Towards a “Trilateral Alliance?” Understanding the Role of Expediency and Values in American–Japanese–Australian Relations

The emerging US–Japan–Australia trilateral alignment is representative of a new archetype of “alliance” calibrated to the changed post-Cold War, post-9/11 security environment. This article considers how we might account for this new alliance formation and how we might conceptualize it. To accomplish this the article formulates an “intra-alliance politics” framework for analysis that juxtaposes competing “Realist” and “Pluralist” images of allied behavior in International Relations theory. This framework is then employed to uncover the motivations and behavioral dynamics driving the trilateral alliance seeking to reveal whether the alignment is predicated upon common “values” or sheer “expediency.” It concludes that though the two different International Relations schools offer ostensibly competitive interpretations, the evidence suggests that they are in many ways complementary and mutually reinforcing. We must therefore consider the trilateral alliance an amalgam of both “expediency” and “values.” The application of the intra-alliance politics framework expounded here thus enhances our understanding of this particular “alliance” and the phenomenon of “alignment” in general.