Disengagement Is Not a Strategy: Rethinking Australia’s Alliance Debate
As I prepare to return to Australia for the October 1 Sir Richard Williams Seminar, an event I have attended, and whose proceedings I have written up every year since 2014, I want to add a modest and, I hope, moderate voice to the debate now underway over the way ahead for the defense of the Pacific region.
That contribution comes on the heels of a different kind of preparation.
Together with the historian Kenneth Maxwell, I have just completed a multi-year research effort published as The Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese Dynamic: An Inquiry into the Evolving Global Order, which looks at how middle powers such as Australia and Brazil are navigating the pressures of China’s expanding informal empire.
That work sharpened my thinking on the argument now circulating in Canberra about disengaging from Washington, and it is in that spirit as one voice among many rather than as a final word that I offer the observations below.
There is a fashionable argument circulating in Canberra’s strategic policy circles that goes roughly like this: the United States under its current administration has become an unreliable, erratic partner, its rhetoric toward allies has been careless at best and insulting at worst; and Australia should therefore begin quietly disentangling itself from Washington, hedging toward a looser, more diversified set of partnerships while it waits for American politics to right itself.
It is an understandable impulse. It is also a strategic error, and one Australia cannot afford to make.
Conflating a President with a Country
The core mistake in this line of argument is a category error: treating a single administration’s tone and temperament as equivalent to the strategic substance of the United States itself. They are not the same thing, and confusing them leads to bad policy.
The United States remains, by a wide margin, the dominant democratic economic power on Earth. It remains the most capable military actor operating between Australia and China, not hypothetically, not on some indefinite future timeline, but today, in terms of platforms, industrial capacity, intelligence architecture, and the ability to project power across the distances that matter in the Indo-Pacific. No combination of middle powers, however well-coordinated, currently replaces that capability, and none will for a very long time. A foreign policy built on waiting out a single presidency, rather than engaging with the enduring architecture of American power, mistakes the weather for the climate.
This is not an argument that the alliance language coming out of Washington in 2026 has been helpful. It plainly has not.
But a governing style prone to that kind of friction is a different problem from the underlying question of whether the American alliance system remains the essential architecture for managing a multi-polar authoritarian challenge. It is possible, indeed necessary, to hold both of these things at once: sober assessment of a genuinely more volatile diplomatic environment, and clear-eyed recognition that the alliance itself remains indispensable.
It is also worth asking why the argument has gained the traction it has. Frustration with the current administration’s manner is a real and understandable driver, but it is not the only one, and arguably not the deepest one. The sophistication of the multi-dimensional challenge the CCP now poses is a major threat to Australia.
Successive Australian governments have been reluctant to speak plainly about the nature of the CCP challenge, officials have often been discouraged from addressing it directly, and much of the media has followed that lead, with few outlets carrying genuine depth on China.
The result is a public debate substantially detached from the threat it purports to be weighing, and Australia is already paying a price for that gap.
The Threat That Doesn’t Wait for Washington’s Mood
Any assessment of Australia’s alliance posture has to start with the actual threat, not with how comfortable Washington makes Canberra feel on any given week.
China’s approach to power projection in the region has not been built primarily on the kind of territorial conquest that dominated twentieth-century strategic thinking. It has been built on something more patient and, in some ways, more difficult to counter: control of critical-mineral processing chains, strategic port and logistics infrastructure, and economic leverage exercised through trade dependency — an informal empire assembled through chokepoints rather than through invasion.
Australia experienced a preview of this model directly during China’s 2020 trade coercion campaign, and nothing about the trajectory since then suggests the pressure will ease. If anything, the tools available to exert that pressure have grown more sophisticated.
Nor is the coercion limited to trade and infrastructure.
The CCP runs substantial, well-resourced organs dedicated to political warfare, cognitive warfare, and efforts to disintegrate allied cohesion from within, shaping elite and public opinion, exploiting fault lines inside allied societies, and working to make disengagement from Washington look like the reasonable, moderate position. Every close ally, Australia included, is being worked on in this domain right now. A debate about alliance strategy that treats the threat as chokepoints and coercive trade measures alone, without reckoning with this cognitive and political dimension, is describing only part of the battlefield.
This is a threat that operates independently of the news cycle in Washington. It does not pause because an American president says something undiplomatic about Canada, or because a trade dispute flares with a European partner, or because a scheduled exercise with South Korea gets abruptly cancelled.
China’s strategic patience is not calibrated to the volatility of American domestic politics; if anything, that volatility is precisely the opening a patient, informal-empire strategy is designed to exploit.
A middle power that responds to allied friction by stepping back from the relationship that provides its most credible counterweight is not punishing Washington. It is creating exactly the kind of vacuum that Beijing’s approach is built to fill.
The uncomfortable question that critics of the alliance rarely answer directly is this: absent the United States, what does Australia’s independent deterrent posture against a great power with a multi-decade head start on regional economic and military presence actually look like? “Standing on our own two feet” is a compelling phrase.
It is not, by itself, a capability, a budget, or a timeline. Sovereignty is not maximized by fewer partnerships; it is maximized by the capacity to act, and for a country of Australia’s size and geography, that capacity has never been generated in isolation.
The Difference Between Diversifying and Disengaging
None of this means the current alliance architecture is beyond criticism, or that Australia should treat every element of its current commitments, including the specific structure and terms of major capability programs, as immune from hard scrutiny. It should not. Australia has every right, and indeed an obligation, to negotiate harder, to demand better terms, to insist on genuine technology transfer and sovereign industrial capability rather than accepting cosmetic definitions of what counts as “Australian,” and to build contingency planning that does not assume permanent American goodwill.
Prudent hedging, deepening industrial and intelligence cooperation with Japan, South Korea, and European partners, and investing in genuinely sovereign capability where it is achievable, diversifying trade exposure, is not disloyalty to the alliance. It is exactly what a mature, serious partner does, and it makes the alliance itself more resilient rather than less.
What is a mistake is conflating that kind of prudent diversification with a strategic posture of disengagement premised on waiting for American politics to change. Those are different projects entirely, and the distinction matters enormously for how Australian policymakers should be spending their political capital right now.
Shaping the Outcome, Not Waiting for It
This is where the current moment actually matters, and where passive framings, wait it out, hedge quietly, hope for the best after the midterms — get the strategic opportunity backwards.
American domestic politics is not a fixed condition to be endured. It is a contested, live process, and the outcome of the coming midterm elections will materially affect the balance of power within Washington and, with it, the tone and predictability of American foreign policy for the remainder of this term. An administration weakened in the legislature does not retain the same freedom of action it has enjoyed to date.
That is not a prediction of a particular electoral outcome; it is a structural observation about how American governance works, and it means the assumption that current conditions are simply the new normal for the next several years is itself unreliable.
A serious middle power does not treat that uncertainty as a reason to retreat to the sidelines. It treats it as a reason to engage more deliberately — through Congress, through the services and combatant commands whose institutional commitments to the alliance run far deeper and are far more durable than any single administration’s rhetoric, through industrial partnerships that create constituencies for the relationship on the American side, and through allied coordination that makes clear to Washington, across administrations, what the costs of unreliability actually are.
Influence is not exercised by observers. It is exercised by participants who show up consistently, make their interests explicit, and build the institutional relationships that outlast any one election cycle.
Australia has done this before, and done it well. In earlier decades, Australian officials worked closely with allied counterparts to develop joint strategies and operational options, then carried that thinking directly into serious discussions with American colleagues, many of them personal friendships built over years, about the choices facing not only the United States but Australia and the other close allies together. Innovative thinking put on the table in that spirit was, more often than not, warmly received in Washington. That is the model of engagement the current moment calls for. Whether it is actually happening now, in the areas that matter most, many of which sit well beyond the Defence portfolio, is far less clear, and there is real reason to doubt it.
Sitting in a corner nursing justified frustration at unhelpful rhetoric is not a strategy. It cedes the field, at precisely the moment when engagement could matter most, to whichever voices in Washington are shaping the post-midterm landscape, and it does so while the actual threat to Australian sovereignty continues its patient, chokepoint-by-chokepoint advance, entirely unmoved by how loudly anyone in Canberra expresses their disappointment in a tweet.
The Anchor, Not the Alternative
Australia does not face a binary choice between uncritical alliance loyalty and strategic disengagement.
It faces the harder task of doing two things simultaneously: pushing back, forcefully and specifically, against alliance rhetoric and program terms that do not serve Australian interests, while recognizing that the underlying strategic logic for deep, active engagement with the United States has not changed and will not be changed by one administration’s conduct.
The United States remains the indispensable anchor in the contest with a multi-polar authoritarian order, however imperfectly that anchor is currently being managed.
The task in front of Australian strategic policy is not to wait for that to become more comfortable.
It is to shape it.
Note: I want to thank Ross Babbage for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.