As Australia deepens its alignment with Washington through AUKUS and expanded military integration, it risks compromising the regional trust and autonomy that underpin its long-term prosperity and security.

In recent years, Australia has increasingly aligned its foreign and defence policies with American strategic priorities, even when these priorities sit uneasily with its own regional interests. The AUKUS agreement, for example, commits Australia to vast military expenditure and deep technological dependence, while offering little clarity about how such commitments enhance long-term regional stability. Rather than acting as a bridge between East and West, Australia risks becoming a forward operating base for the American Empire.

Whatever its historical loyalties, Australia’s lived reality is Indo-Pacific. Its trade routes run north through Southeast Asia and across to Northeast Asia. Its prosperity is woven into the economies of China, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and the ASEAN states. It seems to me that, for Australia, great-powers rivalry is not an abstract debate, but a reality shaped by geography.

And yet, as regional interdependence has deepened, Australia has chosen to bind itself ever more tightly to the strategic logic of the United States (or one might say the new empire). The tension is structural. Economic gravity pulls north; strategic reflex pulls east. In other words, we earn our living in Asia, yet we still seek our security reassurance from America.

The United States is a vital security ally and an important investor. But it does not absorb the bulk of Australian commodity exports, nor does it define Australia’s commercial lifeblood. Security dependence tilts toward Washington. Economic survival tilts toward Asia. This asymmetry is the core strategic fact of Australian life.

Historically, Australia realised its strategic location and maritime interests and aspired to act as a western liberal democracy embedded in Asia, capable of navigating between political cultures and moderating extremes. That role required diplomatic agility and regional trust. Recent choices suggest a different trajectory. The trilateral (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) security partnership agreement (AUKUS) commits Australia to decades of military expenditure and deep technological integration. Nuclear-powered submarines and expanded force posture bind Australia to American strategic planning far into the future. These commitments are justified in the language of deterrence, yet they also signal to the region that Australia may be shifting from partner to an outpost of the New Empire.

Across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, governments have expressed caution rather than enthusiasm. Many states in the region seek neither confrontation nor bloc politics. Their priorities are economic development, climate resilience and strategic autonomy. They seem to have fared well. They welcome balance, not escalation. If Australia comes to be seen primarily as an extension of USA containment strategy, it risks eroding the trust upon which its prosperity depends.

The costs of over-alignment are not abstract. Heightened rivalry increases the likelihood of trade disruption, coercion and supply chain fragmentation. In the event of major conflict – over Taiwan, for example – Australia’s export-dependent economy would suffer immediate and severe consequences. Its exposure to Asian markets is direct and structural.

Long-term technological and operational integration also narrows independent decision-making space. When military systems and force posture are embedded within an ally’s strategic design, disentanglement becomes politically and practically difficult. Alliance, in excess, becomes exposure.

The debate is too often framed as loyalty versus betrayal: stand firmly with the United States or drift into dangerous neutrality. This framing impoverishes democratic thought. Australia does not face a choice between abandoning ANZUS (The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty) and submitting to strategic dependency. It faces a subtler challenge: how to maintain alliance while preserving autonomy; how to deter without accelerating confrontation; how to secure the nation without narrowing its future.

Geography suggests a different emphasis. Australia is a pacific nation with profound obligations to climate-vulnerable island states. It is an Indian Ocean country linked not only to South Asia, but also to East Africa. Australia’s engagement with East Africa is “multifaceted, focusing on maritime security, critical minerals, and digital resilience.” It is an Asian economic partner integrated into regional supply chains. It is a multicultural society whose citizens trace heritage across the Indo-Pacific. Its natural environment is one of interdependence, not imperial rivalry.

To move beyond empire does not require hostility toward the United States of America. It requires clarity about proportion. Alliances should serve national and regional stability rather than define national identity. Defence policy should complement diplomacy rather than eclipse it. Military capability should support deterrence without locking the country into pre-commitments that remove political choice.

Australia’s comparative advantage lies in its capacity to act as a stabilising middle power: investing in regional institutions, championing climate cooperation, strengthening development partnerships, and upholding international law. These are not gestures of weakness but instruments of durable security.

Empires decline; history offers no exceptions. The question for countries such as Australia is how much of that turbulence they choose to inherit. If Australia binds itself uncritically to an increasingly confrontational strategic posture, it risks entanglement in conflicts not of its making and economic shocks not of its choosing. If it balances alliance with independence – deepening Indo-Pacific partnerships, diversifying trade, reinforcing regional diplomacy – it may help shape a stable multipolar order in which no single power dominates, and none is humiliated.

Security achieved at the expense of one’s neighbours is fragile. Security achieved with one’s neighbours endures. The choice before Australia is not between loyalty and abandonment, but between strategic submission and regional realism. Its future will not be decided in distant capitals, but by how honestly it reads its own geography and whether it has the confidence to inhabit it.