China's Rise and Australia-Japan-US Relations: Primacy and Leadership in East Asia (Book Review)

Abstract

In China’s Rise and Australia-Japan-US Relations: Primacy and Leadership in East Asia, Michael Haezle and Andrew O’Neil pursue the objective of providing policy-related observations and recommendations on the nature of the US-led liberal regional order and the shared interest of Australia and Japan in maintaining it. The eleven chapters, written by experts in security politics from Australia, Japan, and the United States, aim to achieve this objective through an analysis of US leadership as seen from Canberra and Tokyo. As the editors rightly point out, this perspective is worthwhile because the two US allies’ views can serve as ‘critical indicators of the prospects for change in the regional order’ (4). Grouped into five parts, the contributions cover the prominent themes of the post-war ‘hub-and-spokes’ alliance system, the strength of the Australian, Japanese, and US commitments to this system, and the challenge for those actors to manage it together with other East Asian security partners.