doi:10.1093/irap/lci113 ANZUS: Regional versus Global Security in Asia?

Debate over the continued relevance of postwar U.S. alliance systems in Asia is intensifying at a time when American ‘global ’ and ‘regional ’ strategies seem to be converging. The ANZUS alliance is no exception to this trend. Australian and regional security analysts have recently focused on whether Australia faces a ‘choice ’ between sustaining U.S. alliance affinities and commitments in a ‘glo-bal ’ context or prioritizing its regional security postures in tandem with its growing economic involvement in Asia. It is argued in this article that the two approaches are complementary rather than divergent and that the current Australian government recognises this geopolitical reality. It concludes that alliances and other ‘classic ’ state-centric mechanisms for pursuing both regional and international security will continue to be applicable to Australia’s need for ‘getting the balance right ’ between its future regional and global strategies. The terrorist strikes launched in America on September 11 2001, and the shock that followed in their wake, did not single-handedly give rise to a new world order. These attacks were symbolic, however, of a more complex but hardly less threatening international system that had evolved since the Cold War’s demise had signified the end of global bipolarity. The United States had emerged from that contest as the world’s uncontested superpower, no longer encumbered with facing a Soviet peer competitor for global pre-eminence. However, it was increasingly confronted by a wider combination of ‘asymmetrical threats ’ in the form of aspiring regional hegemons, ‘failed states’, and transnational actors which collectively challenged American power and values and which have reduced prospects for global unipolarity. Under suc