The Broader Context: How Australia-Japan Relations ‘Fit’ into Regional and Global Security Dynamics

Abstract

More than two decades have passed since the end of the Cold War and a decade has passed since the events of 11 September 2001 largely transformed the meaning of ‘international security’. Yet the United States’ long-standing bilateral alliances with Australia and Japan — part of a US bilateral security network in the Asia-Pacific known as the ‘San Francisco System’, formed in an era when containing the Soviet Union and international communism was the major concern for American policymakers — remain viable. To remain so, however, they must be adaptable. In assessing America’s alliances in Asia, the US Department of Defense’s 2010 ‘Quadrennial Defense Review Report’ observed that ‘the regional and global security environments are more complex today … [t]his emerging security landscape requires a more widely distributed and adaptive US presence in Asia that relies on and better leverages the capabilities of our regional allies and partners’ (US Department of Defense 2010c: 59). The intensification of strategic cooperation between Australia and Japan is a key to such adaptation at a time when the United States confronts a growing array of diverse security challenges with increasingly strained economic resources.