Fear of abandonment and the US alliance – the paranoid logic in Australian foreign policy

For more than seven decades, the US alliance has been a central pillar of Australian security policy. Yet the last decade has seen US commitments become increasingly conditional and uncertain. Why has Australia responded to growing uncertainty about the reliability of the US by binding itself more deeply to the alliance? Building on Allan Gyngell’s account of Australia’s ‘fear of abandonment’, I argue that Australian foreign policy has been shaped by a recurring pattern of anxiety management. Drawing on a Kleinian approach to ontological security, I develop a three-part framework of paranoid activation, depressive integration, and adaptive regression to trace shifts in the relative dominance of different modes of anxiety management. I examine two historical periods in Australia’s relationship with the US to highlight this dynamic process. First, the postwar transition from British to American protection, culminating in ANZUS and Cold War alliance politics. Second, the renewed intensification of alliance dependence after 9/11, from the War on Terror to AUKUS. I show that Australia’s fear of abandonment has not produced a single or linear pattern of dependence. Rather, successive Australian governments have oscillated between idealising the US as protector, tolerating greater ambivalence and differentiation within the alliance, and re-institutionalising alliance dependence as the capacity to sustain that ambivalence comes under strain. In doing so, I contribute to ontological security scholarship by showing how shifts in the relative dominance of different modes of anxiety management can be identified in foreign policy, while introducing adaptive regression as an alliance-specific form of defensive variation within the depressive position.