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As the post-World War II rules-based order continues to erode and a more competitive multipolar world emerges, Australia can no longer afford to ask the same questions; we need to start asking radically different ones.
The end of the Cold War was meant to usher in a more orderly age. With the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Washington stood unchallenged, liberal democracy seemed ascendant, and globalisation promised a smoother alignment between markets, politics, and security. For a time, that confidence held.
The accelerationism of globalisation saw trade expand, capital move faster, institutions multiplied, and the language of a “rules-based order” gave Western governments a reassuring story about stability in an uncertain world.
But history did not stop. What emerged over the following three decades was not the permanent settlement many in the West had imagined, but a more complex, contested, and ultimately fragile international system.
The United States remained pre-eminent, yet its power was increasingly stretched by interventions abroad, domestic division at home, and the gradual rise of strategic competitors unwilling to accept a US-shaped world. China’s economic ascent became the defining geopolitical fact of the era.
Russia, humiliated but not transformed, worked steadily to reassert itself through coercion, disinformation, and force. Middle powers gained room to manoeuvre. Non-state actors proliferated. Supply chains became strategic vulnerabilities. Energy, food, technology, and finance all became instruments of leverage.
Nowhere has this shift been more visible than in the Indo-Pacific. The region has moved from the edge of global politics to its centre of gravity. It is where the world’s largest economies, most consequential militaries, most important sea lanes, and most acute flashpoints increasingly converge.
The South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, Korean Peninsula, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific islands are no longer peripheral theatres; they are pressure points in a broader struggle over influence, access and deterrence. The Indo-Pacific is where the assumptions of the post-Cold War era are being tested most brutally.
For Australia, this is not an abstract debate. It is the strategic environment in which the country lives, trades and must defend itself. Australia’s prosperity has long rested on open sea lanes, functioning international institutions, and a regional order in which rules, rather than raw power, shape behaviour.
Its economic model is deeply exposed to Asia, especially China, yet its security still depends heavily on American power and the credibility of alliances. That tension has defined Australian strategy for years, and it is becoming harder to manage.
The difficulty is that the rhetoric has changed faster than the questions. Governments speak more urgently now of resilience, deterrence, sovereignty, and sovereign capability. They warn of coercion, grey-zone pressure, and the need for greater self-reliance.
Yet beneath the language shift, Australia keeps returning to the same fundamental questions: how to preserve access to markets without becoming strategically captive; how to rely on allies without assuming they will always be able or willing to carry the burden; how to defend an island continent in a region where distance is no longer the shield it once was; and how to do all of this without first waiting for a crisis to make the choices for us.
That is the central problem of the present moment. The world order that has underwritten Australia’s economic, political, and strategic prosperity is not merely under strain; it is fragmenting in plain sight. The institutions remain, the slogans persist, and the rituals of diplomacy continue.
But the underlying order is in free fall. Australia knows this. The question is whether it will continue to speak as though the old assumptions still hold, or finally confront the reality that they do not.
Discussing this uncomfortable reality in a soon-to-be-released podcast with Defence Connect, American strategic policy sage and veteran of the Reagan and Bush Jr White House, respectively, Robbin Laird warns about the dangers of the strategic policy inertia driving Australia’s strategic policy agenda.
The dangers of strategic inertia
The interview with Robbin Laird is, at its core, a warning about strategic inertia. It argues that while the international system is undergoing a profound structural transformation, many Western governments, Australia included, remain intellectually, institutionally, and politically trapped inside assumptions inherited from the post-Cold War era.
This directly reinforces the central thesis that Australia continues to ask the same questions despite overwhelming evidence that the world order underpinning its prosperity and security is fragmenting in real time.
Laird’s central argument is stark: “We’re in a new epoch, and the old questions just don’t work.”
That observation is more than a rhetorical flourish. It is a critique of the entire strategic mindset that has dominated Australian and broader Western policymaking since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For much of the post-1991 period, Australia operated on the assumption that the US-led liberal international order was not merely dominant, but enduring. Globalisation, economic integration and institutional interdependence were treated as stabilising forces that would gradually moderate geopolitical competition.
Defence policy became increasingly managerial rather than existential. Capability planning focused on incremental evolution rather than systemic disruption. Economic policy prioritised efficiency, market access and integration into global supply chains, particularly through China’s rise.
Laird argues this assumption was fundamentally flawed because it misunderstood the nature of the emerging system. He describes the rise of a “parallel authoritarian world” in which states such as China selectively engage with the rules-based order only when it serves their interests.
At the same time, liberal democracies “gave away their manufacturing”, underinvested in defence, and became consumed by domestic political fragmentation rather than strategic competition.
The danger of maintaining the status quo, therefore, is not simply military vulnerability. It is strategic irrelevance.
Australia’s current trajectory, as outlined in the interview, risks producing a nation still optimised for the conditions of the 1990s and early 2000s while operating in an increasingly coercive and technologically disruptive Indo-Pacific. Laird repeatedly criticises what he sees as an overreliance on legacy thinking, particularly in defence procurement and strategic planning.
He notes that Australia continues to debate force structures and acquisition models in ways that have “fundamentally” not changed since the late 1980s, despite political rhetoric describing the “most dangerous strategic time since the Second World War”.
This contradiction is central to the interview. Governments publicly acknowledge deteriorating security conditions, yet institutional behaviour remains largely unchanged. Australia still plans in long acquisition cycles, still treats defence and economic policy as separate conversations, and still assumes that alliances alone can offset structural vulnerabilities.
Laird warns this mindset risks creating what is effectively a brittle strategic culture, one unable to adapt at the pace demanded by technological, geopolitical and economic change.
His critique of alliance thinking is particularly important. He argues the old Cold War model no longer applies because the contemporary system is not bipolar. Instead of a US-Soviet confrontation, the emerging environment is multipolar, fragmented, and fluid. As he puts it, “there are no great powers … there are major powers … and a lot of middle powers.”
This has profound implications for Australia.
The rise of competitive coexistence
Rather than depending exclusively on American primacy, Laird suggests the future lies in “competitive coexistence” and “resilient pluralism” – networks of overlapping partnerships, industrial collaboration, and distributed deterrence structures. He highlights developments such as the Australia-Indonesia defence agreement, growing Japan-Australia cooperation, and emerging US-backed security webs in the Philippines as examples of a new strategic architecture forming “from the ground up”.
The opportunity here is significant.
If Australia embraces this shift early, it can position itself as a central node in a new Indo-Pacific order rather than a peripheral dependent of the old one. That means moving beyond simply preserving alliances and instead shaping networks of industrial capability, technological integration, energy security, space infrastructure, and AI-enabled economic resilience.
One of the interview’s strongest themes is that economic transformation and national security can no longer be separated. Laird argues that Australia’s real strategic question is not what the ADF looks like in 2040, but “what is the future of Australia economically?”
This is a direct challenge to the country’s current economic model.
For decades, Australia has relied heavily on exporting raw materials into the globalised system, particularly to China. That model generated extraordinary wealth under conditions of stable globalisation. But Laird argues the emerging era demands something more sophisticated: a sovereign industrial ecosystem capable of supporting national resilience, advanced manufacturing, AI integration, space capabilities, and defence innovation simultaneously.
His comments on AI and space are especially revealing because they frame technology not simply as military capability, but as civilisation-scale economic transformation. He argues Australia’s geography gives it unique advantages in launch infrastructure and space access, yet policymakers still approach these issues through narrow defence or environmental frameworks rather than as pillars of national power.
This highlights the broader opportunity embedded within disruption itself.
The collapse of old assumptions does not automatically mean decline. It creates space for states willing to adapt faster than competitors. Australia possesses enormous latent advantages: geography, resources, political stability, advanced research institutions, alliance access, and proximity to the Indo-Pacific’s economic centre of gravity. But exploiting those advantages requires abandoning the comforting assumption that the old order can simply be preserved indefinitely.
Perhaps the interview’s most important insight is its critique of institutional imagination. Laird repeatedly returns to the idea that strategists are still trying to restore a world “that’s gone” rather than conceptualise the world now emerging.
That is the real danger.
The greatest strategic risk facing Australia may not be China’s rise, technological disruption, or alliance uncertainty individually, but the inability of political, bureaucratic, and strategic institutions to mentally transition into a new era quickly enough. Because once the underlying assumptions of a system collapse, states that adapt late often discover that capability, resilience, and sovereignty cannot be built at crisis speed.
The full podcast interview with Laird will be available via Defence Connect shortly.
Final thoughts
Taken together, these competing perspectives point to a far more complex and destabilising reality than the prevailing narrative of “strategic adjustment” or “strategic revolution” often suggests.
Australia is no longer operating in the relatively permissive environment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, when economic integration, American primacy, and the assumptions of the so-called rules-based order provided a stable foundation for prosperity and security. That era is ending, and the transition now underway is exposing the widening gap between Australia’s rhetoric and its underlying strategic behaviour.
On one hand, the shift towards “national defence”, denial-based deterrence, sovereign capability and greater self-reliance reflects a genuine recognition that the Indo-Pacific has become the central theatre of global competition.
The region is no longer peripheral to world affairs; it is the centre of gravity for economic output, technological competition, military modernisation, and geopolitical coercion. In this environment, Australia can no longer assume that geography, alliances or economic interdependence alone will guarantee strategic stability.
Yet despite the increasingly urgent language from the government, many of the underlying assumptions shaping Australia’s policy settings remain remarkably unchanged.
Questions persist as to whether capability acquisition, industrial policy, force structure design and political appetite for reform are evolving at the pace demanded by events unfolding around us.
What is increasingly evident is that Australia continues to ask many of the same questions it did in a fundamentally different era. The language has shifted; resilience, deterrence, sovereignty, preparedness, and national defence now dominate official discourse, but the institutional mindset often remains anchored to the logic of the post-Cold War world.
Incremental reform continues to compete with the scale of disruption occurring across the strategic, economic and technological landscape.
As Professor Peter Dean observed, Australia is operating in a period of “polycrisis”, where geopolitical, economic, industrial, energy and technological pressures are compounding simultaneously. This is not a series of isolated challenges, but a systemic transformation of the international environment itself.
At the same time, as historian Alex McDermott has argued, enduring structural realities continue to constrain Australia’s options. The nation remains deeply dependent on secure maritime trade, access to global markets, and the stabilising influence of American power across the Indo-Pacific. Geography still matters. Sea lines of communication still matter.
Industrial resilience still matters. The strategic problem is therefore not simply ideological or rhetorical, but deeply material.
Meanwhile, critiques from Strategic Analysis Australia suggest that despite the increasingly stark warnings about the deteriorating strategic environment, there remains “no shift in thinking or planning” commensurate with the scale of the challenge.
This tension sits at the heart of Australia’s contemporary strategic dilemma. The issue is no longer whether the world order that underpinned Australia’s prosperity is under strain; that is now self-evident. The issue is whether Australia is willing to confront what the collapse of those assumptions actually requires.
Because strategy ultimately demands choices. It demands prioritisation, trade-offs, institutional reform and sustained national commitment over decades, not electoral cycles. It requires governments to align economic policy, industrial capability, technological development, and national security into a coherent framework rather than treating them as separate policy silos.
Against this backdrop, the risks associated with strategic inertia are growing rapidly. A posture that attempts to simultaneously preserve the assumptions of the old order while rhetorically preparing for a far harsher one risks becoming internally contradictory.
Likewise, a strategy seeking to balance ambition with caution, self-reliance with alliance dependence, and regional focus with global interests can quickly lose coherence if not matched by clear priorities, industrial capacity, and credible capability.
Equally, calls for complete strategic autonomy ignore the practical realities imposed by geography, economics, and alliance structures. Australia cannot insulate itself from the wider international system, nor can it assume others will indefinitely preserve that system on its behalf.
The opportunity, however, lies in recognising that periods of systemic disruption also create space for strategic repositioning. Australia possesses significant latent advantages, geography, resources, advanced research capacity, alliance access and proximity to the Indo-Pacific’s economic centre of gravity.
But leveraging those advantages requires moving beyond simply defending the remnants of the old order and instead adapting to the emerging one faster and more coherently than competitors.
Australia, therefore, faces a narrower and more urgent set of choices than public debate often suggests. The question is no longer whether change is coming, but whether the nation is prepared to align its institutions, economy, defence posture and political culture with the realities already visible before us.
The coming decade will not simply test policy settings. It will test Australia’s capacity for adaptation, resilience, and strategic imagination. In a world where the old certainties are fragmenting in plain sight, the consequences of getting that balance wrong are unlikely to remain theoretical for long.
Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below, or get in touch at
Stephen Kuper
Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.
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