In the latest in our Foreign Policy Rethink series, Mark Beeson takes a look at Australia’s long-standing alignment with the United States and argues it is increasingly out of step with shifting global realities and regional dynamics.

Anxiety about our literal and metaphorical place in the world is seemingly baked into the minds of Australian policymakers. Ever since this country became notionally independent, fretting about ‘Asia’ and our distance from fellow members of the Anglosphere has been the default position of strategic thinkers and foreign policy officials.

Despite Australia being economically dependent on the region to our north and enjoying an enviably benign strategic geography that also fortuitously confers fabulous resource wealth, not much has changed. On the contrary, Australia’s integration into the strategic posture of the United States has only grown over time, in spite of pointless and costly wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only the absence of other countries joining America’s latest folly in Iran seems to have stopped the Albanese government from dutifully enlisting in yet another disastrous coalition of the willing. But given the impulsive, clueless and increasingly unhinged policies of the Trump administration, which are undermining the international order it helped create, even the likes of Richard Marles must surely recognise that America is no longer a reliable ally – if it ever........

© Pearls and Irritations