growing Asian power, to then advocate for the propping up of another rising Asian great power on our own doorstep. His premise for the Australia-Indonesia alliance, that no external power should ever dominate Southeast Asia, would basically hand regional pre-eminence to Indonesia in decades to come, should it work as suggested. By this logic it is not entirely clear why we wouldn’t be better off in the long run, absent America, just forming a balancing alliance with China against Indonesia. After all, China is 4,000km away, with no conceivable interest in Australian territory, maritime borders, or seabed resource claims, and is a far closer economic partner with greater complementarities to boot. When we look into the future, Jakarta’s ambitions and means could easily be perceived as more threatening to Australia than Beijing’s. Even when measured against ‘softer’ goals of spreading desirable norms and upholding human rights in our region, recent Indonesian actions in West Papua, East Timor, and, indeed, with its own ethnic Chinese population, does not exactly mark it out as a desirable partner. In this realist calculus, Indonesia, much as any other savvy nation, would take what it could get from Australia and in the future help, or hinder, our national security ambitions exactly to the degree that it corresponded with Indonesian self-interest, agreements and handshakes notwithstanding.

The reader can probably guess that I am highly sympathetic to Fernandes’ account of American empire and Australia’s subimperial position within it. It is a neat, and sadly accurate, way of presenting our foreign policy. Where Fernandes falls short, I think, is in his attempt to take this beyond a description of Australian foreign policy, and to establish it as a model for international relations more broadly. He, somewhat confusingly, identifies Israel as the only other ‘subimperial power’ to support this thesis.

The comparison between Israel and Australia is inaccurate in many ways. Unlike Australia, Israel actually has its own independent foreign policy, which it doggedly pursues even when it runs directly contrary to the wishes and interests of the United States. There are countless instances of this going back at least as far as Israel’s role in the 1956 Suez Crisis, but a few recent examples should suffice. Israel worked tirelessly to undermine the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement in the Middle East, the Iran Nuclear Deal. Israel has refused to offer material support to Ukraine throughout the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War, despite constant appeals from other card-carrying members of the ‘rules-based order’, citing its own national interest in maintaining positive relations with Russia. And, most disturbingly, Israel has refused to bend to even the most modest requests from the Biden Administration to de-escalate its ongoing mass atrocities in Gaza. Israel undeniably acts in its own self-defined national interest, even where those actions undermine the American imperial system and contradict all claims of moral superiority and adherence to a ‘rules-based order’.

That Israel does not neatly play the role of a client state poses a serious challenge to Fernandes’ model of the subimperial power. The unique strength of the Israel lobby has been identified by some of the most eminent scholars of American foreign policy, most notably John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, as the explanation for the independence of Israel’s foreign policy. But Fernandes, in quite inexplicable fashion, dismisses this thesis summarily. He does so by framing the issue in a binary manner: the Israel lobby cannot completely ‘dominate’ or ‘hijack’ Australian foreign policy, therefore it does not exercise enough influence to be noteworthy in understanding our relations. Ignoring the tireless work undertaken by the lobby to dampen criticism of Israel, shape its image in media representation, and bring politicians onside, Fernandes bizarrely foregrounds the ideological influence of Christian Zionism, a considerable factor in the United States to be sure, but of no serious political or cultural weight within Australia at all. Two Former Australian Prime Ministers and one former Foreign Minister have, in the last decade, made the point of identifying the Israel lobby here as a significant influence on Australian foreign policy. Antony Loewenstein (author of the recently published The Palestine Laboratory) and John Lyons (author of Dateline: Jerusalem) have documented the influence of the Israel lobby in Australia in great detail. The Powerbroker, Michael Gawenda’s recent biography of Mark Leibler, Australia’s staunchest advocate for Israel, provides a detailed account of the interactions between wealth, Zionist activism, and influence at the highest levels of Australian politics, albeit from a more sympathetic perspective. The efficacy of the lobby is neither mysterious nor controversial, despite the understandable sensitivities to blowing its influence out of all proportion to reality.

Fernandes’ less-than-convincing use of the Israel comparison to establish the subimperial power as a broader model leads me to something significant that is mostly absent in both books: the historical, cultural, and racial specificity of the US-Australia relationship, especially insofar as they both understand and interact with Asia broadly, and China particularly. The opportunity/threat, greed/fear dialectic defining both nations’ attitudes to China developed in quite striking parallel. Sparsely populated, newly acquired, and resource-rich territories in Australia and California provided the soil in which anxieties around Asian immigration and fears of a great power conflict with emerging Asian powers like China and Japan grew. Australian and American media, politicians, and public intellectuals were highly cognisant of their shared position vis-à-vis Asia, and there was unofficial recognition that programs of Pacific territorial and naval expansion, and the contemporaneous legislated exclusion of Asian immigration, were common means of maintaining white dominance in North America and Oceania, and of establishing a mutual front for seizing the bounty of Asia while hedging against likely future threats from the region.

Perhaps the single most influential work on the matter was National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), written by the historian, journalist, and ex-Victorian legislative assemblyman Charles Henry Pearson. Writing at the height of European imperial influence, Pearson predicted that the end of white global dominance was approaching, and that white men would soon ‘wake to find [them]selves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom [they] looked down upon as servile’. Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, brandished a copy of National Life and Character as he addressed Parliament in support of the Immigration Restriction Act (better known as the White Australia Policy). As John Tregenza recounts in his biography of Pearson, Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first truly imperial president, wrote to the author upon reading National Life and Character, stating that it had greatly excited the interest of the powerbrokers of Washington DC, and influenced their global outlook.

Both Roggeveen and Fernandes are structuralists in their own ways. It is an approach to world affairs I too find mostly convincing. But when it comes to Australia’s entanglement with the United States and China, historical and cultural specificities clearly hold some explanatory power. Understanding this entanglement, and using it to chart a passage through the rough waters ahead, is the ultimate task of the crafters of Australian foreign and security policy in the years to come. Politicians, policymakers, journalists, and a concerned citizenry would all do well to pay close attention to these exemplary recent works.