Recalibrating Australia's Strategy toward Its Maritime Neighborhood

At its core, Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis’s book Girt by Sea: Re-Imagining Australia’s Security calls for an overhaul in the way that Australian policymakers have approached the country’s maritime neighborhood. The book offers an alternative perspective to the assessment of Australia’s maritime security interests and strategies beyond the lens of U.S.-China competition and, by extension, beyond Canberra’s relationships with Beijing and Washington. Noting that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government has embraced a “defence-led approach to security” (p. 3), Strating and Wallis argue that nonmilitary tools of statecraft are equally crucial, given the “multiple dimensions of Australia that need to be secured” (p. 8). These dimensions include Australia’s “physical territory, infrastructure and population, but also its institutions of governance, economy, environment and society” (p. 8). When extrapolated to cooperation with regional neighbors, this means taking a whole-of-government approach to issues such as climate change and transnational crime.