Japan and Australia lift relationship to new heights

 

Middle powers Japan and Australia lift relationship to new heights

 

New Currents: Japan eyes Australia, UK and France
 
As the great-power competition sweeps the Indo-Pacific, a handful of new groupings of middle powers is quietly emerging. No middle-power partnership is more consequential right now than that of Japan and Australia. Australia is now just the second country after the U.S. that will see its assets receive peacetime protection from Japan's Self-Defense Force, and a reciprocal-access agreement to pave the way for more joint exercises is imminent. 
 
  With a more fearsome China and a U.S. not quite the dominant power it used to be, it makes sense for smaller countries to look out for themselves more than they once might have.
 
And this is creating new currents in the Indo-Pacific. Whereas Japan traditionally treated fellow democracies Australia and India in similar ways, analysts suggest that Australia is now pulling away from India in terms of security cooperation with Japan. Up next in deepening ties may be not India, but the U.K. and France, as the two European countries look to the Japan-Australia reciprocal-access agreement as a model.