The rout in Kabul provided something of a problem for this landmark in the history of Australian diplomacy. Some of those preaching from the gospel of US–Australian military integration remarkably disowned the American retreat, although Canberra publicly endorsed it and departed from the Afghan capital earlier than other allies.

It was not quite the commemoration that the military planners and politicians had hoped for. Far from being a crowning moment in Washington to sanctify a new effort against China, the birthday for an alliance conceived with a threatening Asia in mind was playing second fiddle to another Western failure in the Middle East. Even so, these events are unlikely to stimulate the rethink that is required for Australia’s military and political relationship with America.

Twenty years ago, it was then Prime Minister John Howard’s presence in Washington for the fiftieth anniversary of ANZUS – coinciding with the 9/11 attacks – that ushered in Australia’s commitments to America’s most recent wars in the Middle East. Later in his prime ministership, as he made arguments for why Australia should commit to the US invasion of Iraq, Howard said that the alliance was going to ‘get more, not less important, as the years go by’. He had come to office in 1996 believing that his predecessors Paul Keating and Bob Hawke had put so much of their diplomatic shoulder into Asian engagement that the American relationship had been left to wither on the vine.

Howard’s ready commitments to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave rise to a new rendition of the history of the alliance. He spoke of an Australian military tradition stretching all the way from colonial commitments to the Sudan in the 1880s to the decision to join the Coalition of the Willing as it marched into Baghdad. And when Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction were not found, Australia signed on to help rebuild the country as a Jeffersonian bulwark in the Middle East, conceived as the ultimate counter to a rising Iran. Howard began to adorn his speeches with the line that Australia and the United States had fought side by side in every major war of the twentieth century and beyond.

Since then, the American alliance has become steadily fused with the Anzac legend, seemingly putting both above criticism and reproach, although the Brereton Report into alleged crimes in Afghanistan by Australian Special Forces has dented that new narrative. Still, the debate over how to respond to China’s recent rise has only accentuated this trend of hugging Washington even closer. And the result? One’s stance on the alliance has become virtually a badge of national loyalty, in a way not seen since similar debates over Vietnam in the 1960s and before that over the issue of conscription during World War I.

Although faith in the American alliance has been bipartisan since its inception, the problem is that in recent years dewy-eyed nostalgia and misty sentimentalism have overtaken the strategic realism required to navigate an increasingly complex and turbulent region. Australia is putting all its eggs in the American basket. If there is realism in Canberra on all this, if there is a quiet recognition in both parliament and the bureaucracy that the United States may not, after all, be up for a long twilight struggle with China in a new Cold War, it is clearly not a realism that can be uttered publicly.

Each of Howard’s successors has tightened the US–Australian embrace. Kevin Rudd recorded his emotion in Washington as he stumbled across John Curtin’s signature in the guest book at Blair House, the residence across from the White House where leaders visiting the US capital often lodge. Julia Gillard stood in front of the US Congress and spoke of having grown up with an America that ‘could do anything’. Gillard also welcomed US Marines onto Australian soil as part of an American ‘pivot’ back to Asia, so snagged had Washington become in the briar bush of the Middle East that it needed a declaration of its regional return supposedly to stave off Beijing’s challenge to its hegemony. Malcolm Turnbull promised he would invoke the ANZUS Treaty if the United States went to war with North Korea. Scott Morrison, standing beside Donald Trump at a state dinner in Washington, toasted ‘another 100 more’ years of mateship. But with an America internally riven, with two successive presidents now making it clear that their priority is domestic renewal, and with uncertainty over the attitude of future US leaders, who in Canberra has the capacity to imagine a world where US power is focused primarily on itself?

Australian leaders have not really wanted to look all that hard at this different America. Speaking in Washington as Opposition leader in 2014, Tony Abbott said no one should want to see ‘what a shrunken American might mean’. Like Julie Bishop and Turnbull, Abbott was pleading for America to rediscover its global resolve. How many times during the Trump administration did we hear Australian ministers and prime ministers call for the United States to recover its leadership of the so-called ‘liberal international order’? These Australians were like pelicans squalling in the wilderness. But their calls grew more insistent as China’s new assertiveness pressed harder against Australian economic interests.

Both major parties seem incapable of meeting the reality of a less outwardly committed United States. Australian political élites have spent the best part of a decade in denial about persistent racial, cultural, and socio-economic currents in US politics, which, short of war, will dominate the attention of any administration. Dealing with this altered America is the debate Australia needs to have.

But there is a major roadblock in Australian thinking – what we now want is what we once had. This is a problem, fundamentally, of the national strategic imagination. Australia’s diplomatic imaginary remains dominated by memories of World War II and the Cold War, when the nation was saved from Japanese attack and when it was in national interest to keep the United States in Southeast Asia. Ironically, Australia now finds itself in a position akin to that at the time of the Treaty’s creation – profoundly unsure about the kind of guarantee the alliance provides.

ANZUS did not arise from superior Australian diplomacy. Rather, it emerged from dramatic international developments, especially the victory of Mao’s communists in the Chinese civil war, which led to the transformation of America’s East Asia policy. Having previously spurned the idea of a Pacific pact, Washington came to the view that it needed an alliance comparable to NATO for the purpose of containing the spread of communism in the region.

Disappointments in the history of ANZUS are now lost to memory: John F. Kennedy denying US military support during Indonesia’s Confrontation of Malaysia in the early 1960s; Bill Clinton withholding Marines from the 1999 East Timor intervention. Trade spats get swept under the rug. The web of culture, shared values, and the unstoppable imperative of integration closes in, especially during periodic divergence of interests.

The United States, likewise, rarely reassesses or debates its alliance with Australia. A great power can afford to take its junior partners for granted. One American ambassador in the early 1980s filled his valedictory cable with long quotes from a predecessor’s similar effort at the close of World War II, so convinced was he that the observations of 1940s Australia were still current. An Obama official once quipped that America can ‘always rely on Australia’. Trump’s envoy arrived asking ‘Who lost Australia’ to China? It was an absurd proposition, but it showed a nervousness, long since banished, that Australia might be wavering in its commitment to standing up to China.

What has always mattered most for Washington is the intelligence facility at Alice Springs, not only for its global operations but for its own defence shield. When the facility was first mooted in the late 1950s as the Australian military was reconfigured to fight alongside the United States, Robert Menzies proposed that these facilities be called ‘depots’. Even at the alliance’s lowest point during the Whitlam government, US defence planners, while considering the relocation of Pine Gap, held off for want of a genuine alternative in the region. But if the United States ever decides that the facility is no longer required, the alliance will be little more than a brittle chrysalis.

When the topic of the US retreat from the region is raised, the default answer is that Australia should ‘do more’. For a long time, the precise nature of this position was rarely made clear, but the more hawkish true believers now state that it means an increase in the number of US Marines in Darwin, a greater US naval and air force presence in northern Australia – with the cost of base upgrades falling to Canberra – and increased cooperation with the United States on missile design and stockpiling in Australia. All this is predicated on the assumption that the United States will stay in Asia for the long haul. But what if Washington decides that a forward military presence in Asia is no longer in its national interest? These grand visions for an enhanced alliance take no account of America’s domestic travails.

So a renewed debate on the alliance may mean that leaders and officials have to talk more openly of doubts about the US presence in Asia; that greater self-reliance is required with the extra costs – and offsets – it brings. It also surely means that Australia must continue to develop other regional relationships with countries that do not believe in democracy of the Western variety.

In the past, events, not Australian agency, have prompted fundamental reassessments and debate about Australia’s place in the world and its relations with the great powers. Following Britain’s military retreat from Southeast Asia in the late 1960s, Prime Minister John Gorton fronted the Australian people, asking, ‘Who would have thought that suddenly at this point in this nation’s history, all the old conceptions would have to be taken out, have to be re-examined … re-assessed because the world had changed and we had changed?’ Gorton was facing up to a world without Britain. Defence dithering ensued, and only in the mid-1970s did Australian strategic policy attain some clearer shape. Another reassessment came with Paul Keating and Gareth Evans as the Cold War ended. Neither was forecasting the end of American power, but they were reconceptualising Australian foreign policy for a new era.

The alliance has survived many different governments and circumstances. But it cannot be assumed that Washington will want to engage in the costly or prolonged Cold War with China that more bullish commentators here believe is underway or want brought on. Finding a new footing for the relationship that does not fatally constrict Australian policy is a key challenge for our times.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.