Australian foreign policy today confronts two questions as important as any in our history. Can we keep relying on America to keep Asia stable and Australia safe? And what we should be doing if the answer to that first question is “no”?

The overwhelming consensus among our foreign policy establishment – ministers and backbenchers on both sides of politics, bureaucrats and commentators – is that the answer to the first question is “yes”, and that the second question can therefore safely be ignored. By far the most prominent and important dissident from this comfortable consensus is Paul Keating.