Australia has always been in a really weird spot. It’s a very modernized, western nation, who has ideals and traditions more with North America and Western Europe than anywhere else, and yet there it is, stuck in the Pacific with it’s closest ally in the US an entire ocean away. Plus, their geography has never been the greatest; vast swathes of the interior, while mineral rich, are essentially uninhabitable due to the extremely harsh and dry grasslands, deserts, and now, towering infernos were forests once stood. This naturally limits Australia’s ability to become a cohesive economy, or expand its population and be self sufficient in multiple agricultural fields; they can’t become a super power like China or America.
Because of this, Australia has had to make unique security decisions, which often lead to internal conflict with them being tied between opposite forces of the west and Pacific. While the US is traditionally the hegemonic power in the Pacific, a rising China threatens that, forcing Australia to reanalyze its entire strategic position.
Australia knows that culturally, its best ties are with the British (and therefore tangentially, the Americans, Canadians, and New Zealanders), and because of that, they’ve often stuck close by to the US. However, with the US starting to wave on its global commitments due to rising populism on the home front, Australia now has to face the reality that China is starting to projecting its power in the Pacific, and that it has no real geopolitical counter to China without the US, especially economically. While Australian governments have been increasingly aloof with respect to China, their economies are increasingly merged, with Chinese students contributing to the local Australian economy in colleges, and Australian minerals and coal powering China’s factories. Yet, at the same time, climate change poses possibly the greatest threat to the Australian environment, as seen by the recent fires; should they kill their economy and stop funding the Chinese to protect their environment, or hope that they can fix climate change soon enough anyway?
While they can’t compete with China economically, they can attempt to curry favor with other nations in the region by increasing trade and making their economy increasingly merged with the local economies, but that too threatens the Australian economy, as cheap goods can flow into the local nations from China and find their way into Australia, killing local businesses in the process. While Australia has a military, it’s essentially insignificant in comparison to the potential of China. It’s no wonder they wanted to expand NATO to include the Pacific and western aligned nations, because these nations cannot survive as they currently do with a rising China.
With the US receding from the world stage, many western nations located in the East are facing a dilemma. China is rising and threatened their economic stability, independence, and potentially even their sovereignty, leaving these nations scrambling to find allies either in the US, and acceding to their demands, or find themselves as puppets of China. It looks like it may end up being another cold war after all.