The Quad, AUKUS and Australian Security Minilateralism: China’s Rise and New Approaches to Security Cooperation

Abstract

Since 2017 Australia has adopted a gloomy outlook about Asia’s security environment and now sees the PRC as a source of insecurity. A key component of its response to this has been the turn to ‘minilaterals’. This article examines Australia’s approach to the Quad and AUKUS and explains why Canberra has turned to these minilaterals and what this tells us about the nature of security cooperation in an Asia marked by growing geopolitical contestation and webs of economic interdependence. The first part provides an overview of the policy context in which the move to minilateralism occurred and describes AUKUS and the Quad as distinctive type security collaboration. The second part assesses whether the move is an example of ‘hard balancing’ as realist scholarship would anticipate or an example of ‘institutional balancing’. Neither is entirely convincing. The third part makes the case that the experiments in minilateralism represent new ways of doing security cooperation in an international environment of heightened geopolitical competition, dense networks of economic interdependence and complex domestic imperatives. This has led to the creation of mechanisms that attempt to increase traditional security capabilities, provide international public goods and to develop what I describe as ‘security infrastructure’.