On April 15, 2026, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada hosted an Expert Roundtable on “Australia, Canada, and the Indo-Pacific” with Dr. James Curran, a professor of modern history and an expert in Australian politics and foreign affairs at the University of Sydney, columnist at The Australian Financial Review, and the author of Australia’s China Odyssey: From Euphoria to Fear (2022). The talk took place as Dr. Curran was concluding a two-week visit to Canada, supported by the Government of Canada, during which he met with members of the policy community about how Canada is navigating a global environment marked by intensifying great-power competition, geopolitical fragmentation, and growing pressures on the international order.
Jeff Nankivell, President and CEO of APF Canada, opened the event, reminding participants that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Australia in March and addressed that country’s parliament.
Much like Canada’s relationships with other Indo-Pacific countries, its relationship with Australia, he added, is entering a new phase. APF Canada’s Vice-President Research & Strategy, Vina Nadjibulla, who moderated the discussion with Dr. Curran, added that Canadians in the audience would benefit from hearing his thoughts about how Australia is also thinking about how to gain greater strategic autonomy, independence, and agency in the world.
Dr. Curran began with some thoughts on how we might make sense of the current moment in world politics. When new events don’t fit our existing understanding of the world, he said, we must fundamentally re-evaluate the assumptions on which those understandings are based. The ‘Trump phenomenon’ is arguably such a moment.
Nevertheless, despite the profound global changes underway, not least because of the turbulence unleashed by the second Trump administration, he felt his country’s foreign policy establishment had largely been silent. Why is that? He pointed out that Trump has treated Australia much better than others, including Canada. For example, Australia secured a 10 per cent baseline tariff on its exports and has received assurances about the status of AUKUS — the trilateral security agreement between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. Australia is also more confident because it believes it has become more indispensable to the U.S. given the latter’s emphasis on the importance of the first island chain in deterring China.
In this context, Canberra is reluctant to openly talk about a ‘Plan B’ — an alternative to the U.S. alliance — akin to statements such as those given in Carney’s “Davos speech.”
However, Canberra’s relationship with Washington could be complicated by the former’s efforts to pursue a relationship with Beijing. Washington, in addition to pressing allies to increase their defence spending, is also urging them to limit their trade with China. But the value of Australia’s trade with China is almost 10 times greater than its trade with the U. S. As such, the Australian government has pushed back, signalling that it will pursue ties with Beijing based on its own national interests — strong language, Dr. Curran suggested, for an ally that is its main protector.
Moreover, Canberra’s policy of ‘stabilization’ in its relationship with China is the subject of vibrant debate; some Australians say it’s a form of appeasement, whereas others feel it ‘straitjackets’ the relationship. Still others posit that the bilateral relationship is now like a normal bilateral relationship with the attendant ups and downs. Over time, he said, it will become more evident as to whether stabilization provides off-ramps to avoid military conflict or only a temporary hiatus from an overall pattern of strategic fragility and contestation.
Turning to how he perceives the current state of thinking in Canada, Dr. Curran said that as an historian, he’s naturally suspicious of turning points; however, he suspects this could be a turning point for Canada. He described a sense of “vitality” he detected among people in Canada’s national security, foreign affairs, defence, and intelligence realms, adding the caveat that Canada’s business community seemed less certain about a ‘rupture’ with the U.S.-led world order. The biggest challenge facing Canada would be implementing the vision laid out in the Davos speech — for example, on what issues will these new coalitions form, and who will be part of them? On China, if Canada is looking to re-engage, where will it draw its red lines, and how will Canada deal publicly with China and on what issues will it negotiate in private?
Nadjibulla added that it remains uncertain whether the interest-based coalitions that are part of Carney’s “variable geometry” will operate largely within or outside the U.S. alliance structure. She asked Dr. Curran whether he thought this would be a matter of sequencing: in other words, perhaps there will initially be a ‘dual track’ whereby the U.S. is kept onside as much as possible while middle powers simultaneously strengthen their self-reliance and agency. The question then becomes: At what point can middle powers truly contemplate a ‘Plan B’?
Dr. Curran responded that for now, the U.S. was likely to maintain its pole position in the international system. But he also felt that the ‘minilaterals’ created by prior U.S. administrations could survive even without active support from Trump. The challenge with this middle power diplomacy, however, is that it requires many middle powers working together to even begin to approach the collective action capacity equivalent to that of the great powers.
Asked how Australia’s pursuit of stabilization with China might evolve into selective engagement, Dr. Curran added that Canberra seems to be working out where to put the boundaries and when to ‘talk tough’. He noted that the Australian public’s perception of the China–Australia relationship has been damaged through past episodes of economic coercion and ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy. Similarly, Lowy Institute polling shows that a majority of Australians now views China as a military threat.
Nadjibulla added that Canada is looking to others for lessons on how to manage concerns about China while deepening economic and commercial ties. That includes trying to understand what having guardrails means in the next phase of the bilateral relationship. After his visit to China in January, Carney gave indications that Canada will be engaging in specific areas, but that other sectors — defence, AI, parts of the energy landscape, and critical minerals — will remain off limits.
She closed the event by thanking Dr. Curran and noting that we should be having more such intellectually honest conversations — taking the world as it is — given that both countries are grappling with similar questions around alliance management, building resilience, navigating ties with both the U.S. and China, and creating the conditions that would allow both countries to explore what a ‘Plan B’ might look like.
• Edited by Ted Fraser, Senior Editor, APF Canada.
