ABSTRACT
The idea of Australia and Japan strengthening their postwar security cooperation is hardly new. Both countries were stalwart allies of the United States during the Cold War which shared Washington’s antipathy toward the growth of Soviet military power and were key players in the US strategy to contain it. As maritime states and US allies on the near extremes of the East Asian littoral, Australia and Japan have frequently been viewed by critics of US strategy in the region as the ‘northern and southern anchors’ of the American regional alliance system in East Asia. The two countries remain resource-dependent on fossil fuels and economically reliant on stable trade routes for their own national prosperity. Both sustain cultures and identities that often lead regional elites from Chinese, Korean and Malay constituencies to declare that their ‘Western’ underpinnings isolate them from the ‘core’ of East Asia. Though somewhat ironically perhaps given its European culture, Australia with its membership of the Five Power Defence Arrangement (FPDA) and its former participation in the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) has considerably more experience of regional defence partnerships in East Asian than Japan. Adopting the reasoning of difference, Samuel Huntington has labelled Australia as a ‘torn country’ and Japan as a country that possesses its own ‘civilisation’ apart from other key regional actors.1
