Agonising about Australia’s place in the scheme of things has been the principal pastime of policymakers since our notional independence.
As Michael Wesley argues persuasively in Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia’s Future, our “government and society suffer from a form of strategic long sightedness”. We reflexively identify with faraway members of the Anglosphere, such as the United States and the United Kingdom. But even more consequentially, we outsource responsibility for our foreign and security policy to one great and powerful friend or another.
This means, Wesley argues, that “our leaders seem to believe that whatever the challenge, the solution was investing ever more heavily in the alliance with the United States”.
