THERE is a specific kind of quiet that settles over a capital city when its ruling elite begins to realise that the ground beneath their feet is moving. In Canberra and Melbourne, among the scholars and officials who manage the delicate machinery of the Australian state’s foreign policy, that quiet is palpable. There is the hushed intensity of a room where the old maps no longer match the terrain.

I am currently here meeting those tasked with studying and navigating these waters, and the sense one gets is unmistakable: Asia is undergoing a crucial transition. For decades, the regional order was built on two sturdy pillars: American security protection and American economic dynamism. Today, both pillars are trembling. The region is waking up to a world where it can no longer outsource its security to Washington or rely solely on the American consumer to drive its growth. Instead, it is being forced to find its own security architecture and cultivate its own sources of economic dynamism.

The realisation is not unique to this part of the world. Last year, a similar trip to Europe yielded almost identical observations. In Brussels, the conversation was dominated by the ‘Great Retreat’ — the fear that the Atlantic alliance is fraying and that Europe must finally learn to speak the language of power on its own. Now, standing on the other side of the globe, the echoes are hauntingly familiar. Whether in the North Atlantic or the Indo-Pacific, the era of the ‘unconditional umbrella’ is drawing to a close.

The catalyst for this upheaval, of course, is a burgeoning China. Beijing’s shadow now looms over every conversation here, presenting Asia with a stark and........

© Dawn