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The cover of the Turnbull government’s 2017 foreign policy white paper shows Australia large and at the centre of our universe—but still dwarfed by the imposing vastness of Asia stretching right over it. Europe, at the top, looks a very long way away.

And the subtitle—‘Opportunity, security, strength’—sums up succinctly the document’s key message that being poised on the edge of such a dynamic region brings economic opportunities, but also a sense of future uncertainty that the nation needs to prepare for. The ‘security’ and ‘strength’ parts of the equation could easily be replaced with the unspoken ‘threat’ and ‘need to be stronger’.

The paper acknowledges that the decade to come will bring unprecedented change, and it notes that while the United States has been the dominant power in the region through Australia’s post–World War II history, ‘today China is challenging America’s position’.

It says that navigating the decade ahead will be hard because, as China’s power grows, the region is changing in ways without precedent in Australia’s modern history.

‘Our alliance with the US is central to Australia’s approach to the Indo-Pacific’, the paper says. It warns that ‘without strong US political, economic and security engagement, power is likely to shift more quickly in the region and it will be more difficult for Australia to achieve the levels of security and stability we seek. The government will broaden and deepen our alliance cooperation, including through the US force posture initiatives.’ The paper doesn’t go into detail but it is those US force posture initiatives that are bringing up to 2,500 US marines to northern Australia for several months of training each year, as well as increased visits by long-range US bombers.

Australia and its regional and global ‘partners’ face diverse threats, ranging from North Korea’s long-range missile and nuclear programs to Islamist terrorism, the paper says.

The fragility of states, demographic shifts and environmental challenges like climate change will continue to shape our world and demand policy responses. ‘Powerful drivers of change are converging in a way that is reshaping the international order and Australia’s interests.’

While acknowledging the economic and other benefits a stronger Asia could bring to Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull noted the presence of the head of the ADF, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, at the paper’s launch:

He understands, as does the Defence Minister, Marise Payne, and the Defence Industry Minister, Christopher Pyne, as do all our defence leaders; they all understand that we live in times, yes, of uncertainty and indeed times that are more dangerous than we’ve seen for a very long time. That is why we are investing in the largest revitalisation of our armed forces, in the air, on the land and on the sea, in peacetime history. Security and prosperity, they go hand in hand.

The prime minister continued, ‘Uncertainty is a fact. Rapid change is a fact. They’re realities. The challenge for us is not how to resist them, let alone deny them, but how to prosper with them, how to hedge against the risks and seize the opportunities the times offer us.’

Turnbull said the white paper was clear-eyed and hard-headed. ‘It sees our world, and our region, as it is, not how we wish they could be, or fondly imagine they once were. Prosperity and security, I repeat, go hand in hand and you can’t have the former without the latter. If the Minister for Finance were here, he would remind us you can’t afford the latter without the former.’

The simplicity of the Cold War was long gone, Turnbull said. ‘The world is a much more complex environment. It’s a world in which over the last 30 years we have seen the greatest rise out of poverty in all of human history, but in which the number of civil wars tripled between 2007 and ’14. Conflicts and lawless spaces have generated 65 million displaced people, more than at any time since the Second World War.’

The prime minister said there was no more important bilateral relationship in the world than that of China and the US. ‘I have seen firsthand that Presidents Trump and Xi respect and understand each other, both on the issues on which they agree and those on which they differ.’

The white paper says Australia will have to be agile to catch the benefits flowing from dynamic Asian economies, but that along with those benefits, the risks are building too, and the stability of the Indo-Pacific region can’t be assumed. Any significant rise in protectionism globally could create strategic friction, damage economic growth and undermine the rules that support flows of trade and investment.

The rules and institutions that have helped maintain peace and security and guide global cooperation are under strain, the document says. It notes that in some cases major powers are ignoring or undermining international law. It doesn’t mention China in that context, but it appears to be a clear reference to Beijing’s building and fortifying of islands in the South China Sea and its rejection of an international arbitration court’s ruling that such activity was illegal. Deep inside the report, it observes that the South China Sea is a major fault line in the regional order and says Australia is particularly concerned about the unprecedented pace and scale of its island-building activities.

‘In this dynamic environment, Australia must seek opportunity while protecting our interests in the face of complexity and uncertainty’, the white paper says.

‘We will require active, determined and innovative foreign policy built on strong domestic foundations—a flexible economy, strong defence and national security capabilities and resilient democratic institutions within a cohesive society.’ An outward-looking Australia fully engaged with the world is essential to our future security and prosperity, the paper says.

‘For Australia, the stakes could not be higher.’

Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith have written a significant ASPI paper that may well mark a turning point in Australia’s efforts to adapt to the new strategic circumstances we confront in Asia. That policymakers of their status and experience now acknowledge that China’s rise requires big changes in Australia’s defence policy suggests that we are indeed, and at last, making progress towards a serious debate about our strategic future.

Dibb and Brabin-Smith analyse our situation using the concepts of ‘warning time’ and ‘expansion base’ which were most fully elaborated in the 1987 Defence White Paper. They argue that only recent events—even since the 2016 White Paper—have given grounds for deciding that we’re now in warning time as it was then conceived. But in fact the indicators and warnings go back much further than that. They were clear at the time of the 2009 White Paper, as that deeply flawed but perceptive document half-acknowledged, and plain enough even a decade before that.

But more importantly, I’m not sure that the 1987 conceptual framework is very relevant today. Warning time ceased to play a major role in defence policy in the 1990s, and was explicitly repudiated in the 2000 White Paper (paragraphs 6.36–6.38). We would have to venture deep into the airless crypts of defence-planning theology to explain in full detail why that happened, but the key reason was that by 2000 we had stepped quietly away from the ‘defence of Australia’ focus within which the warning time/expansion base had evolved.

As we have given higher priority to operations beyond the defence of Australia, we have slid back to depending on America for the defence of Australia itself, especially as it became less unthinkable that we might face a threat from a major Asian power more formidable than Indonesia. The concept of self-reliance faded away, until it almost disappeared completely from the 2016 White Paper. The more our defence policy has focused on China, the further we have stepped away from self-reliance.

So the defence policy we have today is much further from the policy of 1987 than Dibb and Brabin-Smith suggest. It is indeed much closer to the ‘forward defence’ policy of the pre-Vietnam era.

Plainly the credibility of this policy depends on our confidence that America will always be there for us. Dibb and Brabin-Smith barely touch on that question, but it is absolutely central to our current defence-policy predicament.

Despite China’s increasing power and ambition, our current policy would be quite workable if we could be sure that America was going to remain in Asia as the region’s leading strategic power and Australia’s protector. That’s because it would both reduce the chances of a Chinese attack on Australia and reduce the demands on the ADF in dealing with such an attack if it nonetheless occurred.

That’s why our political leaders are so eager to assure us that this is the case. But the evidence is now inescapably clear that they’re wrong. America’s position in Asia is collapsing fast, and not just because of Donald Trump.

The big question is therefore whether, and if so how, Australia can prepare to defend itself and its vital strategic interests from China without America’s support. Our problem isn’t just that we have run into warning time, but that we have run out of allies.

So what should we do? If, as Dibb and Brabin-Smith imply, we should reinstate self-reliance and aim to build forces that can defend us against China independently, just as we aimed to do against Indonesia in the old days, then we have a very big task ahead. They acknowledge that much needs to be done, but they make the task look less intimidating by suggesting that we can still rely on the concept of warning time to defer major investments.

I’m not sure that’s true. Warning time made perfect sense in relation to Indonesia in the strategic circumstances of the 1980s, but in relation to China today that is less clear. There’s no reason to assume that we would get anything like the warning they assume of an emerging threat.

If we decide that Australia should be able independently to resist a direct attack from a major Asian power like China, then we need to start building the forces to do that right now, not wait for some further warning sign. That’s especially true because it’s now abundantly clear that China’s capability development cycle is a lot shorter than ours.

But before we can do that we need a much clearer idea of what forces we need for this very demanding task. We must think much more seriously about the operations that could most cost-effectively achieve this strategic objective, and about the capabilities that could most cost-effectively undertake them.

Dibb and Brabin-Smith nod in that direction when they talk of developing an anti-access and area denial posture, but that’s where a lot more real work is needed, especially because so much of the investments we’re now committing to—for example, in massive warship programs—make no sense in that kind of posture. The ADF that could defend Australia independently from China would be very different from the ADF today, and the country and economy that could sustain such a force on protracted operations would be very different too —as Dibb and Brabin-Smith acknowledge in relation to things like fuel supplies.

So we still have a long way to go to understand what’s happening to us and what we can do about it. But it makes a big difference that Dibb and Brabin-Smith have now joined the discussion in such a forthright way.

In the first week of his marathon Asia tour, Donald Trump has made state visits to Japan, South Korea and China. Knowing that he can be easily swayed by over-the-top hospitality, China has even billed it as a ‘state visit-plus’. Given the importance of these bilaterals, the white-hot tensions on the Korean peninsula and the crucial question of the tone and tenor of US–China relations, it can be easily overlooked that the initial reason for the president’s Asia trip was to take part in the regional summit season and, in particular, to attend the annual APEC leaders’ meeting.

Formally referred to as the Economic Leaders’ Summit (APEC has member economies not states to overcome the difficulties of Taipei and Hong Kong joining as separate entities in the early 1990s), the annual gathering has become a fixture of the diplomatic calendar. Indeed, even though it hasn’t really delivered much in the way of economic collaboration, its members still see attending an APEC summit as a useful expenditure of political leaders’ time. It regularly attracts a high level of participation that the other regional bodies can’t match. Crucially, it’s the only multilateral mechanism which the Chinese president attends.

What can we expect from the jamboree that was able to lure The Donald across the Pacific to the attractive coastal city of Da Nang?

For nine months or so, US policy on Asia seemed to be at best on autopilot and at worst suffering from neglect. Prior to the tour, the White House finally set out a vision for the region in which the US seeks to protect and promote a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’. While not officially a continuation of Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, maintaining the prevailing regional strategic and economic order in the face of China’s rise is plainly Washington’s goal. The challenge at APEC is how to square the lofty rhetoric of an economically open region with Trump’s mercantilism.

Don’t expect any meaningful policy movement on that at APEC. Signalling is all that’s likely to be achieved. But even there, Trump’s limited understanding of the economics of international trade means that, despite Washington’s intent to use APEC to signal the constancy of its regional commitment, there are good prospects that the opposite will occur.

At the only other large diplomatic gathering, the G20 in Hamburg, Trump showed his inexperience and poor feel for multilateral meetings. The US appeared both literally and metaphorically isolated from the rest of the group, leading some to describe it as G19 + 1. APEC supporters fear a repeat performance from the US leader, who clearly doesn’t like having to be one among many leaders. That’s probably unlikely. Trump will be more experienced and will have come almost immediately from bilateral meetings with a number of other leaders. But it is a distinct risk that would damage both APEC and US leadership in the region.

Trump won’t be the only leader making his APEC debut; Korea’s president Moon Jae-in, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen and Hong Kong’s Carrie Lamb are all first-timers. Trump is also scheduled to have a range of bilateral meetings ‘on the sidelines’, including with Rodrigo Duterte and Malcolm Turnbull. This kind of diplomatic speed dating is one of APEC’s enduring points of appeal.

Yet Trump travels as a president under siege. Beset by historically low approval ratings and a special prosecutor who has just indicted his former campaign chairman, the contrast to Xi Jinping’s domestic political fortunes couldn’t be more stark. The general secretary of the Communist Party of China has buttressed his position atop Chinese politics and has laid out an ambitious vision for China’s global role at the 19th national party congress.

Xi Jinping will give a keynote address at the meeting and is expected to use it to reiterate China’s commitment to economic openness and a broader leadership position in the regional economy. While Xi won’t couch it in explicitly competitive terms, he’ll use APEC as another platform from which to project China’s alternative regional order. Asia’s multilateral mechanisms will be a forum for great-power competition. Even if it isn’t overt or heated, the contest will be in plain sight.

APEC was Trump’s main excuse for going to the region, yet the impression is that it, and the other multilaterals, aren’t a high priority for him. The forum may have been established to promote trade liberalisation, but its value is now as a diplomatic platform. On stage will be competing visions for Asia’s future. Trump’s belligerent rhetoric, poor strategy and prickly demeanour will stand in contrast to Xi’s carefully modulated tone, avuncular attitude and highly strategic outlook. APEC won’t be the place where Asia’s future will be definitively determined, but it will show us how the competition is going.

A year after his election, US President Donald Trump is making his first official visit to Asia. The 12-day tour of five countries—Trump’s longest foreign trip so far—will, according to official briefings, focus on easing doubts about the reliability of the United States and its leader. Given the challenges and possibilities for the US in Asia, that is an unambitious goal.

Trump is starting his trip by reinforcing America’s alliances with Japan and South Korea—alliances that he previously discounted and belittled, particularly during his campaign. The aim is to buttress his demand, which he will reiterate when he reaches Beijing, that China follow through on its pledges in the United Nations Security Council to tighten sanctions on North Korea.

Next, Trump will head to Vietnam and the Philippines. Close relations with both are necessary to underpin ongoing US efforts to challenge China’s growing influence in Southeast Asia. President Barack Obama’s administration had mixed results in competing for influence with China. Trump administration officials have lately hinted that the US may, at some point, devise a new strategy for the entire Indo-Pacific region.

Beyond foreign policy, Trump’s Asian tour should also advance some economic objectives. A large group of US corporate leaders will accompany Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to China, where they will seek to strike deals, promote open markets, and address abuses in bilateral trade. Chinese officials, for their part, have indicated that they will announce new agreements and consider opening parts of the Chinese market that are now closed to outsiders.

So far, so good. But so far is not far enough.

Talks with officials around the region reveal that America’s friends and allies have not received the sort of advance briefings that are normally used to prepare the ground for important new policies and undertakings. More fundamentally, briefings and statements in the run-up to the trip have shown no regard for major political and strategic trends that are now converging—trends that must inform any comprehensive US policy towards Asia.

The first such trend is the decline of the US-led unipolar world order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War, and the reemergence of great-power rivalries. China, Russia, Europe and the Middle East are all headed in new directions, and America no longer has the capacity it once did to influence them. The Trump administration needs to abandon its complacency and pursue competitive coalition-building.

Doing so will require Trump’s confident assertion of the benefits of the US-led liberal international order, which China and Russia are now challenging. It will also demand that Trump display leadership in forging international cooperation, particularly on trade.

Just as Trump has walked back his denigration of America’s European and Asian allies, he should stifle his inclination for protectionism and unilateral action. Politically, Trump stands to gain much more by leading the way toward a new multilateral free-trade agreement than he would by pursuing isolationism and allowing China to assume trade leadership in Asia.

And Trump has a golden opportunity to do so. Though he pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership early in his term, the remaining 11 partners are moving to sustain most of the agreement. Why not get back in front of the parade and demonstrate a capacity for leadership in changing times?

Meanwhile, the Trump administration needs to be more ambitious in pressing China for greater reciprocity in market access and competition. Earlier this year, Trump praised China for making promises on this front, even though it had already made—and broken—the same promises to the Obama administration.

The US wants access to financial-services markets in China, but appears willing to settle, at least for now, for openings in credit research services and, possibly, credit-card marketing. Meanwhile, China leads the world in disruptive financial technologies (fintech), with payments by mobile phone replacing credit cards.

The second major trend that should be informing the Trump administration’s Asia policy is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power. By not designating a successor to Xi, the Communist Party of China’s recent 19th National Congress has opened the way for him to serve a third term.

With so much political capital, Xi now has the scope to adjust his stance on domestically sensitive issues, according to China’s longer-term interests and his own. China’s recent agreement to normalise relations with South Korea, after more than a year of acrimony, may reflect the effect of Xi’s liberation from succession politics.

Prior to the 19th National Congress, China insisted on punishing South Korea for allowing the US to deploy its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antimissile system on its territory. But this approach brought China no benefits; on the contrary, it damaged China’s reputation in South Korea. Now, China is backing off.

Trump should seize this moment to secure greater cooperation from China in tackling, along with South Korea, the North Korean threat. China is not in a position to shut down North Korea’s nuclear-weapon and ballistic-missile programs. But it can cooperate with the US to narrow the North’s choices and reduce the potential for a conflagration on the Korean peninsula, such as through covert cooperation and official contingency planning for the future of North Korea. When Trump meets Xi in Beijing, he should offer a path towards just such a strategic compromise.

As it stands, it seems that Trump is hoping to impress critics with headlines about what are actually small-bore accomplishments. But there are historic opportunities ahead. Trump’s Asia trip is the ideal moment to begin to seize them.

Crackdowns, like protests, gain momentum fast. But the things that set them in motion often have a slow, heavy build-up. In Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen’s new move to hang onto power gained force quickly, shocking people after Kem Sokha, the head of the opposition, was arrested on treason charges. And then, at the beginning of this month, the famed Cambodia Daily newspaper shuttered its doors.

Its last headline was: ‘Descent into outright dictatorship’.

The latest news is that another opponent of Hun Sen, Mu Sochua, quickly left Cambodia after threats of arrest. Sochua, a deputy president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), says that half the party’s parliamentarians have fled the country. She’s now calling for sanctions against her country, including visa restrictions on top officials (but not constraints on the exports of garments to markets in the US and EU, on which the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian workers depend).

There have also been many arrests, ongoing worries by Hun Sen over ‘colour revolutions’, and some truly weird stuff, like accusations levelled at one former Cambodia-based reporter that he is a CIA spy responsible for the fall of Korean president Park Joon-hye.

None of this is exactly new for Cambodia, not least the spook accusations (though Park’s destruction was a creative touch by the pro-government Fresh News Asia). But it suddenly seems like the one-party democracy is taking a further authoritarian turn, brought on by fears about next year’s election.

The 2013 vote delivered the first serious slap to the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) in a long time, with the CNRP losing by just 300,000 votes. The by-election in June this year failed to fully deliver on those gains—the CNRP won 44% of the vote rather than the expected 60%, and the CPP won 51%—but it hasn’t assuaged an apparently panicked Hun Sun.

The shooting of critic and political analyst Kem Ley last year and the dozens of arrests of critics were initial signs that things were getting worse. Other activists were tied up in legal or tax cases.

Kem Sokha was arrested in September and faces decades in jail on treason charges for apparently conspiring with Americans to overthrow the government. However, one observer, historian and writer Alphonsus Pettit, has noted that:

[Sokha’s] speech was not dissimilar to the types of things opposition politicians would say anywhere else in the democratic world. The fact that it was said before the elections in 2013, and had gone unnoticed since then, made Hun Sen’s reaction all the more unfathomable.

But revolution in general, and colour revolutions in particular, have been much on Hun Sen’s mind. He has Chinese money for a proposed think tank to study them. Analysts concur that the latest crackdown rather misses the point: if the aim is to keep the party in power, more repression probably won’t do that. The days are gone when an illiterate populace was happy to see the cyclops strongman in a village handing out rice; they’re younger and understand social media now.

Like in neighbouring Vietnam, social media has significantly changed the playing field in China and Laos. The Cambodian government’s and citizenry’s grasp of the power of social media is neither as sophisticated as Vietnam’s and China’s, nor as basic as Laos’. However, all three communist neighbours are on hand to give tips and, with China’s growing influence (remember ASEAN in 2012?), repression is more likely to be welcomed than condemned.

China certainly doesn’t care about a crackdown unless it threatens to create protests that could target Chinese business or citizens. In fact, it has suggested support for Hun Sen, who’s more used to being attacked by opponents like former CNRP leader Sam Rainsy as Hanoi’s lackey than as Beijing’s latest strongman stooge.

Geng Shuang, a foreign ministry spokesperson, said that China ‘supports the Cambodian government’s efforts to protect national security and stability’.

Should the West ‘do something’? President Trump likely doesn’t care much, and international intervention has varied effect. The West has been ‘doing things’ in Cambodia for decades, and yet the mess remains. International official protests over crackdowns haven’t worked in Vietnam, China or the Philippines.

Sochua’s suggested targeted sanctions offer a better solution than rhetoric or an embargo on a very poor nation. Such a move has been backed by US senators John McCain and Dick Durbin, who recently introduced a Senate resolution that asked the Treasury and State Departments to place senior Cambodian officials on the ‘Specially Designated Nationals’ list, which would prevent them from entering the US.

Will it work? No—at least not in the sense of fixing the situation in one fell swoop. Will it help? Maybe. But then again, Sokha is charged with conspiring with the US to overthrow the Cambodian government, so who is listening to Washington?