Balancing Australia's National Interests

Melissa Conley Tyler and Shane Ivimey

Chapter 16 in Australia's Trade, Investment and Security in the Asian Century, 2015, pp 273-287 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Australia has three enduring national interests: security, prosperity and the maintenance of the international system. The objective of Australia's foreign policy is thus clear: it should help advance these national interests. But what happens when these three national interests come into conflict? Should one be favoured over the others or is it possible to balance them? One useful approach is to apply ‘a balance of interests’ framework as suggested by Australian National University (ANU) Professor Ramesh Thakur. This chapter will look at the national interests to be balanced in Australia's key relationships with China, Japan, India, Indonesia, South Korea and the US. In each case there are difficult questions involved, such as balancing Australia's security and economic relationships, balancing Australia's bilateral relationships with a commitment to the multilateral system and managing the trade-off between economic interests and Australian values. This chapter concludes that a nuanced approach is needed that recognises that national interests can come into conflict and need to be carefully balanced in each case.

Keywords: Australia; National Interest; Trade and Investment; National Security; Regional Security; Asian Century; Labour and Migration; Financial Stability; Globalisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814632874_0016 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814632874_0016 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789814632874_0016

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().