But the current search for agency and strategic equilibrium are signs of the gap narrowing. While Australian views on each of these factors have shifted over recent years, there remains grave resistance to the idea of these as inevitable structural conditions. Southeast Asian strategists’ post-Cold War choice sets have been based on three strategic truths - US power and attention is not guaranteed, China is resurgent as an indigenous Asian power and that the centre of global economic power is shifting East and is no longer concentrated in Western developed countries. Since the Cold War ended, this sub-region of disparate small states and distinctly small powers has been constantly exercising the type of agency Wong is now promoting. Southeast Asian observers might be forgiven for thinking that Australia has finally caught up to the conundrum which the region has been struggling with for over three decades. All countries of the region must use diplomatic, economic and other means ‘to maintain the region’s balance’. The Asia Pacific is now a multipolar region and ‘we cannot just leave it to the US’, Wong warned. The United States remains the indispensable power in the Asia Pacific region - but ‘the nature of that indispensability has changed’. Wong’s National Press Club speech on 17 April 2023 more explicitly connected this search for equilibrium to the waning of US hegemony. In Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in mid-2022, Wong described Canberra’s desire for a regional order as ‘framed by a strategic equilibrium where countries are not forced to choose but can make their own sovereign choices’ when explaining Australia’s Quad and AUKUS partnerships. In her travels over the past 10 months, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has referred repeatedly to Australia’s search for ‘a strategic equilibrium’.
Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
0 kommentar(er)
