In response to my post arguing Howard was a foreign policy radical, reader The Piping Shrike writes:
I think your assumptions on the Gorton-Keating years are wrong. It was American policy to make accommodations through détente with China and Russia as their failure in Indochina became clear. Australian foreign policy (including that of Whitlam's recognition of China just ahead of Nixon's) was to keep track with the US' more multilateral defensive turn.
Howard maintained its tracking with US foreign policy, but it was US foreign policy that was the aberration, namely its unilateralist lunge that you confuse with Australian foreign policy. Now US foreign policy is changing to accommodate to its loss of political leadership over climate change, and Australian foreign policy, as ever, is keeping track.
