Burden-sharing: The US, Australia and New Zealand alliances in the Pacific islands

Abstract

One of President Joseph Biden's foreign policy priorities is to 'renew' and 'strengthen' the United States' alliances, as they were perceived to have been 'undermined' during the Trump administration, which regularly expressed concern that allies were free-riding on the United States' military capability. Yet the broad range of threats states face in the contemporary context suggests that security assistance from allies no longer only - or even primarily - comes in the form of military capability. We consider whether there is a need to rethink understandings of how alliance relationships are managed, particularly how the goals - or strategic burdens - of alliances are understood, how allies contribute to those burdens, and how influence is exercised within alliances. We do this by analysing how the United States-Australia and Australia-New Zealand alliances operate in the Pacific islands. Our focus on the Pacific islands reflects the United States' perception that the region plays a 'critical' role in helping to 'preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific region'. We conclude that these understandings need to be rethought, particularly in the Pacific islands, where meeting non-traditional security challenges such as economic, social and environmental issues, is important to advancing the United States, Australia and New Zealand's shared strategic goal of remaining the region's primary security partners and ensuring that no power hostile to their interests establishes a strategic foothold.