62. What is Australia's role in a Multipolar World?

As the multipolar world takes shape and tensions over Taiwan rise, it is timely to ask, what should be Australia's role in the emerging multipolar world? Are we, as Hugh White suggests in his recent Quarterly Essay, sleepwalking to war with China? Have we given up on framing our own foreign and defence policy to service the will of that "indispensable nation", America. What will it take to develop a new vision of Australian foreign policy suited to history, geopolitics today, and our real place in the world, not in the Atlantic Alliance but on the coasts of Eurasia?

Credit: Hugh White, Sleepwalk to War: Australia's Unthinking Alliance with America (Black Ink, 2022)