The United States and China have oversized impacts on the fortunes and policies of Australia for obvious reasons. The year began with the indecorous exit of Donald Trump and the swearing in of a far more conventional administration led by Joe Biden. Regardless, US-China relations hardly improved, while Beijing’s standing with almost every advanced economy and democracy deteriorated over the past year.

It is evidence that the greater challenge and disruption to Australian foreign policy and the world as we know it in recent years was never the election of Trump but the stridency and menace of Xi Jinping’s China. This reality is what Australian external policy had to respond to and will continue to define what we can expect in 2022.