PERSPECTIVES | What Paul Keating wants for a country ‘swimming between sharks’

This article appeared in UTS:ACRI's Perspectives on September 4 2026. Perspectives is the commentary series of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI), offering research-informed viewpoints on developments and debates in the Australia-China relationship.

The Sydney launch of historian James Curran’s new book, Grand Ambition: Paul Keating’s Global Vision for Australia (Simon & Schuster, 2026), had the energy of a rock concert.

Curran’s conversation with Australia’s 24^th prime minister drew a packed audience ready for a healthy dose of Keating wit and provocation. The man sitting to my left told me he had secured a ticket only after spending several weeks on the waiting list. The woman on my right said she had come by herself because, while she had been a Keating fan all her life, her husband was a supporter of John Howard.

The 82-year-old statesman spoke to the packed, multi-level theatre like a man who had completed his political odyssey and could now take the long view of Australia’s place in history.

There was also something of the mountaintop in his demeanour: the sense of someone who had reached the peak and acquired an aerial view of Australia’s place in the world.

The conversation ranged widely, from the influence of Keating’s upbringing on his worldview to AUKUS, Indigenous reconciliation, the republic, and the case for fundamental structural reform of the Australian economy. But its central concern was Australia’s place in the world – where it stands, and where Keating believes it should.

Naturally, that meant asking how Australia should navigate what Curran described as the ‘diabolical situation’ of ‘swimming between sharks’ – the US on one side and China on the other.

The first of those great powers to come under discussion was the US.

When Curran asked whether Australia should be ‘more upfront about telling the Americans what we will and won't do’, Keating turned to prepared notes about General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded Allied forces in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Speaking of MacArthur’s meeting with prime minister John Curtin, Keating said:

He met John Curtin at the Lodging Camp. And he said to Curtin this. He said that the US viewed Australia solely as a military base to strike Japan rather than, get this, rather than having any protective affection for Australians. In other words, you're a base. We're not here to defend you or save you. We're here to use you as a base to fight back.

That does not mean Keating wants the US to leave the Asia-Pacific. On the contrary, he sees an important role for it – but not as the region’s guarantor. To clarify the distinction, he quoted Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter:

The United States must recognize that stability in Asia can no longer be opposed by a non-Asian power, least of all by the direct application of US military force.

Keating then explained how Brzezinski’s thinking aligned with his own:

In other words, what he's arguing for is what I've always argued for. And that is for America, in this part of the world, to be the balancing power to China, not trying to be the guarantee power.

He elaborated:

What we want to see is an Asia where the two great powers exist, and particularly the United States has the balancing power. So, if the United States represented itself, as Brzezinski suggested it should, as the balancing power, that is, the guaranteed power in the Atlantic, that is, because of NATO, because of the North Atlantic, the United States' mainland, Europe and NATO, the US is the guaranteed power in the Atlantic. But in the Pacific, in Asia, the balancing power. If America is to be the balancing power, we all put our hands on that, right? But they don't want to be the balancing power.

He then offered a more pointed account of what he sees as the problem when the US goes beyond that role:

They've got their bases in Guam, Okinawa, the Philippines, and now they wish to add to that Australia. This is a ring fence around China. You know, this is dumb with a capital D.

Capital D, dumb.

Acknowledging former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in the audience, Keating said both he and Turnbull were concerned about Australia losing sovereignty to the US.

But if Australia is ‘swimming between sharks’, the shark on the other side is China.

Keating made clear that he does not want to see an Asia-Pacific dominated by China:

So, the thing is that, where do we stand? Do we want to see an Asia which is dominated solely by China? Answer, no.

Nor, however, does he believe China poses an existential threat to Australia. He was scathing about what he sees as exaggerated rhetoric about the danger Beijing presents.

You've got the Sydney Morning Herald talking about the Red Alert. You know, they gave us three years before the Chinese would come down and attack us. You've got all the crazies in The Australian every weekend talking about the Red Alert. They talk about the threat from China. There is no threat.

For anyone who has followed Keating’s public interventions over the past few years, little of this would have come as a surprise. His views on Australia’s strategic position and the dangers of great power rivalry are well established.

What may have raised a few eyebrows – and perhaps a few heckles – was what he had to say about Donald Trump’s foreign policy:

I'm the only one in this country who has supported Trump in both first and second terms about his broad interest in his foreign policy. What Trump wants to do is avoid World War III. This is a big objective. And he's the only one being prepared to deal with Russia independently, China independently. Never, none of the Democrats and none of the Republicans are ahead of him.

And this is why he's friendly with Xi Jinping… So that's fine with us. That's the best guarantee we've got.

Whether one agrees with Keating or not, it was clear that the audience was listening to a man who still has a vision of Australia’s place in the world – and remains convinced of the political courage required to pursue it.

At the heart of that vision is an Australia that is neither strategically subordinate to the US nor resigned to Chinese dominance, a country confident enough to preserve its sovereignty while navigating between the region’s two great powers.

Perhaps that was what brought so many Keating admirers to the theatre: a mixture of enduring respect for a formidable political figure and a deeper sense of regret – regret for a vision that has, to some extent, been lost, and for opportunities that may have been missed.