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Middle powers like Australia were told they did not need a grand strategy. For Paul Keating, however, the end of the Cold War was a chance to chart an independent course. But was it prescient, or a naive idea from a historic aberration from the start?
Australia’s relationship with the world has long been defined by a fundamental tension: the necessity of great-power alignment weighed against the aspiration for strategic autonomy. In the three decades since Paul Keating’s prime ministership, this tension has only intensified, reshaping not merely the substance of Australian foreign policy but the very terms in which Australians imagine their nation’s place in a fundamentally altered geopolitical order.
To understand the contemporary Australian strategic predicament, one must first appreciate the arc of the previous century. Australia entered the Second World War as a British dominion and departed it with illusions about British power permanently shattered.
The fall of Singapore in February 1942, that cataclysmic moment when the “impregnable fortress” fell to Japanese assault in a matter of days severed the final threads of the imperial narrative that had bound Australian identity and security strategy since Federation. Britain, as Keating would later bitterly recall, had “sold Australia down the river”.
The memory of that abandonment would prove formative, particularly for a young politician raised on stories of family sacrifice in the Pacific theatre. Keating’s uncle, Billy, perished on the Sandakan Death March in 1945. The photograph of Uncle Billy remained on Keating’s desk decades later, a tangible reminder of what happened when Australia relied entirely upon distant powers for its security.
Yet out of that catastrophe emerged a new alignment. The United States, emerging from the Pacific War as the paramount power, became Australia’s security guarantor. This substitution of great powers – Britain for America – became the foundational assumption of Australian strategic culture for the next 45 years.
The ANZUS treaty of 1951 formalised what had become geopolitical necessity: Australia would hitch itself to American power and, in return, receive security assurances. The Cold War crystallised this arrangement. With the Soviet threat looming across the region, with communist insurgencies threatening Malaya and later Vietnam, Australia’s strategic identity became almost entirely derivative.
To be Australian, in the Cold War imagination, was to be anti-communist, Western and fundamentally dependent upon American strategic benevolence.
The Vietnam War, that first major test of the ANZUS alliance saw Australia commit “all the way” with the United States. Over 60,000 Australian servicemen served in Indochina, and nearly 3,000 died. By 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson visited Australia, the alliance was cemented in blood.
Yet Vietnam also planted seeds of doubt. The war’s conduct and ultimate failure prompted the first serious questioning of whether unquestioning alignment with American strategy was truly in Australia’s interests.
The end of the Cold War arrived with astonishing swiftness. In December 1991, as Professor James Curran chronicled in his recent study of Paul Keating for The Australian Financial Review, titled Behind Paul Keating’s grand vision for Australia, the Soviet Union dissolved.
The “force field” whose ideological currents had shaped world politics since 1945 evaporated almost overnight. To Keating, newly installed as prime minister, this represented not merely an international event but an opportunity for fundamental recalibration of Australian statecraft.
The post-Cold War moment and Keating’s intellectual intervention
What distinguished Keating’s approach, as Curran argued, was his conviction that Australia required a conscious, intellectual reckoning with the post-Cold War world. The Kirribilli House gathering of December 1991 – that “intellectual event” convened by a prime minister with publicly unknown foreign policy views – represented something unprecedented in Australian politics: a systematic attempt to think through Australia’s strategic position as a matter of first principles rather than Cold War reflex.
Keating gathered six men, “mostly in their 40s, like him”, who represented Australia’s top minds on international trade, strategy, US relations and the rising Asian economies. They were not cabinet ministers.
This was an act of intellectual stocktaking, not routine government business. They examined how to elevate the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation to a leaders’ summit, a mechanism through which an Australian prime minister might sit at the strategic table with American and Chinese presidents on a regular, institutionalised basis. They considered how Australia might position itself in an Asia that was rising in economic power while remaining institutionally underdeveloped in strategic architecture.
When Keating met with President George HW Bush on New Year’s Eve 1991, he was, in Curran’s phrase, “compelling and shameless” in presenting this vision. Bush, according to the official transcript, was reportedly “mute with perplexity”.
Yet Keating’s core argument was compelling: the United States needed to be as commercially engaged in Asia as it was strategically; America required a network of arrangements, a “latticework” of alliances, that extended beyond its bilateral relationships; and China, still relatively weak by historical standards, required an institutional footing in the regional order lest it become a destabilising force later.
These were prescient observations, made at a moment when China’s rise was still largely anticipated rather than observed. Keating grasped what few in the early 1990s understood: that the post-Cold War world would not be unipolar but rather multipolar, and that Australia’s security would ultimately depend not on uncritical deference to American power but on the development of regional institutions and partnerships that could manage great-power competition.
Asia, identity and the question of sovereignty
Yet Keating’s vision extended beyond strategic architecture. As Curran emphasised, Keating understood foreign policy as “the story of his nation and its place in the world”. This meant that Australia’s strategic reorientation towards Asia and the Indo-Pacific could not remain merely a matter of elite statecraft; it required a cultural and political transformation. Keating pushed for an Australian republic and a new national flag.
He articulated, with unusual passion, a vision of Australia that was “independent in ways that we’ve never been” emotionally as well as strategically engaged with Asia, shedding the residual Britishness that had haunted Australian identity since Federation.
This ambition was born not of abstract idealism but of historical reckoning. Keating’s understanding of Australian history, his reference to the conscription debates of World War I, the ways the Cold War had been prosecuted formed his conviction that Australians needed a more genuine sense of their own national identity, distinct from both the British imperial inheritance and reflexive American alignment.
His 1991 reflections on multiculturalism, though often misread, were rooted in this preoccupation: how could Australia develop a coherent national identity in an age of cultural diversity without either retreating into the “lingering Britishness” that had constrained post-war Australian identity or surrendering to a multiculturalism that risked dissolving any sense of shared national purpose?
The 1995 security agreement with Indonesia, negotiated in secret and announced only months before Keating lost the 1996 election, represented the practical expression of this vision.
It was, as Curran noted, a “steel ringfence across the top of the country”: an insurance policy against Chinese expansion, achieved through regional cooperation rather than great-power dependence. When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a new defence agreement with Jakarta in 2024, he explicitly grounded it in Keating’s precedent.
Strategic contestation and contemporary relevance
In the 30 years since Keating left office, Australian foreign policy has become a terrain of sharp contestation. Keating himself has emerged as a commanding voice in this debate, publishing regularly and intervening forcefully on questions of China policy, American alignment and Australian sovereignty.
His continued critique of AUKUS, the Australia-UK-United States submarine agreement negotiated under Prime Minister Scott Morrison crystallises this tension. For Keating, AUKUS represents precisely the kind of uncritical alignment that threatens Australian strategic autonomy. In conversation with Allan Gyngell (his former senior foreign policy adviser) and later with Prime Minister Albanese, Keating has framed AUKUS not merely as a defence procurement decision but as a capitulation of Australian sovereignty.
He described it as a “strategic disfigurement” that has diminished Australia’s “freedom of policy movement” in Asia.
This argument will intensify as Australia confronts the implications of its strategic choices. The United States, as Keating observed in the 1990s, will have to accept being a “balancing, not dominant” power in Asia. Successive Australian governments have not internalised this insight.
Instead, as Curran documented, they have “woven themselves more deeply into America’s strategic web in Asia”, a phrase that captured the tension between alliance management and national agency.
An unfinished reckoning
The Keating vision remains unfinished business in Australian political and strategic discourse. For some, he represents an alternative path, a “lost vision for Australia”. For others, he remains a figure of profound misjudgement, a prime minister who attempted to wrench Australia away from the security foundations upon which post-war prosperity was built.
Yet Curran’s recent work demonstrates that this binary framing misses the central point. Keating was not arguing for abandonment of the American alliance but for its recalibration.
He recognised that Asia’s rise was inevitable and that Australia’s prosperity and security depended not on resisting this reality but on positioning itself within it, with American partnership, certainly, but also with the strategic autonomy to pursue independent relationships and, when necessary, to diverge from American preferences.
The 2020s have vindicated many of Keating’s predictions. China has indeed become the predominant power. The United States, facing domestic challenges and strategic overstretch, has become less reliably present in Asia.
The complexities of managing great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific have become the defining challenge of Australian statecraft. And the question of Australian sovereignty of whether Australia can chart an independent course or whether it has surrendered that capacity through AUKUS and other commitments has become acute.
As Curran observed, Keating remains “convinced that the issues he placed onto the national agenda will have to be confronted in future”. His statement that “my priorities cannot be denied” captures the defiant conviction that history will vindicate his vision, even if contemporary politics remains unwilling to fully embrace it. Australia, in the decades ahead, will have to keep returning to the fundamental questions Keating posed: Who are we? Where do we belong? And most pressingly: can we be truly independent in an age of great-power competition?
These remain the unresolved questions at the heart of Australian geopolitical strategy.
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