Three months ago, the American President insulted the Australian Prime Minister.

In the now infamous telephone call, the Prime Minister might’ve managed the asylum seekers issue more nimbly. But he didn’t deserve what was dished up to him. President Trump did not just have a ‘frank’ or ‘robust’ conversation with Mr Turnbull. He was talking as President to Prime Minister, not as one man to another in a bar. In such circumstances, his behavior publicly impugned Australian national dignity.

While Anzac Day can sometimes take on a flavour of mawkish sentimentality, the degree to which we honour it indicates that Australians take national dignity more seriously than our sardonic humour might suggest.

So, doesn’t it seem a bit odd that Mr Turnbull should this week be standing alongside President Trump celebrating past glories and a spirit of mateship as if nothing had happened?

There’s a story of a small boy who, having been humiliated by a bully in front of other boys, asked his father what to do about it. The parent advised his son to avoid the bully, but if pushed, to stand up to him. He also told the boy not to worry about his popularity with the other boys. That would come with respect.

Mr Turnbull should ponder that. You don’t run after bullies. They smell obsequiousness. At worst they bully again. At best they respond with benevolent condescension. They have you where they want you. And for a country which claims to pride itself on its independence, that isn’t the place for Australia to be.

And even if Mr Trump were a nice fellow, we should still reflect on the nature of our relationship with the United States. America’s a great and inspiring country and the people who rise to the top of it are generally capable and farsighted. Americans tend to like us because of a partially accurate perception that our national qualities are similar to their own. But in the end, as they should, they put their own interests first. Single minded loyalty by an ally to the US doesn’t necessarily engender reciprocity.

Allies can differ from Americans and remain allies. Neither Britain nor Canada were in Vietnam. Canada, France and others in NATO were not American partners in the first Iraq war. We must keep those two factors at the front of our minds in the testing months ahead.

For all that the new king in Washington might’ve assembled good men around him, he remains an untested and untrusted king. So it’s more incumbent than ever on the Australian leadership to use its own judgment about our international posture. We can’t adopt the posture of a deputy sheriff, to use the term falsely but damagingly attributed to John Howard.

We’re already doing much with the US in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Even if the argument’s accepted that such contributions are in Australia’s national interest, it’s hard to argue that we need to do more, given that we already exceed the contributions of most NATO countries closer to those theatres.

And as storm clouds gather over Northeast Asia, we should eschew any precipitate enthusiasm for military options. It’s perhaps a sign of the times, and a harbinger of things to come, that we’re looking to China’s influence as the primary lever in an effort to dismantle the North Korean stalemate.

Australian leaders of stature have expressed concern about Australia’s increased tilt towards surrogate status since 9/11. These include the late Malcolm Fraser, Gareth Evans and Bob Carr. Only last week Paul Keating opined that: ‘one thing not to do with the Americans is keep bowing down.’

While other Australians might disagree with these men politically, few would suggest that they were other than Australian nationalists who think deeply about our role in the world.

And surrogacy doesn’t impact only on Australian self-respect. It affects how we’re regarded elsewhere in the region.

In the wake of that telephone call, it would’ve been better to have the next leaders’ exchange at an international meeting at what’s euphemistically termed ‘a mutually convenient time’.  In the meantime, we could’ve worked with Pence, Mattis and the rest.

Instead, we’ve waited for the summons we encouraged. Let’s hope we can still rescue a modicum of self-esteem.

In 2011, in the wake of President Obama’s announcement about the use of Darwin by US marines, Malcolm Turnbull, then in opposition, questioned  ‘extravagant professions of loyalty in relation to the United States’ and ‘dewy eyed fascination with the leader of the free world’.

In terms of the intertwined concepts of national interest and national dignity, Mr Turnbull got it right in 2011. Let’s hope he still has the courage of those convictions when caught up in the hype of celebration of our alliance on an American warship in New York.

You don’t run after bullies.

Since the 1960s, Australia and Japan have built one of Asia’s closest partnerships. I was going to say one of Asia’s most unusual, but lots of relationships in this region are strange.

When times get tough in Asia, Tokyo and Canberra are always talking and trying to plan. Once a peculiar partnership, constant tending has rubbed away the strangeness. The habit of closeness is based on huge trade interests, constant meeting of minds, common needs, agreement on means—and twin alliances with the US.

As an Asian pairing, Japan and Oz have become a comfortable, status quo marriage–their only argument in public is about whaling. Please don’t mention that spectacular upset about submarines; best forgotten, if not forgiven.

While not overdoing the national psyche interpretation, part of the relationship glue is Japan’s conception of itself as a unique nation in Asia and Australia’s status as an Asian outsider. Here are two nations that feel different. And then there’s the shared obsession with the US.

In the last quarter of the 20th Century, the constant Canberra-Tokyo focus was framed by trade and economics, reflecting the way Japan saw the world. In the first quarter of the 21st Century, the flavour has turned strategic as Japan’s views have broadened.

Having bedded down the bilateral trade relationship in the 1960s, Japan and Australia mounted a joint effort to build Asian architecture; Asia Pacific governments would create systems to secure the trade sinews created by business.

The institutional construction of a Pacific economic community evolved through a series of Oz-Japan proposals from the 1960s to the 1990s. As a journalist, I covered a key moment: the Pacific Community Seminar held at Canberra’s Shine Dome in September, 1980. Called by the Prime Ministers of Japan and Oz, the conference was chaired by Sir John Crawford, giving birth to the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, and leading to another Canberra creation moment in 1989, the formation of APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation).

Crawford is credited with the seminal term ‘open regionalism’, although he attributed it to the Japanese. In the same way, Australia gets creation rights for APEC yet this was another partnership production with Tokyo. Indeed, Asia’s hardheads saw Oz more as Japan’s front man.

I thought of that 1980 conference last week as I passed the Shine Dome and went a couple of hundred metres further along to the J.G. Crawford building. The Crawford link was only part of the echo. Australia’s National Security College was hosting a major conference with Japan doing plenty of the lifting on the topic of prospects and challenges for strategic cooperation between Australia, Japan and the US.

The tone was set by the College’s new paper on the coming of Donald Trump: ‘Don’t panic, don’t relax.’ Outside the Crawford building, signs warned about the danger of snakes in the grass. Inside, the fear was about the new Washington elephant trampling the grass.

Japan is ever on guard against the chance of another Nixon shock/Kissinger surprise of the magnitude of Washington’s 1972 rapprochement with China.

Japan’s former Defence Minister, Satoshi Morimoto, summoned up that dread with his description of a Trump tete-a-tete in a small room with China’s leaders, doing a deal ‘with no notification to US allies’.

‘My personal concern on the unpredictability and uncertainty of Donald Trump and the trend of the Trump administration is the future prospect of US-China relations. Especially, I worry President Trump may make a deal and a compromise with China.’

From Keio University, Professor Yuichi Hosoya, listed four changes in the regional order that confront Japan and Australia:

1. China’s rise has ‘radically changed strategic relations in the region’.
2. The Trump administration promises ‘more shocks and anxiety’. The new President will ‘betray his own words’ and ‘not respect his own words’.
3. The spread of nationalism and populism in Asia will ‘make diplomatic solutions based on rational compromises more difficult than before’.
4. The decline of the Liberal International Order: Donald Trump shows no respect for norms, order or justice—only ‘interests are important’.

China plus Trump. No wonder the Japanese Embassy estimates that Shinzo Abe and Malcolm Turnbull spent a total of eight hours together during Abe’s flying visit to Sydney. After that, Japan’s PM flew off to repeat the urgent business in Southeast Asia.

No front man needed. In rounding up Asia, Abe is doing it from the front. The shift from geo-economics to geopolitics has seen Japan discard its modesty. In his separate meetings with President Trump and the new US Defence Secretary, James Mattis, Abe can speak for many in the region as well as Japan. Much is changing in Asia when Japan reaches naturally for strategic leadership.

When the US-Japan-Australia trilateral was being created early in the previous decade, the push was from Australia and the US (the Bush and Howard governments). Japan was the small steps, slowly-slowly recruit.

Today Japan is the partner putting the push into the trilateral. Abe wants to repurpose it as an instrument of influence directed at Trump. Australia seconds the idea.

The trilateral designed to help Japan emerge is suddenly all about stopping the US from reneging. The Australia-Japan partnership exhibits new urgency in securing the established relationship with the US. Tokyo and Canberra look to Washington for an embrace not a choke hold, a firm grip not a shove-off.

Australian questions about what Donald Trump will do to the alliance recall Robert Menzies’ fear that ANZUS would be ‘a superstructure on a foundation of jelly’. If Trump has the Oz alliance assumptions quivering, that dread of a shaky base has been around since the moment of conception.

As with Curtin’s turn to the US in WW2, Australia’s feat in achieving the ANZUS treaty was driven by circumstance and happenstance and a lot of pushing. That perspiration and inspiration didn’t come from Prime Minister Robert Menzies. The intellectual creativity and diplomatic wheeling-dealing came from the External Affairs Minister, Percy Spender, who described his leader as sceptical verging on negative about the Pacific pact quest.

Spender seized the moment to get ANZUS in 1950–51 when the Korean War meant the US desperately needed Oz (and Kiwi) agreement on what Menzies called a ‘soft’ peace treaty with Japan.

Though pessimistic about Spender’s chances, Menzies was present at the creation and exploited the deal with a master politician’s gusto. Retiring in 1966, Menzies told his farewell press conference:

‘If I were asked which was the best single step that had been taken in the time of my Government I think I would say the ANZUS Treaty because the ANZUS Treaty has made the United States of America not perhaps technically, but in substance our ally. In other words, we have a species of alliance. Don’t hold me to it as a technical expression—we have a species of alliance with the United States. And placed as we are in the world, that is tremendously important.’

The duality is striking: from jelly to the best single step. Yet the way Menzies phrased that farewell thought—‘species of alliance’—hints that some jelly reservations lingered.

Donald Trump stirs at old tensions between the desire for firm alliance commitments and enduring doubts.

Spender laid out the quest for a Pacific pact in his first foreign policy statement to Parliament on 9 March 1950 (Menzies led the Coalition to power in December 1949). Spender’s speech is a foundational document of Oz foreign policy (here in Hansard).

In his memoirs, Spender wrote that Menzies was ‘unenthusiastic’ and ‘poured cold water’ on the efforts to create a Pacific pact. The Menzies view was that Australia didn’t need a formal alliance because the US was ‘already overwhelmingly friendly to us and Australia could rely on her’. In both London and Ottawa, Spender said, Menzies used the ‘superstructure on a foundation of jelly’ description.

The jelly perspective from the Washington at the time is given by the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who signed the ANZUS treaty in 1951 and gave President Truman this account of the first ANZUS council with Australia and New Zealand in 1952:

‘It seemed to me that both countries suffered from a paucity of knowledge of what was going on and faulty appreciation of current situations. They felt remote, uninformed and worried by the unknown.’

Menzies’ jelly scepticism was based on experience with American diplomatic reluctance and outright resistance from the US military. From 1936 to 1950, all Australian political parties ‘advocated negotiation of some form of Pacific security pact as an essential element in Australian foreign policy’. Menzies’ scepticism also went to the core of his personality and beliefs—his Britishness.

Menzies was uncomfortable with the shift from a family relationship with Britain to a contract with the US. And the eventual Menzies’ passion for ANZUS was tinged with disappointment at the decline of Britain’s role in Asia.

Coral Bell commented that Australia’s ‘over-long national adolescence as part of the British Raj’ produced the model of a family commitment which was comprehensive and automatic, not needing to be defined in writing. ANZUS marked the move to the world of contract:

‘It was not comprehensive, never covering economic relationships, nor even all security problems (though at one stage Australian policy-makers tried hard to interpret it as doing so). It wasn’t automatic, but required an act of political will—a choice—at a specific time by both parties.’

Menzies used that ANZUS-as-contract language in a Parliamentary debate on the meaning of the alliance in April, 1964: ‘There is a contract between Australia and America. It is a contract based on the utmost goodwill, the utmost good faith and unqualified friendship. Each of us will stand by it.’

Those were Menzies’ final words in a speech dancing eloquently around Washington’s decree that ANZUS wouldn’t cover Australian troops sent to Malaysia during Confrontation. Malaysia is certainly in ‘the Pacific area’ covered by ANZUS; but the US wasn’t going to read the contract as creating any obligation to help Australia (and Britain) fight Indonesia.

Menzies, the great lawyer, had to invoke the spirit of the pact rather than the letter of the treaty. What ultimately mattered, he said, was the ‘high-level acceptance of responsibility’ by America in embracing ANZUS: ‘It is not for us to assume that any great ally of ours will avoid that [responsibility] any more than we will avoid it. It is a great mistake to talk dogmatically of what the United States of America will do.’

Donald Trump is the personification of Menzies’ thought about never being dogmatic about what the US will do. How will Trump read the terms of the contract?

Menzies proved right about the shifting foundations of the alliance: the treaty wording is unchanged yet the nature of the pact has evolved and grown and shifted extraordinarily (and shed the Kiwis).

As President Trump nears, Canberra suffers another Dean Acheson moment—feeling ‘remote, uninformed and worried by the unknown’.

It’s easy to see why the Indo-Pacific concept is so popular in both Canberra and Washington. Managing China’s rise would be much easier if East Asia and South Asia really do coalesce to form a single integrated strategic system, because in that system India and China would almost certainly be primary strategic rivals. India would therefore hopefully function as a counterweight to China, balancing and limiting its growing power, helping America to persuade or compel China to drop its challenge to the US-led regional order and restoring Pax Americana.

But just because strategic rivalry between China and India might suit us doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, and just talking about an Indo-Pacific strategic system doesn’t make it real. We need to look more closely at whether a single Indo-Pacific system really will emerge across the Indian and Western Pacific oceans.

Andrew Phillips offers some key reasons to doubt that the Indo-Pacific can or will function as a single system, but I think there’s another one that deserves attention. It concerns the choices that India and China each have to make about their future relations with one another.

Why the focus on choices? Because our concept of ‘strategic system’ is something of an abstraction. A strategic system is simply the product of the aggregate of choices that each country makes about the countries it focuses on strategically. Countries don’t become strategic rivals because they’re part of the same system: they’re part of the same system because they choose to be strategic rivals. There will be an Indo-Pacific strategic system if India and China choose to be primary rivals, and there won’t be if they don’t.

Sometimes those choices are forced on countries by geography, but not always. Japan and China can hardly avoid primary engagement with one another strategically. But geography doesn’t compel India and China to engage strategically the same way. They have a wider range of choices.

That might seem surprising, because India and China share a long and contested land border. But it’s perhaps the most militarily impermeable land border in the world. It’s impossible for either country to project land forces over the Himalayas on the scale that would be needed to have any strategic impact on the other. It stands as a barrier between them, not unlike a major ocean. As a result, India and China relate to one another strategically mostly as maritime powers—as the expression ‘Indo-Pacific’ tacitly implies.

That means they do have choices about how directly they challenge one another’s core strategic interests. Of course two such powerful states are going to be rivals to some degree and on some issues. But their rivalry won’t create a single Indo-Pacific strategic system—and help us manage China’s rise—unless it engages their core strategic interests.

My hunch is that they won’t contest one another’s core interests, become primary strategic rivals and create an Indo-Pacific strategic system unless one or both seek to contest the other’s primary position in their respective ocean approaches. In other words, India would have to seek a major strategic position in the Western Pacific, or China would have to do so in the Indian Ocean, or both.

I think it’s quite unlikely that either will seek to do that. First, because each would find it very hard to project and sustain strategically significant maritime power into waters dominated by the land-based sea-denial capabilities of the other. They’d each face the kind of A2AD challenges that America faces today in the Western Pacific.

And second, because it’s not clear why they would want to try in the first place. Neither side needs to dominate the other’s sea-space into order to achieve their key objectives. Each will recognise the other as a formidable adversary. Why would either take on such a country as a primary rival if they don’t have to?

Some will argue that China at least has no choice but to become a major meantime power in the Indian Ocean to protect its sea lines of communication there. I don’t see the vulnerability. Since the Napoleonic Wars, no major power has sought to interdict the trade of another major power except in a World War. That’s globalisation and interdependence at work. China’s sea-borne trade, like everyone else’s, is protected by the mutual dependence that we all have on trade. It doesn’t need to challenge India in the Indian Ocean to defend it.

Of course it’s possible that one or both countries might mistakenly launch a costly strategic contest that they could and should avoid. But we can’t bet on that. It’s more likely that they’ll tacitly agree to stay out of one another’s regions. In that case, and judging, as I do, that the US-led order in Asia doesn’t endure, we’re likely to see separate Indian Ocean and Western Pacific strategic systems dominated by India and China, and separated by the line running from Myanmar through Malaysia and Indonesia down to Australia.

If that happens, Australia will be in an interesting position on the boundary between the spheres of influence of two great powers. That will offer up both risks and opportunities. Our policymakers and analysts should spend their time better exploring those risks and opportunities and what we can do about them, rather than assuming that India will allow itself to be played as a card in America’s contest with China.

A complex network of interconnected supply chains keep Australia fed, fuelled, and functioning. But recent changes to Australia’s energy supply chain mean they’re increasingly vulnerable to disruption.

Australia, like most advanced economies, relies on a ‘just-in-time’ supply chain system, in which goods are delivered only when they’re needed in the production process. That makes a lot sense economically, as it increases efficiency.

But supply chains don’t operate in a vacuum; they’re intricate and interconnected systems of systems. The efficient functioning of ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing supply chains depends in turn on domestic fuel supply chains that allow trains and trucks to transport goods.

These domestic fuel supply chains themselves rely on international maritime ‘just-in-time’ fuel supply chains that bring refined fuel to Australia for further distribution around the country. Even a slight disruption to this process can have cascading consequences.

Supply chain interdependencies can become very obvious in such circumstances. The slowdown in global automotive manufacturing caused by the 2011 Japanese Tohoku earthquake and tsunami involved a series of disruptions to suppliers up and down the supply chain. Many Japanese automakers believed that their suppliers were more reliable than they actually were, and several supply chain bottlenecks were exposed by the disaster. That in turn affected automakers outside of Japan, whose supply chains were susceptible to the same bottlenecks.

While Australia’s economy is more services-based than Japan’s, we can learn much from the experiences of Japanese automakers in 2011. A key lesson is that disruptions to supply chains can be both regional and global, meaning that multiple industries across linked economies can be affected.

Another lesson comes from the fact that the Japanese automotive manufacturing industry was able to recover relatively quickly thanks to explicit planning for supply chain resilience. Earthquakes are a familiar hazard, and were duly considered in Japanese supply chain planning. While Australia faces a different set of potential disruptions, planning for them is prudent.

Fuel is a fundamental input to supply chains; if the fuel stops, everything else stops. So identifying vulnerabilities in Australia’s maritime energy supply chains is critical. Due to recent refinery closures, Australia’s increasingly dependent on Asian suppliers (notably Singapore, South Korea, and Japan) for the refined fuels that keep our supply chains running. By outsourcing most of its refining, Australia has effectively ceded the ability to regulate its domestic fuel stocks to the international petroleum industry and to maritime suppliers.

Australia isn’t compliant with the suggested minimum ‘whole-of-economy’ fuel reserves set by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which mandates that member states hold 90 days’ worth of fuel reserves. By some accounts Australia has only 71 days of industry fuel stockholdings (and no public reserves), equivalent to about 23 days’ worth of consumption. However, Australia’s non-compliance is set to be addressed over the coming decade with the announcement that it will comply with IEA regulations by 2026.

But there’s a problem with that. Part of that planned compliance depends on the purchase of oil ‘tickets’, which give Australia priority when buying crude oil from another producer in the case of a disruption. What oil tickets don’t do is provide any guarantees on how that oil will get to Australia.

If the maritime energy supply chain is disrupted, the oil Australia is a priority customer for might be stuck where it was produced while Australians are running on empty. Purchasing oil tickets may make Australia technically compliant with IEA regulations, but whether it makes Australia’s energy supply chains less vulnerable will depend on the context of the disruption.

A solution could be for the federal government to pass legislation that enacts national supply vulnerability reduction measures. This legislation could mandate a number of measures, notably the establishment of mandatory fuel reserves based on type and projected needs. The reserves could be implemented by the Department of Environment and Energy using federal funds; this model is similar to the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve, funded by the US Department of Energy.

Encouraging the re-establishment of a large domestic refining capacity through a series of tax breaks for the petroleum industry is another possible solution.

A third option is to decrease demand for petroleum by moving towards renewable energy sources. Renewable energy has its limitations so Australia’s future energy supplies will likely continue to be a mix of renewable and non-renewable.

This would help alleviate some of Australia’s dependence on overseas imports—especially refined fuels—that are extremely vulnerable to disruption. The US government has had such legislation in place for some time and the Department of Homeland Security has established strategies for the identification of disruptive triggers for loss of global supply chain continuity.

Given Australia’s reliance on imported fuel and the variable storage of reserves, considering the effectiveness of implementing strategic and legislative solutions similar to those in the US makes sense.