Quarterly Essay #101, Michael Wesley: Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia's Future. (March 2026)
Sun, Apr 19, 2026./noise/books | LinkThe costs of Australia's serial distraction from its own geopolitical imperatives have been masked by the fact that maritime Southeast Asia has been peaceful, focused on economic development and benignly disposed towards Australia since 1966.
I had to wonder what I was reading when this came at the 10% mark given that the ADF was active in Việt Nam at the time, and to my mind Việt Nam is very maritime. Eventually I was told that the "strategic core" of Southeast Asia is Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This hierarchical take is a category error even on the terms laid out in this essay. I surmise the date is probably when it became apparent that Suharto had bedded down his coup and the largest domino was not going to fall. But the war continued anyway. Upon its conclusion the American-sponsored SEATO folded and ASEAN's indigenous consensus-driven, unaligned, non-interference model rose and has proven durable. The latter has often been a venue for expressing negative sentiment about Australia by various post-colonial states. But you won't find that kind of framing here.
Wesley's essay is annoying like this all the way along, doubly so as I am very sympathetic to the point he is trying to make, that point being Keating's from the early 1990s about Australia finding its security not from Asia but in Asia. He wants a return to the policies of the period from 1975 to 2005 (he does not appear to argue for those dates) that saw a deepening of expertise in this country about our neighbours and increasingly broad engagement with them. What's mostly absent is any account of why things are as they are; the diversity, tensions and even contradictions within ASEAN are not explored. On some fronts his proposals are already archaic (the rules-based international order is a dead letter) or just not going to happen (a revision of AUKUS). There's a lot of assertion, e.g. Australia is "difficult to invade, but relatively easy to coerce if hostile forces gain access to the islands to our north." but no grappling with how we may realistically, even unilaterally ameliorate those risks.
It's unclear to me just how vulnerable the Straits of Malacca are; unlike Hormuz there is the possibility of at least some cargo taking longer routes. Wesley does not dig into the connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and who might wish to sever it.
Google suggests the author toured widely and discussed his essay on a variety of podcasts but it appears to be thinly reviewed and discussed in prose. Mark Beeson found more novelty than I did. Huiyun Feng spills many fewer words arguing along the same lines for the incorporation of ASEAN into the G2. This sounds great but contradicts the rising spheres-of-influence/great-man-of-history model. More realism about ASEAN and Australia from Lindsay R. Dodd (2025).
