Never waste a good beat up, especially when your political opponent calls a non-event a catastrophe. The foreign minister, Penny Wong, the defence minister and deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, have had a great time punishing the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, for his ill-judged foray into regional strategic affairs.
A report on Tuesday that Russia had filed an official request with Jakarta to base Russian military aircraft on Manuhua air force base in Biak island in eastern Indonesia tricked Dutton, a former defence minister who might have known better, into premature claims of catastrophic intelligence failure with monumental strategic consequences. But his political misadventure does prompt some consideration of the more serious issues at play.
US president Donald Trump has created a massive opportunity for America’s adversaries to capitalise on his rare facility for ceding economic, political and strategic ground to China and Russia. China’s president is now making hay in the sunshine of Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia, while his trade minister was recently in discussion with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts on a joint approach to tariff imposts – three ancient enemies joined at last in common purpose.
The US has also given Russia virtual carte blanche in eastern Europe, as it combines duplicity with opportunism to kill Ukrainian civilians, smash their cities and exacerbate the apparent impotence of Ukraine’s western European friends.
It’s not surprising that Russia seems to explore opportunities for influence and strategic display. And generating fear and loathing in Australia during an election campaign is an added bonus.
But it’s not only autocrats like Xi and Putin who benefit from the vacuum created by Trump’s single-minded pursuit of American self-interest. Vacuums like this are opportunity rich – especially for those with the imagination and initiative to transform dependency into self-direction.
The Indonesia that welcomed Soviet MiG-15 fighters in the 1950s (and, let’s remember, Russian Tupolev-95s transited at the Manuhua airbase in Biak in 2017) is a fundamentally different country in 2025. It is making its own way in Asia and the world as a fast-growing and significant economy. It recently joined the Brics grouping comprising the leading economies of the global south. More significantly, it is an increasingly confident and independent nation pursuing its own agenda and exercising its own agency, remaining resolutely non-aligned. President Prabowo Subianto is much more aware than most Australians that Russia needs its relationship with Indonesia, not vice versa.
Like the rest of the south-east Asian “tigers”, Indonesia is focused on economic growth and conflict avoidance. It is no accident that it hosts the Asean secretariat. It does not want to be caught between Beijing and Washington. Nor will it put the advantages of its long history of non-alignment at risk. But it will act in its own interests, with Russia on the outermost margins.
Australia, however, is not marginal to Indonesia. We need to recognise and capitalise on that.
A key consequence of Trump’s insistence on American interests at all costs is that the post-second world war alliances, such an important part of America’s strategic dominance until now, have collapsed. Australia and its European partners feel abandoned.
Abandonment is not without advantage – it is actually a massive opportunity for Australia.
For perhaps the first time since 1942, we can now set our own strategic direction, unencumbered by the imminent threat of war or the dominance of a great and powerful friend. As we recover from our infatuation with Anzus, we can now look at Asia and the Pacific as a region in which we can make our own way, in partnership with our neighbours instead of being a willing cats paw for America’s narrowly defined contest with China.
The starting point for our brave new world is to understand that the opportunity of a lifetime lasts only as long as the lifetime of the opportunity. We need to get cracking. We need the leadership that recognises good luck rather than looks backwards at a lost world or, even worse, cries over spilt milk. We need the confidence to engage with our neighbours and to reinvest in the diplomatic tools that are critical to creating the geopolitical capital that is now so much in demand.
And least of all do we need to start at shadows and indulge in the fear of unknown non-events and “agreements” from over-excited politicians who are making heavy weather of an election campaign.