cam: This type of arrangement makes sense: we are Japan\'s biggest trading partner and China\'s strength is largely a fabrication of US interests anyway. China\'s military budget is 36B, ours is 17B. So at the moment they are a 2xAu. It wont always remain that way, but they are not the military threat the US is making out. Destablisation through economic volatility and one-party corruption/mis-management is more of a concern I think. The only time the politics will be a problem is if the communist party cant hold on to support and uses a nationalist policy - ie Taiwan - to try and bind the population to them. Not much different to how Indonesia used West Papua before it negotiated a security treaty with Au.

I do think we lost an opportunity here to restate the map and Australian power . America is weak internationally at the moment and most nations are standing back to see which way the wind blow and basically have disengaged from the Bush Administration other than what they have to. It would be a chance for us to create a treaty across the Indian Ocean and draw India and South Africa into our influence. The Japan-US-Au circle is a given and as Gary Sauer-Thompson argues , the US is starting to look to India as the final point in the arc to contain China geo-politically.

We had an opportunity to make us indispensible in any kind of arrangement. Our politicians lack imagination and guts in this area. I think they like geopolitical isolation and obscurity.

cam

adam: One security agreement might look like misfortune: ... two looks like encirclement. Don\'t you think an agreement with India would aggravate China without any great benefit?

Besides which, any sort of agreement with India is far more fraught with difficulty than with Japan or even Indonesia. India is a nuclear power, shares a border with a nuclear power they don\'t much like, and they only recently stopped exchanging artillery shells in Kashmir. They had a shooting war with China in the sixties over a border dispute which is still not resolved. It would be hard to engage India without antagonising China and Pakistan.

The Republic of India is a magnificient achievement in the history of democracy, but as a foreign policy partner they\'re unfortunately pretty flaky. They had reasons to play silly buggers with alliances during the cold war, some highminded, some not. But diplomatic habits die hard; it doesn\'t inspire confidence.

cam: Antagonising China: If the agreement was an Au-US-Ja-IN then yes it would. But Au isn\'t the US and can cast an Indian Ocean treaty as predominantly and economic one rather than military encirclement which any treaty that involves the US will have the suspicion of being.

Au isn\'t the US so it can make treaties that appear more benign even though they are about increasing Australian clout (directly or indirectly). I think India has to be dealt with in the same manner as Indonesia; fragile but making remarkable steps. I think they should be engaged positively, and even given a couple of chances (with an Au in the 1900s required too), though if they fall to crap, dumped very quickly and a new approach taken.

If Australia did take a two-circle approach, I would not consider it an encirclement of China, but an Australian repositioning of themselves geopolitically and geoeconomically from the South Pacific into Central Asia. It is a way of moving the map away from the tyranny of geography.

cam