ABSTRACT
What do Australia, Japan and the United States hope to achieve through their emerging Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD)? Ultimately, the goal must be to achieve a meaningful level of security policy coordination among the three parties. But what is it that the three countries judge they cannot achieve through either bilateral or broader multilateral means? For the moment, it is hard to say. The inaugural ministerial-level dialogue in March 2006 resulted in a joint communiqué that did little more than check off a predictable list of generic topics without proposing specific policy action on how to approach or pursue them.1
