Australia’s Choices in 2011

 

Asia’s rise and the prospect of the West’s decline will have “huge implications for how the world works, and Australia’s place in it”, confronting Australia with historic and profound choices for its strategic future, argues Lowy Institute Executive Director Michael Wesley in a speech delivered on 10 February. 

“A new Indo-Pacific commercial and strategic dynamic” has rendered Australia’s “mental maps”, based around the Asia Pacific, increasingly irrelevant. “The countries of Asia are trading with each other, investing in each other, and relying on each other more with each passing year”, he said.

“The new mechanisms and understandings of security and stability within Asia will be central to the world’s stability and security, just as Asia’s systems of finance and trade will set the standards of the rest of the world”, he argues.

Some traditional, historical alliances were becoming increasingly irrelevant, worn down by “the great convergence between population and productivity that is bringing about a major shift in global power from the developed to the developing world.”

Centres of power are rapidly shifting – “the places to make waves are no longer Brussels, London or Paris, but increasingly Beijing, New Delhi and Brasilia.”

Dr Wesley will outline the strategic choices Australia faces in 2011. “Perhaps the biggest choice will be over how Australia reconciles its two core interests – its security which is tied to the United States, and its prosperity which is ever more closely tied to China.”

The fate of the West.

The shape of Asia.

The choices facing Australia.

These are big questions.

Meanwhile, “alongside the apparent ebbing of the West’s significance and authority, there are real questions about its future as an entity.”

Dr Wesley observes that even with the doubling of Australia’s aid commitment, it is not certain we can compete for influence with the big new Asian donors in areas where we have traditionally been influential, such as the South Pacific.

The Lowy Institute was recently ranked as one of the world’s most influential think tanks by the McGann Global Think Tank Index.

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