For even the most casual of observers, it’s clear that over the past decade the global strategic security environment has become increasingly complex. With a rising and increasingly assertive China, a resurgent Russia and a growing number of capable and unpredictable non-state actors, the US finds itself relying on its allies more than ever. This is particularly the case in the Indo-Pacific, where the US is trying to nurture greater cooperation with partners and allies. The good news here is that while long-time ally Australia isn’t writing blank cheques, it’s both willing and able to work with the US, where the two countries’ mutual interests align.

The geographic location of northern Australia is of significant strategic interest to the US, as the sea lines of communication are open to the broader Indo-Pacific in multiple directions. And there’s space for investment in adequate infrastructure for future expansion. The US and Australian defence strategies and policies are aligned in the Indo-Pacific and the national interests of each country are easier to navigate when our like-minded democracies cooperate.

The US should continue defence cooperation to leverage Australia’s strategic geography and modern defence capabilities to counter the recent corrosive and aggressive actions of China in the Indo-Pacific. This is why, today, ASPI is releasing its latest Strategic Insight, Stronger together: US force posture in Australia’s north—a US perspective of Australia’s strategic geography.

The new report argues why, and analyses how, Australia’s defence force capabilities and strategic geography can enable US force posture initiatives in the Indo-Pacific and promote greater regional cooperation in ways that advance US and Australian national interests.

There are several practical and tangible areas for US–Australia cooperation and growth, which include: expanding the Australian defence industrial base while securing and hardening supply chains; increasing US Army force posture in northern Australia; increasing multinational training opportunities; and, in conjunction with Australia, expanding the defence partnership with Indonesia. These actions should be explored to counter the growing influence of the Chinese state, as part of a broader national strategy.

The report’s first recommendation is that Australia should contribute to the US force posture initiatives with an expansion of its defence industrial base through a US–Australian joint venture to manufacture critical ammunition in Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison voiced support for a similar initiative when he stated the Australian government will ‘accelerate the creation of a $1 billion Sovereign Guided Weapons Enterprise, boosting skilled jobs and helping secure Australia’s sovereign defence capabilities’. Investment in the defence industry is part of Australia’s $270 billion, 10-year investment plan outlined in its recently published force structure plan.

An increase to US force posture in northern Australia would be in the strategic interest of both nations. Any force increase in US Army Pacific forces in northern Australia could be rotational, with the capability for rapid expansion during a crisis, to a semipermanent presence if conditions warrant. Such an increase would act as a strong grey-zone deterrent to China during a time when Australia has been subject to economic coercion from Beijing, apparently for Australian decisions made in its national interest over recent years. Australia can enable US Indo-Pacific Command’s force posture initiatives by allowing additional US Army pre-positioned stocks to be stationed in northern Australia, complementing the already planned US strategic fuel storage projects. This kind of investment will also mean more jobs and increased foreign investment for Australia.

A third area in which Australia could contribute to the US force posture initiatives is by offering an expansion of multinational training opportunities for additional US forces and those of other like-minded democracies, such as Quad members Japan and India. An increase in multinational training opportunities that compliment Marine Rotational Force – Darwin seems feasible given the $747 million recently announced as investment in training facilities in the Northern Territory. Through its strategic geography and economic leverage, Australia can be an important part of the connective tissue required to bring Quad members closer together.

The final area of cooperation is the expansion of the strong defence partnership between Australia and Indonesia, a relationship that’s important to the US and the region. A 2018 study from Australia’s Lowy Institute make the case for a recalibration of the Australian Defence Force’s defence cooperation program, with a focus on increased maritime security operations and defence industrial collaboration. Through expanded defence cooperation, Australia will build greater trust with Indonesia, which, together with the changing strategic environment in the region, could encourage Jakarta to re-evaluate its own defence policy.

The US now relies on increased cooperation from partners and allies to regain the initiative from China in the Indo-Pacific. Australia’s defence strategy and policies are better aligned to US defence strategy and policies today than ever before. Military modernisation alone will not effectively expand the competitive space and disrupt China’s grey-zone activities.

Australia can and should use its strategic geography and defence capabilities to enable US force posture initiatives to promote greater regional cooperation and, through greater deterrent posture and capability, reduce the risks of conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

Australia has a highly capable, professional military equipped with small numbers of very complex, extremely expensive aircraft, ships, submarines and land vehicles. Australia could fight other middle powers and win, but Australia should only ever plan to be in a major conflict against a great power if we are in very good company.

The idea that Australia should have a military able to fight alone against China is deeply flawed. Fortunately, the prospects of a neatly bilateral conflict between China and Australia are remote. Australia deciding to fight alone would be an outstandingly stupid act of unilateral disarmament that discounted the value of powerful partners, notably the United States.

While our military has an impressive force, it has large vulnerabilities in being able to sustain itself in combat. It’s been slow to take up the power that comes from low-cost, semi-autonomous systems like armed drones and unmanned systems such as sensors, whether they’re in the air, under the sea or on the ground. And Australia is not taking advantage of our ‘strategic geography’ to support how our military and partner militaries can operate in times of conflict.

Addressing these gaps in a way that fits with the urgency of our darkening security environment is the best contribution Australia can make to deterring conflict in our near region and in the wider Indo-Pacific—and to being prepared if that deterrence fails.

To do this, big changes are needed in how all the ‘consumables’ of conflict are supplied. That’s highlighted in the case of advanced missiles, which Australia has only in small numbers that would be consumed rapidly. And we rely on lengthy global supply chains for resupply. Having the best missiles in your military’s ‘order of battle’ doesn’t matter if you run out of them days or weeks into a war.

Our military’s expensive manned ships, aircraft, submarines and army vehicles are also vulnerable to the new kinds of weapons that other militaries—including China’s—have in numbers and which we have so far been slow to adopt.

This is about missiles, but also the new and lethal semi-autonomous and autonomous systems that are the force multipliers for modern militaries. The Azerbaijanis used cheap but lethal armed drones to destroy Armenian tanks last year. The Iranians used them to put one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil refineries out of business in 2019.

In the era of low-cost lethality, our defence organisation is taking the same approach to unmanned systems and missiles that it has to manned systems such as naval ships in past decades: buying small numbers of elaborate, very expensive systems that are hard to get, slow to replace and not made here.

As examples: Defence is buying 12 armed MQ-9B Sky Guardian drones, based on the Predator used against terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, for around $2 billion, and four large MQ-4C Triton long-range maritime surveillance drones for $1.8–2.7 billion, and both are made offshore.

This has to change. Defence needs ‘consumable’ weapons that are able to be used, lost and replaced in large numbers during conflict if the Australian government is not going to get some very nasty surprises in a future war. That could include the loss in combat of air warfare destroyers, F-35 joint strike fighters and tanks—together with the men and women operating them. Losing one destroyer’s 180 crew in combat would be 4.5 times the casualties the Australian Defence Force suffered in the entire Afghanistan conflict.

Such sobering possible combat losses are because potential adversaries have understood the implications of advanced missiles and drones operating with their militaries’ planes, ships and submarines—and they’ve gone beyond small-scale experimentation to supplying their militaries in high volumes.

Avoiding such tragic losses will take a radical reordering of thinking for a Defence organisation that’s operated with a peacetime mindset, where ‘attrition’ is about training accidents and equipment wearing out, not brutal contact with another powerful military, where small stocks of missiles are lovingly tended and used very sparingly in training.

Discretionary missions by highly specialised forces with overwhelming technological advantage like those in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t Australia’s likely future.

There are some limited but refreshing indicators of change that Defence Minister Peter Dutton can welcome and expand. Rapid development of the ‘loyal wingman’ drone to operate with the F-35 is one. So is Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s plan to manufacture in Australia at least some of the $100 billion in advanced missiles Australia’s military will buy over the next 20 years.

Buying Boeing’s large unmanned Orca submarine now would add to Australia’s undersea capability well before the launch of the first Attack-class submarine in the mid-2030s. This would add significantly to the Collins submarines’ combat power. Four Orcas would come at a fraction of a manned submarine’s cost and be in the water more than 10 years sooner.

Some of these ideas are in the government’s 2020 force structure plan, but on timelines that stretch into or even begin in the 2030s. The shift needs to happen faster and in a much bigger way to give our military considerably more firepower, and for it to be able to survive in a conflict lasting months, maybe years—not days or weeks.

That would give Australia a military force able to exert control of our territory and our near region, most logically working with partners across Southeast Asia, PNG and the South Pacific.

For this additional combat power to be effective in deterring conflict and keeping our near region strategically benign, though, Australia also needs ‘places and bases’ domestically and in our near region that our military can operate from.

Domestically, all roads lead to Darwin as an essential piece of strategic geography to be able to operate naval and air forces from. There’s focus now on how to end the lease of the Chinese port operator, but the bigger picture should be Australia investing in a major expansion of the Darwin port for the purpose of multinational naval operations in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

That fits with the US ‘global posture review’, which is looking to disperse its forces in places other than Guam, Japan and South Korea to make them more survivable in conflict with China. Our Quad partners would welcome this Australian move, which is likely to make more sense over coming years.

In our near region, if our military is going to be able to project power and deter growing Chinese presence, then the Pacific step-up needs a rethink. Right now, its defence aspect is almost a public relations campaign to make the South Pacific less likely to welcome rising Chinese military presence and access at ports, airfields and other infrastructure.

Given the darkening strategic environment, that’s not enough.

Australia needs to take advantage of our near region’s strategic geography, not just seek to deny that advantage to others. One example would be a bigger Manus Island base than planned, with Australian naval vessels based there working with Papua New Guinea’s patrol boats.

That starts with confronting but frank discussions about the emerging security environment with our Pacific island partners, making the case that enabling joint operations and activities with Australia helps bring stability, and is fundamental to regional security.

For those thinking this plan makes Australia so secure we don’t need our alliance with the US, that’s a mistake. Although the US gets considerable value from Australia as an ally, Australia gains much more from the US.

Access to US technology and intelligence, combined with our own research, intelligence and industry capabilities, gives Australia a far more powerful military than we could achieve otherwise. That’s leaving aside the likely enormous advantages through cooperation with the US in emerging areas like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, hypersonics, space and offensive cyber systems.

But can we rely on the US in the world we see emerging? The public debate on this neglects the fact that US strategy recognises its own deep need to act with allies and partners to meet the China challenge.

That judgement has been driven home by the experiences of the Trump administration, which experimented with unilateralism. President Joe Biden’s administration learned the lesson from those four years. But it’s also understood in Congress, the State Department, think-tanks and in the giant US defence organisation.

The development and use of Chinese power under an assertive Xi Jinping will reinforce this strategic understanding.

Australia invests in its own security. That means we’re not just a customer of US security but a contributor to American and global security. Closing some urgent gaps and vulnerabilities in our defence capabilities will make Australia and the world safer, and help deter future conflict.

Last year’s war between Azerbaijan and Armenia was short, sharp and decisive. By effectively employing precision guided weapons, the former rapidly forced the latter to capitulate and accede to its political demands. The conflict confirmed the centrality of guided weapons to modern warfighting and showed how small states can now master the technologies and techniques needed to use them.

Last year also witnessed the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the supply-chain crisis it triggered. That provoked much soul-searching from governments and companies about how to manage the risks presented by modern just-in-time supply chains that span the globe.

When we take those two events together, it’s clear that the Australian Defence Force will not only need many kinds of guided weapons across the spectrum of conflict, but also need to guarantee their availability in times of crisis when supply chains will be under pressure and threat. That will be difficult, since Australia currently manufactures virtually no guided weapons.

The Australian government is also aware of both needs. Its 2020 defence strategic update plans on investing tens of billions of dollars in guided weapons over the next two decades. It also directs the Defence Department to explore the potential for new sovereign guided-weapons production capability to mitigate supply risks. It appears that exploration has determined that the potential can be turned into reality: on 31 March, the government announced that it was ‘accelerating’ the development of a sovereign guided-weapons manufacturing capability.

In a new ASPI report, launched today, I examine two fundamental questions. First, would the manufacture of guided weapons in Australia enhance ADF capability and provide greater self-reliance? Second, is it viable to manufacture guided weapons in Australia? The answer to both questions is ‘yes’. The report also presents some key considerations about how the industry should be established.

No single measure is a panacea for supply-chain risks, but domestic guided-weapons production, combined with greater stockpiling and cooperative development and production arrangements, would greatly reduce those risks.

Australia has the industrial capability to produce guided weapons here. In fact, we have a long and successful living history of doing just that. We can also draw upon ‘missile-adjacent’ sectors such as space and autonomous systems as well as leverage the power of the fourth industrial revolution to accelerate the design and manufacture of weapons. We can also leverage our alliance with the US to establish production lines for US weapons here, to the benefit of both partners.

A multibillion-dollar investment in the local manufacture of guided weapons is also consistent with broader government policy; for example, it supports the government’s modern manufacturing initiative, which is a key element in the effort to wean the Australian economy away from a dangerous over-reliance on the export of commodities and build on some other national strengths.

The government has announced that it’s establishing a guided-weapons ‘enterprise’, although it has released few details. What should that enterprise look like? To maximise the prospects for success, Defence needs to adopt a programmatic approach to its selection of guided weapons and actively manage the ‘missile matrix’. That is, rather than allowing the number of types of weapons that it uses multiply by letting individual projects choose different weapons for different platforms, it needs to make decisions that take all relevant factors into account and choose weapons or families of weapons that will be used across multiple platforms.

That approach will have many benefits. Acquiring more weapons of fewer types will increase the economies of scale of local production. It will also help to contain the overheads of ownership, such as sustainment costs, the logistics chain and integration costs.

A programmatic approach will necessarily involve ‘backing winners’ up front. While some may have concerns about the potential loss of commercial leverage, Defence is already using such an approach with success, for example in the navy’s combat management system, for which the government has decided that all classes of ships must use Saab’s combat system. This will involve seeing industry as long-term partners, rather than simply as suppliers—but that’s already a fundamental tenet of the government’s defence industry policy. Moreover, losing commercial leverage is a manageable issue, as Defence would be a more powerful, larger customer if it procured missiles using domestic co-production and the ‘family of weapons’ approach I outline in the report. And reduced commercial leverage is a different order of risk compared to losing a conflict owing to a lack of missile supplies.

A national guided-weapons enterprise could adopt many of the measures in Australia’s naval shipbuilding plan, including enhanced funding for research and development, support for the establishment of precincts for the design and production of guided weapons, and coordinated training and education programs to develop the workforce. Making guided weapons one of Defence’s ‘sovereign industrial capability priorities’, supported by an implementation plan, also makes sense as part of this broader plan.

But we can’t wait until the perfect plan is developed. The urgency of our strategic circumstances means we need to start now. There are many mature weapons that the ADF is already using or has decided to buy that we can start producing here now with minimal risk. But the government should also make some ‘big bets’, investing in the development of technologies such as hypersonic weapons that can be put into production here once mature, rather than waiting to see that maturity demonstrated elsewhere and then trying to retrofit Australia with a production capacity for these powerful new weapons.

The government has established a national enterprise to build ships, submarines and armoured vehicles in Australia, but, without guided weapons, those platforms will have limited utility. Put simply: a small number of military platforms without a large supply of advanced missiles is a force fitted for but not with combat power. The government’s decision to establish a guided-weapons enterprise, if implemented well, will be a key step in providing the ADF’s platforms with the advanced missiles in the types and quantities they need to deliver lethal and survivable capability.

President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US military forces from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021 is his first big blunder in office. This could cost America dearly in future years and should give America’s friends and allies pause to ask if Biden has the grit for the tough road ahead.

The president’s announcement, laughably titled ‘On the way forward in Afghanistan’, was nothing more than an unseemly bolt for the exit based, Biden tells us, on a ‘conviction’ he formed in 2008 that ‘American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government’.

In fact, that is precisely what American, Australian and other forces delivered to Afghanistan: a flawed but functioning democracy, keeping the Taliban at bay, and preventing groups like al-Qaeda from using the country as a training base from which to attack the West.

Here Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump are on a unity ticket, locked onto a bizarre sabotage mission, negotiating, and now honouring, a ‘diplomatic agreement’ with the Taliban, while deserting the very Afghans who have fought with our forces over the past two decades.

Let’s be clear: this is an abandonment as complete as America’s failure to back South Vietnam after many promises of providing air support to Saigon in the face of North Vietnam’s advancing conventional forces in 1974 and 1975.

Biden’s statement gives the Taliban a green light to start massing forces against the capital. The president says: ‘the Taliban should know that if they attack us as we draw down, we will defend ourselves and our partners with all the tools at our disposal.’

‘Partners’ refers to NATO, Australia and other countries that seem to have been swept into a unilateral American decision to get the hell out of Dodge. Biden explicitly says that the US ‘will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily’. He apparently decided—in that crystalline moment of ‘conviction’ in 2008—that Afghanistan cannot succeed.

Moreover, the withdrawal is happening without detailed thinking about what happens next. There is no plan for how the US will fight terrorism in the region, just a promise that ‘my team is refining our national strategy to monitor and disrupt significant terrorist threats.’

There is no plan for how the US will support the government in Kabul, just a vague assurance that ‘over the next few months, we will also determine what a continued US diplomatic presence in Afghanistan will look like.’

With no military forces to provide protection, I’ll tell you what that future diplomatic footprint will look like: nothing, nada, bupkis. Australia will be compelled to follow suit. Our mission in Kabul has a strong security detachment, but protecting an embassy compound is the last part of a system that must also stabilise the town, limit access to key government institutions and embassies and, at worst, enable evacuation to an airport. Without a larger military force, the Western diplomatic presence in Kabul will wither.

To whom should Kabul look for support? Biden has a suggestion: ‘we’ll ask other countries—other countries in the region—to do more to support Afghanistan, especially Pakistan, as well as Russia, China, India, and Turkey. They all have a significant stake in the stable future for Afghanistan.’

Yes, you read that correctly. The US is going to ask Russia to support Afghanistan. Presumably not like the Soviet Union did in its invasion of 1979. Russian President Vladimir Putin will not prop up Kabul, except to put his own proxies in power.

And China? Biden has no interest in promoting Beijing’s growing presence in Central Asia and the Middle East. China has prudently minimised its presence in Afghanistan but may indeed be interested to build a corridor of control through Afghanistan, linking up with its closest partner in the Middle East, Iran.

Beijing also has a close partnership with Pakistan. What could be attractive to China is the chance to build a condominium of influence, strengthening Beijing’s access to the ports of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

In that outcome, apart from Afghanistan of course, the big strategic loser is India, which would then face a hostile China on its northeast as well as Chinese proxies in Myanmar under the generals and, to the northwest, in Pakistan.

Biden is right that these countries have significant stakes in Afghanistan, but their interests are not America’s interests, or ours. Beijing will, I suspect, be amazed at Biden’s invitation to supplant American interests in Afghanistan. Xi Jinping may judge that this confirms his assessment of American decline and withdrawal—a dangerous assessment, right or wrong.

This is the enduring reality of America’s strategic situation: Biden can withdraw the remaining 2,500 US troops from Afghanistan, but he can’t withdraw America from its global strategic interests, be they preventing the rise of terror groups, or limiting the malign behaviour of countries hostile to the US—China, Russia and Iran.

For a force deployment no larger than the annual ‘rotation’ of US Marines to Darwin, denying Kabul to America’s enemies was a valuable military investment. Leaving, with only the barest of notions about how to protect American interests in Afghanistan, will destabilise the region and more than likely create the basis for a new intervention half a decade or more in the future.

Biden told the press corps: ‘For the past 12 years, ever since I became vice president, I’ve carried with me a card that reminds me of the exact number of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.’

He stumbled on the numbers, simply couldn’t read them out, but the corrected transcript of his statement records that 2,448 US personnel died in the Afghanistan conflict. Biden’s announcement offers no solace to the families of those people, or indeed the families of Australia’s Afghanistan casualties, only the weary absence of strategic purpose and historical perspective.

The bigger threat from an aggressive, intolerant, authoritarian China is the strategic challenge of our age. Biden is right to focus on that, as we must, but the Middle East and Central Asia cannot be forgotten and will not be ignored.

I wonder how President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan reacted to Biden’s words that, ultimately, ‘only the Afghans have the right and responsibility to lead their country.’ Replace ‘Afghans’ in that sentence with ‘Taiwanese’, or ‘Australians’, for that matter.

As if the Afghanistan war wasn’t fought defending American and Australian interests and purposes. As if the next one won’t be. Lest we forget.

The pandemic has geopolitical and geoeconomics equivalents. Disruption all around, amid the end of the old global order.

The central truths that set the topography of Australian grand strategy in Asia—the four compass points—haven’t fallen, but their alignments are shifting. New navigation is needed.

The first compass bearing is a major trend that’s tough for any Oz politician to talk about in public: the long-term decline of Australia’s relative power. Call this our Going South star.

When a bunch of development, diplomacy and defence leaders got together for a foreign policy rethink in 2019 (ah, how long ago that seems), their statement pinged relative decline first up: ‘Australia’s weight in the world is declining. Primarily, this is driven by two factors: firstly, the fall of Australia’s relative economic weight to other nations and secondly, the fragmentation of the international order from which Australia has benefited.’

In Asia, our waning weight is striking because once we were heavy. Back in 1990, China’s GDP was US$360 billion, while Australia’s was US$310 billion. From that point, the World Bank graph has China’s economy soaring up a mountain while Australia’s gently streams.

Close to the end of the 20th century, the Australian economy was larger than the economies of all ASEAN members combined. No more. It’s a given that the shift of economic and strategic power means Australia faces a ‘disruptive Asia’—a truism heavy with significance.

In a book on Oz foreign policy, 21 years ago, my starting point was Australia’s relative economic and military decline: ‘This core reality has shaped Australian assessments. It is a key trend often hinted at but rarely stated in blunt terms. In the phrase “relative decline” the important word is relative. Decline does not equate with decadence or internal failure. Australia can keep getting richer and ever more affluent.’

The still-happy-and-getting-richer message of ‘relative’ suffers because of Edward Gibbon’s great title: any Oz leader who says ‘relative decline’ knows what the voters will hear is ‘decline and fall.’ To avoid nasty headlines, the polity deals tacitly and tangentially with Australia’s relative loss of power.

Much easier to talk about is a related compass point: Australia’s Great Asia Project. The compass metaphor means this is our East star.

Asia is ‘fundamental to Australia’s future,’ a Canberra consensus that former prime minister John Howard expresses in his 2010 memoir, starting his Asia chapter with this sentence: ‘For more than 40 years, every serious political leader in Australia has been committed to the belief that close engagement and collaboration with our Asian neighbours was critical to Australia’s future.’ On the next page, Howard makes clear that the leader at the head of this line is Gough Whitlam. While the term ‘Great Asia Project’ is mine, see 1972 as the start date, as tacitly embraced by Howard.

Howard often hammered the debating point that Australia didn’t have to choose between its history and geography. Yet in embracing (or recognising) geography, the Great Asia Project is a defining choice. Obvious, even unavoidable. But still a choice. The consensus is set and Australia’s political unity ticket on our Asian future approaches its 50th birthday.

Australia knew Asia existed before 1972, but didn’t want to have to translate geography into policy. The importance of the project is the acceptance that Australia must function as part of Asia, not apart from Asia. The Commonwealth of Australia spent its first seven decades seeking security from Asia; since then we’ve sought security in and with Asia.

The get-with-the-Asia-strength sentiment complements the North point on our compass (our axis of rotation): the reordering of the way Australia operates as a democracy with an open economy and open society.

The march to a multicultural identity started in 1966 when the Coalition government of Harold Holt quietly began to inter the White Australia policy; full burial with loud fanfare was delivered by the Whitlam Labor government after 1972. Both sides of Oz politics did the big deed.

Remaking the nation’s face with a new non-discriminatory immigration policy, we remade political traditions, junking the original ‘Australian settlement’ mindset (white Australia, industry protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism and imperial benevolence). The term ‘Australian settlement’ was coined by Paul Kelly in one of the great works of Oz journalism as history, a magisterial tome with a superb title that resonates anew, The end of certainty.

The only time Oz leaders have broadcast the relative-decline reality was during that era when Australia was tearing down tariffs and casting off the protection mentality (most memorably with Paul Keating’s 1986 warning about Australia becoming a ‘banana republic’).

An open society, in and of Asia, is why ‘our ethnic face has made a decisive shift from Anglo-European to Eurasian,’ as George Megalogenis writes, turning Sydney and Melbourne into Eurasian cities: ‘Australia’s identity is undergoing epic transformation. In seventy short years, we have shifted from the most insular rich nation on Earth to being a global role model for diversity. It took fifty years to get from white to Anglo-European, but only another twenty to cross the threshold to Eurasian.’

Looking north, east and south, Canberra ponders what a Eurasian grand strategy will mean. And how that relates to the fourth point on the compass, the leader of the West, the United States.

The US alliance came through Donald Trump’s presidency unscathed. Canberra worked the bilateral relationship with success while quietly horrified at Trump’s multilateral mayhem; Malcolm Turnbull called Trump a ‘natural isolationist’ and ‘thoroughly dystopian’.

The US has bounced back before, and Canberra offers President Joe Biden a fervent welcome. The Western point of our compass, though, has lost much ‘credibility and influence,’ as Biden acknowledges.

As the pandemic fog clears, we can take some compass sightings across tough topography. Our stars do not align.