No public foreign policy debate worth the name took place during the recent federal election campaign, and next to none on defence or trade policy either. There wasn’t much to discuss, because the longer the Rudd government lasted, the less its international agenda differed from that of John Howard. Few people paid any attention to the Greens’ plan to revise or abrogate the ANZUS treaty, or to their policy of denying nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships – including American ones – access to Australian ports. Australia’s long foreign policy idyll, according to Professor Hugh White, is due to the United States’ reassuring presence in Asia. It is, he writes in Power Shift: Australia’s future between Washington and Beijing, ‘simply too difficult for us to conceive that Australia might no longer be able to rely for protection on the world’s richest and strongest country’.

In fact, Australians have never thought hard about foreign policy, because the important decisions were always made for us, first in London, and then in Washington. Believing we could not defend ourselves, our governments delivered Australia’s foreign policy independence as a tributary offering to Britain or the United States in the hope that they would protect us. We paid for their defence by buying equipment and weapons from them, and by sending Australians to fight and die for their causes. Kevin Rudd, as prime minister, asserted that well beyond his term – not anticipating how short it would be – Australia would go on relying on America’s power. His proposed Asia Pacific community (APc) was an attempt to lock that in. Both Howard and Rudd, when they visited Washington in early and late March 2008 respectively, expressed humble gratitude to America for its protection. Rudd even echoed his predecessor’s words.

Howard: As the most powerful force for good in the world, the United States remains the ultimate guarantor of the way of life most of us in the West wish to continue to enjoy.

Rudd: [The United States is] an overwhelming force for good in the world.

For Australians on either side of politics to question that the United States is good, powerful and guarantees our security has for decades been tantamount to treason. While the United States has in the past done much that was good in the world, its recent global record contains more of the opposite: deception, invasion, rendition, torture, civilian deaths, human rights violations, environmental vandalism, defiance of international norms, agricultural protectionism and irresponsible economic regulation. Indeed, its new rival, China, has often behaved better. Many observers, including some in the United States, predict the end of American hegemony, and some say it is already over. White now wants Australians to discuss what that means.

What we rarely discuss is that no past American administration has unreservedly guaranteed Australia’s security, and neither will any future one. It occurs to few Australians that since our alliance with the United States delivers such dubious benefits, it costs us more than it is worth. No one in the Australian foreign affairs, defence, and intelligence Establishment ever says that the alliance actually endangers us more than it protects us. We give the nuclear-armed American Seventh Fleet the credit for four decades of peace in our region, but the absence of serious conflict is due at least as much to the trust that has gradually been built up among large and small Asian countries. Signatories of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), joined in 2007 by Australia and later by the United States, forswear the threat or use of force, reject interference in each other’s internal affairs, and attend the East Asian Summit (EAS). (Howard, by the way, may have ‘eagerly’ joined the EAS, as White claims, but to do so he had to sign the TAC, without the United States, and he was reluctant about that.)

Howard’s hand was evident in two White Papers that gave primacy in Australia’s interests to the United States over Asia. Rudd similarly overwrote the 2009 Defence White Paper, but because Labor foreign policy attributed equal weight to the United States, Asia and the United Nations – one nation, a group of nations and a body of nations – it created more confusion than clarity. What Australia would do, if the United States demanded support in a war in Asia that the United Nations opposed, was not explained. White, co-author of the 2000 Defence White Paper, acknowledged the implications of China’s rise then, and he remains non-judgemental about China’s power and potential. Now, in this White paper of his own, he admits that China is the putative enemy, as it has always been.

White’s essay brings welcome rationality to the discussion of foreign policy, proposing ways of responding to changed circumstances, and spelling out their merits. He admits that American power is in decline, and that the reliance that White Papers placed on the United States is no longer an unquestioned article of faith. He sets out how Australia might head off conflict between China and the United States. But he doesn’t explore the consequences to their logical conclusion. Towards the end, the essay’s freshness fades, and its logic becomes circular.

It is not a matter of if the United States will resist China: it is already doing so. It is not that if the United States withdraws from Asia it won’t commit real resources to protect Australia: it won’t anyway, unless it is in America’s interests to do so. White’s solution – a concert of powers in Asia, in which the United States would not dominate but would participate as a co-equal – has already been proposed by Coral Bell in 2003, and it didn’t fly then. Australia should try to talk the Americans into it, White proposes. But why? To keep the United States engaged in the region, of course. To defend Australia. For that, he wants us to spend more on defence. But against whom? Against China, our biggest trading partner.

As a model for his concert of powers, White cites the Korean six-party talks, which were also Rudd’s starting point for the Asia Pacific community. But Australia is not one of the six. The concert differs in little but name from the APc, whose real purpose was to bring the United States on board. Rather than rock the Asian boat, most countries in the region said ‘no thanks’. They would probably respond in the same way to White’s similar idea for a concert, pointing to the equivalents that already exist in the EAS and the ASEAN Regional Forum. They might admit that regional cooperation needs strengthening, but as all participating countries have undertaken not to use force against each other, they would probably say a new arrangement to achieve the same purpose is unnecessary, particularly another one proposed by Australia.

As a vice-chancellor recently remarked, Australia is already China’s client state. We should recognise that our interests and those of the United States are far from identical, and make our own foreign policy for a change.