The essential alliance.(Defence)

SINCE THE MIDDLE of the twentieth century, the Australian-American Alliance, based upon shared cultural values, national interest and a tradition of friendship, has been part of the framework of Australian politics. Although the emphasis and weight given by Australian governments to the Alliance has differed, both major political parties, Coalition and Labor, have accepted the long-term security benefits of a special relationship with America. In the words of Australian historian Peter Edwards, the Alliance is a political institution in its own right; it may be questioned from time to time by Australians but its existence is seldom challenged. There is no mood in Australia for the kind of insular nationalism that, in the mid-1980s, led New Zealand to break the ANZUS Pact over the issue of the US Navy's nuclear-armed warships visiting its ports.

Because of Australia's bipartisan political consensus over the value of the Alliance, the real questions that will shape and define the future of the bilateral relationship with the United States in the early twenty-first century relate to custodianship of the national interest and to alliance-management. From the Australian perspective, the key issue regarding the Alliance is the level of political skill demonstrated by the government of the day in Canberra in managing the relationship so that its benefits are maximised and its costs are minimised.

DEFENDER-REGIONALISTS AND REFORMER-GLOBALISTS

EVER SINCE the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 led to Australian participation in the Bush administration's "war on terror" and to military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, questions of alliance management have assumed a sharper focus in Australian politics. Questions have arisen over the balance to be struck on such issues as alliance commitment versus national independence; on global allegiance versus regional commitment; and on dependence versus self-reliance. These questions have been magnified and complicated by the fact that the Australian defence and security debate is currently divided into two opposing schools of strategic philosophy: the defender-regionalists and the reformer-globalists.

The defender-regionalists represent a strand of strategic thought that first emerged in the mid-1970s and 1980s in the wake of the controversy over the Vietnam War. It is a school of thought that is closely associated with such figures as Paul Dibb and other revisionist thinkers who formulated the geo-strategic doctrine of Defence of Australia. Defender-regionalists believe that Australian defence policy should be governed by the principle of preparing for the most serious contingency, namely an attack on Australian territory through the "sea-air gap" of the northern island archipelagos. According to this logic, Australia's defence effort should be concerned mainly with the creation of a powerful air and naval arsenal designed to secure the continental approaches.

The defender-regionalists tend to be "little Australians" or continentalists, who view the defence instrument as being defined by fixed geographical, rather than fluid policy, imperatives. Moreover, advocates of the defender school emphasise that Australia's security relationship with the United States is based on the 1980s notion of "self-reliance in an alliance framework". When it comes to considerations of twenty-first-century security, many defender-regionalists tend to believe that 9/11 and the new global security agenda of transnational threats may be exaggerated. In essence, they view non-state threats as far less important than the older regional security agenda of inter-state tensions in the Asia-Pacific revolving around such flashpoints as Kashmir, the Taiwan straits and North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

The reformer-globalists are a school of thought largely associated with former Defence Minister, Senator Robert Hill. It is a strand of strategic thought that views the 1980s policy of Defence of Australia as a form of geographical determinism that is unrealistic because it seeks to disconnect defence planning from foreign policy interests. Although it is sometimes styled an "Army school of strategic thought", reformer-globalists tend to be maritimists as opposed to continentalists in their strategic outlook. They believe that Australia's geopolitical identity is that of a trade-dependent maritime state in the Anglo-American liberal tradition. Accordingly, Australia's destiny lies in its history as a liberal democracy and in the web of cultural and trading links that give Australia its national identity and its international purpose.