Australia is a country worried about a future under a mighty and demanding China, and afraid that American leadership has already checked out.
Those concerns have been the motive behind the Turnbull government's white paper on foreign policy. And the white paper itself is the government's plan for what to do about it.
A breakthrough concept in the paper is that Australia should start something it has never done before. Balancing.
Not balancing one priority against another, or balancing the US alliance against the China relationship. But balancing in the meaning of classical European statecraft.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Credit: Brook Mitchell
That is a group of nations banding together to offset – or balance against – the power of an overwhelmingly strong state.
The white paper doesn't actually say that Australia and other regional countries should combine to balance against China's growing might.
But that's the clear implication. And there is a second breakthrough concept. It's that Australia needs to act without waiting for America.
This is a policy for a country that has decided that the US cannot be relied upon to protect the regional order.
China showed that it is prepared to ignore the rules-based order when it is constraining Beijing's ambitions.Credit: AP
It doesn't envisage an Indo-Pacific region without America. But it implicitly accepts that region has already lost American leadership.
At core, this is a policy for a country that is anxious about the future under an assertive China. And a country that doesn't believe its own public rhetoric about the US as some sort of security guarantor.
US President Donald Trump may no longer be relied upon to protect the regional order. Credit: Bloomberg
Asked specifically whether the government was seeking a group to balance against China, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop replied:
"What we are seeking to do is to balance against bad behaviour. The key is a rules-based order. We urge China to defend and strengthen that order.
"It's the rules-based order that helped China's rise, and it can help other countries to rise, too."
China showed that it is prepared to ignore the rules-based order when it is constraining Beijing's ambitions.
It brushed aside the ruling from the international arbitration panel at The Hague, for instance, when the panel found China's claim to most of the South China Sea had no basis in international law.
China's government rejoiced this week that it had turned that ruling into "waste paper".
Of course, all great powers are selective about breaking the international rules. The difference is that when the US did it, it was an Australian ally doing it and Canberra could have confidence that it wouldn't attack Australia's core interests.
Now, when China does it, it's not an ally, and Canberra can't be sure.
So, if Australia needs other countries to join it to "balance against bad behaviour", who's in the posse?
The paper says that Australia will put priority on deeper strategic relations with two separate sets of nations. One is the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations.
The other is the "like-minded democracies" of the so-called quadrilateral group, the quad – the US, Japan, India and Australia.
And what do these two groups have in common? They don't include China.