US President Joe Biden has put Australia and other Asian allies at the centre of an aggressive foreign policy strategy that paints China as the primary threat to the world order and calls on democracies including the US to show they can still deliver for their people.

Describing Washington’s alliance with Canberra as one of America’s “greatest strategic assets”, the administration released a muscular “interim” national security statement that formally acknowledged and effectively endorsed the hawkish China shift that developed under Donald Trump.