Can the US handle conflict on 3 fronts?

Decades of complacency

The unipolar decades gave both the United States and Australia a false sense of security. We ran down our militaries at the same time as we ran down our manufacturing capacities and enriched a trading partner that had designs to become a strategic competitor.

Now we are playing catch up (although the current Australian government is spending even less on defence than the previous one).

We are onshoring the production of strategic minerals, investing in transferring some of Taiwan's chip manufacturing capacity to the United States, and diversifying our outsourced manufacturing away from China.

One of the missing factors in Mr. Mearsheimer's analysis is the part that India can play. Its economy is only one-fifth of China's, but this year it just passed China in population size.

The size of India's economy is doubling every 10 years. If manufacturing and investment are diverted to India, this will accelerate.

The next decades promise to be less idyllic than the last ones. Australia has bet its continental security on the United States.

It's time we started laying some of that off by investing in our own defence directly and putting some of it towards other regional alliances.

Arrangements like AUKUS and the Five Eyes security partnership will only work with genuine commitment. Entering into them is easy, but delivering on them is not.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese needs to bear that in mind as he visits both our modern-day "imperial courts" in Washington and Beijing.