Plan B: time for some tough realism

Abstract

In October 2016, before the US presidential election, I suggested that Australia was entering a foreign-policy crisis period—given the relative decline of American power in the Asian region, the likely withdrawal of the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency. We’ve had these crises before, especially in the late 1940s, before the US alliance replaced the British Empire as our protective umbrella. After seven decades of that alliance, it was clear that we needed to work creatively on a Plan B, and I thought that some Turnbull government initiatives on Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines were signs of new thinking.