Australia’s security compromised

CANBERRA is sounding the alarm loud and clear at the likely direction of US policy in our region under President Donald Trump. Twice in two months, Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop has called on the US administration to stay engaged in the neighbourhood.

“If stability and prosperity are to continue, the US must play an even greater role as the indispensable strategic power in the Indo-Pacific,” Ms Bishop warned in a speech in Singapore on Monday night. Because without the US, it will be China, is her unstated implication.

That’s an unpalatable idea for a great many reasons. Chief among them is that China plays by a set of rules that sets it apart from most of the countries it seeks to engage with politically and economically. Its rules defy the system that works for everyone else.

In her insistence that Mr Trump’s attendance at the East Asia Summit in the Philippines later this year is “critical”, and her advocacy for an important role for the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean), Ms Bishop conveys Australia’s nervousness. But what if the US, not China, now poses the bigger threat to that rules-based order?

Mr Trump has a demonstrated aversion to playing by the rules. Whether he will share the Obama administration’s belief that a strong Asean is in the US interests, or have much patience for its bureaucratic protocols and ponderous deliberations, is unclear.

The East Asia Summit and the open and inclusive regional trade and diplomatic architecture it expresses is crucial for Australia. It gives us, a middle power and an isolated nation utterly dependent on freedom of navigation of the seas for prosperity and defence, a voice in regional security issues.

And those issues are more troubling now than perhaps at any time in the post-World War II era.