As a geographically isolated middle power in an increasingly fractious strategic environment, Australia can no longer afford to wantonly free-ride off the US alliance and its embedded principle of extended nuclear deterrence.

Within our lifetimes, the world’s biggest economy will be an avowedly non-democratic state, China, that threatens the stability of our “global commons" – namely, liberty, democracy, free trade, and a rules-based international order – the US hegemony has fostered. Ironically, no nation has benefited more from this than China.