Asian Angle | What Australia can learn from Southeast Asia in search for ‘strategic equilibrium’ amid US-China tensions

Australia is promoting the need for maintaining a strategic balance in a region where states had already acknowledged China’s leadership role despite backing continued US presence

Canberra can still reap diplomatic dividends from its policy by learning about regional perceptions and ensuring its outreach is in favour of the national interest

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Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong addresses the National Press Club in Canberra on April 17. Photo: AAP/dpa

Published: 4:00pm, 28 Apr 2023Updated: 6:17pm, 28 Apr 2023

In her travels over the past 10 months, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has referred repeatedly to Australia’s search for “a strategic equilibrium”. In Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in mid-2022, Wong described Canberra’s desire for a regional order as “framed by a strategic equilibrium where countries are not forced to choose but can make their own sovereign choices” when explaining Australia’s Quad and Aukus partnerships.

Wong’s National Press Club speech on April 17 more explicitly connected this search for equilibrium to the waning of US hegemony. The United States remains the indispensable power in the Asia-Pacific region – but “the nature of that indispensability has changed”. The Asia-Pacific is now a multipolar region and “we cannot just leave it to the US”, Wong warned. All countries of the region must use diplomatic, economic and other means “to maintain the region’s balance”.

Southeast Asian observers might be forgiven for thinking that Australia has finally caught up to the conundrum that the region has been struggling with for over three decades.

Since the Cold War ended, this subregion of disparate small states and distinctly small powers has been constantly exercising the type of agency Wong is now promoting. Southeast Asian strategists’ post-Cold War choice sets have been based on three strategic truths: US power and attention is not guaranteed; China is resurgent as an indigenous Asian power; and that the centre of global economic power is shifting East and is no longer concentrated in Western developed countries.

While Australian views on each of these factors have shifted over recent years, there remains grave resistance to the idea of these as inevitable structural conditions. But the current search for agency and strategic equilibrium are signs of the gap narrowing.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Asian Angle | What Australia can learn from Southeast Asia in search for ‘strategic equilibrium’ amid US-China tensions

Asian Angle | What Australia can learn from Southeast Asia in search for ‘strategic equilibrium’ amid US-China tensions