The new Australian Government will have to navigate some difficult diplomatic waters in a world where power is shifting away from unipolarity and towards an Asia-centric multipolar order. This Lowy Institute Paper by one of Australia's renowned international security scholars, Dr Coral Bell AO, sketches the probable future landscape of the society of states as...

The unipolar world - the world of unchallenged US paramountcy in the society of states - was with us only rather briefly, for approximately ten years, from January 1992 until September 2001, argues Coral Bell.

Coral Bell writes that Australian Opposition leader Kevin Rudd's foreign policy approach is not likely to do serious damage to the relationship with Washington, but the alliance might be challenged within the foreseeable future by quite a different factor in world politics. The next landscape of world politics, she argues, which might be with us...