Review: The Shaky Foundation of Australian Defence Policy — Cameron Leckie

In The Shaky Foundation of Australian Defence Policy, Cameron Leckie advances a sweeping and deliberately unsettling thesis: that Australian defence policy rests on an assumption—the enduring primacy of the United States—that is no longer sustainable. Written in 2018 for the Australian Defence Force Journal and unpublished at the time, the essay has aged in a way that gives it renewed force rather than obsolescence. Its central claim—that Australia has failed to seriously plan for a post-hegemonic world—now feels less provocative than overdue.

A clear thesis, rigorously pursued

Leckie’s great strength is conceptual clarity. He does not merely argue that US power is declining; he specifies how and why it matters. By framing the United States not as a benign “ally” but as an imperial system with identifiable structural supports, he forces Australian defence thinking out of its habitual euphemisms. His four “pillars of empire”—military dominance, information dominance, economic dominance, and supportive client states—provide a coherent analytical framework that is consistently applied across the essay.

This structure prevents the article from degenerating into a loose catalogue of grievances. Each pillar is examined for stress fractures, and the cumulative argument is that none of them is as robust as Australian defence planners assume. Importantly, Leckie does not predict imminent collapse. Instead, he argues that strategic confidence has already ebbed, which is arguably the more consequential shift.

Military power without primacy

The military analysis is among the article’s most persuasive sections. Leckie is careful to distinguish between absolute power and effective power. The United States remains the most heavily funded military in the world, but Leckie argues that global dominance—rather than regional deterrence—has become prohibitively expensive and strategically brittle. His critique of aircraft carriers as symbolic rather than decisive assets is particularly effective, not because it is novel, but because it is placed within a broader argument about declining returns on force projection.

Where the analysis is strongest is in its attention to cost asymmetry. The observation that potential adversaries achieve parity or overmatch at far lower cost undermines the comforting fiction that spending alone guarantees superiority. This is a problem for the US; it is a deeper problem for allies like Australia who hitch their strategy to US overmatch rather than to their own resilience.

Information dominance and credibility erosion

Leckie’s discussion of information dominance is less about media bias than about credibility decay. His claim is not that US narratives are false in every instance, but that selective enforcement of norms—international law, sovereignty, humanitarian concern—has hollowed out the authority those narratives once carried. The argument here is not moralistic but instrumental: once credibility is lost, deterrence weakens and diplomacy becomes coercive by default.

This section occasionally risks overstatement, particularly in its treatment of Western media as largely “cheerleading” for US foreign policy. While not entirely unfair, the claim would benefit from greater differentiation. Still, the core point stands: rivals do not need to “win” the information space if the dominant power is steadily forfeiting trust.

Economics, de-dollarisation, and strategic inertia

The economic pillar is where Leckie’s argument is boldest—and most contestable. His emphasis on inequality, debt, and monetary expansion aligns with a long tradition of imperial decline literature. The discussion of de-dollarisation is particularly important for defence audiences, who often treat currency dominance as a background condition rather than a strategic enabler.

That said, this is also the section most exposed to counter-argument. De-dollarisation is uneven, slow, and constrained by the absence of a fully credible alternative system. Leckie occasionally writes as though erosion of dollar dominance automatically produces collapse, when in reality it may instead produce a prolonged period of instability and partial adjustment. This does not invalidate his argument, but it does suggest that the timeline is less deterministic than his rhetoric implies.

Client states and Australia’s uncomfortable reflection

The most confronting aspect of the article—particularly for an Australian audience—is the treatment of “supportive client states.” Leckie’s language is blunt and intentionally unsettling. Australia is not described as a partner shaping outcomes, but as a beneficiary of empire whose autonomy has narrowed as dependence deepened.

This framing will alienate some readers, but it is analytically difficult to dismiss. The argument is not that alliances are illegitimate, but that alliances premised on asymmetry become liabilities when the centre weakens. Leckie’s warning is not anti-American; it is anti-complacency.

Conclusion: uncomfortable, necessary, unfinished

The article’s conclusion is its most compelling feature. Leckie does not advocate alignment with another great power, nor does he romanticise “multipolarity.” Instead, he poses a stark choice: drift downward with a declining hegemon, or undertake the far harder work of redefining Australian defence and foreign policy on independent terms.

What makes the essay endure is not that every claim is indisputable, but that the central question it raises remains unanswered by Australian policymakers. If the United States is no longer able—or willing—to underwrite the international order in the way Australia’s defence planning assumes, then continuity becomes riskier than change.

That this argument was deemed “too polemical” for an official defence journal is itself telling. The article’s real provocation is not its criticism of US power, but its insistence that Australian strategic thinking confront reality rather than ritual.

In that sense, The Shaky Foundation of Australian Defence Policy is less a prediction than a challenge—one that Australia has still not met.

https://cameronleckie.substack.com/p/the-shaky-foundation-of-australian