On the Future of the ANZUS alliance:
Well, there’s no doubt the alliance does bring benefit and will continue to be bring us benefit for the foreseeable future and I don't for a moment suggest we walk away from the intelligence relationship we have, the logistic support relationship we have, and the potential deterrent effect—however problematic it might increasingly be—of having that big ally there as at least a warning sign for anyone that might be minded to put us to existential military risk is important to have. But the notion of total dependence on the US, to follow the US down every rabbit hole it wants us to engage in, in the interest of alliance solidarity—with Iraq, you know, the invasion being the classic example of a rabbit hole we should never have gone down—I think those days are past.
We just have to recognise that America’s got its own interests, that it's—for all the passion with which the Biden administration is now re-embracing alliance relationships rather than regarding them as irritating encumbrances, which was the case under Trump—for all of that, you know we're not getting much support from American farmers and wine makers in terms of not filling the, you know, the gaps left by the Chinese treatment of us. I mean, America is always going to follow its own interests – whether it's there for us militarily if some catastrophe does erupt in a region, is going to depend entirely on America's assessment of its own interests and we just have to be wide awake to that.
America's far more powerful now and will remain so for the indefinite foreseeable future than was ever the case with Britain, America’s far more obviously a player in our own region, America’s far more obviously a counterweight to an overly aggressive, overly asserting China than the United Kingdom was ever capable of being to Japan or anyone else in our own region. Those are the realities: we’ve got to be conscious of the limitations of that American power, we’ve got to be conscious of the decline of the unipolar moment, we've going to be conscious of the impossibility of the United States just insisting on total primacy, predominance, pre-eminence—the “P words” as I call them—in the region. We've got to recognise, as the United States has to recognise that its future doesn't lie in dominance, it lies in a cooperative, collaborative relationship. And all of that means that we've got to be less reliant, totally reliant, on America. We've got to build our own defence capability and our capacity to protect our own waters – those of the southwest Pacific and our own airspace.