Between 2016 and 2020 Australia’s foreign and strategic policy became more tightly focused on South-East Asia and the Pacific, which it identified as its ‘immediate region’. This reflected the government’s concern about the strategic consequences of emerging great-power competition, and particularly the assumption that China’s presence in these subregions equated to greater influence. While this assumption influenced Australia’s strategic and foreign policy choices, it was largely untested. Australia responded by increasing its engagement in both subregions to solidify its relationships, bolster its influence, and reassure its regional partners of its continued commitment. But Australia had different geostrategic perceptions and interests than South-East Asia and the Pacific. Its failure to acknowledge the agency of these neighbours sometimes led to counterproductive strategic and foreign policy decisions.

The period from 2016 to 2020 was dominated by the rivalry between China and the United States, and by Australia’s relative position amid this rivalry. At the same time, a debate about how to combat climate change and its role in foreign affairs took place in the backdrop to this great-power rivalry. In this chapter we examine the interaction of political and public commentary around these three issues – the United States, China and climate change – with the insights available from polling data. We also examine how opinion on these issues fed into ongoing and longstanding debates. Our results suggest that there was both continuity and change in public opinion on international affairs between 2016 and 2020. Trust in the two great powers declined significantly. At the same time, support for Australia’s military alliance with the US remained strong. In terms of threat perceptions, concerns around climate change remained high, reflecting a lack of policy certainty and a failure to act decisively at the federal level. Accompanying this steady trend of high concern around climate-based security risks was a sharp increase in the perception of China as a potential threat to Australian security interests.

Georgia under Mikheil Saakashvili provides a two-part illustration in which initial success in concealing its quasi-authoritarian rule from the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation might have been, but ultimately was not, repurposed into success with its most important audiences: the European Union and NATO. Georgia after the Rose Revolution was just illegible enough for the Americans, given their strong asymmetrically interdependent relationship with the new regime, even though Saakashvili’s government had increased legibility by consolidating corruption into his inner circle’s hands. This was not enough for the EU or NATO, even though each has found reasons to overlook domestic insufficiencies before and, according to some members, the Russian threat prior to the August War of 2008 demanded rather than prevented Georgian accession. Georgia had the same mid-level legibility as it showed the Americans, but it faced a deeply divided audience in the other organizations. With no agreement on what Georgia meant for either organization, an asymmetrically interdependent relationship did not coalesce, and Georgia did not manage to conceal its quasi-authoritarian domestic rule from either one.

This chapter explores Australia’s engagement with South-East Asia during the period under review by focusing on its partnership with Singapore. In the period under review, what former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull termed a ‘natural’ partnership showed signs of becoming an increasingly important conduit for Canberra’s engagement with the region, hitherto an under-realised one. With Australia looking to deepen its ties with South-East Asia and ASEAN more broadly, Canberra’s partnership with Singapore went some way towards realising this goal.

This chapter examines Australia’s perspectives and strategies on the rules-based order between 2016 and 2020. Australian understanding of the rules-based order were built on US supremacy as well as US-led multilateral institutions, but China’s rise posed serious challenges to both the power configuration and the institutional foundation of that order. Australian leaders believed that the United States would enjoy military advantage over China for decades, so Australia adopted a series of balancing strategies to cope with China’s challenges under the Coalition government. This was evident in a higher military budget, stronger security cooperation with the Quad countries, support for ASEAN’s centrality to Asian diplomacy, coordination of an infrastructure coalition in the South Pacific, and a campaign against the CCP’s ‘sharp power’. Australia pursued balancing strategies against China to defend the existing order, despite the attendant risks to its national interests.

An overview of existing approaches to less powerful states’ strategies in international relations shows that no theory explains the behaviour described in the introduction. By most logics, they should evade international attention or, if they do approach larger actors with ulterior motives in mind, they should become socialized to valuing the norms they once invoked with cynicism. On no account should they draw the attention of larger actors whose global missions they not only undermine, but depend on undermining for domestic stability. This chapter introduces two scope conditions that begin to explain this conduct. Domestically, these states rule by patronage, a logic of rule that distributes money, jobs, political voice and physical security as privileges rather than by right. Internationally, they are peripheral, which means that they lack material and agenda-setting power in relation to other countries. As such, when patronage rule brings them into conflict with the global rights-based order, they cannot afford to change the offending practices, but neither can they withdraw or bear punishment. A historical account of political development in several post-colonial regions illustrates why peripherality and patronage, while they do not always overlap, correlate highly.

This chapter examines how the ‘Indo–Pacific’ concept became entrenched as the primary frame of reference for Australian regional security between 2016 and 2020. It first briefly reviews the process by which the ‘Asia–Pacific’ descriptor was jettisoned in favour of the ‘Indo–Pacific’ to capture Australia’s conception of its region and its place therein, and how this affected related policies. The chapter next examines Australia’s efforts to engage the region’s major powers, as well as the sub-regions of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, to illustrate how the Indo–Pacific framework governed Australia’s approach to regional security. Australia’s enunciation of the Indo–Pacific concept, the chapter shows, facilitated closer relations with the US, Japan and India, but it created frictions with China and gained only limited acceptance in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

This chapter is concerned with how the foreign policy process developed during the period 2016–20 and how it interacted with and was shaped by the return of great-power politics. In particular, the chapter examines the foreign policy process through the lens of three main developments: the significant change in Australia’s approach to the People’s Republic of China in the context of growing Sino-American rivalry, the dominance of security in Australian foreign policy, and the adoption of the Indo-Pacific strategic construct. The chapter examines each of these in turn. Its conclusion reflects on what each of these developments tells us about the foreign policy process and in particular the role of key institutions, actors such as think tanks, parliament and the media, as well as individuals have played during this period.

After Sierra Leone’s civil war, President Kabbah oversaw creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission despite his government’s previously strong preference for amnesty, seen as a precondition to rebels’ non-relapse into violence, just before the intervention of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. An unexpected candidate for concealing – one would expect it to recruit, as it normally does – the country successfully concealed a de facto, targeted amnesty for most combatants. Confusion and rumours surrounding the TRC and its relationship to the SCSL limited the amount of truth that would be told, thereby also limiting the information available to the SCSL, leaving it less able to indict. The British, who set the tone for other European donors, had strong incentives to overlook whatever evidence of this amnesty did rise to the surface. If they challenged the Kabbah government on this point, the result could be state collapse and the British might be called upon to intervene in addition to gaining a reputation as a global bully. Because Sierra Leone’s dissembling and its success in doing so both derive from the country’s extreme fragility, the case draws particular attention to the problems of framing its “invitation” of the SCSL as truly consensual.

The Ugandan government was the first to engage with the International Criminal Court and did so via the then-unexpected mechanism of self-referral when it requested an investigation into its conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army in the country’s north. While this seems like evidence of the government accepting global norms of accountability for atrocities in wartime, it entailed significant risk for the Museveni regime. The Uganda People’s Defence Force, essentially fused to the ruling regime, has committed acts within that conflict that may have amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Moreover, these are bound to occur whenever the UPDF is deployed – as it usually is – since its function as a vessel for distribution of patronage makes it a blunt instrument strongly tending towards indiscriminate use of force. Yet Museveni was able to use the country’s centrally managed illegibility to help control the process of ICC scrutiny and gained further leverage through a strong asymmetrically interdependent relationship to the brand new court. This allowed Uganda to emerge better than unscathed, not only with warrants only issued for LRA high command, but with newfound international support for a military solution to the Northern crisis where once he found only criticism due to the rights violations it invariably generated.

Between 2016 and 2020, Australia began to feel the effects of international pressure on climate change and struggled to articulate a convincing public case that its failure to take decisive action was consistent with national interests and values. This chapter asks how and why the government found itself in this seemingly unsustainable position, and the role that Australia’s approach to climate change played in its foreign policy more generally. It first discusses Australia’s approach to the international climate regime and the commitments made under the Paris agreement, before examining the impact of the leadership change from Turnbull to Morrison and election outcomes within Australia. The third section examines the domestic pressure for political action on climate change, especially during the 2019–20 bushfires and their aftermath, before shifting to a focus on the international pressure that Australia faced. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the state of climate politics and policy in Australia, and the possibility of moving beyond the ‘toxic politics’ of climate change that have long plagued Australia’s engagement with this issue.

The distinctive features of regional organizations arise from the fact that they strive to integrate a smaller set of countries but they often aim to reach across a wider range of substantive issues than the other international organizations in this book. The regional organizations in this chapter are vastly different from each other but they face the same challenge of integrating members on an almost limitless range of policies. They approach this challenge diversely: the EU has created powerful central authorities, including a bureaucracy and a legal hierarchy between the center and the member states; in contrast, the AU, ASEAN, and the OAS leave most powers of decision in the hands of meetings of their heads of government. These are more typical of regional international organizations in that they could in theory make forceful collective decisions but in practice their main contribution is as a forum in which intergovernmental negotiation takes place.