ABSTRACT
The Australia-Japan-United States Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD) should be a consensus-building instrument, facilitating security cooperation among the three countries to meet the current security challenges in East Asia in both the ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ security policy sectors. ‘Facilitation’ of regional stability, however, is not synonymous with ‘replacement’ of already established regional multilateral security forums such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) or the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) annual heads of state summits. These instrumentalities have already established positive track records in such policy areas as confidence-building, maritime security and other components that are particularly critical to Southeast Asia.
