Foam flecked

AUSTRALIA recently announced that it would develop a new white paper on foreign policy—its first since 2003—reflecting recognition of both a sense of drift in its traditional partnerships and an array of strategic challenges that did not exist 13 years ago. Nowhere is this more evident than in the South Pacific, an expansive, sparsely populated region that Australia has long considered its own backyard. “Our relationships in the South Pacific have drifted off course,” says Michael Wesley, a national-security expert at the Australian National University. “There’s no real sense of an Australian agenda of what we want to achieve.”