Julia Gillard and Barack Obama recast the union

JULIA Gillard and Barack Obama have taken the US alliance to a new intensity and invested it with fresh meaning - to manage the dynamic changes in the Asian power balance.

Gillard has become one of the most pro-US leaders in Australia's peacetime history. The Obama-Gillard concord redefines the alliance and deepens its permanent military character.

Praising an extremely nervous Gillard as "a champion of our alliance" and a leader "down to earth", Obama still left her in the lurch on climate change.

Obama and Gillard have engineered a historic recasting of the alliance to manage security and disaster contingencies in Southeast Asia amid the rise of China.

In Obama, the PM has the perfect partner. His popularity in the Labor Party and with the Australian public means Gillard can seal a depth of military closeness that would have provoked domestic rebellion if tried under George W. Bush.

She rides the current Obama-induced high tide of domestic consensus about the US. The upshot is a series of alliance decisions potentially even more significant than under John Howard because they relate to our strategic future with China.

Under the Obama-Gillard accord, US marines will train permanently in northern Australia, the US air force will intensify its operations in and from Australia and HMAS Stirling will have a greater US naval presence.

Gillard, acting on advice, has seized the opportunity offered by the geo-strategic reorientation of US policy from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Asia-Pacific.

Obama's message was music for Gillard: the alliance was "indispensable" and the US commitment to the region was "enduring and unwavering". Gillard has plunged ahead. She refuses to be intimidated by warnings that China may get upset. Her posture will alienate the Left, the Greens and much of the strategic community outside government.

Gillard is almost a Labor version of Howard: an enthusiast adapting an alliance she sees as enduring to new events. The conventional wisdom half a decade ago that Labor would retreat from Howard's intimacy with the US has been repudiated.

These initiatives are new in scale yet merely build on existing arrangements. There is no new base being established. Existing facilities will be used and expanded. US marines will train both alone and with Australian forces. This will strengthen force inter-operability and options for combat, disaster and humanitarian relief. The message to the region is that the Australia-US alliance has fresh traction. Labor knows this will be welcomed by most Asian nations. In recent days, the government has briefed China, India and New Zealand on the alliance deepening.

Labor seeks a growing US role in the region and the Obama administration has pledged to a deepening of US trade, security and military ties in the Pacific.

For Labor, this is a hedging strategy with China, not a containment policy. While academics agonise over the dilemma Australia faces in managing the US and China, the leaders have made their decisions.

Sources within government suggest these decisions will be seen as the most important expansion of strategic ties since the joint facilities in the Cold War nuclear era. That's a big call. But it's where Gillard is coming from.