Panel: Australia and the Changing International Order, 2021–2025 (ii)
This chapter explores how Australia promoted its foreign economic policy (FEP) from 2021 to 2025 by focusing on three main aspects of FEP: the resolution of trade disputes with major trading partners, the brokering of new trade agreements, and the interplay between trade and security. First, it illustrates how a key priority for Australia in the first four years of this period was to resolve the trade dispute with China, before the Trump administration’s tariff policy presented a new challenge for Australia in 2025. Second, the chapter analyses the numerous concurrent negotiations that Australia undertook to broker or deepen preferential economic agreements bilaterally (e.g., with India and Indonesia), regionally (e.g., the CPTPP and RCEP), and multilaterally (via the WTO). Finally, it analyses the intricate connections between trade and security which have expanded in an age of great-power rivalry, and which have limited some of the options available to Australia’s FEP. Notable here are securitisation of foreign aid (especially in the Pacific), new restrictions on foreign investment, preferential deals relating to the extraction and use of critical minerals, and the allure of economic spinoffs as part of ‘Pillar II’ of the AUKUS agreement.
